Frank Mueller

Societal Effect, Organizational Effect and Globalization

This paper argues that traditional contrasts between countries as depicted by the societal effect approach, among others, may have been over-emphasized. Diverse evidence suggests that aspects of work organization, government policies and training arrangements have changed substantially over the last decade or so, and multinational companies have been effective in diffusing best practices across borders. One implication is that organizational and globalization effects may complement or even counteract the societal effect. This suggests that some cases, where the presumption has been that societal effects are dominant, may be open to a modified analysis.

‘A Rounded Picture is What We Need’: Rhetorical Strategies, Arguments, and the Negotiation of Change in a UK Hospital Trust:

This article is concerned with the introduction of the agenda of New Public Management (NPM) within the board of a UK Hospital Trust: West London Hospital (WLH). We discuss the literature on New Public Management, including its limitations for analysing the organizational reality of implementing NPM. But we will also be drawing on discourse theory and the literature on rhetoric. The main argument in this article is that in order to understand the reality of the NPM paradigm, we need to study the rhetorical strategies of protagonists involved in the negotiation of the NPM agenda. Rhetorical strategies are means of making general viewpoints more convincing, for example, by comparing ‘our’ organization with similar organizations. Rhetorical strategies show patterns, which reappear in conversations and arguments made by protagonists. Specifically, we identified three rhetorical strategies justifying why and what kind of a more ‘rounded picture’ was required: widening the argument to include national productivity comparisons with other hospitals; widening the argument away from a narrow focus on finance toward a strategic and political perspective; and, lastly, widening the argument to look at innovation in the whole clinical process.

Bankers in the dock: Moral storytelling in action

This article draws on insights from a variety of fields, including discursive psychology, ethnomethodology, dramatism, rhetoric, ante-narrative analysis and conversation analysis, to examine the discursive devices employed in the storytelling surrounding the recent financial crisis. Discursive devices refer to the linguistic styles, phrases, tropes and figures of speech that, we propose, are central to the development of a compelling story. We focus our analysis on the moral stories constructed during a public hearing involving senior banking executives in the UK. The analysis suggests that two competing storylines were used by the bankers and their questioners to emplot the events preceding the financial crisis. We propose that a discursive devices approach contributes to the understanding of storytelling by highlighting the power of micro-linguistic tools in laying out the moral landscape of the story. We argue that the stories surrounding the financial crisis are important because they shaped how the crisis was made sense of and acted upon.

Switching Strategic Perspective: The Reframing of Accounts of Responsibility

We provide an empirical study of the reframing of accounts of responsibility for strategy. We found that top management ambivalence about strategy provided a middle management team with wide scope for interpretation of responsibility for developing and implementing a strategic initiative. In the early stage, responsibility as well as expectations about the strategy’s successful outcome were ‘talked up’. In the later stage, when it was considered that the strategic initiative was failing, the middle management implementation team engaged in ‘talking down’ of expectations. We show that reframing from initial duty to capability to later accountability shaped and reflected actors’ changing goals. By focusing on responsibility we increase understanding of the division of labour in the actual practice of strategizing, including where and how strategizing is done. Most important, we show how protagonists’ goals drive the framing and reframing of strategic agendas, and how linguistic devices such as disclaimers and self-handicapping influence this process.

The Scripting of Total Quality Management within its Organizational Biography

The last 20 years or so have seen a proliferation of managerialist innovations, including Total Quality Management. Many existing accounts, however, tend to view TQM either as a copy of an institutional template or lose themselves in the richness of ‘the case’. Our intention is to trace institutional influences at the organizational level. For this purpose, we put forward an organizational biography perspective. The main promise of an organizational biography perspective is its concern with scripts of typical activities occurring during the ‘biography’ of an organizational innovation. We argue that scripts such as ‘exhortation’, ‘mimetic learning’, ‘structuring’, ‘contesting’, ‘routinizing’ and ‘disbanding’ are useful concepts in order to understand the dynamics of a management innovation at organizational level. The scripts refer to different combinations of rhetoric and practice(s). There will be some form of temporal sequence, but it will not be a strict sequence: for example, exhortation in some parts of the organization will co-exist with routinization in others. Accounting for such diversity is a strength of scripting analysis.

