Search results
1 – 10 of 36Scrutinizes one of the main features of the conventional credo of organizational management: The “ethic of self‐preservation” (ESP). The ESP is the inevitable by‐product of a…
Abstract
Scrutinizes one of the main features of the conventional credo of organizational management: The “ethic of self‐preservation” (ESP). The ESP is the inevitable by‐product of a culture that denies interiors and encourages materialistic consumerism and narcissistic self‐interest. Several pertinent questions will be explored: What is an ethic and what role does it play in governing both personal and collective behavior? What specifically is the ESP? How is it fostered by the prevailing culture of narcissism? What impact if any, does it have on the maintenance of organizational integrity? Furthermore, how can the Chaos principle of Connectivity be construed as an imperative for organizational adaptation and sustainability? Finally, what lessons can Chaos lend practitioners of organization development that will permit them to grasp, and ultimately, accept a new ethic based on the fact of connectivity in the essential process of organizational change?
Details
Keywords
Charles Thomas Tackney and Imran Shah
Authenticity/ الصحة (as-sehah) serves as a criterion or predictor variable for the purpose of a comparative theological investigation of employment relations parameters in light…
Abstract
Purpose
Authenticity/ الصحة (as-sehah) serves as a criterion or predictor variable for the purpose of a comparative theological investigation of employment relations parameters in light of social teachings from Sunni Islam and Roman Catholicism. Authenticity finds initial, shared significance in both religious traditions because of its critically important role in judgments concerning the legitimacy of source documents. It also stands in both traditions as an inspirational goal for human life.
Design/methodology/approach
Particular issues of theological method for cross-cultural analysis are addressed by the use of insight-based critical realism as a transcultural foundation. Workplace parameters, the minimal enabling conditions for the possibility of authentic employment relations, are then identified and compared. The authors explore shared expectations for authenticity enabling conditions in terms of the direct and indirect employer: those national laws, systems and traditions that condition the functional range of authenticity that can be actualized within national or other work settings as experienced in the direct employment contract.
Findings
The study found remarkable consistency in the minimal conditions identified by Roman Catholic and Sunni Islam social teachings for the prospects of authenticity in employment relations. These conditions addressed seven parameters: work and the concept of labor; private property; the nature of the employment contract; unions and collective bargaining; the treatment of wages; the relationship between managerial prerogative and employee participation; and the crucial role of the state as indirect employer.
Practical implications
Specific minimal or threshold conditions of employment are described to ensure the prospect for authenticity in modern employment relations according to religious traditions. These include just cause employment conditions, unions and collective bargaining support, some form of management consultation/Shura, a living wage and a consultative exercise of managerial prerogative.
Social implications
The study offers prescriptive and analytical aid to ensure assessment of circumstances fostering authenticity in employment relations.
Originality/value
The method and findings are a first effort to clarify thought and aid mutual understanding for inter-faith employment circumstances based on Roman Catholic and Sunni Islam social teachings through a transcultural foundation in cognitional operations. The criterion variable specification of authenticity conditions offers a fully developed basis to support further empirical research in management spirituality, corporate social responsibility and enterprise sustainability.
Details
Keywords
This paper is concerned with the concept of reflexive agency through the biography and memoirs of Georg Mayer, a Jewish businessman who immigrated to Turkey before 1945 and lived…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper is concerned with the concept of reflexive agency through the biography and memoirs of Georg Mayer, a Jewish businessman who immigrated to Turkey before 1945 and lived there for almost 40 years. This paper aims to explore reflexive agency using the concepts of structural conditions (socioeconomic background), contextual stimuli (activation of reflexivity) and individual perspectives at different points in life (main concerns, reflection on the past, projects and decision-making).
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is developed using qualitative research methods, analyzing a variety of sources including books, papers, biographical materials and personal memoirs. Primary sources are three books written about him and Mayer Stores using the method of oral history. Moreover, Mayer’s memoirs, which provided rich information about his observations of people, acts and culture, were analyzed.
Findings
Several conclusions can be drawn. While there are typologies for reflexive agency, it is found that a person can fit into several modes at different times and/or at the same time. Another finding is that an individual’s social network is an important factor for his/her reflexive agency. When immigrating to another country with a contextual discontinuity and structural change, an established community and economic opportunities are important factors. A strong stimulus such as a life threat can be a force majeure and trigger for individuals to take risks, affecting their abilities of reflexivity.
