Search results

This research investigates the politics of smiling as a central driver for employees to navigate power dynamics within the prevailing discourse at a Japanese retailer in Hong Kong. Existing critical management studies emphasize power in organizational language, often neglecting the role of employees’ emotions in sustaining discourse. This paper examines employees’ smiles as tools for legitimizing (sensegiving) and interpreting (sensemaking) discourse. It explores how the use of their emotional display influenced the outcome of the company’s attempt to legitimize discourse. This research divides the discourse process into five phases: formation, codification, implementation, monitoring and adaptation.

Using the critical sensegiving and sensemaking approach, this paper discusses how employees’ interpretations of corporate policies shape the perpetuation of dominant discourse and outcomes. Data were collected through the author’s long-term participant observation in the Hong Kong branches of Japanese retailers.

The formation phase discusses the emergence of a dominant discourse favoring Japanese practices in the company’s Hong Kong operations. Codification involves the conceptualization of standard smiles in customer service policies. In practice (implementation, monitoring and adjustment), employee smiles serve as tools for negotiating power—shaping careers, earnings and shift preferences. This paper argues that this discourse shapes organizational norms while employees’ sensemaking influences the discourse implementation. Furthermore, this paper highlights the transnational impact of Japanese culture in Hong Kong, which has shaped the way Japanese top management and local employees interpret the dominant discourse.

This study demonstrates the importance of discussing the display of emotions and employees’ intentions to understand their impact on the outcome of discourse implementation. This study also reiterates the significance of discussing the influence of one culture on another to understand the broader social context that affects the perpetuation of discourse.

The objective of this study is to examine developments in the discursive practice of non-financial reporting in the public healthcare sector. In doing so, the authors investigate how the main reform foci of productivity and quality are represented, with a specific focus on the patient.

Drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA), the authors conduct a longitudinal study (2007–2018) of healthcare reporting foci across the five administrative regions responsible for public hospitals in Denmark. The study analyses sixty annual reports and draws on contemporary reform documents over this period. CDA enables a micro-textual analysis, combined with macro-insights and discussions on social practice.

The findings show complex webs of presentation strategies, but in particular two changes occur during the period. First, the patient is centred throughout but the framing changes from productivity and waiting lists to quality and dialogue. Second, in the first years, the regions present themselves as actively highlighting financial and quality concerns, which changes to a passive and indirect form of presentation steered by indicators and patient legislation enforced by central government. This enhances passivity and distance in healthcare regional non-financial reporting where the regions seek to conform to such demands. Simultaneously, however, the authors find a tendency to highlight very different local initiatives, which shows an attempt to go beyond a pure automatic mode of reporting found in earlier studies.

Responding to the literature on both healthcare and financial reporting, this study identifies novel links between micro-level texts and macro-level social practices, enabling insights into the potentially intertwined impacts of public-sector reporting. The authors offer insights into the complexity of the construction of non-financial reporting in the public sector, which has a wider impact and different intentions than private-sector reporting.

The purpose of this paper is to show the benefits of bridging the gap between supply chain management (SCM) and political philosophy to challenge the underlying assumptions about SCM concepts and open doors to novel theory building.

A thought experiment is conducted to illustrate how the two philosophers Niccolò Machiavelli and Jürgen Habermas would tackle sustainability issues in coffee supply chains from a research perspective. The thought experiment is carried out using data from 30 semi-structured interviews with actors from the coffee industry. Supplementing the thought experiment with empirical insights allows for a deeper understanding of supply chain dynamics and how these are impacted by the application of the philosophical viewpoints.

The research stresses the importance of SCM scholars being aware of the underlying assumptions of their research, as these have a remarkable impact on theory building. A combination of empirical insights and philosophical understandings makes it possible to reflect on the underlying concepts of SCM, providing suggestions for reimagining SCM.

The contribution of the research is twofold. First, the paper presents an original view on SCM, as the thought experiment is introduced as an approach to better understand SCM concepts. By challenging the underlying assumptions with political philosophy, researchers will be better equipped to address grand challenges in the twenty-first century. Second, this is exemplified by the case study of the coffee supply chain, which provides the reader with insight into the dynamics of supply chains with prevalent power differences.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to science communication literature by further highlighting the underexplored role of organizational and corporate perspectives in science communication.

The paper takes the form of a conceptual article that uses two illustrative vignettes to highlight the power of corporate science communication.

