When do charismatic leaders rise to the top job?

Necessity, rather than opportunity, pushes older adults to become entrepreneurial, writes Lucia Garcia-Lorenz

Something is missing in the idea of entrepreneurs as young and empowered

Necessity, rather than opportunity, pushes older adults to become entrepreneuria

Why do older entrepreneurs face unique challenges?

Dr Lucia Garcia discusses the challenges facing entrepreneurship for the older unemployed, where the transition from unemployment to self-employment is more fragmented and fraught with difficulties than entrepreneurial narratives portray

The role of Intellectual Capital Reporting (ICR) in organisational transformation: A discursive practice perspective

Intellectual Capital Reporting (ICR) has garnered increasing attention as a new accounting technology that can engender significant organisational changes. However, when ICR was first recognised as a management fashion, the intended change it heralded in stable environments was criticised for having limited impact on the state of practice. Conceiving ICR through a lens predicated on the notion of discursive practice, we argue that ICR can enable substantive change in emergent conditions. We empirically demonstrate this process by following the implementation of ICR in one organisation through interviews, documents and observations over 30 months. The qualitative analysis of the data corpus shows how situated change, subtle but no less significant, can take place in the name of intellectual capital as actors appropriate ICR into their everyday work practices while improvising variations to accommodate different logics of action. The paper opens up a new avenue to examine the specific roles of ICR in relation to the types of change enacted. It thus demonstrates when and how ICR may transcend a mere management fashion and the intended change it sets in motion through altering organisational actors’ ways of thinking and doing within the confines of their organisation

The invisible entrepreneur: from unemployment to unstable self-employment

Since the 2008 financial crisis, entrepreneurship has become the preferred public solution to combat unemployment. Public discourses in many EU countries, including the UK, portray entrepreneurship as socially desirable and feasible. However, this ‘solution’ makes the unemployed responsible for creating their own jobs by asking them to stoically transition between unemployment and self-employment with little or no institutional support

Organizational remembering as a trigger for cultural change: exploring the episodic memories of a financial scandal

Organizational memory research has developed from the 'storage bin' model of memory towards emphasizing collective remembering. We advance this view by proposing organizational remembering not just as the process of evoking past events to reproduce traditions but also as a projection into the future using imagination. Empirically this is illustrated through the qualitative analysis of 27 episodic interviews with employees of a global financial institution, documents and the media coverage of the organization’s involvement in two well-publicized financial scandals. We explore the impact of the episodic memories of those events on employees' readiness for the cultural change programme launched by management after the scandals. The analysis shows how the negative media coverage of the organization generated a powerful dis-confirmation of its working practices among employees and how this was amplified by the strong emotional reactions remembering those events provoked. Management used both to re-frame the past in a narrative used to increase receptiveness to change. Yet the past was brought differently into the present by different organizational groups depending on the future each group imagined, counteracting the impact of the generic management narrative. The findings illustrate the collective, emotional and imaginative qualities of organizational remembering and provide new insights into the process of cultural change through the lens of memory showing how while memories may be shaped by management to respond to crisis, they can also become part of prospective and transformative change processes

Changing the NHS a day at a time: the role of enactment in the mobilisation and prefiguration of change

This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the unique role of enactment in the dynamics of motivation and participation in prefigurative social movements, with the intention of providing a deeper understanding of the mechanisms, inherent to prefiguration, driving change through collective action. We achieve this through examining what motivates people to participate as activists in a social movement trying to enact changes within the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom. To do so, we explore the narratives of 23 activists working to develop the NHS Change Day movement. The narratives describe how NHS frontline staff engage in daily grassroots change activities while having to navigate top-down, planned, organisational change interventions. We analyse our findings in light of recent developments in the understanding of group identity processes in the mobilisation of collective action, and highlight the role of enactment in these dynamics. The findings indicate that it is not the overall top-down managerial strategies, but rather the daily participation and enactment of self-initiated small-scale change actions that gives meaning and direction to the activists’ participation in the social movement – a meaning which is constructed through the encapsulation of a sense of personal agency and collective efficacy, contributing to a sense of the affirmation of vocational and organisational identity. We contend that the relationship between the experience of the daily enactment of self-initiated activities within a supportive group setting and the motivation to participate in collective action is mutually constructed, and as such, inextricable

Between planned and emergent change: decision maker’s perceptions of managing change in organisations

Today’s business environment is increasingly complex, interconnected, unpredictable and competitive. Within this context decision makers struggle to find some stability amidst uncertainty using planned change methods while being aware of the need for flexibility and agility to leverage emergent change and survive. It is this tension between the desire for continuity and the experience of emergence in change processes that this paper addresses. To examine this tension the paper contrasts the planned organisational change methods used by decision makers since the 1950s with the more recent emergent change approaches developed out of economic destabilization and increased competition. The paper is based on a qualitative research project that used relevant organisational documents and in-depth interviews with 14 highly placed decision makers involved in change efforts in different organisations to explore different experiences and understandings of change. The stories told show a rich picture of organisational change efforts as well as individual understandings and insights. The experiences transmitted by the different decision makers illustrate the tension between planned and emergent change. The language they use however, leads to the conclusion that a ‘becoming view’ on change combining both continuity and emergence could help to eliminate the paradox

'I just want a job': the untold stories of entrepreneurship

In this chapter, we explore the untold stories of Spanish and Irish necessity entrepreneurs to better understand the process of becoming an entrepreneur. Working with narratives, media articles, and policy documents, we illustrate how necessity entrepreneurs do not recognize themselves in the institutionalized entrepreneur narrative as empowered, creative and independent individuals. It is necessity, not opportunity that is pushing, not pulling, them to become entrepreneurial. The process is experienced as more fragmented than official narratives outline. In exposing these untold stories, the chapter expands our understanding of entrepreneurship, presenting a more nuanced view of both entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial process