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Article
Publication date: 21 September 2020

John H. Humphreys, Milorad M. Novicevic, Stephanie S. Pane Haden and Md. Kamrul Hasan

Uhl-Bien and Arena (2018) presented a persuasive argument for recognizing the concept of enabling leadership as a critical form of leadership for adaptive organizations. This…

Abstract

Purpose

Uhl-Bien and Arena (2018) presented a persuasive argument for recognizing the concept of enabling leadership as a critical form of leadership for adaptive organizations. This study aims to narratively explore the concept of enabling leadership in the context of social complexity.

Design/methodology/approach

To explore how leaders enable adaptive processes, Uhl-Bien and Arena (2018) called for future research using in-depth case studies of social actors centered on emergence in complex environments. In this in-depth case study, the authors pursue theory elaboration by using a form of analytically structured history process to analyze primary and secondary sources.

Findings

During archival research of Whitney Young, Jr’s largely overlooked and misunderstood leadership in the historic social drama of the 1960s US civil rights movement, the authors discovered compelling evidence to support and extend the theoretical arguments advanced by Uhl-Bien and Arena (2018).

Research limitations/implications

The reflexivity associated with interpretive case approaches confronts the issue of subjectivism. The authors ask readers to judge the credibility of their arguments accordingly.

Originality/value

Using a relational leadership-as-practice lens, the authors interpret the dramaturgical performance Whitney Young, Jr directed to facilitate coherent emancipatory dialogue, affect the social construction of power relations and enable the adaptive space needed for social transformation to emerge.

Book part
Publication date: 18 June 2014

Elizabeth A. Degi Mount

This chapter critically analyzes the outcomes of a legal reform enacted in Bali to address unintended consequences of a World Bank policy that undermined women’s economic, legal…

Abstract

Purpose

This chapter critically analyzes the outcomes of a legal reform enacted in Bali to address unintended consequences of a World Bank policy that undermined women’s economic, legal, and human rights.

Design/methodology/approach

This qualitative exploratory inquiry employs ethnographic data including participant observations and 18 interviews conducted in Denpasar, Bali.

Findings

The analysis suggests that policy measures intended to empower women which fail to address the influence of gender in the formation and functioning of social institutions reinforce conceptualizations of gender that constrain women’s autonomy and reify patriarchal sociocultural institutions.

Research implications

Conceptualizations of gender in post-conflict research have lagged behind the richness of theories pertaining to gender as a social structure. Incorporating analyses of gender ideologies into the research phase of policy development will bridge this gap between theory and application.

Practical and social implications

Calls for women’s empowerment in the wake of the collapse of central governance structures, such as in the Arab Spring, must be accompanied by attention of feminist researchers and activists ensuring that policy measures intended to address barriers to women’s equality move beyond conceptions of empowerment that privilege economic capital. Dominant frameworks employed by microcredit programs and legal reformers emphasizing economic independence without attending to structural causes of women’s marginalization run the ironic risk of more deeply entrenching harmful social institutions.

Originality

This project allows women’s voices to reciprocally transform social theories and practices, contributing to understandings of the influence of gender in legal reform efforts and gender as a social structure.

Details

Gendered Perspectives on Conflict and Violence: Part B
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78350-893-8

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 6 May 2014

David A. Morand

The purpose is to show how actors' relative power or parity is dynamically instanced in discrete speech behaviors that are exchanged throughout everyday organizational…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose is to show how actors' relative power or parity is dynamically instanced in discrete speech behaviors that are exchanged throughout everyday organizational interaction.

Design/methodology/approach

Politeness theory, rooted in the dramaturgical theories of Erving Goffman, details a set of linguistic indices used to show regard for others' face. This conceptual paper draws on politeness theory to model the unfolding of power relations within face-to-face verbal interchange in organizations. The paper presents a number of propositions suggesting how power differentials (or parity) are reflected in a set of common speech behaviors used to defray threats to face throughout organizational interaction.

Findings

This article extends and applies politeness theory to organizations by exploring specific motives and linguistic outcomes of high and low power actors, describing the behavioral egalitarianism associated with organic organizations, and suggesting how the demand characteristics of face-to-face interaction create oligarchic tendencies that militate against the success of workplace participation. Politeness' role in the social construction of power, and in distortive processes within hierarchical communication, is also discussed.

Research limitations/implications

This paper enables researchers to understand the specific linguistic features associated with power-related roles, and it shows how the social distribution of certain speech behaviors is a function of power and dependency relations.

Practical implications

The findings provide managers a fine-grained understanding of how power affects speech, and an understanding of how such speech patterns may stymie attempts to stimulate organizational empowerment and employee voice.

Originality/value

Prior scholarship has neglected this most important topic.

Details

International Journal of Organizational Analysis, vol. 22 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1934-8835

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 13 February 2017

Helena Desivilya, Dalit Yassour Borochowitz, Shalom Bouknik, Geke Kalovski, Ilana Lavy and Liora Ore

The purpose of this paper is to examine the perspectives of academic staff on issues of diversity and social schisms: capturing their perceptions of the complex relations at an…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the perspectives of academic staff on issues of diversity and social schisms: capturing their perceptions of the complex relations at an academic campus positioned in an intricate sociopolitical context. It also explored how the faculty’s construal of diversity and social divisions inform their educational practices.

