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Following a successful career in industry, Dr. Douglas V. Shick, a newly minted entrepreneur, established NRS Associates, LLC, to perform consulting services based on two highly technical computer-modeling programs. Doug was heavily involved in the development of one program, an innovative computer simulation software for modeling a particular manufacturing process, through intrapreneurial activity during his corporate experience. Doug established his business on September 1, 2001, and on September 10 announced his services by e-mail to everyone he knew. The unforeseen events of the next day, September 11, produced some unexpected aftereffects that Doug had to factor into his developing business.

This chapter addresses relevant academic discourses and theory development in the cross-disciplinary fields where the arts and business meet. Three specific discourses are investigated: the arts for business, the arts with business and the arts’ disruptive business (or against business). The manner of the investigation reflects the overall tone and approach of this book in that it includes an introductory review of the relevant literature as a means of distilling the key themes and theories that have emerged in this research field. The chapter will thus also add some reference value to the key questions of academic debate about the arts and businesses: where have we come from and where are we now? Some speculation on ‘where we are going’ is also included.

In this chapter, the authors build upon the value and the gaps of the traditional model to propose a more strategic and comprehensive framework for designing and conducting intelligence work. The future of intelligence work in the knowledge economy requires a new approach. The new framework includes four primary intelligence capabilities, including design, analysis, automation and operationalize, and accelerate. The framework applies to any organization operating in any economic sector.

The basic thesis espoused in this chapter is that a discourse analytic approach, that explores managers’ stories, is equally valid as a more typical case study approach that seeks confirmatory data. Depth interviews with industrial network participants are conducted and described; interviews where managers are encouraged to talk of their lived experiences, beliefs, attitudes, and intentions. Specifically, this case study presents a qualitative exploration of identity processes in industrial networks, in particular social constructions of Indian modernity. The analysis suggests what these constructions mean for the management of buyer–seller relationships (cf. Bagozzi, 1995). The study also reflects calls for more empirical research to be undertaken to improve understanding of contemporary marketing practices, especially in large emerging market economies such as India and Brazil (Dadzie, Johnston, & Pels, 2008). Discursive data were collected in the form of transcripts from semi-structured interviews with a variety of managerial participants involved in trade between New Zealand (NZ) and India. All the participants are Indian, with interviews taking place in 2006 in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Chennai. Interviews were conducted in English; with 23 individuals representing organizations operating in the lumber, wool, horticulture, dairy, engineering, IT, tourism, and education industries, they lasted between 45 and 90 minutes, and were recorded on audio and video media. The study goes some way toward addressing the dominant Western perspective prevalent in most studies of business relationships, and shows how discourse analysis can provide a rich analytical perspective on business-to-business relationships.

This chapter considers problems and opportunities for design and management to contribute to creating a sustainable world. We consider the epistemology of two discourses bridging design and management, design management and design thinking, and that of appreciative inquiry, which we suggest has much in common with design thinking. We discuss problems with combining discourses from different paradigms, and highlight opportunities when paradigms are similar. We illustrate these opportunities with examples of three projects lead by designers, and comment on ways these discourses contribute to the concept of sustainability and ways in which practitioners create sustainable value.

Design thinking has become something of a buzz word in innovation discussions and has recently also invested occupied education spaces. In this chapter we briefly compare design thinking to problem-based learning (PBL) and enquiry-based learning (EBL) approaches to problem solving in education before focusing on the approach itself and current debates about its meaning and significance. This chapter focuses particular attention on the problem finding aspect of design thinking and its integration of creative methods for solving a range of tame to wicked problems in a variety of spaces. We ground our analysis in three environments of design thinking and five specific cases of application across education sectors from primary through to university. The examples focus on the generative potential of design thinking for all students and especially those from non-design disciplines. It is this capacity of design thinking to complement existing pedagogies and provide inspiration for change and innovation that is the strength of the model.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature on how actors manage competing logics in an organizational field. The authors do so by introducing the concept of organizational irony to the literature on how to manage competing logics, and analyze a collaborative cultural project encompassing actors subjected to competing institutional logics.

The case study is built on qualitative data from in-depth interviews, newspaper articles and observations.

The authors describe and analyze a cultural project encompassing actors subjected to competing institutional logics and show how they responded to institutional pressures in their environment with the use of organizational irony. Thereby, the actors could collaborate with actors subjected to a competing institutional logic and still maintain adherence to their respective institutional logic.

Most studies of how to manage competing logics asserts that one logic will prevail over a competing one, either through “battles” or gradual dominance (Reay and Hinings, 2009). This study supports and adds to Reay and Hinings’ (2009) finding that actors also can collaborate and maintain adherence to their respective logic under such circumstances. In particular, it supports two identified mechanisms of how this can be achieved, namely, to separate decisions and to jointly innovate in experimental sites. It also adds to these mechanisms by showing that this can be done through the use of organizational irony. The authors only study one cultural project in one organizational field. It remains unclear if these findings are common in other cultural projects or in other organizational field, and the authors therefore encourage other researchers to extend or challenge the findings of this study.

The authors believe that the analysis and findings can be useful for politicians to take into account and address either to minimize the risk of organizational irony or on the contrary encourage it as a source of reflexive critique of society and cultural politics. The authors also believe that the response of organizational irony to institutional pressures broadens the acting space of cultural actors, provide media and critics with an analytical tool to analyze and deconstruct practices that otherwise would risk to be silenced or neglected. Finally, the authors believe that an analysis of organizational irony has the potential to make people attend to contradictions and multiple meanings in the artworks under study in a novel way.

The paper provides an intriguing and complex empirical case to demonstrate how actors manage competing logics in an organizational field through the production of organizational irony. The authors believe that its theoretical contributions and practical implications can inspire future research on how paradoxes can be managed through the use of organizational irony in other projects and organizational fields.

To illustrate methodologically and conceptually how understanding of entrepreneurial management can be enhanced through a discourse perspective which focuses on discourse as both noun and verb, encompassing discursive resources and discursive practices.

An ethnographic study of SME managers and their companies, which deployed a discourse perspective to managing, organising and learning. Through two case study companies the paper explores how managers' formal management learning influenced their organisation practice.

Demonstrates how significant communicative acts are to understanding a company. Illustrates how apparent organisation dysfunction might be analysed and sense made of it.

By differentiating between discursive practice and discursive resource it shows that entrepreneurship research can be enriched through ethnographic study of both the content of communication between organisation members and their communicative practices.

Illustrates a method of gaining insight into dysfunctional organisational processes. Provides new ways of understanding and researching the interconnections between learning, knowledge and management in small enterprises.

In the small firm sector there are still few empirical discursive analyses of organization and managing. Discursive organization studies have also tended to be undervalued as “an obsession with talk” and “an intellectual luxury”. This article addresses both these gaps, both offering evidence of the practical utility of the methodological approach for advancing organisation understanding and providing a rare empirical discursive study of managing in SMEs.