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The purpose of this paper is to provide insights from the upper echelon, agency, and organizational identification literatures to help explain cross-cultural differences in top management team pay.

This is a theoretical paper building upon the executive compensation literature examining US and Japanese pay schemes.

The paper presents three propositions relating to the influence of organizational constitution and organizational identification on the level of pay, as well as the allocation of pay in top management team compensation schemes.

There is relatively little research focusing on why there are cross-cultural pay differences. This paper uses US and Japanese studies to highlight mechanisms that can foster principal-agent goal alignment in different contexts.

Although resilience is heavily studied in both the healthcare and organizational change literatures, it has received less attention in healthcare information technology (HIT) implementation research. Healthcare organizations are consistently in the process of implementing and updating several complex technologies. Implementations and updates are challenged because healthcare workers often struggle to perceive the benefits of HITs and experience deficiencies in system design, yet bear the brunt of the blame for implementation failures. This combination implores healthcare workers to exercise HIT resilience; however, how they talk about this construct has been left unexplored. Subsequently, this study explores healthcare workers' communicative constitution of HIT resilience.

Twenty-three physicians (N = 23), specializing in oncology, pediatrics or anesthesiology, were recruited from one healthcare organization to participate in comprehensive interviews during and after the implementation of an updated HIT system DIPS.

Thematic analysis findings reveal physicians communicatively constituted HIT resilience as their (1) convictions in the continued, positive developments of newer HIT iterations, which marked their current adaptive HIT behaviors as temporary, and (2) contributions to inter-organizational HIT brainstorming projects in which HIT designers, IT staff and clinicians jointly problem-solved current HIT inadequacies and created new HIT features.

Offering both practical for healthcare leaders and managers and theoretical implications for HIT and resilience scholars, this study's results suggest that (1) healthcare leaders must work diligently to create a culture of collaborative HIT design in their organization to help facilitate the success of new HIT use, and (2) information technology scholars reevaluate the theoretical meaningfulness a technology's spirit and reconsider the causal nature of a technology's embedded structures.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the communicative constitution of organizational inclusion and/or exclusion through humorous acts at the expense of members of minorities and/or historically disadvantaged groups.

Semistructured interviews with 84 employees in Austria and Germany dealing with their experiences regarding diversity and inclusion (D&I) at work were conducted and analyzed in two steps. First, a thematic text analysis was performed to structure the content and identify relevant themes and anecdotes for further analysis. Second, a ventriloquial analysis sought to identify the physically absent yet present voices in these anecdotes.

The interviews revealed that jokes and quips mostly target colleagues of observable foreign origin. The analysis further identified three themes that show that disparaging humor can simultaneously reinforce inclusion/exclusion across hierarchies and create boundaries within teams – but in different ways. The findings also indicate that above all prejudices “participate” in such events and that in most cases the collective is invoked to increase the joke's “authority”.

This research is the first one that investigates humor in the context of D&I through a communicative constitution of organization (CCO) lens, which facilitates studying the constitutive character of humorous communication in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Moreover, this is one of the first empirical humor studies to draw on established theory-driven concepts of inclusion-exclusion in its analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to question and reflect on the spatial metaphors that inform Mats Alvesson’s (2009) conception of an organizational home in his description of at-home ethnography. (Cultural) hybridity is proposed as an alternative metaphor because the concept of hybridity can be used to highlight the complex nature of the relationships between an at-home ethnographer and the people she or he studies as they are produced during ethnographic work in an era where multiple (organizational) cultural sites are increasingly connected; where (organizational) cultural boundaries are uncertain; and where the notion of (organizational) culture itself is opaque, rather than transparent. Thus, this paper suggests that it may be more appropriate to speak of “hybrid home ethnography,” rather than “at-home ethnography.”

This paper explicates the concept of (cultural) hybridity and shows that this concept provides a useful metaphor for understanding and studying one’s own organizational home in these times of globalization where complex societies and the social collectivities of which they are composed are increasingly dispersed and mediated. Subsequently, the value of this metaphor is briefly illustrated through a hypothetical study of an academic department.

The metaphor of (cultural) hybridity reveals how studying one’s own organizational home (or homes) entails investigating a web of relationships between other organizational members, nonmembers, and oneself (the ethnographer) that are blends of diverse cultures and traditions constituted in the course of everyday communication. In addition, this metaphor shows that liminality is a key feature of this web and invites at-home ethnographers to combine first-, second-, and third-person perspectives in their fieldwork, deskwork, and textwork. Moreover, this metaphor highlights the importance of practicing “radical-reflexivity” in this kind of ethnography.

This paper provides a relational, communicative view of at-home ethnography based on a critical reflection on what it means to examine one’s own organizational home.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the change experience of a regional health centre that was merged in the late 1990s and shows how organizational talk becomes privileged in the change process, and how some talk becomes meaningful in the constitution of organizational identity.