Translating Management Ideas: A Discursive Devices Analysis

This paper puts forward a discursive devices approach to analysing the linguistic practices involved in the translation of management ideas. The paper draws on empirical data from a study of a quality improvement initiative in a UK public—private partnership. To illustrate our argument, we examine the discursive devices skilfully employed by two change champions during a training session to introduce staff to the new quality regime. Drawing insights from the field of discursive psychology, we analyse how a variety of discursive devices, such as footing, are employed to translate the idea during dialogue between sellers and recipients. We suggest that skilful variation can play a relevant role in the translation of management ideas.

Funnel of Interests: The Discursive Translation of Organizational Change

In this article, the authors examine the role of discourse in the implementation of organizational change. They develop the concept of the “funnel of interests” to describe the process through which the perceived goals, concerns, and interests of different actors are aligned with change. To illustrate the argument, the authors analyze organizational change in a U.K. public—private partnership and show how the creative use of discourse helps to “funnel” the perceived interests of different groups and thereby facilitate the implementation of change. In particular, the authors examine the role of change agents as “translators,” who use discourse to actively reconstruct and realign change as congruent with the recipient’s interests. The findings suggest that change agents need to act as a mediator, interpreting and reinterpreting the change, rather than as a passive intermediary that simply diffuses a fixed set of ideas and practices, letting them pass without modification. It was through translation that the change agents in this study helped to funnel the broad range of concerns expressed by the recipients in the required direction. This study thereby opens up a new research agenda that seeks to examine how interests and interest groups are constructed through discourse, rather than viewing interests as preexisting entities that are simply expressed in discourse.

The ‘Long March’ of the Management Modernizers: Ritual, Rhetoric and Rationality

This article deals with a transition process from a professional engineering archetype to a modernizing managerialist archetype in a British electricity utility. This took place in the context of the substantially changing utility sector characterized by privatization, the introduction of efficiency targets, the introduction of a regulatory system, the prospect of mergers and predatory takeovers. The high-flying rhetoric of modernizing managerialists needs to be seen in the context of institutional templates, which carried substantial mimetic legitimacy, in particular programmes such as total quality management, teamworking and job redesign. They provided a basis to displace entrenched engineering rituals, and establish a new ‘dominant rhetoric’. One reading ascribes such projects as striving towards objectified and technocratic organizational improvements - the modernizers’ rhetoric. An alternative reading is one that problematizes such an understanding by instead drawing attention to the largely ceremonial and rhetoric intensive nature of modernizing managerialism - the critics’ rhetoric. A third perspective is provided by engineers who were fighting a largely rearguard action, as professional expectations emphasizing engineering safety were gradually losing force, but remained in sedimented form. The rhetoric intensive practice of talking ‘spin’ and engaging in elaborate rituals may well, whether in political or in organizational life, lead to critical, and sometimes cynical responses. In this article we highlight the way in which the scripts of ceremonialism, reformism and cynicism have played out among managerial and professional groups in the organization.

Strategy, enrolment and accounting: the politics of strategic ideas

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to use Actor Network Theory to explore the role of management accounting systems (MAS) in the construction of business strategy. Design/methodology/approach - The paper draws on findings from an ethnographic study of a UK-based firm. Theoretical concepts from Actor-Network Theory are used to illuminate the findings of the study. Findings - The study found that MAS acted as an obligatory point of passage into the strategic agenda of the firm. However, the findings also reveal the political tactics used by employees in order to work within, against and around the MAS. Originality/value - The paper shows that MAS are a key player in the political contests that occur during the process of strategy formulation, as opposed to offering a neutral tool for measuring the strategic value of innovative ideas.

Learning, Teamwork and Appropriability: Managing Technological Change in the Department of Social Security

Drawing on an extensive case study, we argue that management has to actively manage information flows, both within the organization and between the organization and its environment. Three tasks of knowledge management are, in our view, important in building technological capability: appropriation, teamworking and learning. ‘Appropriation’ includes the retention and effective utilization of internal knowledge. ‘Teamworking’ refers to the integration of diverse knowledge bases. ‘Learning’ embraces the acquisition and exploitation of externally held knowledge