Prelims

Half Title Page

THE EMERALD HANDBOOK OF MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION INQUIRY

Title Page

THE EMERALD HANDBOOK OF MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION INQUIRY

EDITED BY

DAVID M. BOJE

New Mexico State University, USA

MABEL SANCHEZ

New Mexico State University, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2019

Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78714-552-8 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-551-1 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-972-4 (Epub)

Dedication

We, the editors, dedicate this book to the wonderful people who attended the Standing Conference for Management and Organization Inquiry, which we affectionately called “sc’MOI” which in French means, “it is me.” We were a community of scholars in search of critical inquiry, at a time when the regular mainstream academy did not do that sort of thing. We pushed the limits of critical inquiry to its limits. We were rebellious, often roasting the conference invited speakers. We danced, laughed, and had fun doing inquiry. Each year there were books or special issues of journals about the topics we explored. We appreciate all the wonderful board members and participants in all the sc’MOI sessions. We would like to make a special dedication to Professor Abbass Alkhafargi, who in the early years gave us a home for sc’MOI inside the International Academy of Business Disciplines conference. We were welcomed there, and emerged as our own independent conference.

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Contributors

About the Authors

Jerry Biberman, PhD, was a Professor of Management and retired from full-time teaching in 2012. For 12 years he served as Chair of the Management/Marketing Department at the University of Scranton. He obtained his MS, MA, and PhD from Temple University. Biberman has co-edited several books and has published many articles in the areas of work and spirituality and on organizational behavior teaching. He also served as first co-editor of the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion, and has co-edited several special editions on work and spirituality for the Journal of Organizational Change Management. He was a founder and first chair of the Management, Spirituality and Religion interest group of the Academy of Management. In 1999, Biberman was the recipient of the first University of Scranton Kania School of Management Scholarly achievement award. He received the award a second time in 2003. In 2010, he received the Provost Award for Excellence in Integrating Mission and Justice into the Curriculum.

David M. Boje <www.davidboje.com> is Regents Professor of Management at New Mexico State University. He is an international and highly esteemed Scholar in the areas of storytelling and ante-narratives in organizations. He also holds an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University, and is considered godfather of their Material Storytelling Lab. He is founder of Tamara Journal of Critical Organization Inquiry. He has published 21 books, including Storytelling Organizational Practices: Managing in the quantum age (Routledge, 2014). His 141 journal articles have appeared in top-tier journals such as Management Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Studies, Human Relations, and Academy of Management Journal.

Julie Wolfram Cox (PhD, Organizational Behavior, Case Western Reserve University) is Professor of Management in the Department of Management at Monash Business School, Australia. Her research interests include interpretive and critical studies of organizational change; organization development and resistance dynamics; organization theory and research metatheory; organizational esthetics and identity politics; and occupational identity and professionalization. Julie’s research articles have been published in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Learning & Education, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Organization, and British Journal of Management.

Robert F. Dennehy (PhD, New York University) is Adjunct Professor of Management at Pace University. He has published two books on storytelling and diversity. His numerous published articles have appeared in a wide range of outlets including Journal of Management Development, Transportation Research Report, and Journal of European Industrial Training. His consultancy includes work for GE in Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

Dr Alexis Downs graduated from St Louis University with a PhD in Business Administration. She is a CPA and graduated from Oklahoma University with a Master of Accountancy degree; she also graduated from the University of Tulsa with a Master of Taxation degree, a Master of Accountancy degree from the University of Oklahoma, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Her teaching and research interests are interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and international. Specifically, she enjoys the intersection of strategic management and taxation.

Dr Rita A. Durant graduated with a PhD from the University of Alabama, an ABT MA in Linguistics from the University of Florida, and a BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. Currently, she is an RYT 200, FM level 1 embodiment yoga teacher, academic editor, and ESL tutor in Mobile, AL. Her teaching and research interests address the post-Cartesian emerging understandings of the intersectionality of mind and body.

Dr Marja Flory is a Senior Lecturer in Organizational Change Management at Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University. Her primary research and teaching topics are change management, advisory skills, cross-cultural management, and narrative methodology. She has done consulting work for large multinational companies. Having a BA in South American literature, she is particularly interested in Hispanic cultures. Marja is also a visiting professor at ESADE, Barcelona; she has been involved with organizing the conference on Rhetoric and Narratives in Management Research (RNMR) since 2008. She has published in a variety of peer-reviewed and professional journals and currently is the Managing Editor of the Journal of Organizational Change Management.

Robert P. Gephart, Jr. is Professor of Business at the University of Alberta and Chercheur Associé at Institut de socio-économie des entreprises et des organizations, Magellan, IAE Lyon, Université Jean Moulin. Dr Gephart is an internationally recognized scholar whose research has contributed important advances in qualitative research methods for the Social and Management Sciences. His substantive research has also provided important insights into the management of organizational risks, crises and emergencies. Dr Gephart served for over 10 years as Associate Editor of the Organization Research Methods journal. He has published in a number of highly visible journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management Organization Studies, and Organizational Research Methods. Dr Gephart is the author of Ethnostatistics: Qualitative Foundations for Qualitative Research (Sage, 1988), a co-editor of Postmodern Management and Organization Theory (Sage, 1996, with D. Boje and T. Thatchenkery) and the lead editor of the Routledge Companion to Risk, Crisis and Emergency Management (2019 with C. C. Miller and K. Svedberg Helgesson). Dr Gephart received the 2015 Sage/Research Methods Division Career Achievement Award from the Academy of Management for his contributions to organizational research methods and launching the field of ethnostatistics.

John Hassard (PhD, Organizational Behavior, Aston University) is Professor of Organizational Analysis at the Alliance Manchester Business School (Manchester University, UK). Previously he taught at London Business School and universities of Cardiff and Keele. From 2000 to 2011 he was Visiting Fellow in Management Learning at the Judge Business School, Cambridge. He has published 20 books and over 170 research articles. His books include the monographs Sociology and Organization Theory (1993), Disorganization Theory (2008) and Managing in the Modern Corporation (2009) and the edited volumes The Theory and Philosophy of Organizations (1991), Postmodernism and Organizations (1993), and Actor Network Theory and After (1999).

Dr Tonya L. Henderson, MS, DM, is an expert in organization development and change. She currently works for Software Engineering Services Corporation and spent several years as an independent researcher and consultant. As a Doctor of Management and a graduate of the US Naval Academy, she blends original management research with a military officer’s practicality. A veteran of the aerospace industry, her work is informed by multi-disciplinary experience, education, and scholarship. Tonya loves exploring how groups of people self-organize and how repeated patterns of perceptions, communications, and behaviors offer clues to organizational values and outcomes. Her doctoral work and primary line of inquiry explore how socio-material fractals unfold in organizational life, as seen through the lens of storytelling. An experienced keynote speaker, she has been featured at TEDxColoradoSprings and the Story Project. Tonya lives in Divide, Colorado, and is the 2018 − 2019 Division Chair for the Academy of Management’s Management Consulting Division.

Mark E. Hillon has worked in civil engineering, international development, sustainable agriculture, strategic planning, curriculum development, and critical management scholarship. He holds a PhD from New Mexico State University with a concentration in Strategy and a PhD from ISEOR/Jean Moulin University (Lyon 3) in Management Science, a co-tutelle supervised by David Boje and Henri Savall. His current venture is the Lafayette Institute, a consultancy for research, education, and diffusion of SEAM to improve the practice of management in America.

Yue Cai Hillon holds a PhD from New Mexico State University where she pioneered the study of strategic inflections by imagery deconstruction. She studies socioeconomic business venturing, organizational storytelling and narrative methods, and critical perspectives on management practices. Her students learn future-oriented data-intensive strategy creation and socioeconomic management consulting for organizational change in an applied business context. Beyond teaching, Yue is actively engaged in the community working toward regional economic development, serving on local nonprofit boards and assisting organizations with strategic planning and socioeconomic management consulting.

Hugo Letiche (PhD Free University Amsterdam) is Professor at the University of Leicester Business School (UK) and Professeur invité Institut Mines: Telecom Business School Evry/Paris (FR). Previously he was Professor and Director of the practitioner PhD program at the Universiteit voor Humanistiek Utrecht (NL). His most recent research has been about: (i) ways of thought, magic versus rationality; (ii) the Anthropocene, politics, denial & the crisis; (iii) coaches versus coaching: repression and denial; (iv) affect and ontology. His most recent books: L’art du sens (with J-L Moriceau & M-A Le Theule; 2019) and Turn to Film (with J-L Moriceau; 2019).

Slawomir (Slawek) Magala, was Professor of Cross-cultural Management at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands (1985 − 2015). Currently, he taught at the Faculty of Management and Social Communication of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. At present he teaches at the Faculty of Management of Warsaw University. He has written books – “Cross Cultural Management”(2005), “The Management of Meaning in Organizations” (2009), papers and essays, and taught undergraduate and graduate courses (“Machiavelli and von Clausewitz for Managers,” “Culture Vultures,” ”Identity in Work and Society”). He has supervised master’s and PhD theses, and tried to gauge changing cultural climate (also online: www.magala.nl). In 2006, he succeeded David Boje as Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Organizational Change Management. Married to Joanna Ramlau since 1974. They have two children, son Jacek and daughter Magdalena. Described as a Generalist with a cause by his friends and colleagues.

Grace Ann Rosile, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Management at New Mexico State University. She studies organizational storytelling, ethics, indigenous ethics, and pedagogy. She is the lead Co-author of “Ensemble Leadership Theory: Collectivist, Relational, and Heterarchical Roots from Indigenous Contexts” in the journal Leadership (2016). She is founder of HorseSense At Work, offering leadership, teamwork, and communication programs through working with horses. Rosile has developed, written, and co-produced a series of seven short educational films on “Tribal Wisdom for Business Ethics,” featured on public TV. These films, along with instructor materials, are available for free on YouTube and also the NMSU website for the Daniels Fund Ethics Initiative, which funded most of this project: http://business.nmsu.edu/research/programs/daniels-ethics/tribal-ethics/ Rosile’s 2016 edited companion book Tribal Wisdom for Business Ethics features many of the contributors to the films, and is available from Emerald Publishing: http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/books/notable/page.htm?id=9781786352880

Jillian Saylors is an Executive Director of Positive Autism Narratives. Research interests are in Human resources training and development, teams, leadership, innovation, Autism, dialogical storytelling materiality, qualitative research methods, postformalism context-domain interrelation of complexity, and critical pedagogy.

Mabel Sanchez is currently a third-year PhD Candidate at New Mexico State University in the Management department. She has a BA in International Business and an MBA from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Mabel worked in the government and private sector, including the World Trade Center El Paso/Juarez, the New Mexico Border Authority, and the Dallas Independent School District. Working as an Ambassador of Mexico at UTEP for three years, the interaction with people from eleven different countries, and having lived in the United States, Mexico, France, and England has marked her research interest in storytelling, diversity, gender and organization, organizational change, feminist theory, and qualitative research. Mabel returned to the US–Mexico borderland to study diversity, where there are Native, Asian, American, and Mexican cultures that work and prosper: It is a window into the United States’ future.

Henri Savall is an Emeritus Professor at the Iaelyon, University Jean Moulin (France), where he was the Founder and Codirector of the École Universitaire de Gestion Innovante and the Socioeconomic Management master’s program. He is the Founder and President of the ISEOR research center where he supervised 85 doctoral theses. He has a multi-disciplinary education in management, accounting, finance, political science, linguistics, economics, and economic history. His current research interests are socioeconomic theory, strategic management, qualimetrics methodology, CSR, and tetranormalization. He has authored and coauthored 56 books, 102 articles, and more than 300 conference papers in French, English, and Spanish.

Rohny Saylors is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Carson College of Business, Washington State University. His research is focused on entrepreneurial storytelling processes and methods. His passion is the advancement of human creativity, hope, and authentic compassion through, and within, organizational scholarship. Dr Saylors has published well-cited articles in Organizational Research Methods and Human Relations.

Dr Anete M. Camille Strand is the originator of the Material Storytelling approach to restory actions and as such she is one of the pioneers within the field of bringing together the Baradian theory of quantum entanglement and the Bojean approach to organizational storytelling. Coming from Communication studies she approaches the field from a unique angle of multimodality research, materiality and storytelling methodology. She has found inspirations for her post-humanistic and post-capitalistic approach in diverse areas such as Fengshui, Sandplay and Bodynamic – as well as Quantum theory, New materialism, Feminism, and so on, and on that backdrop, she is an expert on development, learning, and change in regard to restorying materialized practices of spaces, bodies, and artifacts. She has authored several book chapters and articles on the subjects. For example, a book section in the book Being Quantum. Storytelling and Ontology in the Age of Antenarratives. Cambridge Scholar Publishing.

Anete directs the international network platform of Material Story Lab www.materialstorylab.com from the unique base at the problem-based learning university of Aalborg in Denmark. The network spans cross research and practice, and private and public organizations and socioeconomic initiatives. The advisory board of the lab is headed by David M. Boje.

Marita Svane, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Business and Management, Aalborg University. Her research area relates to organizational storytelling, organizational change and development, and leadership development. She is interested in dilemmas of dialogue, power, and ethics in organizations and leadership.

Preface

This Handbook is based on 25 years of the critical and important presentations of participants in the Standing Conference for Management and Organizational Inquiry (sc’MOI). Our collection of chapter authors have amassed a history of our many critiques of the “business-as-usual” narrative known far and wide as “managerialism.” A short list of the top 10 themes of managerialism:

• (1)

  Efficiency of Taylorism;

• (2)

  Total Quality Management (TQM);

• (3)

  Globalization as one more round of (neo)colonialism;

• (4)

  Technological Progress Narrative;

• (5)

  Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as ridiculous;

• (6)

  Corporate Ethics (another nonsequitor);

• (7)

  Sustainable Future as illusion;

• (8)

  Social Constructivism ignores both sociology and construction;

• (9)

  Grounded Theory (which has no ground and no theory); and

• (10)

  Action Research (recently versions have no action and no theory).

The Anthropocene has been declared an official subdivision of geological time, an epoch, by the Union of Geological Sciences. The Anthropocene Epoch is a way of dating anthropogenic climate change, but there is not much agreement. For sc’MOI we focused on the impact of the Industrial Revolution, the steam engine burning coal, and then other kinds of fossil fuel − as kicking off unprecedented anthropogenic changes in the climate that impact species life on the planet. For 25 years we hoped sc’MOI inquiries into managing and organizing would bring about more sustainable praxis. We decided to stop meeting when it turned out that the financial situation of our international colleagues no longer afforded them travel budgets to attend. In our final meetings, we had some inkling that sustainable management and organization is a fantastic myth, a way of pretending to do something while the Titanic takes on water, a kind or rearranging of the deck chairs. All the reduce-reuse-recycle (3R) ignore the obvious: we continue to use fossil fuel energy even though we have passed peak oil and gas, passed peak water, and are about to pass peak food therefore all these peaks mean that on the other side of the hump, it will cost more and waste more to get at these resources. Any sensible civilization would read the apologetic grand narratives of progress in “Carboniferous Capitalism” (Mumford, 1934), such as, there is no alternative to fossil fuel, there will be a technological fix to the coming energy crisis, we can all transition to solar energy and drive electric cars, or we can all build Earthships and live off-grid growing aquaponics. Unfortunately, wind energy is only 1.1% and photovoltaic only 0.06% of what the fossil fuel economy is supplying (Malm, 2016, p. 368). The electric cars will be affordable by the rich, and last we looked the Earthships are as expensive as McMansions in Taos, New Mexico.

We know from antenarrative (forecaring for the future) that we have to actually make space and time to care for the future, in order, to get off the path of “business-as-usual.” What we at sc’MOI in its closing session observed was the death-grip of managerialism on the organizations. We know how to make them more efficient, but cannot steer them away from a short-term, quarterly return mindset. It takes a long temporal horizon, to understand how we are depleting resources that the future generations, our children’s grandchildren, and soon just our grandchildren, will be experiencing the consequences of our decisions about living in Carboniferous Capitalism.

We continue to meet in Las Cruces, as the “Quantum Storytelling Conference” (davidboje.com/quantum for info). We are hoping, once more, that storytelling can be a way to address the dominant narratives of managerialism with any number of counternarratives. However, we also look to the antenarratives that are forecaring for a continuation of “business-as-usual” and ways many counternarratives are more illusions, and hope for some antenarratives that take civilization along a path that is lifestyles living within the planetary limits, in living stories, finding balance with the rights of other species, plants, and animals, rivers and mountains too, to coexist.