Search results

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Slawek Magala and the author have a great deal in common and that the author is putting the differences to an interesting use in the Erasmus Honors Program designed for the top students of all faculties of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. The model of education gaining the upper hand in contemporary universities should be balanced with the more fundamental humanist upbringing of students-citizens.

The paper has been written as an empirical report based on five years of participative observation, regular analysis and group discussion of student essays, and on the on-going application of qualitative techniques in designing a curriculum, running the program and joint evaluation of its intended effects with the main protagonist of the paper, namely the colleague Slawek Magala. The labels “traditionalist” and “postmodernist” have been codified according to the most frequent academic usage.

If Slawek manifests himself as a typical post-modernist who does not believe in stable identities, the author will be then the neo-traditionalist, who tries to connect identities to value choices and value choices to stable philosophies of virtue and moral choices. Both of them have multiple identities. Slawek is a Pole who has adapted the Dutch nationality. The author is a born Dutch who also carries an American passport. What brings them together intellectually, the author thinks, is a conviction that they have to bring culture into the scientific pursuits.

Very few academic studies pointed out that cultural repertoire of value qchoices involves an on-going cultural negotiation. The author has succeeded in legitimizing the concept of culture in the teaching and research. Other researchers may employ the notions of culture and value to develop a value-based approach to the economy. The paper helps to show that identities get stabilized, that people are in need of stabilizing their values, and with those their identities.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the background and the plot of the academic career of Slawomir Magala, particularly from the point of view represented by the author who had co-created significant international conference on critical theory and the sciences of management which triggered off the critical management studies in the British and subsequently global academic research networks.

The content of the research is based on a mixture of a historical account of a conference on the Frankfurt school of social research, observations and participatory observations, qualitative content analysis and a bibliographical case study.

The long-term effects of an international networking event are hard to predict and almost never respect the academic borders and gate keepers.

This paper is a very personal point of view.

This paper is a case study of academic school emergence.

This paper is a case study of social and political relevance of managerial research.

The unique selling point of this paper is that it is based on a critical event in uncritical sciences.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that narrative methodology is increasingly caught in an ideological deadlock set in terms of a false choice between meaning (an unconditional respect for the voice of experience) and truth (the scientific validation of stories), which has led to an increasing dismissal of analysis in narrative research. Inadvertently, however, this development has also heightened vulnerability to ideological deception in storytelling.

Through the lens of Žižek's theory of ideology, this paper offers a reflection on narrative analysis that proposes a renewed critical perspective on “writing responsibly” about organizations by repositioning narrative analysis and its purpose vis‐à‐vis science, storytelling and ideology.

Žižek's conception of ideological fantasy highlights the impotence of cognitive forms of ideology critique in this age. He stresses how this reality is pervaded as deeply by fetishistic illusions as is thought. These illusions, disseminated through narrative, serve as the backbone of everyday practices in organizations and society, based on a process of symbolic “quilting” that is designed to cover up the traumatic emptiness of central signifiers used to make sense of experience. Semiotic analysis enables people to recognize how they constantly “re‐write” this experience in organizational narratives and science to erase from view the structural impossibility of social fantasies.

Three areas for the semiotic analysis of narratives are identified that merit special attention for the recognition of this ideological deception in stories: the entwinement of fact and fiction, the interplay of form and content and the use of perspective and voice.

Žižek's theory has not been systematically applied yet as a methodological tool in narrative research and analysis, while it affords a promising way to critically negotiate the pitfalls of representation in organization and business research.

With the help of Slavoj Žižek's concept of interpassivity, this paper seeks to illustrate the frantic activities performed by employees to maintain a separation between the idea of an authentic self and the idea of a corporate self. Furthermore, this paper aims to illustrate these activities empirically.

The empirical example is based on a case study of three of the largest international consultancy firms. About 50 consultants were interviewed in this study, but this paper primarily focuses on the experiences of one of these consultants, and goes into depth with his experiences to illustrate the frantic mechanisms of interpassivity.

The paper shows how the maintenance of an “authentic self” outside of the corporate culture demands a distinct and frantic activity; that this activity can best be understood as interpassive in the sense that it involves taking over the passive acknowledgement for which someone else is responsible; and how the separation of an authentic from a corporate self, rather than resist the demand to enjoy one's work – prescribed by contemporary management programs – nourishes it.

The paper builds on recent literature on cynicism and normative control in organisations. It introduces interpassivity to this discussion.

The purpose of this paper is to see how digital societies’ studies can be inspired by cross-cultural management.

Theory critical analysis and review.

The paper reveals many similarities and analogies, allowing for useful connections between cross-cultural management research, and studying digital societies.

By exposing methodological and theoretical links of cross-cultural management field in general, and Magala’s contribution in particular, the following paper helps in better understanding of contemporary research on digital societies, as well as allows for the use of already proven methodologies and approaches in the emerging field of the internet studies.

