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This study presents evidence concerning the effects of affective and cognitive rhetoric on the underpricing of firms at the time of their initial public offering. It is suggested that firms that use less affective, and more cognitively oriented discourse in their IPO prospectus will experience better underpricing outcomes. We examine these assertions using a sample of young high-tech IPO firms where investors rely on prospectuses as accurate and informative firm communications. Results from a robust five-year time span observe initial support for the hypothesized effects. Moreover, the signaling of a higher degree of entrepreneurial orientation in the firm prospectus is found to worsen the negative effects of affective discourse

The purpose of this paper is to longitudinally explore the symbolic and substantive ideological strategies located in ENGIE’s environmental discourse while considering the specific negative media context surrounding the company’s environmental activities.

Thompson’s (2007) and Eagleton’s (2007) theorizations are used to build an extended ideological framework to analyze ENGIE’s environmental talk from 2001 to 2015.

ENGIE drew extensively on a combination of symbolic and substantive ideological strategies in its annual and sustainability reports while ignoring several major issues raised in the press. Its substantive ideological mode of operation included actions for the environment, innovation, partnerships and educating stakeholders/staff, while its symbolic ideological mode of operation used issue identification, legal compliance, rationalization, stakeholders’ responsibilization and unification. Both ideological modes of operation worked synergistically to cast a positive light on ENGIE’s environmental activities, sustaining the ideology of a company that reconciles the irreconcilable despite negative press coverage.

This paper develops the notion of environmentally friendly ideology to analyze the environmental discourse of a polluting company. It is the first to use both Thompson’s and Eagleton’s ideological frameworks to make sense of corporate environmental discourse. Linking corporate discourse with media coverage, it further contributes to the burgeoning literature that interpretively distinguishes between symbolic and substantive ideological strategies by highlighting the company’s progressive shift from symbolic to more substantive disclosure.

The aim of this paper is to understand discursive strategies used by organizations to restore their fading legitimacy. This longitudinal case study is built around two events representing a threat to the legitimacy of the pharmaceutical industry. This study describes some subtle techniques employed to restore legitimacy during those difficult periods.

This research analyzes the president's letter of the annual report using semiotic tools designed to catch the essence and goals of the narrative sections. This case study covers 20 of Pfizer most recent annual reports (1988‐2007).

The paper suggests that some narrative sections are built to protect legitimacy on two fronts. Most of the time, the discourse maintains legitimacy in front of the salient stakeholder by presenting the firm's main “object of desire” as the enhancement of shareholder's value. In a period of crisis, the narratives are built to restore legitimacy in the eyes of the general public. To do so, they substitute a screen object (related to the theme of the crisis) as the goal of the companies' action.

The annual report appears as a selling document, discussing “political issues” rather than economic rendition of accounts. However, it is impossible to expose the controversies here, and it is not the purpose of the paper.

The paper brings together multiple elements of narrative sections to show how pharmaceutical firms built their discourse to restore legitimacy by adapting their defensive texts to specific screen objects as a response to a crisis.

Organizational literatures stress the empowering effects of worker participation programs. The case of a Mexican garment factory is used to examine the contradictory location of women in self-managed teams. While self-managed teams require independent and assertive workers, women workers are hired specifically for their docility. I argue that managers provide the tools and mechanisms for workers to be autonomous decision-makers, while at the same time they gender teams in ways that assure continued female disadvantage. Placed in this contradictory location, women workers both reproduce and resist gender subordination by carving out spaces of independent action, using the language of traditional womanhood.

The organizational change that is happening when firms are undergaing a CEO succession is difficult to apprehend and analyze. Further it is not related to any kind of linear approach. Rather, in most cases, the CEO succession is complex, dynamic and is embedded in a context and a situation that needs to be analyzed from inside the organizations by listening to the actors in order to really understand what is going on.

This paper aims to develop understanding of how the pursuit of practice change in auditing, especially in relation to audit methodologies, is conveyed, presented, reflected in and enabled (or hindered) through discursive, textual constructions by audit firms.

The paper uses an extensive series of interviews with audit practitioners, educators and regulators and a textual study of the content, concordances and narratives contained in two key audit methodological texts published by KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms.