The key argument is that corporate science communication is a compound ideology that results from merging the hegemonic corporate voice with the ultimate/god-term science (see the work of Kenneth Burke) to form a mega-ideological construct and discourse. Such communication can be so powerful that vulnerable publics and powerful advocates speaking on their behalf have little to no recourse to effectively challenge such discourse. While critiques of corporate science communication in practice are not new, what the authors offer is a possible explanation as to why such discourse is so powerful and hard to combat.

The value of this paper is in the degree to which it both sets an important applied research agenda for the field and fills a critical void in the science communication literature. This conceptual article, in the form of a critical analysis, fills the void by advocating for the inclusion of organizational perspectives in science communication research because of the great potential that organizations have, via science communication, to shape societal behavior and outcomes both positively and negatively. It also coins the terms “compound ideology” and “mega-ideology” to denote that while all ideologies are powerful, ideologies can operate in concert (compound) to change their meaning and effectiveness. By exposing the hegemonic power of corporate science communication, future researchers and practitioners can use these findings as a foundation to combat misinformation and disinformation campaigns wielded by big corporate science entities and the public relations firms often hired to carry out these campaigns.

Guided by Habermas’s three cognitive interests, this paper reviews the studies on school leaders’ emotional labor. It seeks to provide a typology of how researchers inquire about school leaders’ emotional labor by focusing on different understandings, topics and characteristics.

This is a narrative review with 38 studies finally selected for analysis. Guided by Habermas’s three cognitive interests, all the studies were examined carefully and were found to fall into different clusters of understanding of school leaders’ emotional labor.

The review revealed three understandings of school leaders’ emotional labor, namely instrumental understanding, practical understanding and emancipatory understanding. The instrumental understanding treats school leaders’ emotional labor as a tool to effectively control the schools; the practical understanding regards emotional labor as a way to build and maintain relationships and as the process of meaning-making; the emancipatory understanding perceives emotional labor as a site for school leaders’ reflection and action for achieving a more just and self-determined leadership.

This review contributes to the growing literature on school leadership and emotional labor by providing a theory-guided typology and synthesis of the existing understanding of school leaders’ emotional labor, which lays a knowledge base and points out directions for future scholarly inquiries. It also provides practical suggestions for educational policy, school leaders’ practice and leadership training.

The question of whether and how communication departments contribute to organizational value creation has rarely been addressed in research. Such evidence is crucial, however, as communications compete internally with other functions (e.g. marketing and human resources (HR)) for budgets and staff. This article fills the gap by applying the business model concept, an established approach from management theory and practice, to communication units.

Based on an interdisciplinary literature review, the authors propose the Communication Business Model (CBM) as a new management approach for communications. To this end, pertinent definitions, frameworks and typologies of business models are analyzed and combined with insights from corporate communications literature.

The CBM outlines the generic architecture of business models for communication departments. Such models describe the basic principles of how such a unit operates, what services and products it provides, how it creates value for an organization and what revenues and resources are allocated.

The approach stimulates the debate on communication units as objects of observation when researching communication management practices. Further research with appropriate empirical methods is needed to identify and study different types of business models for communications.

The CBM can be used as a management tool to analyze, explain and innovate communication management in organizations. It is a fertile approach for communication practitioners to make the work of their department visible and to position themselves internally and externally.

Transferring a well-known concept from general management to communication management enriches the value creation debate in theory and practice. It allows communication leaders to align their work with organizational goals and make it accessible to top management and other decision-makers in the organization. It also opens up new avenues for research and education.

This paper aims to explore how accounting is fostering neoliberal citizenship through the participants of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). More specifically, this paper aims to understand how accounting discourse and the management accounting technique of budgeting, when intertwined with automated administrative processes of the NDIS, are giving rise to a pastoral form of power that directs people’s behaviour toward certain ends.

Publicly available data has been crafted into an autoethnographic case study of one fictitious person’s experiences with the NDIS – Mina. Mina is an amalgam created from material submitted to the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on the NDIS. Mina’s experiences are then analysed through the lens of Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to explore how accounting has contributed to marketising and digitising public disability services.

Accounting rhetoric appears to be a central part of rationalising the decision to shift to individualised disability funding. Those receiving payments are treated as self-governable, financially responsible subjects and are therefore expected to have knowledge of management accounting techniques and budgeting. However, NDIS’s strong reliance on the accounting concepts of funds, budgets, cost and price is limiting people’s autonomy and subjecting them to intervention and control.

This paper addresses calls to explore the interplay between accounting and current disability policies. The analysis shows that incorporating accounting into the NDIS’s algorithms serves to conceal the underlying ideology of the programs, subtly driving behaviours towards neoliberal objectives. Further, this research extends the Foucauldian accounting literature by revealing the contribution of accounting to reinforcing the authority of digital pastors in contemporary times.