Design/methodology/approach

The study employed a qualitative approach using grounded theory methodology. Data collection was based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 diverse faculty members from different departments in a Northern Israeli college. The interviews were transcribed and processed into main themes and categories.

Findings

The findings revealed two main themes: “Diversity awareness” depicting recognition and sensitivity to the complex social context in the college, strategies of directly engaging with it, downplaying or overlooking the intricacies, and “Practices” describing the practical translations of the educational credos into teaching practice. Both themes reflected a myriad of faculty voices.

Social implications

The study illuminated the challenges posed by social schisms, inequalities, and diversity for the faculty who need to grapple with the intricacies on a daily basis. More open dialogue and debates by the protagonists are needed to increase awareness of diversity and experimenting with different ways of addressing the intricacies.

Originality/value

Empirical evidence of the organizational actors’ predicaments, their diverse patterns of coping with intricacies, and the factors underlying their choices contribute to the body of knowledge on managing diversity in vivo by real women and men with different backgrounds and experiences.

Details

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, vol. 36 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2040-7149

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 12 October 2015

Manuel Hensmans

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how executives can rapidly gain employee acceptance for strategic change through reciprocal sensegiving. The author draw on a…

1318

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how executives can rapidly gain employee acceptance for strategic change through reciprocal sensegiving. The author draw on a processual case study of a transformational European merger to study this question, highlighting the properties of reciprocity in making sense of urgent strategic change, then developing them through the lens of a gift exchange.

Design/methodology/approach

The author draws on several qualitative methods to study sensegiving and sensemaking processes in Alpha and Beta from 2011 to 2014: insider-outsider team meetings at the beginning, mid-way and at the end of the merger integration process, ethnographic field notes during a four-month research internship, one focus group meeting with Alpha and Beta managers after the announcement of the redistribution of managerial positions, interviews with a carefully selected sample of top and middle managers, participant observation in key sensegiving meetings with top managers and “custodians,” triangulation with secondary data from the database Factiva, and finally follow-up insider corroboration of the findings by the research intern who took up a management position at Alpha in 2014.

Findings

Likening executive and employee sensegiving to a gift-giving and gift-returning exchange, the author elucidates how executives induce employees to quickly “give in” to strategic change imperatives. the author single out the key third party role of custodians of reciprocity in the mechanism, using the metaphor of the Trojan horse to illustrate its executive use and point to the underexplored darker side of prosocial sensegiving dynamics.

Research limitations/implications

Further research should clarify the long-term advantages and disadvantages of the mechanism. The Trojan horse mechanism possibly sacrifices long-term reciprocity for short-term purposes. Following the example of executives in this case study, use of the Trojan horse mechanism should be followed by attention to socio-political balance concerns, including new procedures that clarify the link between value creation aims and employees’ collective contribution. Without such a cohesion-building exercise, employees’ feelings of procedural injustice may build up, resulting in negative reciprocity in subsequent change projects.

Practical implications

The work indicates that a leader’s visionary credentials are not the main source of her norm-shaping power in a project of urgent strategic change. Visionary credentials are welcomed by the dominant group of employees as long as they are framed as a symbolic management exercise that will not substantially impact socio-political balance. Substantively, employees make sense of the justice of urgent strategic change primarily through the lens of custodians and their “power from the past.”

Social implications

All in all, executives should use the Trojan horse mechanism sparingly, in contexts of urgent strategic change and institutionalized employee behavior. Working with sources and voices of resistance from lower levels of management is more likely to yield symbiotic integration benefits.

Originality/value

Applied to the problem of rapid strategic change in a non-crisis context, the Trojan horse mechanism is a solution to the question: how can executives avoid lengthy socio-political confrontations and quickly induce employee ownership of painful strategic changes?

Details

Journal of Organizational Change Management, vol. 28 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0953-4814

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 13 December 2010

Olga Bain

The chapter identifies and analyzes scholarly discourses that framed understanding of change and directed further reforms in post-socialist education over the past two decades. It…

Abstract

The chapter identifies and analyzes scholarly discourses that framed understanding of change and directed further reforms in post-socialist education over the past two decades. It discusses the origins of these discourses, their theoretical underpinnings, evolution, and cultural biases. The analysis of scholarly texts published on post-socialist education draws on methods of discourse analysis and utilizes the concept of sensemaking and the lens of translation to deconstruct how educational change is framed. Most of the identified discourses – restoration, importation, revolution and evolution, transformation and innovation, crisis and survival, glocalization, educational borrowing, system convergence, education for social transformation – originated outside either education or the post-socialist region itself in transitology studies, dependency theory, world system theory, and social reproduction theory. The resultant discourses carried over or challenged the underlying theoretical assumptions, exposed cultural sensitivity, or otherized the post-socialist region. The chapter identifies emerging scholarship that deconstructs framing of the same post-socialist educational phenomena. These emerging approaches reflect local and national searches for identity rather than global agendas. Contrary to the earlier prediction that with the end of the cold war, economic, political, and social institutions would converge into one monolithic world order, the chapter argues that the contemporary world today has come to display diversity, particularism, multiple voices, and the beginning of new histories. This study identifies emerging lines of research that look into the construction of meanings and expose cultural biases, while offering original conceptualization of two decades of scholarship on post-socialist educational change.

