Leadership Manipulation and Ethics in Storytelling

This article focuses on exerting influence in leadership, namely manipulation in storytelling. Manipulation is usually considered an unethical approach to leadership. We will argue that manipulation is a more complex phenomenon than just an unethical way of acting in leadership. We will demonstrate through an empirical qualitative study that there are various types of manipulation through storytelling. This article makes a contribution to the literature on manipulation through leadership storytelling, offering a more systematic empirical analysis and a more nuanced view of the topic than previously existed by outlining how managers engage in manipulative storytelling and what kind of ethics…

Kentältä kokemuksen kautta huipulle : narratiivinen tutkimus suomalaisten urheilujohtajien etenemisestä liikunnan ja urheiluhallinnon ylimpään johtoon

This study examines Finnish sport managers’ stories of their careers: how they had proceeded and what kinds of meanings they constructed in their stories. The data included interviews of sixteen Finnish operational and governmental managers from the top of Finnish sport administration. Four different story types were distinguished: the story of growth, drifting story, the story of coincidence and aspiration story. Sport managers’ stories illustrated at the individual level how the sport managers’ careers were constructed, but they also reflected the social reality and the wider sociocultural context of Finnish sport administration and management. Keywords: Sport manager, sport management, n…

Work, power and learning in a risk filled occupation

In this article we describe various ways in which power is exercised between personnel in a hospital operating theatre. We aim to investigate how the forms of discursive power and workplace learning are intertwined with each other by utilizing an ethnographic approach in the fieldwork. Our data were collected mainly through observations and interviews with surgical residents, physicians and nurses. In the article we describe the delicate ways in which power is exercised and resisted in everyday practices. We argue that there is a close relationship between learning and manifestations of power, together with the various forms of these manifestations and the restrictions that may be placed o…

Evolution of strategy narration and leadership work in the digital era

This paper examines the evolution of strategy narration, contributing to ongoing discussions in this field. Our empirical data, gathered from a large Finnish co-operative bank, cover three decades. According to our findings, digitalisation has brought about an epoch change in strategy narration, as top management has strongly adopted digital media in their leadership work, which has replaced ‘traditional’ face-to-face strategy meetings and public presentations by gatherings on digital platforms, including webcasting, intranet and Skype. This has brought about a leadership vacuum, and left organisational members long for their superiors to ‘exercise’ some traditional leadership practices, su…

Kuntien johtoryhmien kertomuksia työuupumuksesta

Burnout Narratives of Municipal Management Teams.This study aims to gain an understanding of personal experiences of burnout phenomenon among members of municipal management teams. Fourteen managers were interviewed. Four types of burnout narratives were iden-tified: denier, persevering, recovered and de-fender. These data were analysed using Labov & Walezky’s model of the structural types of narra-tive clauses. The analysis reveals similarities and differences of burnout experiences within each of the identified narrative types. Particularly, the study explores the role of workplace community in burnout recovery.

Antenarratives in Ongoing Strategic Change : Using the Story Index to Capture Daunting and Optimistic Futures

Strategic organizational change is a complex, future-oriented phenomenon that is critical for any organization. Traditional means of inquiry have struggled with the difficulty of capturing the future; thus, the methods for managing things to come remain scarce. In this chapter, we contribute to managing strategic change, and thereby the future of the organization, by developing the Story Index (SIX) method. The method facilitates a better understanding of how organizational change takes shape in the discursive reality before materializing in concrete terms. SIX is an analytical process combining antenarratives and narrative rationality to reveal the emerging meanings and rationales of chang…

Narrativity and its application in business ethics research

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a narrative framework for doing empirical research into business ethics and shows, through two examples, how the framework can be applied in practice in this context. The focus is on interview-based research. Design/methodology/approach A theoretical research based on literature review was conducted. Findings In the developed narrative framework, two main kinds of analysis are distinguished: an analysis of the narrative and a narrative analysis. An analysis of the narrative is a matter of classifying and producing taxonomies out of the data. The purpose of a narrative analysis is to construct a story or stories based on the data. Narrative an…

Metamorphosis of Euro Metaphors: The power of mathematical models and drama in economics storytelling.

Racism and ethics in the globalized business world

This paper analyzes the concept of racism in the context of business ethics and globalization. It first introduces three ethical traditions to understand moral issues in business: deontological, utilitarian and virtue ethics. Then it discusses about the challenges and demands that globalization has set to multicultural and multinational business operations. Third, it clarifies how racism works when it is understood as an ideology‐based phenomenon. It argues that there is a great value of knowing how racism works for the development of an anti‐racist and nondiscriminating organization. Although any of the three traditions on ethical thinking does not give direct answer to the question of how…

Narratives as a tool to study personnel wellbeing in corporate mergers

This article presents the methodological solutions used in a study investigating personnel wellbeing in the context of mergers and acquisitions in the Nordic electricity business. There have happened rapid changes in working conditions in general and in the electricity business today in the Nordic countries as on a global scale. As a result, the notion of a secure job with the same employer lasting a whole lifetime career seems to have lost its meaning also in the Finnish electricity distribution sector. This has challenged the traditional idea of wellbeing. We wanted to see how a corporate integration is experienced by those whom it affects most: namely, personnel at different levels of th…

