Discursive positioning and planned change in organizations

This study uses discursive positioning theory to explore how planned change messages influence organizational members’ identity and the way they experienced organizational change. Based on an in-depth case study of a home healthcare and hospice organization that engaged in a multiyear planned change process, our analysis suggests that workers experienced salient change messages as constituting unfavorable identities, which were associated with the experiences of violation, recitation, habituation, or reservation. Our study also explores the way discursive and material contexts enabled and constrained the governing board’s change messages as they responded to external and internal audiences. We highlight the importance of viewing messaging as a process of information transfer as well as discursive construction, which has important implications for the way change agents approach issues of sense making, emotionality, resistance, and materiality during planned change processes.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

'Getting people on board': Discursive leadership for consensus building in team meetings

Meetings are increasingly seen as sites where organizing and strategic change take place, but the role of specific discursive strategies and related linguistic-pragmatic and argumentative devices, employed by meeting chairs, is little understood. The purpose of this article is to address the range of behaviours of chairs in business organizations by comparing strategies employed by the same chief executive officer (CEO) in two key meeting genres: regular management team meetings and ‘away-days’. While drawing on research from organization studies on the role of leadership in meetings and studies of language in the workplace from (socio)linguistics and discourse studies, we abductively identified five salient discursive strategies which meeting chairs employ in driving decision making: (1) Bonding; (2) Encouraging; (3) Directing; (4) Modulating; and (5) Re/Committing. We investigate the leadership styles of the CEO in both meeting genres via a multi-level approach using empirical data drawn from meetings of a single management team in a multinational defence corporation. Our key findings are, first, that the chair of the meetings (and leading manager) influences the outcome of the meetings in both negative and positive ways, through the choice of discursive strategies. Second, it becomes apparent that the specific context and related meeting genre mediate participation and the ability of the chair to control interactions within the team. Third, a more hierarchical authoritarian or a more interpersonal egalitarian leadership style can be identified via specific combinations of these five discursive strategies. The article concludes that the egalitarian leadership style increases the likelihood of achieving a durable consensus. Several related avenues for research are outlined

glossaLAB: Co-Creating Interdisciplinary Knowledge

The paper describes the glossaLAB international project as a contribution to confront the urgent need of knowledge integration frameworks, as required to face global challenges that overwhelm disciplinary knowledge capacity. Under this scope, glossaLAB is devised to make contributions in three main aspects of such endeavor: (i) development of a sound theoretical framework for the unification of knowledge, (ii) establishment of broadly accepted methodologies and tools to facilitate the integration of knowledge, (iii) development of assessment criteria for the qualification of interdisciplinarity undertakings. The paper discusses the main components of the project and the solutions adopted to achieve the intended objectives at three different levels: at the technical level, glossaLAB aims at developing a platform for knowledge integration based on the elucidation of concepts, metaphors, theories and problems, including a semantically- operative recompilation of valuable scattered encyclopedic contents devoted to two entangled transdisciplinary fields: the sciences of systems and information. At the theoretical level, the goal is reducing the redundancy of the conceptual system (defined in terms of “intensional performance” of the contents recompiled), and the elucidation of new concepts. Finally, at the meta-theoretical level, the project aims at assessing the knowledge integration achieved through the co-creation process based on (a) the diversity of the disciplines involved and (b) the integration properties of the conceptual network stablished through the elucidation process.2019-2

Isolated and dynamical horizons and their applications

Over the past three decades, black holes have played an important role in quantum gravity, mathematical physics, numerical relativity and gravitational wave phenomenology. However, conceptual settings and mathematical models used to discuss them have varied considerably from one area to another. Over the last five years a new, quasi-local framework was introduced to analyze diverse facets of black holes in a unified manner. In this framework, evolving black holes are modeled by dynamical horizons and black holes in equilibrium by isolated horizons. We review basic properties of these horizons and summarize applications to mathematical physics, numerical relativity and quantum gravity. This paradigm has led to significant generalizations of several results in black hole physics. Specifically, it has introduced a more physical setting for black hole thermodynamics and for black hole entropy calculations in quantum gravity; suggested a phenomenological model for hairy black holes; provided novel techniques to extract physics from numerical simulations; and led to new laws governing the dynamics of black holes in exact general relativity.Comment: 77 pages, 12 figures. Typos and references correcte

Favouritism: exploring the 'uncontrolled' spaces of the leadership experience

In this paper, we argue that a focus on favouritism magnifies a central ethical ambiguity in leadership, both conceptually and in practice. The social process of favouritism can even go unnoticed, or misrecognised if it does not manifest in a form in which it can be either included or excluded from what is (collectively interpreted as) leadership. The leadership literature presents a tension between what is an embodied and relational account of the ethical, on the one hand, and a more dispassionate organisational ‘justice’ emphasis, on the other hand. We conducted 23 semi-structured interviews in eight consultancy companies, four multinationals and four internationals. There were ethical issues at play in the way interviewees thought about favouritism in leadership episodes. This emerged in the fact that they were concerned with visibility and conduct before engaging in favouritism. Our findings illustrate a bricolage of ethical justifications for favouritism, namely utilitarian, justice, and relational. Such findings suggest the ethical ambiguity that lies at the heart of leadership as a concept and a practice

Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger

On 2017 August 17 a binary neutron star coalescence candidate (later designated GW170817) with merger time 12:41:04 UTC was observed through gravitational waves by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor independently detected a gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) with a time delay of ~1.7 s with respect to the merger time. From the gravitational-wave signal, the source was initially localized to a sky region of 31 deg2 at a luminosity distance of 40+8-8 Mpc and with component masses consistent with neutron stars. The component masses were later measured to be in the range 0.86 to 2.26 Mo. An extensive observing campaign was launched across the electromagnetic spectrum leading to the discovery of a bright optical transient (SSS17a, now with the IAU identification of AT 2017gfo) in NGC 4993 (at ~40 Mpc) less than 11 hours after the merger by the One- Meter, Two Hemisphere (1M2H) team using the 1 m Swope Telescope. The optical transient was independently detected by multiple teams within an hour. Subsequent observations targeted the object and its environment. Early ultraviolet observations revealed a blue transient that faded within 48 hours. Optical and infrared observations showed a redward evolution over ~10 days. Following early non-detections, X-ray and radio emission were discovered at the transient’s position ~9 and ~16 days, respectively, after the merger. Both the X-ray and radio emission likely arise from a physical process that is distinct from the one that generates the UV/optical/near-infrared emission. No ultra-high-energy gamma-rays and no neutrino candidates consistent with the source were found in follow-up searches. These observations support the hypothesis that GW170817 was produced by the merger of two neutron stars in NGC4993 followed by a short gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) and a kilonova/macronova powered by the radioactive decay of r-process nuclei synthesized in the ejecta