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The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a qualitative study of software engineers' perception of dress code, career, organizations, and of managers.

The software engineers interviewed work in three European and two US companies. The research is based on ethnographic data, gathered in two longitudinal studies during the period 2001‐2006. The methods used in the study include open‐ended unstructured interviews, participant observation, collection of stories, and shadowing.

It was found that the majority of software engineers denounce formal dress‐codes. The notion of career was defined by them mostly in terms of occupational development. They perceived their own managers as very incompetent. Their view on corporations was also univocally negative. The findings confirm that software engineers form a very distinctive occupation, defining itself in opposition to the organization. However, their distinctiveness may be perceived not only as a manifestation of independence but also contrarily, as simply fulfilling the organizational role they are assigned by management.

The study contributes to the organizational literature by responding to the call for more research on high‐tech workplace practices, and on non‐managerial occupational roles.

Previous research has shown that eras of managerial rhetorics have alternated between normative and rational ideologies. The purpose of this study is to test the influence of generational membership on this phenomenon.

Examining data for the past 130 years, eras of managerial rhetorics are matched with recurring generational archetypes.

Empirical evidence is analyzed and found to be generally supportive of the hypotheses: generational membership is associated with the timing of the alternation in managerial rhetorics.

The findings of association suggest generational change could be a causal driver of long‐term change in managerial rhetorics.

The model tested implies a predictive ability to anticipate the movement from the current normative rhetoric to a new rational rhetoric in the near future.

This study is the first to find evidence that the alternation between rational and normative managerial rhetorics is related to generational effects.

This ethnographic investigation of a general hospital aims to critically analyse a much lauded corporate culture. Rather than accepting the managerial and academic claims concerning the mobilisation of corporate culture at face value, this study builds upon a labour process analysis and takes a close look at how it actually seems to work.

The paper explores and describes how executive managers seek to design and impose corporate culture change and how it affects the nursing employees of this organisation. This was achieved by means of a six month field study of day‐to‐day life in the hospital's nursing division.

The results lend little support to the official claims that, if managerial objectives are realised, they are achieved through some combination of shared values and employee participation. The evidence lends more support to the critical view in labour process writing that modern cultural strategies lead to increased corporate control, greater employee subjection and extensive effort intensification. The contradiction this brings into the working lives of the employees leads to the conclusion that the rhetoric of corporate culture change does not affect the pre‐existing attitudes and value orientations of nursing employees. However, there were considerable variations in how employees received the managerial message and thus, by their degree of misbehaviour and adaptation, affected the organisation itself as well as using the cultural rhetoric against the management for their own ends.

The paper concludes that an extended labour process analysis is necessary to challenge the way in which corporate culture change is explored and described by management academics and practitioners.

This ethnographic revisit of a general hospital aims to critically explore and describe the mechanisms of corporate culture change and how institutional excellence is facilitated and constrained by everyday management practices between 1996/1997 and 2014/2015.

A five-month field study of day-to-day life in the hospital's nursing division was conducted by means of an ethnographic revisit, using participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, free conversations and documentary material.

Using labour process analysis with ethnographic data from a general hospital, the corporate culture is represented as faceted, complex and sophisticated, lending little support to the managerial claims that if corporate objectives are realised, they are achieved through some combination of shared values, beliefs and managerial practices. The findings tend to support the critical view in labour process writing that modern managerial initiatives lead to tightened corporate control, advanced employee subjection and extensive effort intensification. The findings demonstrate the way in which the nursing employees enthusiastically embrace many aspects of the managerial message and yet, at the same time, still remain suspicious and distance themselves from it through misbehaviour and adaptation, and, in some cases, use the rhetoric against management for their own ends.

What are the implications for clinical and managerial practitioners? The recommendations are to (1) develop managerial practitioners who are capable of managing change combined with the professional autonomy of clinical practitioners, (2) take care to practise what you preach in clinical and managerial reality, as commitment, consent, compliance and difference of opinion are signs of a healthy corporate culture and (3) consider the implications between social structures and human actions with different work behaviours on different levels involved.

This ethnographic revisit considers data from a labour process analysis of corporate culture change in a general hospital and revisits the ways in which contradictory expectations and pressures are experienced by nursing employees and management practitioners spread 17 years apart.

The need for a permanent revolution in organizational structures and use of human resources is legitimated by reference to the need to adapt to ever more turbulent times. This gives rise to and is sustained by a distinctive anti‐bureaucratic rhetoric based largely on over‐hyped, unrepresentative examples and misunderstood processes. However, though empirically unsustainable, the rhetoric survives, in part because this kind of managerial discourse is playing by different rules. Explores and challenges the internal dynamics of this discourse to show that the rhetoric of discontinuity has been a continuous feature. Uses case studies of privatized utilities and analysis of the literature to explore both the gap between rhetoric and reality, and how managers operate in that gap.

Although the gap between rhetoric and reality is not a specific human resource management (HRM) feature, the disconnection between discourse and action seems to have reached unusual stages in this case. Not much is known about HRM in Portugal, but it is clear that Portuguese academics and practitioners have extensively adopted the global HRM rhetoric. With an environment apparently unfavorable to the HRM normative model, this paper examines the ways in which global HRM rhetoric meets Portuguese reality.

Attempts to reanalyze the concept of empowerment as it relates to management. Tracing the origins and nature of management, outlines a case for viewing empowerment as part of a larger system of management control innovations, or cocktails of control. Does not seek to debunk or dismiss empowerment as simply founded on control, and so unworthy of serious analysis. Instead, using the concept of governance, attempts to analyze how managers use the rhetoric of empowerment to secure control. From here analyzes the limits to managerial control, founded on empowerment. Offers observations and conclusions for future research on empowerment.

The authors unpack the critical role of rhetoric in developing and justifying the New Zealand (NZ) government's coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown strategy.

Using Green's (2004) theory of rhetorical diffusion, the authors analysed government documents and media releases before, during and after the lockdown to reconstruct the government's rationale.

The blending of kairos (sense of urgency and “right” time to act), ethos (emphasis on “saving lives”), pathos (fear of disruption and death) and selective use of health-based logos (shrinking infection rates), prompted fast initial adoption of the lockdown. However, support for the rhetoric wavered post-lockdown as absence of robust logos became apparent to the public.

The authors implicate the role of rhetoric in decision-makers’ ability to successfully elicit support for a new practice under urgency and the right moment to act using emotionalisation and moralisation. The assessment of the NZ government's response strategy provides insights decision-makers could glean in developing policies to tame the virus.

This study’s analysis demonstrates the unsustainability of rhetoric in the absence of reliable information.

The authors demonstrate the consequences of limited (intermittent) evidence and disregard for accounting/accountability data in public policy decisions under a rhetorical strategy.