Professor Slawomir Magala is a full professor of Cross-Management at the Department of Organization and Personnel Management in Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University (RSM, 2015). His education stems from Poland, Germany and the USA, and has taught and conducted research in China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Croatia, Estonia, the United Kingdom and Namibia. He is a former Chair for Cross-Cultural Management at RSM and has achieved many things, from being editor-in-chief of the Journal of Organizational Change Management (JOCM), to receiving the Erasmus Research Institute in Management (ERIM) Book Award (2010), for The Management of Meaning in Organizations (Routledge, 2009). It has received honors for being the best book in one of the domains of management research. It was selected by an academic committee, consisting of the Scientific Directors of CentER (Tilburg University), METEOR (University of Maastricht) and SOM (University of Groningen). All these research schools are accredited by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This is a review of Professor Slawomir Magala’s contributions as editor of Journal of Organizational Change Management.

Slawomir (Slawek) Magala will be known for many contributions to social, organizational, managerial research, and it will be remembered that he has created a great legacy in the field of cross-cultural competence and communication on processes of sense making in professional bureaucracies. He has authored and co-authored many publications including articles, books, professional publications, book contributions and other outputs, and is an established professor of cross-cultural management at the Department of Organization and Personnel Management in RSM, Erasmus University. He will be known for his work as editor of Qualitative Sociology Review, and one of the founding members of the Association for Cross-Cultural Competence in Management, not to mention the Journal of Organizational Change Management. Many of his articles have appeared regularly in leading refereed journals, such as the European Journal of International Management, Public Policy, Critical Perspectives on International Business and Human Resources Development International. His greatest legacy is in the field of cross-cultural management, but branches out to many other management studies.

The research is limited to his work in capacity of editor of Journal of Organizational Change Management.

This review provides a guide for positive role model of an excellent editorship of a journal.

Magala’s legacy acknowledges this research and its power to create numerous papers and attract a lot of attention (Flory and Magala, 2014). Because of these conferences, these empirical findings have led to disseminating the conference findings with JOCM (Flory and Magala, 2014). According to them, narrative research has become a respectable research method, but they also feel that it is still burdened with a lot of controversies on with difficulties linked to applying it across different disciplines (Flory and Magala, 2014).

The review covers the creative accomplishment of Professor Magala as editor.

The purpose of this paper is to show that Slawek Magala’s theory of management of meaning in organisations can be considered as a step towards a generic theory of organisational change.

The authors are integrating Slawek Magala’s views on the processes, which play a role in changing organisations (i.e. framing, reflecting, negotiating, and seeking new windows of opportunities) with the related types of narratives as developed by David Boje (2001, 2008) and with further extensions by Fink and Yolles (2012), which are based on a model of paradigm change.

The authors develop a theoretical framework, which might serve as a basis for analysis of change processes emerging from different contexts within or outside a firm and offer some reflections about comparing research into issues of organisational change.

This is a theoretical viewpoint paper.

The extension of Magala’s model offers a practical guide for research into organisational change processes.

Magala’s model offers a deeper understanding of actual change processes.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time where a concept about emergent causality deriving from interaction between two conflicting agents (i.e. involved parties as, e.g. managers and subordinates) is applied to emerging stages in change processes.

The purpose of this paper is to address the decreasing role of professional associations in governing the work of entrepreneurial, knowledge-intensive professions such as management consulting. It presents the example of an alternative path to traditional professional regulation. This organic professionalization path is introduced through the concept of dispersed institutional entrepreneurship.

The paper builds on an in-depth qualitative investigation of professionals in the intercultural industry combining physical and digital ethnography in a multi-modal investigation.

The findings illustrate how an ideological divide within the professional community prevents an emergence of the traditional, association-led professionalization path. Instead, the investigated community follows an organic, bottom-up route, with competing individual entrepreneurs developing converging strategies and products. This process is labelled dispersed institutional entrepreneurship.

The findings indicate that current views on professionalization need to reconsider admission criteria and the professionalization paths that are generally assumed. Further research could focus on investigating organic professionalization paths among other professional groups.

With an in-depth qualitative investigation of an aspiring professional community this paper contributes to an ongoing discussion on the process of professionalization. The findings show that independent agents’ efforts could be at the centre of the process. They can prevent the professional association from leading the professionalization project while enabling the organic development of synergies across the community.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an introductory overview of this special issue highlighting some of the distinctive features of Žižek's Lacan‐inspired thought relevant to the role of ideologies in organizational change management.

The approach used aims to show how ideological and ethical ramifications of Žižek's recent analysis of a “Jacobin” change paradigm can affect thought on everyday change practices in business and management.

Some parallels are drawn between current change practices and narrative tactics employed by Robespierre during the Jacobin reign of terror to “extort” the commitment of participants in the change process.

This paper/special issue invites reconsideration of our late capitalist intellectual/practical “reflexes” in change management, i.e. to reassess their ideological mechanism.

Žižekian/Lacanian approaches to organizations and change are especially suitable for this purpose but have only recently begun to emerge.