Hans Hansen

The SAGE handbook of new approaches in management and organization

Ten years ago critical theory and postmodernism were considered new and emerging theories in Business and Management. What will be the next new important theories to shape the field? In one edited ...

The ethnonarrative approach

While much research within narrative theory has focused on discourse in organizations, context should be a central focus because it is material in the production of meaning. In this article, I suggest an ethnonarrative approach that seeks to combine ethnographic methods and narrative methods in conducting hermeneutic analyses of narratives and stories, shifting not only between texts and contexts, but texts within a context of construction. Narrative research relies on analysis of various texts and often ignores context, while ethnographic methods are especially attuned to making observations and interpretations regarding the context in which texts are produced. The ethnonarrative approach highlights the multiple materials at play in narrative construction and attempts to demonstrate contextual influence on meaning making. The ethnonarrative approach is distinguished by a focus on the context of construction, the endosymbiotic relationship between text/context, and the social act as the level of analysis.

Daring to Care: Scholarship that Supports the Courage of Our Convictions

Whatever we choose to do, the stakes are very high. David Whyte (1994, p. 298), poet Researching questions that matter demands passionate conviction. Whether recognized as such or not, such conviction, combined with profound compassion, defines true scholarship. Daring to care requires courage—the courage to speak out and to act. Courage transforms convictions and compassion into action. Thus, by its very nature, daring to care calls into question the traditional role of rigid scientific objectivity and invites advocacy to play a vital role within our scholarly tradition. In focusing on daring to care, this article raises questions that academia must ask itself in order to support scholars in rigorously researching and teaching about issues that matter. It provides examples of scholarship that have required courage, conviction, and compassion, including a case example where the outcome of appropriate methodology is literally life or death. Throughout the discussion, readers are invited to consider what supports their core convictions, compassion, and courageous action in their own scholarship, teaching, and advocacy.

To Text or Context? Endotextual, Exotextual, and Multi-textual Approaches to Narrative and Discursive Organizational Studies

Organizational researchers doing narrative and discursive research have three choices in how they approach a text: an ‘endotextual’ approach where the researcher works within a text, an ‘exotextual’ approach where the researcher works outward from a text to its context(s), or a combined exo/endotextual approach which embeds a textual analysis within contextual inquiry. Although all three methods are now widely used in mainstream organizational research, the merits of combining, sequencing, or separating them have never been systematically considered. After reviewing the advantages and limitations of each perspective, we discuss an experiment in which endo and exo methods were applied to a skit co-written by management and a communications company specializing in organizational theater. The finding that using one approach creates multiple, subtle blind spots towards the other, and even more significantly affects a researchers capacity to effectively adopt a combined method, is used to construct an alternative ‘diatextual’ framework. This is used to frame a discussion of how multi-method textual studies of organizations might be conducted in the future.

Truth or Consequences An Improvised Collective Story Construction

What follows is a collectively improvised story that emerged as four authors set out to explore their experiences and thoughts concerning organizational stories. The story is a reflection of their collective, creative, improvisational sense making via the construction of a narrative. The authors were selected because of their experience in the fields of organizational storytelling, narrative theory, and improvisation. They began by asking themselves “What would happen if we engaged in improvisation to collectively create a story that makes sense of organizational research?” After several rounds of reviews, they added reader voices, along with their own insights gained from their experience in constructing “Truth or Consequences.”

This Is Going to Hurt Compassionate Research Methods

As compassion has become established in the organizational literature as an important area of study, calls for increased compassion in our own work and research have increased. Compassion can take many forms in academic work, but in this article we propose a framework for compassionate research methods. Not only driven by caring for others and a desire for improving their lot, compassionate research methods actually immerse the researcher in compassionate work. We propose that compassionate research methods include three important elements: ethnography, aesthetics, and emotionality. Together, these provide opportunities for emergent theoretical experimentation that can lead to both the alleviation of suffering in the immediate research context and new theoretical insights. To show the possibilities of this method, we use empirical data from a unique setting—the first U.S. permanent death penalty defense team.

