Anshuman Prasad

The Contest Over Meaning: Hermeneutics as an Interpretive Methodology for Understanding Texts:

This article focuses on the methodological and epistemological aspects of hermeneutics, a leading genre of interpretive research. Beginning with a brief overview of the limitations of methodological discussions of hermeneutics in current organizational research, the article first introduces readers to the historical context of hermeneutics and then discusses the major epistemological and methodological concepts and debates that inform contemporary hermeneutics. Next, methodological guidelines for employing hermeneutics in organizational research are proposed. Finally, some conclusions are offered.

The Coming of Age of Interpretive Organizational Research

After decades of occupying a relatively subordinate position in the shadows of mainstream (i.e., positivistic) research, interpretive organizational scholarship appears poised today to come into the limelight and to speak in a stronger and more independent voice. Over the years, interpretive inquiry has steadily affirmed its relevance to management and organization studies by addressing questions that cannot adequately be answered by traditional experimental or survey methodologies and by enhancing our understanding of, among other things, the symbolic dimensions of organizational life. Different genres of interpretive research have also demonstrated (even to their critics) that they are as rigorous as positivist science even though their rigor necessarily needs to be judged by criteria that are markedly different from those used in conventional empirical research. This coming of age of interpretive organizational research provides us with an opportunity and a space for taking stock of some of its more noteworthy features and accomplishments, for grasping the complexity of the varied genres subsumed under this label, and for assessing the significance of certain crucial directions it might be taking. Toward these ends, this special issue of Organizational Research Methods brings together five scholarly pieces that exemplify, in different ways, the maturity and newfound self-confidence of interpretive organizational research and that address significant and complex methodological and epistemological questions designed to further an informed practice of interpretive organizational research (and, indeed, of organizational research, per se). In many ways, the emergence of interpretive organizational research is linked to the explosion of so-called qualitative research during the past several years within the various disciplinary fields and subfields of management and organization studies. Qualitative organizational research, as we know well enough, arose partly in response to certain significant (some would say, fatal) limitations of conventional quantitative and

Managing the Organizational Melting Pot: Dilemmas of Workplace Diversity

It remains for future researchers to determine exactly why high-performance work systems improve plant performance and worker contentment. In their concluding chapter, the authors suggest that high-performance work systems improve plant performance because they elicit greater discretionary effort from workers and because they provide more opportunities for shop-floor learning. These are certainly plausible intervening variables; pinning down what precisely discretionary effort is and how exactly it shapes organizational outcomes would be a worthy extension of this study.

Understanding Workplace Empowerment as Inclusion: A Historical Investigation of the Discourse of Difference in the United States

This article situates workplace empowerment within the broader principle of inclusion and offers a historical analysis of the discourse of difference in America since the 1930s with a view to developing a deeper understanding of the dynamics of empowerment in the American workplace. The article identifies two primary themes, namely, discrimination and diversity, as constituting the discourse of difference and investigates the differing historical contours of these two themes over the period of this study. The article argues that, during different years, these two themes came to attain different levels of salience that held important implications for inclusion and empowerment in the American workplace.

‘One mirror in another’: Managing diversity and the discourse of fashion

In this article, we report on a multi-sited ethnographic study that investigates how the discourse of fashion influenced the design and implementation of workplace diversity management programs in six organizations. These organizations, from the Canadian petroleum and insurance industries, were manipulated by an institutional field of consultants and experts into adopting relatively superficial initiatives that lacked local relevance, and produced a high level of organizational cynicism regarding diversity. In our analysis, we particularly explore one adverse effect of this discourse of fashion; that it may trigger a form of meaningless imitation by organizations adopting diversity management initiatives, resulting in superficiality and organizational cynicism. At the same time, the discourse of fashion may also hold the key to enable meaningful change, for it has a powerful influence on organizational practitioners. Our article suggests that organizations need to be aware of the institutional field, and engage with it in a manner that imbues their initiatives with local relevance, for their initiatives to contribute to meaningful organizational change.

