Search results

Using intersectionality and introducing newer developments from critical cross-cultural management studies, this paper aims to discuss how diversity is applicable to changing cultural contexts.

The paper is a conceptual paper built upon relevant empirical research findings from critical cross-cultural management studies.

By applying intersectionality as a conceptual lens, this paper underscores the practical and conceptual limitations of the business case for diversity, in particular in a culturally diverse international business (IB) setting. Introducing newer developments from critical cross-cultural management studies, the authors identify the need to investigate and manage diversity across distinct categories, and as intersecting with culture, context and power.

This paper builds on previous empirical research in critical cross-cultural management studies using intersectionality as a conceptual lens and draws implications for diversity management in an IB setting from there. The authors add to the critique of the business case by showing its failures of identifying and, consequently, managing diversity, equality/equity and inclusion (DEI) in IB settings.

Organizations (e.g. MNEs) are enabled to clearly see the limitations of the business case and provided with a conceptual lens for addressing DEI issues in a more contextualized and intersectional manner.

This paper introduces intersectionality, as discussed and applied in critical cross-cultural management studies, as a conceptual lens for outlining the limitations of the business case for diversity and for promoting DEI in an IB setting in more complicated, realistic and relevant ways.

The purpose of this conceptual‐theoretical review article is to examine two claims made by critical management studies (CMS): that CMS is emancipatory and that it has critical theory (CT) as its origin and prime theoretical base.

Two theories are contrasted: CT and CMS. The paper analyses one of CMS' newest key publications: the Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies in great detail focusing on epidemiology and philosophy.

The main finding is that CMS is a critical representation of mainstream MS. CT focuses on emancipation while CMS provides a system‐conforming interpretation of traditional MS that rarely presents alternatives to mainstream MS.

The key implication is that CMS assists mainstream MS as a corrective but, in general, does not enhance emancipation.

The paper assists researchers in the field of management studies (MS) and its “critical” offspring of CMS in understanding the role CMS plays for traditional MS.

It makes scholars aware that research conducted from within CMS provides system‐conforming solution to issues such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental issues. CMS scholarship is not a critical evaluation of, for example, CSR and environmental issues directed towards emancipation from present structures of managerial domination.

The value of the paper is threefold: for the first time, CMS has been measured against its own claims; the article provides clarity on three issues: MS, CMS and CT; and it assists research in the area of CMS and CT because it shows that the former is about improving mainstream MS while the latter is about emancipation.

The purpose of this study is to examine the potential of integrating material from the arts into postgraduate curricula to deepen students’ engagement with marketing phenomena. The authors assess the use of arts-based activities, within a broader critical pedagogy, for encouraging imaginative and analytical thinking.

The authors devised two learning activities and an interpretive method for studying their value. The activities were an individual essay connecting themes in song lyrics to marketing, and a group photography project. These were applied, within a broader, critical approach, in postgraduate modules on sustainability, ethics and critical marketing. Data collection comprised diaries kept by the teachers, open-ended feedback from students and students’ assignments.

Students showed high levels of engagement, reflexivity and depth of thought, in felt experiences of learning. Their ability to make connections not explicitly in the materials, and requiring imaginative jumps, was notable. Several reported lasting changes to their behaviour. Some found the tasks initially intimidating or, once they were more engaged, stressful or saddening.

This adds to scholarship on management education by showing the usefulness of an arts-based approach towards a transformative agenda.

It offers a template of how to draw from the arts to strengthen critical engagement upon which marketing teachers can build. It also contains practical advice on the challenges and benefits of doing so.

The authors provide evidence that this approach can enhance sensitivity and reflexivity in students, potentially producing more ethical and sustainable decisions in future.

The pedagogical interventions are novel and of value to lecturers seeking to enhance critical engagement with theory. An empirical study of an attempt to integrate arts into teaching marketing represents a promising direction, given the discipline’s creative nature.

This study aims to investigate the implications of applying critical realism to the study of organizational learning. It considers critical realism as an alternate theoretical science foundation to the domains of empirical realism and social constructivism that characterize most of the field of organizational learning.

This study adopts the approach of a philosophical/conceptual discussion.

This study finds that the critical realist approach makes it possible for organizational learning researchers to apply a prescriptive change agenda. It requires researchers to study the context in which organizational learning occurs. These two features enable the researcher to propose what the world must be like for organizational learning to occur. Hence, a critical realist foundation moves organizational learning theory a step closer to its theoretical sibling, the learning organization.