This paper aims to map the antecedents and precursory contexts regarding the four principles of management. Moreover, a description of its codification and coalescence as a unified teaching framework is provided, critically reviewing key theoretical underpinnings of management principles in academic research and management textbooks.

A historiographic approach reviewed seminal works for theory origins of the four principles of management, by analyzing 260 management textbooks from 1935 to 2013 to document their adoption in management education. This study used critical hermeneutics (Prasad, 2002) to explore the framework’s progression by providing the context of cultural, political and economic influences.

This research study tracked and mapped the creation of the four principles of management, as it became the commonly accepted teaching framework in management education. Today, every predominant management principles textbook uses the four principles of management – plan, lead, organize and control – as the basis for teaching students.

There is limited research on the application of the four principles of management in contemporary management, despite its ubiquity in management education. The study’s historical account of its formation provides insights into its adoption and utilization in modern education context. The study’s primary limitation stems from the generalization of the representative sample of textbooks used in the study (1917–2013). However, data saturation was achieved for the scale of textbooks and writings which was reviewed.

Through a critical analysis into the formation of the four principles of management, this research not only provides a historical account of its construction but, as importantly, the influencing factors that led to its development. This research fills a gap in critical literature, as a post mortem exegesis has never been conducted on the four principles of management in the afteryears of its amalgamation.

While scholars have researched the impact of specific total quality management (TQM) aspects on innovation performance (INP), empirical evidence on how the former, as a composite construct, influences the latter is rare. To add, empirical evidence on the mechanism through which TQM passes to affect innovative behaviour (INB) and, then, INP is limited. Essentially, scholars have requested that future research look at the boundary conditions that support the adoption of TQM activities in businesses. Although the banking sector has experienced a number of transformations, there is still a need to raise the standard of service provided to bank customers. This research sheds more light on this subject.

This research tests the hypotheses in Ahinful et al.’s (2023) conceptual model using responses from 260 top- and middle-level bank managers by applying Smart PLS. Organisational support and team member exchange were used as potential control variables for the mediator, while slack resources and bank size were applied to the target endogenous latent construct. Mediation and moderation effects were estimated using the variance accounted for (VAF) and product indicator approaches, respectively. Sig. level was set at 5%.

This study found that TQM and INP had a positive and significant connection (ß = 0.303, p = 0.000), and INB partially mediated this connection (VAF = 40.92%). However, government regulation (GOV; ß = 0.055, p = 0.365), market dynamism (MKD; ß = 0.063, p = 0.434), competitive intensity (CMP; ß = 0.069, p = 0.297) and technological turbulence (TUR; ß = 0.011, p = 0.865) all failed to moderate the TQM–INB connection, although the expected positive directions of these moderation relationships were established.

This research provides empirical evidence on the TQM–INP connection, how this connection may be mediated and how the TQM–INB connection may be activated. It also sheds light on novel ways in which service quality in the banking sector may be improved. Upcoming research may explore other control variables in their research. Since the moderating relationships were unsupported, this avenue is open for further research, particularly in other banking settings across the globe.

Practical lessons for bank consultants, regulators, customers, employees and managers are deliberated.

This research is novel. It is the first to test the hypotheses in Ahinful et al.’s (2023) conceptual model. This study advances the theoretical frameworks and existing knowledge within the TQM, innovation and performance management fields.

This study addresses the pivotal role of digital transformation (DT) in the post-pandemic business landscape, identifying a notable gap in comprehending strategic adaptations and digital communication amidst the complexities of the digital era. It seeks to illuminate practical insights for businesses navigating through DT by intertwining its technological and organizational aspects.

Employing a conceptual approach, this paper synthesizes existing literature and theoretical frameworks related to DT, integrating its technological, strategic and organizational dimensions. It utilizes real-world instances to elucidate the digital era’s practical implications and strategic adaptations. The study also proposes a research agenda that spotlights pressing DT issues, challenges and actionable strategies for businesses.

Despite DT’s inherent complexity, the paper reveals that it is crucial for businesses navigating the contemporary digital landscape. It underscores the importance of strategic adaptations in DT, highlighting their implications on customer experiences and organizational structures amidst the evolving technological and market dynamics. Moreover, it accentuates the significance of effective digital communication strategies in enhancing user experiences and conveying value propositions adeptly.

This paper brings vital aspects of DT impacting modern organizations, offering invaluable insights for practitioners and scholars aiming to comprehend and navigate DT’s complexities. The identified research gaps underscore the necessity for further exploration, aiming to broaden DT’s theoretical and practical facets.