Barbara Townley

Business Planning as Pedagogy: Language and Control in a Changing Institutional Field

Language and power are central to an understanding of control. This paper uses the work of Pierre Bourdieu to argue that an enriched view of power, in the form of symbolic violence, is central. We examine the pedagogical function business plans played in the provincial museums and cultural heritage sites of Alberta, Canada. The struggle to name and legitimate practices occurs in the business planning process, excluding some knowledges and practices and teaching and utilizing other knowledges and ways of viewing the organization. We show that control involves both redirecting work and changing the identity of producers, in particular, how they understand their work through the construction of markets, consumers, and products. This process works by changing the capital, in its multiple forms-symbolic, cultural, political and economic-in an organizational and institutional field.

The Role of Competing Rationalities in Institutional Change

Reporting on a longitudinal case study of the introduction of business planning and performance measures in cultural organizations, this article uses Webers identification of types of rationality ...

The Institutional Logic of Performance Appraisal

The focus of this paper is to examine the responses to institutional isomorph ism in one area of the public sector — universities. As an example, one particu lar organizational practice is examined — performance appraisal — and its implications for one group of professionals — academics. In doing so, some of the sources of variation in responses to institutional pressures are illustrated and the strategies of resistance actors engage in to resist such pressures. It is suggested that the concept of institutional logic is an important element in influencing responses to isomorphism, providing a repertoire of beliefs with which to contest concepts of legitimacy.

In the Name of Accountability - State Auditing, Independence and New Public Management

This article investigates the role of the state auditor in Alberta. An analysis of the Office of the Auditor General of Alberta’s annual reports shows that the role of the Office has significantly changed to promote and encourage the implementation in the public sector of a particular type of accountability informed by new public management. The authors argue that the Office has increased its power to influence politicians and public servants about the merits of its specific understanding of what accountability should be. However, as the Office becomes more powerful, it also becomes more vulnerable to complaints about a lack of independence from the executive. Indeed, the Office is now so closely associated with new public management that we believe that it is difficult for the Office to sustain the claim that it is able to provide independent assessments of public‐sector administration.

Managing with Modernity

This article critiques an increasingly abstract management that is being advocated in organizations. It locates the foundations of an abstract management in what Foucault and others have identified as the epistemic foundations of modernity. Using the example of a strategic performance management system it shows how these systems have such epistemic assumptions as their foundations. The article concludes by considering the role of practical reason in guiding management practice.

`Know Thyself': Self-Awareness, Self-Formation and Managing

In this paper, I argue that self-knowledge is an important dimension of our understanding of management as a practice. Using the work of Foucault, I trace a distinction between self-awareness and self-formation. I argue that contemporary mechanisms of self-knowledge available in management education and development are premised on self-awareness and that this sustains a broader discourse of management as the interpretation and satisfaction of needs. This discourse is inherently hierarchical. I argue that revisiting the concept of self-formation allows for the articulation of an understanding of managing and organizing based on the concept of rights.

The Cult of Modernity

This article examines Strategic Performance Management Systems oftenintroduced as a key component of New Public Management. In doing so, it identifies some of the common and long-standing difficulties identified with the introduction and use of performance measures. The article then questions why such management systems are consistently advocated given some of the apparently serious dysfunctions that their introduction and use can engender. It concludes that these systems reflect a deeper attachment to what has been characterised as Enlightenment thinking, and that an archaeology of this style of thought is a necessary pre-requisite for understanding models of management that are promulgated.

Misfits, Mavericks and Mainstreams: Drivers of Innovation in the Creative Industries

Creative industries are among the fastest-growing and most important sectors of European and North American economies. Their growth depends on continuous innovation, which is important in many industries and also challenging to manage because of inherent tensions. Creative industries, similar to many industries, depend not only on novelty to attract consumers, but also on familiarity to aid comprehension and stabilize demand for cultural products. Agents in the creative industries play with these tensions, generating novelty that shifts industries’ labels and boundaries. This tension and agency makes them a valuable setting for advancing theoretical ideas on who drives innovation, from mavericks that challenge conventions to mainstreams that build upon them. We trace this history and then turn to the five papers in the special issue, which examine in depth how mavericks, misfits, mainstreams and amphibians in various creative domains, from artistic perfumery to choreography, engage with innovation and address tensions. These processes of innovation point to future research that explores and exploits the role of materiality in meaning making, the role of capitals in translation processes and the dynamics of value and evaluation.

Discussion of Roberts: Controlling Foucault

Archaeologies, genealogies, power/knowledge, the self as the object and subject of knowledge, disciplinary power, technologies of the self, subjectification and objectification. All are concepts associated with the work of Foucault. ‘Control’ is not one of them.1 So why the fascination with Foucault for those who are interested in control? And how do Foucauldian concepts inform an understanding of control and resistance? I raise these questions because of Roberts’ comment that ‘Foucault’s account of disciplinary power has effected a sea change in the conceptualisation of control and resistance at work’ (p. 619). For Roberts, this sea change comes from Foucault’s account of disciplinary power and his destabilization of the humanist subject. An essentialist view of human nature is seen as underpinning an ‘A has power over B’ concept of power that has informed the control/resistance dualism. Management controls labour. Subject, verb, object. Modern management methods introduce the individual into a ‘field of visibility’ through the exercise of power/knowledge regimes. These categorize, locate, differentiate, compare, cluster and isolate individuals, groups and populations. This is the function of the panopticon, the archetype of disciplinary power that creates power effects through knowledge regimes. Visibility functions to individualize, helps create the individual and, in so doing, creates a narcissistic preoccupation with how one is seen and judged. Disciplinary power is at its most efficacious when it breaks the dyad between seeing and being seen, when the subject adopts both roles. Roberts poses the interesting question of why we should be vulnerable to such actions. Why is power/knowledge effective? He suggests that current explanations of the efficacy of power/knowledge regimes— self-discipline, internalization, identification with norms, the need for closure, etc.—are somewhat tautological. Disciplinary power is the Volume 12(5): 643–648 ISSN 1350–5084 Copyright

Innovation in the Application of Digital Tools for Managing Uncertainty: The Case of UK Independent Film

This research investigates innovation in how film producers use social digital tools to engage consumers, reduce demand uncertainty and respond to the challenge of digital disruption that affects the traditional film value chain. Through three empirical case studies of film production and exploitation, we examine examples of innovation in product, service, distribution, marketing and process, each having important implications at the organizational level. Our findings show that innovations in one area have important implications for other areas, distribution impacting on concepts of product and service, for example. We also show that internal firm micro-process dynamics impact directly on external interactions between the firm, consumers en masse and partner firms. Our research thus lies at the nexus of innovation, social media and uncertainty management, and questions the boundaries found in innovation ‘types’ or dominant taxonomies in traditional R&D frames.