Originality/value
This paper presents a unique case study that examines immigration from Western countries before 1945. This paper tries to provide detailed information about social context, including critical milestones, bring the concepts of culture, identity, migration and reflexivity together by analyzing an atypical business figure through his biography and personal memoirs, and use narrative analysis to explain how a reflexive person can act in contextual discontinuity, hence showing how structural, cultural and personal emergent properties can be understood together.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this afterword is to examine which questions have been illuminated in the present issue and which theoretical problems still need to be addressed.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this afterword is to examine which questions have been illuminated in the present issue and which theoretical problems still need to be addressed.
Design/methodology/approach
Examines articles in this issue.
Findings
Many epistemological views, e.g. social constructivism, critical theory, feminist epistemology, postmodernism and systems theory, need to be considered more deeply within library and information science (LIS). For some of the other epistemologies such as phenomenology and (post)structuralism there is still a need for deeper explorations of their potential contributions. Finally eclecticism is discussed as one way of coping with different theories in a field.
Originality/value
The value of this afterword is to contribute to future reflections and debates concerning the philosophical basis of LIS and the specific contributions of specific systems of thought.
Details
Keywords
Emanuela Conti and Andrea Chiarini
This paper aims to investigate the phases of new product development within the design-driven innovation (DDI) process, the role of designers and collaborators in the process and…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the phases of new product development within the design-driven innovation (DDI) process, the role of designers and collaborators in the process and how this process relates to some quality principles.
Design/methodology/approach
This study adopted a qualitative approach using Gioia methodology. In particular, four Italian manufacturing companies in the home appliances and furniture industry were selected, and data mainly collected through direct interviews were analysed through content analysis.
Findings
The new product development related to DDI includes the following phases: the company brief, the designer research, the concept of the designer, the design, legal protection, prototyping, production and the market launch. Designers play a strategic role in the above phases of DDI, but other actors also cooperate and some quality principles affect positively on the process. This study proposes a model for a DDI process in the home appliances and furniture sector.
Research limitations/implications
Although this exploratory study was conducted on only four companies, it advances the DDI research in relation to new product development.
Practical implications
This study makes recommendations to entrepreneurs and managers on how to innovate successfully and to effectively manage designers and collaborators to ensure competition.
Social implications
This analysis highlights that design-based innovation contributes to improving the quality of life of consumers.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first qualitative study to examine the phases of new product development in DDI process, the actors involved and relationship to quality principles for the Italian home appliances and furniture sector.
Details
Keywords
Gramophony of an Application for ‘Recognition of a Condition of Permanent Desire’ is a collage of theoretical arguments, creative writing and audio performances that examines…
Abstract
Gramophony of an Application for ‘Recognition of a Condition of Permanent Desire’ is a collage of theoretical arguments, creative writing and audio performances that examines notions of (life) writing, voice and subjectivity from a poststructuralist feminist perspective. By engaging in what Smith and Dean (2009) describe as the interwoven processes of ‘practice‐led research’ and ‘research‐led practice’ I combined conceptual research with creative practice and produced a form of hybridised text that blurs traditional binaries of ‘fact’/‘fiction’, ‘creative’/‘critical’ and ‘speech’/‘writing’. Following Smith (1995), I suggest understanding Gramophony as an example of ‘performative autobiography’ that challenges traditional discourses of identity and representation.
Details
Keywords
This paper attempts to conceive the “narrated event” by considering the use of open‐ended a‐synchronous “blogs” in a current PhD study looking at the perceptions of 30 senior…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper attempts to conceive the “narrated event” by considering the use of open‐ended a‐synchronous “blogs” in a current PhD study looking at the perceptions of 30 senior secondary students over their final year of secondary schooling.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper discusses the role of identity‐play in the construction of narrative accounts and specifically, how those accounts, when solicited in a blog study, might come to represent a “performance” of the narrator.
