Despite the central role of legitimacy in social and organizational life, we know little of the subtle meaning-making processes through which organizational phenomena, such as industrial restructuring, are legitimated in contemporary society. Therefore, this paper examines the discursive legitimation strategies used when making sense of global industrial restructuring in the media. Based on a critical discourse analysis of extensive media coverage of a revolutionary pulp and paper sector merger, we distinguish and analyze five legitimation strategies: (1) normalization, (2) authorization, (3) rationalization, (4) moralization, and (5) narrativization. We argue that while these specific legitimation strategies appear in individual texts, their recurring use in the intertextual totality of the public discussion establishes the core elements of the emerging legitimating discourse.Key words: legitimation, discourse, media, industrial restructuring, globalization ‗Legitimacy' and ‗legitimation' play a central role in social action in general and organizational action in particular. In organization studies, legitimacy has been an important theme in several streams of research, but explicit analyses of legitimation are still scarce (e.g. Hybels 1995; Suchman 1995). We argue, in this paper, that there is a specific lack of knowledge concerning the discursive processes, practices, and strategies used to (re)construct senses of legitimacy/illegitimacy. Nevertheless, such knowledge is needed if we want to better understand the complex, but often subtle meaning-making processes through which organizational phenomena, such as industrial restructuring, are legitimated in contemporary society.As a step in this direction, we concentrate in this paper on the discursive legitimation in the media. By adopting a critical discourse analysis (henceforth CDA) perspective and by drawing on previous work by linguists on legitimation (Van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999), we focus on discursive legitimation concerning industrial restructuring. Our aim is to develop an empirically grounded model that will serve organization scholars in trying to understand the micro-level discursive strategies used in legitimating contemporary organizational phenomena. We focus on the media as an 3 important but still not very well-known legitimating arena for organizational phenomena.Our research question is the following: Authors nameWhat are the discursive strategies used when legitimating industrial restructuring in the media?We are consequently not looking at whether specific changes at particular points of time are seen as legitimate by any stakeholder group. Instead, we focus on the subtle discursive strategies that tend to construct a sense of legitimacy around these phenomena in the public discourse.In our analysis, we focus on a ‗revolutionary' Finnish-Swedish merger that paved the way for a series of cross-border mergers and acquisitions, fundamentally changing the international paper and pulp industry. This case created a lively debate in the F...

We argue in this paper that corporate language policies have significant power implications that are easily overlooked. By drawing on previous work on power in organizations (Clegg, 1989), we examine the complex power implications of language policy decisions by looking at three levels of analysis: episodic social interaction, identity/subjectivity construction, and reconstruction of structures of domination. In our empirical analysis, we focus on the power implications of the choice of Swedish as the corporate language in the case of the recent banking sector merger between the Finnish Merita and the Swedish Nordbanken. Our findings show how language skills become empowering or disempowering resources in organizational communication, how these skills are associated with professional competence, and how this leads to the creation of new social networks. The case also illustrates how language skills are an essential element in the construction of international confrontation, lead to a construction of superiority and inferiority, and also reproduce post-colonial identities in the merging bank. Finally, we also point out how such policies ultimately lead to the reification of post-colonial and neo-colonial structures of domination in multinational corporations.

Higher education has been subject to substantial reforms as new forms of performance management are implemented in universities across the world. Extant research suggests that in many cases performance management systems have disrupted academic life. We complement this literature with an extensive mixed methods study of how the performance management system is understood by academics across universities and departments in Finland at a time when new management principles and practices are being forcefully introduced. While our survey results enabled us to map the generally critical and negative view that Finnish scholars have of performance management, the qualitative inquiry allowed us to disentangle how and why our respondents resent the ways and means of measuring their work, the assumptions that underlie the measurement, and the university ideal on which the performance management system is rooted. Most significantly, we highlight how the proliferation of performance management can be seen as a catalyst for changing the very ethos of what it is to be an academic and to do academic work.