Ghostbusters! On the Narrative Creation of (Absent) Leader Characters

We seek to “bust out” ghost leaders, narrated leader(ship) characters manifesting leadership influence, to discuss the inherent challenges related to leaderless management. By taking the non-corporeal aspect of leadership into account, we challenge the notion of leaderless management—which we argue has turned out to be more of an inspiring and empowering idea rather than a standing practice. We illustrate, with a Finnish high-tech organization, how organizational members narrate leader characters into existence in the non-corporeal realm during an organizational change to fill the void of a corporeal leader. While organizations may declare themselves to be leaderless, they, in fact, are not…

Etninen identiteetti ja narratiivisuus : Kanadan suomalaiset miehet elämänsä kertojina

The stigma of feminism: disclosures and silences regarding female disadvantage in the video game industry in US and Finnish media stories

This article examines how the issue of gender, particularly women’s (under)representation in the video game industry, is framed in US and Finnish media. Building on the notion of stigma surrounding feminism, the article examines discourse practices as acts of managing the image of feminism. The findings illustrate five stigma management strategies that offer the possibility of maintaining socially accepted ways of discussing gender inequality and portraying women in mainstream media. Using critical discourse analysis, the paper addresses how the use of these stigma management strategies connects with different contemporary feminisms. The strategies used and their ideological backgrounds var…

Organizational identity construction as a control mechanism

This study examines how identities become constructed and regulated during a strategic organizational change process. Planning and implementing a strategy is a social process, which consists of constructing, delivering, compelling, receiving, resisting and multiple contradicting meanings. The process includes multiple social factors influencing the strategy. The visions, notions, images, conceptions, assumptions and appreciation of members of an organization make the process dynamic and flexible. Thus, the strategy process is also always a matter of organizational change. By participating in the strategy process, the members produce meanings for the process and receive meanings produced som…

The development of mobile banking services in a large Finnish financial organization

The chapter, based on an ongoing qualitative study, provides answers to the following questions: what are the case organizations’ rationales in developing mobile banking services? how are customer perspectives considered in developing them? and what are the implications of digitalization and m-banking for the bank and the client? Based on the findings, m-banking is seen to allow ubiquitous availability and efficiency of service provision, offering a sound rationale for their development. The flipside is that digital and m-banking services dilute the human interaction, which challenges the rationale of improving the customer experience. The service development follows the software industry m…

A narrative approach for organizational learning in a diverse organisation

PurposeThis paper aims to construct an approach referred to as “the participatory narrative” for organizational learning in diverse organizations. The approach is grounded in an understanding of organizational learning as the process of social construction which is narratively mediated.Design/methodology/approachThe participatory narrative is constructed theoretically. Additionally, the approach and its potential use are illustrated by means of a practical example.FindingsIt is shown that the participatory narrative enables interplay between various perspectives of diverse people. It makes it possible to overcome the temporal and spatial limits of organisational learning situations and help…

Leadership as an enabler of professional agency and creativity : case studies from the Finnish information technology sector

This paper summarizes and elaborates the findings of a research project on leadership as an enabler of professional agency and creativity in information technology organizations. The synthesis in this paper is based on a summary of three primary studies. Each of the studies approached leadership, creativity and/or professional agency with a specific focus. Leaning on a mixed‐methods and ethnographic approach, including various empirical data collection and analytical tools, the project investigated the relationship between professional agency and creativity; issues that frame professional agency and creativity; and the meaning of leadership practices for the enhancement of agency and creati…

Arvot suoritusmittareiden aiheuttamien ohjausjännitteiden hallinnassa suuressa osuustoiminnallisessa organisaatiossa

Efficiency vs. values : Institutional logics, situated rationality, and performance measurement in a cooperative bank

This qualitative case study explores how situated rationality is achieved and maintained between two coexisting institutional logics, ‘global’ financial efficiency and ‘local’ customer-owners, around a performance measurement system in a large cooperative bank. We focus especially on the relationship between financial performance measures and softer, cooperative and communal organisational values. The results highlight that communal values may be effectively used to smooth and manage managerial contradictions; thus, situated rationality for operations can be achieved and maintained. This may also explain the resilience and success of communal values and cooperatively formed organisations in…

Strategy implementation as fantasising – becoming the leading bank

In this empirical case study we explore the fantasy nature of strategy work and propose fantasising as a framework contributing to the nascent literature dealing with the previously overlooked fantasy nature of strategy. More specifically, our interest is on examining how the meaning of official strategy gets constructed as it is being implemented, as well as and how and why the perceptions may evolve during implementation. Our data consists of official strategy documents and interviews from Finland's largest financial services group and its largest unit. The interviews cover all organisational levels, enabling us to reveal the variations of perceptions of strategy as it is being implemente…

Diversiteetti ja narratiivisuus : tutkielmia diskursiivisesta organisaatiotodellisuudesta

Racism and Business Ethics