This study reveals the potential in applying critical realism to the study of organizational learning and identifies its related strengths.

This paper details how we adapted a critically informed third-year career management and development course to address an identified gap in our Human Resource Management students learning at both practical and theoretical levels. In order to address this gap, we explored and challenged the aims of our critically informed pedagogy, and alongside our campus career development services, collaboratively redesigned the course to enhance theoretical and practical learning outcomes of students.

We detail changes made through three stages of curriculum redesign and provide an exploratory analysis of 106 student reflections on the third iterative redesign. This exploratory analysis focuses on student learning outcomes resulting from their engagement with the career practitioner and the revised course content.

Students found the course theoretically challenging and practically relevant and were readily able to incorporate career theory into descriptions of their own careers. However, more significantly, students were also able to situate themselves within a wider critique of the context of careers, demonstrating the development of critical reasoning skills and moving towards practical and critical action, demonstrating praxis.

Our experience provides an example of bridging the seeming paradox of critical pedagogy and practice. Specific details of curriculum design may be of interest to those looking to improve both theoretical and practice engagement.

This paper analyzes how information systems (IS) can serve as tools of neo-colonial control in offshore outsourcing of research and development work. It draws on critical work examining business and knowledge process outsourcing.

The paper reports an empirical study of how laboratory information management systems (LIMS) shape offshore outsourcing practices involving Western client firms and Indian contract research organizations (CROs) in the pharmaceutical industry. The study adopted a multi-actor perspective, involving interviews with representatives of Western clients, Indian CROs, system validation auditors, and software vendors. The analysis was iterative and interpretative, guided by postcolonial sensitivity to themes of power and control.

The study found that LIMS act as tools of neo-colonial control at three levels. As Western clients specify particular brands of LIMS, they create a hierarchy among local CROs and impact the development of the local LIMS industry. At inter-organizational level, LIMS shape relationships by allowing remote, real-time and retrospective surveillance of CROs’ work. At individual level, the ability of LIMS to support micro-modularizing of research leads to routinization of scientific discovery, negatively impacting scientists’ work satisfaction.

By examining multiple actors’ perceptions of IS, this paper looks beyond the rhetoric of system efficiency characteristic of most international business research. As it explores dynamics of power and control surrounding IS, it also questions the proposition that outsourcing of high-end work will move emerging economies upstream in the value chain.

This paper aims to explore how historical context influences the content and selection of rhetorical legitimation strategies. Using case study method, this paper will focus on how insurance companies and labor tried to defend their legitimacy in the context of enactment of Medicare in the USA. What factors influenced the strategic (rhetorical) decisions made by insurance companies and labor unions in their institutional work?

The study is empirically grounded in archival research, involving an analysis of over 9,000 pages of congressional hearings on Medicare covering the period 1958–1965.

The authors show that rhetorical legitimation strategies depend significantly on the specific historical circumstances in which those strategies are used. The historical context lent credibility to certain arguments and organizations are forced to decide either to challenge widely held assumptions or take advantage of them. The authors show that organizations face strong incentives to pursue the latter option. Here, both the insurance companies and labor unions tried to show that their positions were consistent with classical liberal ideology, because of high respect of classical liberal principles among different stakeholders (policymakers, voters, etc.).

It is uncertain how much the results of the study could be generalized. More information about the organizations whose use of rhetorics the authors studied could have strengthened our conclusions.

The practical relevancy of the revised paper is that the authors should not expect hegemony challenging rhetorics from organizations, which try to influence legislators (and perhaps the larger public). Perhaps (based on the findings), this kind of rhetorics is not even very effective.

The paper helps to understand better how organizations try to advance their interests and gain acceptance among the stakeholders.

In this paper, the authors show how historical context in practice influence rhetorical arguments organizations select in public debates when their goal is to influence the decision-making of their audience. In particular, the authors show how dominant ideology (or ideologies) limit the options organizations face when they are choosing their strategies and arguments. In terms of the selection of rhetorical justification strategies, the most pressing question is not the “real” broad based support of certain ideologies. Insurance company and labor union representatives clearly believed that they must emphasize liberal values (or liberal ideology) if they wanted to gain legitimacy for their positions. In existing literature, it is often assumed that historical context influence the selection of rhetorical strategies but how this in fact happens is not usually specified. The paper shows how interpretations of historical contexts (including the ideological context) in practice influence the rhetorical strategies organizations choose.