Although extant research has highlighted the role of discourse in the cultural construction of organizations, there is a need to elucidate the use of narratives as central discursive resources in unfolding organizational change. Hence, the objective of this article is to develop a new kind of antenarrative approach for the cultural analysis of organizational change. We use merging multinational corporations (MNCs) as a case in point. Our empirical analysis focuses on a revelatory case: the financial services group Nordea, which was built by combining Swedish, Finnish, Danish, and Norwegian corporations. We distinguish three types of antenarrative that provided alternatives for making sense of the merger: globalist, nationalist, and regionalist (Nordic) antenarratives. We focus on how these antenarratives were mobilized in intentional organizational storytelling to legitimate or resist change: globalist storytelling as a means to legitimate the merger and to create MNC identity, nationalist storytelling to relegitimate national identities and interests, Nordic storytelling to create regional identity, and the critical use of the globalist storytelling to challenge the Nordic identity. We conclude that organizational storytelling is characterized by polyphonic, stylistic, chronotopic, and architectonic dialogisms and by a dynamic between centering and decentering forces. This paper contributes to discourse-cultural studies of organizations by explaining how narrative constructions of identities and interests are used to legitimate or resist change. Furthermore, this analysis elucidates the dialogical dynamics of organizational storytelling and thereby opens up new avenues for the cultural analysis of organizations.

This article joins recent critical diversity studies that point to an urgent need to revitalize the field, but goes further by showing the inherent contextual issues and power relations that frame existing contributions. Based on a theoretical reading inspired by Michel Foucault, diversity is presented as discourse that is not independent of the particular research exercise of which it is part but, rather, remains contingent on the prevailing forms of knowledge and choices made by researchers. By attending to more refined understandings of power and context within diversity discourse, this article makes visible and calls into question the categorization and normalization of diversity and its management. It contributes to existing research by suggesting that the knowledge produced by mainstream and critical diversity scholars alike is biopolitical and governmental. To do diversity research differently or ‘otherwise’ requires finding ways to develop theorizations and practices that turn this modality of power against itself.

In this article, we explore the discursive possibilities available to men and women when they construct their professional self as ‘knowledge workers’ in multinational management consultancies. We argue that this professional identity construction is embedded in a normalizing, gendered discourse of what it means to be an ‘ideal’ consultant. However, representations of an alternative discourse, which constructs different spheres in an individual’s life, can also be traced in the consultants’ talk. Through a comparison of British and Finnish consultants’ talk, we show the relevance of placing micro-discourses in context. In the UK, discourse on ‘work/life balance’ may be understood as a form of resistance at the level of subjectivity. In Finland, discourse on the ‘balanced individual’ can be seen to be an articulation of a societally bound normalizing discourse. The cultural context can thus be said to have an effect on forms of resistance in knowledge work.

This article concentrates on the discursive construction of mergers and acquisitions in the media. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, the article focuses on justification, legitimization and naturalization processes in three historically significant cases in the Finnish media. The analysis reveals four distinctive discourse types- `rationalistic', `cultural', `societal' and `individualistic'-and elaborates their structural characteristics. The analysis shows that rationalistic discourses typically dominate discussion, while the other discourses are subordinated to the rationalistic discursive practices. This usually means justification of particular merger or acquisition deals and legitimization of specific actions taken by management. In the longer run, this is likely to lead to naturalization of specific management practices in the mergers and acquisitions context.

The primary purpose of introducing a common corporate language in crossborder mergers is to integrate two previously separate organizations and facilitate communication. However, the present case study of a cross-border merger between two Nordic banks shows that the common corporate language decision may have disintegrating effects, particularly at organizational levels below top management. We identify such effects on performance appraisal, language training and management development, career paths, promotion and key personnel. Our findings show that top management needs to work through the consequences of the language decision upon those who are expected to make such a decision work. Keywords Mergers and acquisitions; post-merger integration; language. The number of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) has been increasing over the past years, although study after study of past mergers has shown that two out of every three deals have not worked and fewer than half of all mergers add value in medium term {The Economist, 1999a), One of the factors to blame for the failure of these deals is the sociocultural, human side of mergers (Buono and Bowditch, 1989), the so-called 'soft trap' {The Economist, 1999b). Executives who have been through the merger process are now starting to recognize that the management of the human side is the real key to maximizing the value of mergers (Buono