Findings
The implications of how we, as qualitative researchers, obtain our data places limitations on what kind of voice we allow the subjects of our enquiry. “Agency” requires dialogic interaction which “brings self and other together so that they may question, debate, and challenge one another” (Conquergood). Not only the ear, but also the voice of the listener thus bind the extent to which the subject can narrate their own stories. Thus, the subject is reflective, she constructs a dialogue where “underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject” (Deleuze).
Originality/value
By employing dialogic/performative narrative methods (Riessman), along with online methods (Fielding), this paper positions online blogs within the broader methodological discussions around identity and narrative by facilitating a conversation between subjectivity, trustworthiness, the value of blogs as meaningful data, and how a conceptualisation of blogs as narrative performance helps give agency to those “tellings”.
Details
Keywords
Chris Steyaert, Laurent Marti and Christoph Michels
The purpose of this paper is, first, to assess the potential of the visual to enact multiplicity and reflexivity in organizational research, and second, to develop a performative…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is, first, to assess the potential of the visual to enact multiplicity and reflexivity in organizational research, and second, to develop a performative approach to the visual, which offers aesthetic strategies for creating future research accounts in organization and management studies.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper reviews existing visual research in organization and management studies and presents an in‐depth analysis of two early, almost classical, and yet very different endeavors to create visual accounts based on ethnography: the multi‐media enactments by Bruno Latour, Emilie Hermant, Susanna Shannon, and Patricia Reed, and the filmic and written work by Trinh T. Minh‐ha and her collaborators.
Findings
The authors’ analysis of how the visual is performed in both cases identifies a repertoire of three distinct and paradoxical aesthetic strategies: de/synchronizing, de/centralizing, and dis/covering.
Originality/value
The authors analyze two rarely acknowledged but ground‐breaking research presentations, identify aesthetic strategies to perform multiplicity and reflexivity in research accounts, and question the ways that research accounts are written and published in organization and management studies by acknowledging the consequences of a performative approach to the visual.
Details
Keywords
Current approaches to sustainability science and education focus on (assessing and addressing) the external world of ecosystems, wider socio-economic structures, technology and…
Abstract
Purpose
Current approaches to sustainability science and education focus on (assessing and addressing) the external world of ecosystems, wider socio-economic structures, technology and governance dynamics. A major shortcoming of such approaches is the neglect of inner dimensions and capacities (which constrains education for sustainability as an end), and a limited capacity to facilitate reflection on the cognitive and socio-emotional processes underpinning people’s learning, everyday life choices and decision-taking (which constrains education for sustainability as a means). More integral approaches and pedagogies are urgently needed. The purpose of this paper is to advance related knowledge.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper provides a reflexive case study of the development of an innovative course on “Sustainability and Inner Transformation” and associated interventions in the form of a practice lab and weekly councils.
Findings
The paper elaborates on the connections between sustainability and inner transformation in education, offers insights into the process of adapting contemplative interventions to sustainability education and concludes with some reflections on challenges, lessons learnt and future work needed to support more integral approaches. The findings show that inner dimensions and transformation can be a vehicle for critical, improved education for sustainability and how this can be achieved in practice.
Originality/value
It is only recently that the concept of the inner or personal (sphere of) transformation has received growing attention in sustainability science and education. Despite this interest, such new conceptualizations and heuristics have, to date, not been systematically connected to education for sustainability (neither as an end nor means). The paper presents a critical, reflexive case, which advances related knowledge. It sets a precedent, which other universities/training institutions could follow or learn from.
Details
Keywords
Zheyu Li, Muhammad Najib Razali, Hassan Gholipour Fereidouni and Yasmin Mohd. Adnan
The purpose of this study is to estimate different data models on house prices using statistical models and the variables which are controlled by real estate policy.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to estimate different data models on house prices using statistical models and the variables which are controlled by real estate policy.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used several statistical techniques, such as Vector auto-regression (VAR), Johansen co-integration and variance decomposition, which aim to assess the significant effect of macroeconomic factors on Chinese house prices.
Findings
The results show that land supply and other variables have negative effects on house prices. The results also indicate that financial mortgages for real estate have positive effects on house prices and the area of vacant houses as well as the area of housing sold.
Research limitations/implications
This study only covers three cities in China because of limitations of data for other cities.
Originality/value
This study proposes policy suggestions according to the empirical results obtained.