Search results

Research indicates that many innovations and social change initiatives fail to achieve their goals. One of the reasons they fail is because leaders lack an effective methodology that effectively engages support, addresses resistance, and integrates and aligns the innovation and change with the existing culture and social structure of the organization. Actor-network theory (ANT) provides a methodology for helping leaders understand and execute their role in leading innovations and social change as well as the role of networks in changing culture and social structure to support innovation and change. This chapter examines ANT as a leadership strategy for creating macro actors (powerful networks) to foster innovation and social change and describes a case study at a major research university of how ANT was used, in conjunction with the scientific method and appreciative inquiry, to enhance sustainable development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine business growth and explore the “growth mode” among 24 women entrepreneurs participating in a Nordic research, development and networking programme.

A longitudinal design made it possible to follow entrepreneurial growth as an unfolding and emerging research process with a methodology inductive in nature and driven by empirical findings. The analysis is structured following established procedures for inductive, theory-building research, using guidelines for constant comparison techniques and working recursively between the data and the emerging theory.

Two processes were found important to understand the women entrepreneurs’ growth mode. The first is interpreted as intentionally driven and relates to the women’s achievement of expanding their knowledge reservoir; the other is non-intentionally driven and a result of uncontrolled network responses. The latter unfolded as a movement towards a preferable macro-actor status for some of the entrepreneurs.

The study calls attention to relevant knowledge preferable to entrepreneurs who face challenges when trying to grow their businesses. The political implications of this study relate to the importance of awareness among governmental organizations and municipal business advisers regarding the effects of entrepreneurial networking.

This study provides an empirically rigorous insight into the processes of entrepreneurial growth. The findings led the authors to develop a conceptual model for business growth, which contributes to the recent stream of literature on how new businesses are growing.

This chapter will consider curriculum making in lower secondary education in Ireland. Building on the concept of curriculum as a social practice involving multiple actors across different contexts and involving intersecting domains of influence from the supra, to the nano, we characterizethe landscape of lower secondary education in Ireland as an “assemblage” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2003). An assemblage is any number of elements that are engaged in a process of arranging, organising, fitting together and a process of knowledge making. We discuss the emerging properties that have begun to evolve through the inter-connections of the assemblage as they engage in the process of reform by structuring the findings through the lens of how the semiotic, material and social flows worked simultaneously to open up or close down the process. Curriculum ideology, concepts, language and communication are examples of the semiotic flow. The material flow is the content of the domains, such as the actors, the physical structures, documents and artefacts. Relationships, pedagogy, and collaborative practice are involved in the social flow of the assemblage. The research underpinning this chapter mapped the agency of the actors in their capacity to make curriculum as these three flows worked simultaneously during a process of assemblage wide curriculum reform of lower secondary education in Ireland. The analysis and discussion gives rise to a number of insights into processes of curriculum making and into the complexities of system-wide reform.

The purpose of this paper is to consolidate the state of extant academic research on workplace innovation (WI) by proposing a comprehensive conceptual framework and outlining research traditions on the phenomenon.

This paper systematically reviewed the literature published over the past 20 years, basing on a predefined research protocol. The dimensions of WI were explored with the help of thematic synthesis, while the research perspectives were studied by means of textual narrative synthesis.

The analysis suggests that there exist four research traditions on WI – built container, humanized landscape, socio-material macro-actor, and polyadic network – and each of them comprises its own set of assumptions, foci of study, and ontological bases. The findings suggest that WI is a heterogeneous process of renovation occurring in eight different dimensions, namely work system, workplace democracy, high-tech application, workplace boundaries, workspaces, people practices, workplace experience, and workplace culture. The analysis showed that over years the meaning of innovation within these dimensions changed, therefore it is argued that research should account for the variability of these categories.

The paper includes implications for developing and implementing WI programs. Moreover, it discusses the role of HR in the WI process.

This paper for the first time systematically reviews literature on the topic of WI, clarifies the concept and discusses directions and implications for the future research.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the understanding of “the” accounting entity, demonstrating how it is a contestable socio-political construction informed by a nexus of market, state and community actors.

A case study method is utilised to follow debate relating to Swedish football clubs’ responsibility for the payment/non-payment of policing costs between 1999 and 2014. The case study uses documentary and interview data, focusing on one of the high-risk Stockholm clubs.

The paper makes four main contributions: first, demonstrating how the accounting entity is a changeable and contestable construction; second, outlining how distinctions informing contests about the accounting arena are materialised through accounting calculations and other devices; third, showing the importance of community in a coordinated sense in mediating accounting practices; and fourth, contributing to the literature on accounting and sport, highlighting the importance of state actors in this arena.

