Deborah Jones

Narrative in Stractegic Change

Sensegiving constitutes a key process in the management of strategic change. Often this takes the form of narratives that provide a portrayal of events surrounding the change. This article reports the findings of research into the strategic change narratives that emerged in three organizations in which the senior management were seeking to respond to deregulation of the economy in which they were operating. The results illustrate both the existence of such narratives and the variation in form that they can take.

“Managing diversity” meets Aotearoa/New Zealand

Argues that the discourse of “managing diversity”, emerging from the US management literature, cannot be simply mapped on to organisations in other cultural contexts. It uses the example of Aotearoa/New Zealand to show that a “diversity” based on the demographics and dominant cultural assumptions of the USA fails to address – and may in fact obscure – key local “diversity” issues. It argues that the dominant discourse of “managing diversity” has embedded in it cultural assumptions that are specific to the US management literature. It calls for a genuinely multi‐voiced “diversity” discourse that would focus attention on the local demographics, cultural and political differences that make the difference for specific organisations.

Gossip: Notes on women's oral culture

Synopsis Little is known about language use in all-female groups. In this paper an approach to the study of womens oral culture is proposed, based on the researchers own participation in a female speech community and her knowledge of its norms. Womens gossip is an aspect of female language use, distinguished from more general concepts of womens speech style and of gossip. Gossip is described here in terms of its sociolinguistic features, with an emphasis on its functions which form the basis for the division of gossip into four categories: house-talk, scandal, bitching and chatting.

Screwing diversity out of the workers? Reading diversity

“Managing diversity” has emerged as a new and contested vocabulary for addressing issues of difference in organisations. This paper uses a New Zealand case study to exemplify a feminist post‐structuralist reading of managing diversity. The paper argues that a feminist post‐structuralist approach not only addresses feminist theoretical debates about identity, equality and difference, but also opens up new opportunities for practitioners in managing diversity and equal employment opportunities (EEO) to reflect on their own organisational change practice. The paper presents three readings of managing diversity: a discourse of exploitation which provides oppositional readings of managing diversity as a form of human resource management; a discourse of difference, drawing on refusals of managing diversity in accounts from minority group perspectives; and a discourse of equality where EEO practitioners have questioned managing diversity in the context of EEO.

Confronting Gender Inequality in a Business School

ABSTRACT This study, set in a New Zealand Business School, takes an integrative view of the university as an ‘inequality regime’ Acker, J. (2006b). Inequality regimes: Gender, class and race in organizations. Gender and Society, 20(4), 441–464 including all types of women staff: academic women in permanent positions, academics on casual contracts and administrative staff. This approach contrasts with most studies of gender in higher education, which focus on academics, and often on the most senior academic roles. The business school, too, is under-researched in the literature of gender and higher education and we argue that these institutions constitute a particularly ‘chilly climate’ for women. The project discussed here was designed as participatory action research, but we found both participation and action difficult to accomplish. We reflect on how these difficulties resonate with the wider problem of confronting gender inequality in a ‘chilly climate’, and ask why further change is hard. We collected primary data from focus group interviews and a survey, and critically reflected on the process of data collection. Secondary data, including university reports and policies and national legislation, were also collected as part of the context of the School inequality regime. We analysed our data using Ackers categories: the ‘visibility of inequality’, the ‘legitimacy of inequality’ and ‘mechanisms of control and compliance’. We found barriers to change both within and beyond the Business School itself. These included the low organisational priority given to gender equality, which in turn reflected a weak external regulatory environment. At the same time we found a lack of solidarity between women within the School, which we attributed partly to class-based differences. Organisational activism is difficult in this context, where gender inequality is both invisible and legitimated, reflecting a post-feminist mood of ‘gender fatigue’.

Out of the Blue: the dark side of creative enterprise

This paper draws on an archive of media texts that document the making of the film Out of the Blue. Within these media accounts are statements made by a group of residents resisting the film project, and the film‐makers responding to this resistance. We employ a Foucauldian informed discourse analysis to read these statements of resistance as a starting point to examine the power relations within contemporary knowledge generation processes of creative industries. We theorise creative industries as a discursive object located at the intersection of three discursive formations: ‘creativity’, ‘enterprise’ and ‘place’. Through analysing the particular place–identities of Aramoana engaged by the resisting residents and the film‐makers, we are able to suggest how this film project came to be discursively constituted as creative enterprise. In so doing, we find that the resisting residents’ statements work to disrupt the taken‐for‐granted ‘goodness’ of film enterprise, and creative industries more generally.

Change agents, double agents, secret agents: EEO in New Zealand

Purpose – This paper theorises how equal employment opportunities (EEO) practitioners (EPs) operate as change agents within organisations.Design/methodology/approach – It takes a feminist and post‐structuralist perspective, in which EPs are seen as agents of positive social change, contesting existing discourses, but are also themselves subject to being changed by their engagement in those same discursive formations. The key example used is the way that EPs handle tensions between “business” and “social justice” agendas. A case study of EPs in New Zealand government organisations provides the empirical base.Findings – It argues that agency is both produced and constrained by the discursive context of agents in specific situations. The case study showed EPs operating in an environment where the social justice discourse that had been central to introducing the concepts of EEO to the Public Service in the 1980s was in conflict with an increasingly powerful business agenda. This situation produced new “texts”...

The “learning organisation” and Singapore culture

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore practitioner and post‐colonial perspectives on the implementation of learning organisation theory and practice in a non‐Western setting.Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative interpretive study, using in‐depth interviews and participant observation, was conducted in two public organisations in Singapore. The study looked at relationships between the concepts of the learning organisation and of Singapore national culture, as the members of the organisations saw them. This study is presented and then discussed in commentaries from two different perspectives, i.e. the “insider” perspective of a Singaporean practitioner, and the “outsider” perspective of a New Zealand academic using a post‐colonial critique.Findings – The findings indicate that Western LO practitioners need to pay specific attention to the cultural values expressed by non‐Western organisational members, and to their own cultural limitations and biases which may be embedded in the implemen...

The whaanau/support interview

The whaanau/support selection interview is a distinctively New Zealand example of bringing cultural diversity into organizations by changing human resource management (HRM) practices. Aims to advocate the possibilities of the whaanau/support process, to discuss its problems, and to suggest future research directions. Draws on the perspectives of HRM practitioners to present three case studies which analyse the use of the whaanau/support process in terms of specific organizational objectives.

Fifty shades of outrage: women’s collective online action, embodiment and emotions

Social media have become an important avenue through which citizens agitate and advocate for social change. The impetus for protest activity is usually the perception of injustice leading to public anger shared online and which may mobilise people to take further action (e.g. join a protest demonstration or sign a petition). Research on activism using social media is still nascent, and there are as yet no studies examining the gendered dimensions of social activism on the Internet vis-à-vis the world of work. This article discusses two recent social media incidents involving aspects of women’s embodiment – menstruation and sexual attractiveness – in which action through social media arguably influenced organisations to change some aspect of their practice. Our analysis is grounded in feminist theories of embodiment to theorise the expression of anger in Internet social activism. The implications of this article include a deepened appreciation of the potential of social media for women’s collective action and the need for more research into the role of social media in forwarding women’s collective rights at work.