Major discursive shifts in audit methodologies are identified over the last decade, with the dominant audit discourse switching from one of “business value” to one of “audit quality”. Such shifts are analysed in terms of developments in the wider, organisational field and discursive (re)constructions of audit at the level of the audit firm.

The identified shifts in auditing discourse are important in a number of respects. They demonstrate the significance of discursive elements of audit practice, contradicting influential prior claims that methodological discussions and developments in audit over the last decade had focused consistently on notions of “audit quality”. Methodologically, they demonstrate the importance and opportunities for knowledge development available by combining institutional, field‐wide analysis with a detailed discursive study of individual interviews and texts.

While previous studies have primarily assumed dysfunctional effects of cultural distance in joint ventures and M&A, this paper elucidates from a positive organizational scholarship perspective how perceived cultural distance can advance firms’ new product development within non-equity alliances. The purpose of this paper is to explain how perceived cultural distance stimulates task discourse that supports alliance partners’ employees in recognizing and applying culture-related differences as complementary problem-solving potentials. Due to a lower integration level in non-equity alliances compared to joint ventures or M&A, this paper assumes that the positive effects outweigh the negative effects of cultural distance.

This study applies structural equation modeling to test the hypothesized effects on a sample of 246 international alliances in the manufacturing industry.

The analysis mainly supports the hypothesized model and unravels how positive effects can emerge from perceived cultural distance.

The findings provide managerial implications. Alliance managers should note that cultural distance can have positive and negative effects, and thus it is not a barrier per se in alliances. Firms can benefit from cultural distance if they are able to leverage culture-specific complementarities through task discourse among partners in alliances.

The manuscript uses a unique data set of 246 international alliances from the global manufacturing industry. The manuscript has not been published elsewhere.

This paper is based on the experiences of 31 women who have recently left partner roles within an international management consultancy firm. The purpose of this paper is to explore discursively their perceptions of choice within their decisions to leave.

Data were collected from 31 women using semi‐structured telephone interviews, a 66 per cent response rate. A discursive approach to analysis was adopted.

The decision to leave is the culmination of many interacting factors at a time when a financial incentive for resignation is available. Findings present here focus on discourses of loyalty to and affection for the company and work‐life integration.

Limitations include access only to women who have left the firm, allowing for no comparison with those who were still partners. Additionally, we were unable to speak to any of the male partners who have left the firm in the same timescales, although in smaller proportions.

The findings indicate the need to review the excessive time demands placed on partners and provide further support for policies, which enable greater flexibility.

This paper uses data from a rare sample of women, those who have actually left senior roles within one organization.

The purpose of this paper is to advance knowledge about the mechanisms behind, and the implications of, varying involvement in digitally enhanced employee-driven innovation (EDI) by studying how a firm integrates a web-based tool in the organization of its EDI process.

Based on a qualitative in-depth interview study with managers and employees at one high-performing and one low-performing office of a global IT firm, a critical discourse analysis was performed. It explored how the EDI discourse was produced, distributed and consumed in relation to the web-based tool for collecting and selecting employee ideas.

The results demonstrate that the production of the innovation discourse by the top-level management, which emphasizes client satisfaction rather than employee engagement, restricts the employees’ utilization of the digital platform that distributes the discourse. However, at the high-performing office, employee participation is ensured because the local managers act as co-distributors of the digital tool.

The single case study design limits the generalizability of the results, but is nevertheless relevant for understanding the mechanisms and implications in similar contexts where web-based tools are used to enhance EDI processes.

The study provides practical insights into the importance of local management’s active promotion of digital tools in order to ensure employee involvement.

The study contributes to the EDI literature by identifying some mechanisms behind and the implications of varying employee involvement in digitally enhanced EDI processes.

Scholars have primarily focused on how language represents categories. We move beyond this conception to develop a discursive perspective of market categorization focused on how categories are constructed through communicative exchanges. The discursive perspective points to three under-researched mechanisms of category evolution: (1) the interaction between market participants, (2) the power dynamics among market participants and within the discourse, and (3) the cultural and material context in which categories are constructed. In this theoretical paper, we discuss how each of these mechanisms shed light on different phases of category evolution and the methods that could be used to study them.