This research draws on original empirical data providing unique insights into debates regarding the responsibility for the payment of police costs in the context of sports-related violence. The authors show the importance of characterising accounting for sporting organisations as a shifting and contestable nexus of market, state and community actors.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the development of the theory of authenticity and metaconversations, particularly in relation to managerial metaconversations, and to show an empirical example of what one might term authentic metaconversational management from below.

The theoretical part of the paper consists of an analysis and elaboration of theories of metaconversation and management. The empirical part of the paper builds on a single case study, which was of both the one holistic and embedded holistic type. In connection with the case study structured and unstructured, open and direct techniques of participant observation were applied. Certain parts of the case study were based on action research and consultation methods.

This conceptual paper presents a definition of authenticity in relation to the theory of metaconversations, and demonstrates with the help of a case study that metaconversations can also be created from below, via a bottom‐up process.

On the basis of the theory of authenticity and metaconversations, the manager(s) and staff, collectively and individually, can reflect on and discuss whether the metaconversations they create and by which they are encompassed – or to which exposed – are authentic in the sense that everyone is being given a voice.

The paper offers a concept of authenticity, as it relates to management, which challenges the idea of authenticity as being primarily concerned with the manager's relationship with himself or herself, e.g. the degree of consistency between a manager's “walk” and “talk”. Authenticity in relation to the theory of management as a metaconversation deals with the relationship between the manager and the staff, for which reason authenticity in this paper is treated as a social and collective matter, not merely one which is individual and personal.

Social media allows students and faculty to research and display information in innovative new ways. Research methods courses – when developed by faculty members and librarian/instructional technologists – can move beyond database navigation and PowerPoint presentations when incorporating social media. This chapter discusses two Information Literacy case studies, one for a junior seminar in the hard sciences and the second for a class on the history of African-American Mathematicians. The courses were developed at a private, four-year Historically Black College/University (HBCU) through a faculty/library collaboration. These classes used a variety of Web 2.0 and social media tools including Google Maps, Flickr, Delicious, Yahoo Pipes, Meebo, YouTube, iTunes U, and the Moodle Learning Management System. Each case study will define and describe how each tool was used and the collaboration between faculty and librarians/technologists to implement social media. Student and faculty assessment of the program as well as anecdotal evidence is discussed for each study and implementation tips are provided. These case studies provide the practitioner ways to create an interactive, collaborative learning experience for students and faculty while alleviating library anxiety.

This study aims to weave together narrative analysis (hereinafter NA) and Actor-Network Theory (hereinafter ANT), in order to address recent calls for performative studies to combine approaches and specifically to use ANT. Particularly, they address how a conflicting narrative is mobilised through a network of internal–external and human–nonhuman actors.

A fragment of data, generated from a longitudinal case study, is explored using NA and ANT in combination.

By engaging with ANT’s rejection of dualisms (i.e. human–nonhuman and micro–macro) and its approach to relationality, the authors inform NA and performative studies. They also add to the limited literature addressing how conflicting antenarratives are mobilised and shape the organisation’s trajectory.

Generalizing from a single case study is problematic, although transferability is possible. Generalisability could be achievable through multiple performative studies.

By demonstrating how counter networks form and antenarrative is constructed to supplant hegemonic narrative, the authors are able to problematise the taken for granted and highlight the possibilities offered by divergent voices.

The performation provides a deeper understanding of organisational performance through our NA-ANT combination, and the authors provide insight into the mobilisation of conflicting narratives in organisation studies.

This article offers an introduction to a theoretical approach which has recently begun to be used by organisational theorists to explain the distribution and exercise of power between organisations and entities within particular spheres, or “networks”. This approach, which has been labelled “actor‐network” theory, argues that focusing on questions of “identity”, particularly questions of self‐identity, depends upon accepting and reproducing a “modern” set of presuppositions. These modern presuppositions are concerned primarily with the creation of stable boundaries and hierarchies, between subject and object, and between self and other. Actor‐network theory proposes that the notion of “agency” offers an alternative “amodern” perspective from which to explore how entities, or actors, influence other actors through the process of translation. Concludes that actor‐network theory, as a meta‐theoretical position and as a methodological approach offers an alternative to existing public relations theory which cannot easily be ignored.

The Fordist wage compromise may resemble an attempt to macroeconomically establish ethico-political rules governing the conflicting cooperation between capitalists and employees (Aglietta, 1998; Boyer, 1993). The question of the relationship between ethics and economics is, thus, not contemporaneous with the CSR movement. It is particularly misleading to see this recent movement as a fundamental break with the era of relationships between capital and labour, or even, as a definitive and modern break with the old ‘conflicting’ form of productive relations. The Fordist compromise represents a very subtle and substantial means of linking ethics and efficiency, but it is situated at the macro-social level, in contrast to the CSR movement.