The Empire of Organizations and the Organization of Empires: Postcolonial Considerations on Theorizing Workplace Resistance

Recent management and organizational research has frequently noted the complex nature of workplace resistance, and commented upon the difficulties attending scholarly efforts to theorize resistance in organizations (Hodson, 1995; Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994a; Prasad & Prasad, 1998, 2000, 2001). The objective of this chapter is to explore the limits/margins of current management scholarship on workplace resistance by means of drawing upon certain aspects of resistance theory that have received attention in postcolonial theory and criticism. In so doing, the chapter seeks to direct scholarly focus toward new—and hitherto relatively unexplored— areas of complexity that may surround management researchers’ endeavors aimed at theorizing resistance in organizations. Toward that end, the chapter especially looks at two features often found in postcolonial theoretic meditations on resistance—(a) the notion of “unconscious resistance,” and (b) ideas of ambivalence, mimicry, hybridity, and so on and their significance for resistance—and examines the questions, issues, concerns, and dilemmas that they seem to raise for organizational scholars engaged in researching workplace resistance.

The Postcolonial Imagination

Despite some differences, the two metropolitan accounts—one by Winston Churchill, and the other by Hardt and Negri (2000)— which inaugurate this chapter, share something in common at a deep level: what the two metropolitan accounts may be seen to share is an absolute acceptance of the genocidal consequences of “civilization” as the price that “the wretched of the earth” must willingly pay for achieving Europe’s1 idea of the Kingdom of God on Earth. It is accounts of this nature, as well as relatively more subtle expressions of Europe’s will to power, that postcolonialism seeks to “dislodge,” rupture, and “set askew.” Accordingly, postcolonial theory’s engagement with colonialism and its continuing aftermath may be seen as representing an ethico-political project aimed at developing a uniquely radical and comprehensive critique of three monumental and mutually overlapping phenomena of great relevance to us today, namely, Western colonialism and neocolonialism, European modernity, and modern capitalism. As postcolonial critics have noted, these phenomena are overdetermined, with each serving as one of the conditions of possibility, as well as the effects, of the others. These phenomena are also extremely complex as a result of, among other things, their long and variegated history, wide spectrum of constitutive practices, and far-reaching implications whether cultural, political, economic, psychological, philosophical, epistemological, ideological, ethico-moral, aesthetic, or something else.

(Un)willing to resist? the discursive production of local workplace opposition ∗

Workplace resistance is conventionally regarded as the product of worker consciousness and intentionality. More recent studies of resistance have questioned this notion, seeing workplace resistance as emerging out of more spontaneous and non-calculative types of action. This paper examines the discursive production of routine resistance in an organization, showing how notions of employee intentionality and non-intentionality were categories through which resistance itself was produced. We look at an alleged case of sabotage, the enactment of “careful carelessness” and “dumb resistance” as complex discursive productions of both resistance and intentionality. We conclude with a brief discussion of implications for managerial control.

Toward a critical framework for understanding MNE operations: Revisiting Coca-Cola’s exit from India

The exit of Coca-Cola from India in the 1970s has been extensively used in IB textbooks as illustrating the challenges faced by MNEs in difficult political/regulatory environments. In this article, we use critical hermeneutics to challenge the conventional understanding and interpretation of the event. Instead, an understanding of the macro-economic and historical context suggests that the company had other options available to it and may have lost a valuable opportunity due to inflexible policies. IB textbooks should be wary of falling prey to naïve managerialism and instead provide a critical understanding of the operations within a larger context to their readers.

Smoke and mirrors: Institutional entrepreneurship and gender identities in the US Tobacco Industry, 1920–1945:

This article examines the institutional entrepreneurship displayed by the US tobacco industry in its attempt to overcome the moral illegitimacy of smoking among women in the years following World War I. Using historical analysis within a critical institutional framework, we trace the strategies used by the tobacco industry in combating seemingly powerful taboos and convincing large sections of the female population to take up smoking. Contrary to popular explanations linking the appeal of cigarettes to the aura of sexual glamour that was associated with them, we posit that the industry was able to initially expand its female consumer base by creatively appropriating the discourse of ‘the new American woman’ that was emerging in elite circles at that time. We found that many tobacco manufacturers were institutionally entrepreneurial in their ability to discursively connect selected ideals of emancipation with a spectrum of female identities in American society. We conclude by drawing implications for an understanding of the management of moral illegitimacy.