Managing to beat death: the narrative construction process

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce narrative construction, a method by which participants produce a narrative to make sense of their organizational context, as well as strategically guide action and decision making. While narrative theory has long‐held that people construct narratives to make sense of, and guide, their experience, narrative construction here entails a deliberate and strategic approach to narrative theory.Design/methodology/approach – This is part of an ethnonarrative approach that includes both a constructionist and interpretive narrative and ethnographic methodology.Findings – Narrative construction has research implications for an ethnomethodology of social construction and empirical observation of narrative enactment. There are practical implications for enabling change and building highly‐coordinated organizations.Originality/value – Narrative construction offers a new qualitative methodology and extends ethnonarrative research. The research setting, a death penalty d...

Institutional judo: how entrepreneurs use institutional forces to create change

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine an entrepreneur’s attempt to gain legitimacy and change institutions in a multiple institutions setting. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a qualitative case study to track an entrepreneur’s efforts to create a new financial instrument and get it accepted and traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Findings – The authors introduce the concept of institutional judo, analogous to the martial art where a fighter uses his opponent’s forces against him. While institutional theory has focussed on how institutional pressures force actors to conform, the term judo refers to an actor using institutional pressures to their advantage in changing those very institutions. Research limitations/implications – This qualitative research involves a single case study, but is most suited to revealing extensions of theory and subtle processes. Practical implications – The approach allowed the authors to provide a nuanced look at the actual change efforts by an...

Exploiting the Poor in Faraway Locations: a Corporate Guide

We offer of model of corporate exploitation. Our theory is grounded in data from qualitative interviews that were conducted at eleven sites of exploitation across Honduras. Because little is known ...

Book Review: Building the Responsible Enterprise: Where Vision and Values Add Value

Building the Responsible Enterprise outlines the context and plan for developing and managing a responsible enterprise. It is rooted in corporate social responsibility (CSR) but goes beyond CSR in a few important ways. While it is well integrated and informed by fields outside of organizational studies, it takes a value-based perspective on responsibility. While I think this is somewhat rare for an academic text, I also think it may offer the only viable route to long-term corporate responsibility. In this review, I will outline the content of the book, attempt to place it alongside other approaches to CSR in the literature to characterize its contribution as well as illustrate its distinctive points. The book provides an accessible and theoretically informed perspective and practice on corporate social responsibility. Describing a context where companies are increasingly being held accountable for their stances on societal and social rights, responsible enterprises are those that live up to clear constructive visions and core values consistent with the societies in which they are embedded. The authors take a systems approach, in a new way, to analyze the impact that business has on social and environmental problems. The context of responsibility, not dissimilar to a triple bottom line approach of financial, social, and environmental performance, includes four spheres, each with dominant values: the business sphere, the political sphere, civil society, and the natural environment or ecological sphere. The next part of the book discusses the role of vision and leadership in building responsible enterprises, stating strong leadership is needed to bring a responsible vision into reality. They also devote attention to how such value-based visions add value. The next set of chapters highlight management practices in pursuit of CSR. In the last section, the book moves beyond CSR’s technical approach, to a values-based perspective that entails new understandings about the corporation’s role in an interlinked economy, political system, and civil society. They outline a shift in perspective and change in attitude. Waddock and Rasche focus on values as the key to responsible enterprise and, given the content of the text, it is easy to see how the values perspective takes center stage in the book. This is perhaps the least common perspective within CSR, but perhaps the most plausible way forward. The book’s perspective is decidedly value-centered, meaning organizations do what’s responsible because it is the right (moral and ethical) thing to do. In my review of the field of CSR and sustainability, which this book considers aptly, I found three broad research approaches and three related, somewhat overlapping, motivations for corporations to pursue CSR and sustainability. Much of the research on CSR, I believe, has been 484678OSS34810.1177/0170840613484678Organization StudiesBook Reviews 2013