Organization studies is a robust field, replete with diverse, often contentious perspectives that may enrich understandings of pluralism and paradox. Yet polarization of modern paradigms and ruptures between modern and postmodern stances may inhibit researchers from tapping this potential. In response, this article delves into a provocative alternative - multiparadigm inquiry. First, we juxtapose modern, postmodern and multiparadigm approaches to contrast their underlying assumptions. We then review three multiparadigm strategies, exploring their objectives, exemplars and limitations. Our conclusion addresses how multiparadigm inquiry fosters greater reflexivity, while posing considerable challenges.
This paper recognizes the failure of management research to communicate with practitioners, and speculates over the reasons why this may be the case. It is possible that the researchers’ interests may not always coincide with management practitioners’; however, even when such interests are congruent, it seems that relatively little management research is published in practitioner journals. We suggest that this is because academic research is written in a style that tends to alienate most practitioners. This paper isolates the stylistic conventions associated with research targeted to academics (typically published in academic journals) and research targeted to practitioners (typically published in practitioner‐oriented journals). Such stylistic differences are illustrated through a study of organizational change whose findings have been published in both academic and practitioner format, namely in the Administrative Science Quarterly and the Harvard Business Review. We suggest that the gap between these two types of research could be narrowed through processes of translation (i.e. academic jargon could be translated in practitioner language). In addition we might consider greater use of Mode 2 research over Mode 1 research (academic). Mode 2 research presupposes that teams of academics and practitioners assemble to define the research problem and methodology in terms appropriate to a particular context and in a way that accounts for all existing interests so that translation processes are seamless. However, Mode 2 creates its own gap in that the knowledge is more contextual and may not reach a wide audience.
The paper documents the working of the language of total quality management (TQM) and some of its effects in four UK service organizations. By making language central to the 'production' and 'consumption' of TQM practices, the paper explores the use of managerial language and its effects upon organizational practices and employees' experiences. The semantic use of language, reflected merely in the use of labels and platitudes, is concerned with clarity and specificity while the poetic use of language, reflected in the use of metaphors, emphasizes ambiguity by inviting multiple interpretations from below. The paper argues that both uses of language are directed towards achieving some sort of meaning and order; however, managers do not have total discretion over the consequences of their language use. While they may seek to enrol employees in the TQM language (via a process of interest translation), the responses of the employees cannot be predicted or controlled from the top. Employees' discursive responses are themselves riddled with ambiguity and range from open resistance to manipulation to internalization. Indeed, it is impossible to know in advance how TQM language works in practice because such workings are the complex and ambiguous outcome of material and non-material relationships that can never be accurately predicted. This paper is about the language of total quality management (TQM) in four UK service organizations. By making language central to the 'production' and the 'consumption' of TQM, the paper attempts to address some of the limitations of the functionalist perspective on TQM that has dominated the literature for the last three decades. In the first part, the paper adopts a production perspective, which foregrounds TQM and allows the researcher to concentrate on its language as used by top managers. The second part of the paper takes a consumption stance, which is more complex and subtle since it is culture that is at stake, not simply TQM. The paper documents employees' responses to the language of TQM and suggests that such responses cannot be controlled or indeed predicted by top managers, however much effort is put into this project.In what follows the paper highlights the complex and disputed nature of TQM. According to Hackman and Wageman (1995), TQM has come to mean different
Recent debates on the production of knowledge in organizational analysis are interpreted from a largely postmodernist, `sociology of consumption' perspective. Drawing upon the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Michel de Certeau and Stanley Deetz in particular, the analysis rejects both positivist and conventionalist theses on knowledge production in favour of a deconstructionist approach that embraces acts of production and consumption in a reflexive way. The argument is developed by way of a case study of production and consumption in organizational analysis. Through an assessment of scientific status and institutional control-centrally in relation to the `paradigm incommensurability' debate-a taxonomy of styles of knowledge production and consumption is proposed. Five main `camps' comprise this taxonomy-non-consumers, integrationists, protectionists, pluralists and postmodernists. We describe the basic knowledge philosophies of the camps and subject them to evaluation and critique. This analysis sees, inter alia, Jeffrey Pfeffer's proposals for producing an integrated knowledge paradigm for organizational analysis—the so-called `Pfefferdigm' thesis-confounded by the indeterminate rationalities and networks of signification of postmodern analysis. For explaining processes of knowledge production and consumption, it is argued ultimately that the notion of `discourse' should replace that of `paradigm'.
Definitions of volunteering are widespread and complex, yet relatively little attention is given to volunteering as unpaid work, even though it intersects with the worlds of paid employment and the domestic sphere, cutting across individual/collective and public/private spaces. This article advances a typology of volunteering work (altruistic, instrumental, militant and forced volunteering/'voluntolding') that illuminates the complexity and dynamism of volunteering. Using qualitative data from a study of 30 volunteers to explore practices of volunteering as they unfold in daily life, the typology provides much-needed conceptual building blocks for a theory of 'volunteering as unpaid work'. This perspective helps transcend the binaries prevalent in the sociology of work and provides a lens to rethink what counts as work in contemporary society. It also invites further research about the effects of 'voluntolding' on individuals and society, and on the complex relationship between volunteering work and outcomes at a personal and collective level.
Highlights Focuses on community based response to the 2011 Japanese tsunami. Introduces an arts based cultural animation methodological approach to vulnerable communities. Focuses on long term community interventions in order to 'build back better'. Highlights the role of culture in determining resilience in devastated communities. Stresses the importance of community based decision making in the reconstruction process.
While project management has been effectively applied to many fields and sectors, disaster management has yet to see its full benefits. This inductive study generates insights about the nature and role of 'active leadership' (LaBrosse, 2007) in the context of a community led recovery project in Minami-sanriku, Japan, an area affected by the 2011 tsunami. Community leaders displayed 'active leadership' evidenced in 1) the effective identification of project objectives and relevant stakeholders, 2) the efficient management of stakeholder engagement and 3) the robust understanding of the socio-cultural context in which the Nagasuka Beach Recovery Project took place. This multidisciplinary and inductive study highlights the need to train project managers (be they community leaders or otherwise) in both technical and soft leadership skills: the former ensure that Project Management methodologies are clearly understood and applied; the latter facilitate the adaptation of these methodologies to the specific socio-cultural locales in which recovery projects take place.
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