Search results for "narrative"
showing 10 items of 1060 documents
Evolution of strategy narration and leadership work in the digital era
2019
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…
Performing Pan American Airways through coloniality : an ANTi-History approach to narratives and business history
2018
This paper centers on the role of narratives in business history from an ANTi-History perspective. We focus on the networked processes through which narratives are told of, for, and by multi-national companies embed the development of ‘new imperialism’ and coloniality. We set out to achieve this through a discussion and application of ANTi-History to a study of Pan American Airways and particularly its performance as a maturing multi-national company and its relationship to postcoloniality. In the process, we also hope to contribute to recent calls in business history for more explicit accounts of the methods used in the development of historical accounts. We are concerned to encourage ‘a n…
Historic constructions of the early multinational: on power, politics and culture in Pan Am narratives
2018
This paper examines how Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) - an early incarnation of a multinational enterprise (MNE) - developed its image as an international company. In particular, we examine how the company developed and managed potentially conflicting narratives, including the modernising US company and the airline of 'the Americas' (specifically South America); the carrier of US national interests and the politically neutral actor serving to unify cultures; the purveyor of exotic experiences and the pioneer of modernism. Through a focus on organisational narratives, we reveal the powerful influence of such story telling (through design and serendipity) on images of the peoples and co…
Meaningfulness and Meaninglessness of Work in Charles Bukowski
2017
In psychological and managerial literature, the meaning of work boasts a long tradition; in this topic, scholars and researchers have explored sources of meaning and meaningfulness of the working activity in workers' motivations, values, and beliefs. Less attention, however, is given to the function work has in terms of signifier of each individual's personal identity. This article aims at deeply examining the relationship between identity construction and meaning of work, focusing on this theme through the exploration of Charles Bukowski's narrative world. My attention was particularly focused on representations and emotional connotations characterizing the relationship between identity an…
Dominant Story, Power, and Positioning
2016
From a narrative perspective, how we understand our life and tell stories about our lives is shaped and defined by cultural discourses. During these tellings, some stories become dominant while others become silenced. As well as reflecting cultural discourses, these local stories also reflect the positions embedded in these discourses.
Pluriversalizar los regímenes globales de conocimiento: ¿Puede el Análisis del Discurso sociológico contribuir a estudios Decoloniales?
2020
In this paper we discuss the perspective of Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) as a possible strategy applicable to studies framed by decolonial thought. The reflection is approached by comparing key concepts of both perspectives, such as discourse, power and knowledge, as well as their methodological premises. The results allow us to point out potentials of SKAD as a conceptual-methodological reference for investigations towards decoloniality, e.g. the SKAD analysis dimensions patterns of interpretation and narrative structure. However, possible limitations of the SKAD with respect to the design and the realization of decolonial studies were also revealed, particularly in …
The Regulatory State vs. the Networked Polity: confronting narratives of change
2014
The aim of the article is to summarize and reassess the innovations brought about by governance theory. It is argued that the notion of governance is a conceptual device that could help rationalise and articulate the changes undertaken by liberal democracies since the late 1970s. The article suggests the need to distinguish between two distinct research programmes composing governance studies, which are influenced by alternative epistemic traditions—political economy and economic sociology. Rationalizations of change influenced by political economy support the idea that the outcome of recent political change is a market-oriented “Regulatory State”, while those influence by economic sociolog…
Imagining the West in the Era of America First
2019
This chapter focuses on the debates revolving around President Donald Trump’s “America First”-policy from the perspectives of the main actors engaged in discussions on US foreign policy: the president and the administration, Congress, public and expert opinion, and media. We uncover three overlapping crisis narratives present in the debates: crisis of Western values, crisis of the liberal international order, and crisis of US leadership and analyze how the idea and concept of the West is utilized in these narratives. First, we argue that the concept of the West is eminently useful and effective in political rhetoric because of its familiarity, plasticity, and emotiveness. This is why both t…
Power and strategic change in a multinational industrial corporation
2012
PurposeThe aim of the study was to analyze the use of power in a strategic change process within a large forest industry company. The organization in question had a total of 7,700 employees, 6‐8 organizational levels, over 30 production units and a widespread international sales network. The study highlighted the organization's internal narration as an important element in the use of power. It started in conjunction with the appointment of the new management group and continued throughout the two‐year monitoring period, so that gradually all organizational layers were involved in interpreting their roles and positions in the new structure.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical data were c…
The Lord’s Resistance Army and the arms that brought the Lord
2019
This article develops the notion of polyphonic silence as a means for thinking through the ethical and political ramifications of ethnographically encountering and writing about silenced violent pasts. To do so, it analyses and contrasts the silence surrounding two periods of extreme violence in northern Uganda: 1) the northern Ugandan war (1986–2006), which is contemporarily often shrouded by silence, and 2) the early decades of colonial and missionary expansion, which the Catholic church silences in its commemoration of the death of two Acholi catechists in 1918. Employing the notion of polyphony, the article describes how neither of these silences is a mere absence of narration. Instead,…