Details

Post-Socialism is not Dead: (Re)Reading the Global in Comparative Education
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-418-5

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 11 March 2007

Hevina S. Dashwood

Drawing upon research on the initiatives of Canadian mining companies, this paper examines private efforts in the mining sector to promote acceptable standards of corporate social

Abstract

Drawing upon research on the initiatives of Canadian mining companies, this paper examines private efforts in the mining sector to promote acceptable standards of corporate social responsibility (CSR). This paper asks how important emerging global CSR norms have been in influencing the adoption of CSR policies. Sustainable development is a universally accepted principle of environmental protection, and serves as an important indicator of the influence of global CSR norms on mining companies. Most mining companies have embraced the concept of sustainable development to frame their CSR policies. Emerging global CSR norms have thereby set the macro‐level context in which CSR policies have been adopted and evolved at the micro level.

Details

Multinational Business Review, vol. 15 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1525-383X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 10 November 2023

Udeni Salmon and Ann Singleton

The study deploys Anthias' intersectional framework of social spaces and her concept of translocational positionality to explore the barriers to entrepreneurship for refugee…

Abstract

Purpose

The study deploys Anthias' intersectional framework of social spaces and her concept of translocational positionality to explore the barriers to entrepreneurship for refugee entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom (UK). In particular, the study aims to assess how migrant identities require a specific form of business support.

Design/methodology/approach

A total of 32 semi-structured interviews with 14 refugee entrepreneurs and 18 business support agents were conducted between April and October 2022 and, together with field notes, were combined for thematic analysis in NVivo 12.

Findings

Organisational, representational, intersubjective and experiential barriers combined to create practical and psychological deterrents to entrepreneurship for refugees. However, an explicitly humanistic and de-centred approach to business support was (partially) able to counter such barriers.

Practical implications

Policymakers and business support agencies should consider intersectional characteristics and the importance of a compassionate and individual approach when designing business support programmes for refugee entrepreneurs.

Originality/value

Two intersectional concepts of social spaces and translocational positionality are brought into conversation with each other, creating a novel approach to framing the barriers to entrepreneurship for refugees.

Details

International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1355-2554

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 21 July 2022

Angelina Parfenova and Maria Kozlova

This research is devoted to the study of social expectations, and the purpose of this paper is to elaborate the instrument of their measurement based on the main spheres of

Abstract

Purpose

This research is devoted to the study of social expectations, and the purpose of this paper is to elaborate the instrument of their measurement based on the main spheres of influence.

Design/methodology/approach

The research was conducted using a mixed methodology: a series of semistructured interviews and a survey. In the first stage, 15 interviews, and in the second phase, both online and offline surveys (306 participants) were conducted to test the social expectations scale designed. The qualitative phase highlighted the most important areas of social expectations, identifying how they can influence individual behavior. Afterward, the scale of social expectations was developed, and its prognostic function was confirmed.

Findings

It was revealed that expectations influence goal setting, motivation, public opinion orientation, emotional experience and decision-making.

Originality/value

This study is an attempt to construct a measurement tool for social expectations and close the gap for many studies that used the concept without operationalization.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 43 no. 5/6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 17 June 2016

Shoko Yamada

This chapter will situate the global paradigm shift toward Post-Education-For-All (Post-EFA) not only in the policy trends in the field of international education development, but…

Abstract

This chapter will situate the global paradigm shift toward Post-Education-For-All (Post-EFA) not only in the policy trends in the field of international education development, but also in the academic context of international relations and comparative education.

The chapter highlights three dimensions which characterize the paradigm shift; namely, discourse on norms, diversifying actors, and the changed mode of communication and participation in the global consultation processes. The existing formal structure of the EFA global governance is based on multilateralism which recognizes sovereign nation-states, representing national interests, as the participants. However, such an assumption is eroding, given that there is a growing number of state and nonstate actors who influence decision-making not only through conventional formal channels, but also informally. Urging the revision of theories of multilateralism, the chapter introduces the attention given to nontraditional donors and horizontal networks of civil society actors in this volume.

The introduction also shows that that the widening basis of participation in the global consultation processes on post-EFA and advanced communication technology have changed the ways in which discourse is formulated. While the amount and the speed of exchanging information have been enhanced and different types of actors have been encouraged to take part, it also obliges scholars to adopt innovative methods of analyzing discourse formation.

The chapter also demonstrates the importance of the focus on the Asia-Pacific region, which is composed of diverse actors who often underscore Asian cultural roots in contrast to Western hegemony. By focusing on the discourse, actors, and the structure through which the consensus views on the post-EFA agenda were built, the volume attempts to untangle the nature of the post-EFA paradigm shift, at the global, Asia-Pacific regional, and national levels.

Details

Post-Education-Forall and Sustainable Development Paradigm: Structural Changes with Diversifying Actors and Norms
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78441-271-5

Keywords

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