Struggles Over Legitimacy in Global Organizational Restructuring: A Rhetorical Perspective on Legitimation Strategies and Dynamics in a Shutdown Case

Abstract

1 1 Both authors have contributed equally. They are listed in alphabetical order as a matter of convenience. We wish to express our gratitude to Volvo"s and Carrus"s managers and personnel for making this study possible. We also want to thank Cynthia Hardy and the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments that have greatly improved the paper. Cooperation with Janne Tienari and Pasi Ahonen has been a major source of inspiration and learning. Finally, we are grateful for David Miller for language revision. 2 AbstractCritical organization scholars have focused increasing attention on industrial and organizational restructurings such as shutdown decisions. However, we know little about the rhetorical strategies used to legitimate or resist plant closures in organizational negotiations. In this paper, we draw from New Rhetoric to analyze rhetorical struggles, strategies and dynamics in unfolding organizational negotiations. We focus on the shutdown of the bus body unit of the Swedish company Volvo in Finland. We distinguish five types of rhetorical legitimation strategies and dynamics. These include the three classical dynamics of logos (rational arguments), pathos (emotional moral arguments), and ethos (authority-based arguments), but also autopoiesis (autopoietic narratives), and cosmos (cosmological constructions). Our analysis adds to the previous studies explaining how organizational restructuring as a phenomenon is legitimated, how this legitimation has changed over time, and how contemporary industrial closures are legitimated in the media. This study also increases our theoretical understanding of the role of rhetoric in legitimation more generally.

Institutionalization of Contested Practices: A Case of Enterprise Architecture Implementation in a US State Government

“…When viewing common IS practices through this lens, issues arise that exemplify why implementing and enacting IS practices have experienced significant challenges [24]. Much of the prevailing view on how new practices can gain legitimacy during the institutionalization process utilizes a macro-level view and focuses on change agents with their use of discursive strategies to frame and motivate institutional actors to take up new practices [48,11,20]. While such approaches are helpful in addressing educational aspects, they fail to address the knowledge transfer struggles endemic to institutionalization efforts.…”

Strategy as Discursive Practice in a Brazilian Public University: A Look under the Perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis

“…According to Alvesson and Karreman (2000), the "linguistic turn", introduced to the social sciences in the decade of 1980, made of the discursive analysis an important element for the organizational studies. The discourse applied to the construction of strategy has been of increasing interest in the last few years in studies that examine the linguistic nature of strategies and the ways the language shapes strategic practices, especially in considering strategy as a social and discursive practice (FENTON and LANGLEY, 2011;ROULEAU and BALOGUN, 2011;SPEE and JARZABKOWSKI, 2011;VAARA, 2010;VAARA et al, 2010VAARA et al, , 2004MANTERE and VAARA, 2008;HARDY et al, 2000). During the last decade, there has been an increasing focus on the relation between discourse and the organizations (CEDERSTRÖM and SPICER, 2013).…”

“…It should be highlighted that power cannot be separated from discourse: the discourse is an instrument, but also an effect of power (FOUCAULT, 1980). Many studies have focused on strategies as discursive practices (MANTERE and VAARA, 2008;ROULEAU and BALOGUN, 2011;SPEE and JARZABKOWSKI, 2011;VAARA, 2010), especially in the everyday practices of strategy managers (JARZABKOWSKI, 2005;WHITTINGTON, 1996) and with the interpretative nature on strategy elaboration. Therefore, strategy is something that the members of an organization "do", not something that the organizations "have" (HENDRY et al, 2010), since a considerable part of the "doing of the strategy" occurs by the language in the form of text and conversation.…”

“…However, it is important to highlight that the studies of the strategic practice identified how strategists use the discourse in the construction of strategy (LAINE and VAARA, 2007;ROULEAU, 2005;VAARA et al, 2004), the discourses as narratives (VAARA and TIENARI, 2011), the discourses as rhetoric (ERKAMA and VAARA, 2010), and the discourses as metaphor. Still, other studies show discursive activities to justify, legitimize, and naturalize actions (VAARA and TIENNARI, 2002).…”

The big bug: The legitimation of the edible insect sector in the Netherlands

“…Aldrich and Fiol (1994) have developed a legitimacy strategy framework which allows analysis of a sector's progress in doing so. Although other legitimacy strategy frameworks have also been developed (Erkama and Vaara, 2010;Reast et al, 2013;Suchman, 1995), the Aldrich and Fiol (1994) framework is the most appropriate for our analysis due to its focus on new ventures and specific levels of analyses. Employing the framework should therefore be helpful in investigating the legitimacy strategies implemented by organizations in emerging food sectors.…”