The paper analyzes the process through which some talk is privileged in the organizational change process. The deconstruction of language used throughout this analysis highlights the relationship between sites of power and the ability to affect sensemaking among organizational members. Using a post‐structuralist approach, the authors apply the analytic framework of critical sensemaking (CSM) and critical discourse analysis.

Organizational talk is presented as the enactment of a sensemaking process and insights are offered into the process of how organizational identities are maintained, altered or constrained during change. The discursive effects of the language of change, including the belief that change is actually a discursive process about the mutual constitution of language and identity in a process of making sense of the discourse of change, are discussed.

The merging of critical discourse analysis with CSM provides an alternative means of understanding organizational change, including the socio‐psychological processes that occur within the privileging of the language of change.

For organizational change practitioners, the paper provides insights into the importance of how organizational members make sense of the change language discourse, which can affect how they introduce future change processes.

The paper provides a novel way of understanding the change process and furthers the empirical use of (critical) sensemaking as a method.

With a few exceptions, the mainstream literature on learning in multinational enterprises (MNEs) has shown little concern for the transformational nature and the social constitution of learning. This paper aims to address this gap by drawing on Scandinavian institutionalism, social learning perspectives, and comparative institutionalism.

A comparative case study of two subsidiaries of the same MNE was conducted. The subsidiaries received similar practices from headquarters (HQ) but displayed contrasting learning outcomes.

It is shown that learning outcomes differed based on the varying extent to which practices were translated, which depends on the participation of local actors. The difference in participation pattern, in turn, is rooted in differences in the institutional context of the two subsidiaries.

It is recognized that apart from institutional influences, organizational idiosyncrasies may be at work. In addition, the paper briefly considers the extent to which the notion of contrasting forms of capitalism is still useful when comparing the German and British institutional contexts.

The findings highlight the importance of involving employees in the translation of new practices. A challenge for MNEs is that learning of new practices can differ by institutional context. Where enabling institutional conditions are absent, conscious effort may be needed to ensure employee participation.

This paper highlights that MNE practice transfer rests on the translation of the practice content to the local context, and that subsidiary‐level learning processes may be institutionally embedded, thus establishing a link between subsidiary learning and the macro‐level context. As such, this paper both illustrates the value of social learning perspectives and the relevance of the work of institutionalists for understanding MNE learning processes.

Extant research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication primarily relies on a transmission model of communication that treats organizations and communication as distinct phenomena. This approach has been criticized for neglecting the formative role of communication in the emergence of organizations. This paper seeks to propose to reconceptualize CSR communication by drawing on the “communication constitutes organizations” (CCO) perspective.

This is a conceptual paper that explores the implications of switching from an instrumental to a constitutive notion of communication.

The study brings forth four main findings: from the CCO view, organizations are constituted by several, partly dissonant, and potentially contradictory communicative practices. From that viewpoint, the potential impact of CSR communication becomes a matter of connectivity of CSR to other practices of organizational communication. Communication practices that concern CSR should not be generally dismissed as mere “greenwashing” – given that some forms of talk can be action. Consequently, there is a need to investigate which specific speech acts create accountability and commitment in the context of CSR. The CCO view shows that CSR communication potentially extends the boundary of the organization through the involvement of third parties. Thus, it is fruitful to study CSR communication as a set of practices that aims at boundary maintenance and extension. Organizations are stabilized by various non‐human entities that “act” on their behalf. Accordingly, CSR communication should also take into account non‐human agency and responsibility.

This paper links the literature on CSR communication to broader debates in organizational communication studies and, in particular, to the CCO perspective. By applying the CCO view, it reconceptualizes CSR communication as a complex process of meaning negotiation.

The objective of this chapter is to describe and analyze Brazil's main steps in its long and incomplete process of organizing a professional and responsive public service. During the twentieth century, Brazil had two authoritarian regimes and organized a state-oriented process of industrialization. After 1988, democracy has changed how public administration should be constituted, imposing demands for universal recruitment and accountability. The level of professionalization of the federal public service was improved, with a higher level of education, better wages and the recruitment of public servants to management positions. The challenges ahead are improving governance and executive coordination and raising the responsiveness and quality of public management (such as human resources, planning, budgeting, procurement, information and communication technologies, and organizational modeling) in a context of political instability, slow economic recovery, and substantial public debts at the federal government.

The purpose of this paper is to identify possible lines of research relating to communication and secrecy.

This paper is a conceptual essay drawing on recent research on secrecy.

The findings suggest that secrecy entails the communication of rules about communication, and that secrecy can play a role in the communicative constitution of organizations.

The paper is innovative in configuring secrecy as a form of communication rather than being the opposite of communication, and in showing the linkages between what are normally two separate domains of research.