Hugo Gaggiotti

The rhetoric of synergy in a global corporation: Visual and oral narratives of mimesis and similarity

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to expand understanding about the rhetoric of synergy and how it is manifested in a global corporation, Tubworld (name changed), during a period of mergers and acquisitions.Design/methodology/approach – The methodology is based on an analysis of visual and oral material collected during a four‐year, intermittent fieldwork project in four companies of the same corporation across four countries.Findings – There were three main findings. First, the rhetoric of synergy is evidenced in the oral and the written, as well as the visual, and is part of the organizational experience of those involved in mergers – particularly expatriate managers. Second, the rhetoric of synergy operates not only in a prospective dimension (in order to justify the mergers or the takeovers and the future of the organization), but also in a retrospective dimension (in order to create a uniform mythical past). Third, the rhetoric of synergy is visualised and experienced not only in the private dom...

A visual inquiry into ethics and change

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the practices and findings of a visual inquiry developed by the co‐authors with students in a Business School in the south west of England. The authors are interested in how students engaged with the visual as a practice of inquiry and how this contributed to their development of a critical approach to the concept of ethics in business organisations.Design/methodology/approach – Students visited an exhibition shown as part of the 100 days countdown to the COP15 UN climate change conference, and constructed visual representation of questions and dilemmas related to ethical business practice. The analysis focuses on student presentations, and the discussions that these provoked on the relationship between “business” and “ethical practice”.Findings – Doing co‐inquiry with visual images enabled many students to engage more proactively with ethical dilemmas; to attend to deeply felt values that they were not accustomed to bring into the rule bound environment...

The ‘slippery’ concept of ‘culture’ in projects: towards alternative theoretical possibilities embedded in project practice

This paper is conceptual in nature. It begins with a critique of the slippery use of the concept of culture in organization studies and management practice and aims to illuminate problems with mainstream approaches to managing cultural differences and designing corporate culture as a panacea to organizational diversity, lack of intra-organizational cooperation or employee resistance. By contrasting the ‘culture as a variable’ approach with an understanding of culture as social-relational practice, as a meaning-making process, the paper expounds the importance of taking into account the fluidity of cultural categories, and the context-dependent and history-dependent nature of self-identification and self-consciousness in the attempts to improve performance and collaboration. The paper draws on a position known as process organization studies from which projects are ontologically understood as social settings in a permanent state of creation, evolution and emergence through complex processes of relating bet...

Official chronicles of corporate globalization and unofficial stories of international mobility: Resisting patronage of meaning?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse contradictions, similarities, and differences between official corporate chronicles and individual stories of international managers of a multinational company.Design/methodology/approach – The analysis was made following methodological and technical approaches of critical analysis of narratives and organizational discourse of an ethnography conducted in a multinational corporation.Findings – It is suggested that contradictions, similarities, and differences are ways that managers have to resist patronage and imposition of meanings. Implications for organizations are suggested.Originality/value – The discursive manipulation of the meaning of time as a way of organizational patronage is considered.

Working with language: a refocused research agenda for cultural leadership studies

This article critically reviews existing contributions from the field of cultural leadership studies with a view to highlighting the conceptual and methodological limitations of the dominant etic, cross-cultural approach in leadership studies and illuminating implications of the relative dominance and unreflective use of the English language as the academic and business lingua franca within this field. It subsequently outlines the negative implications of overlooking cultural and linguistic multiplicity for our understanding of culturally sensitive leadership practices. In drawing on lessons from this critical review and the emergent fields of emic, non-positivist cultural leadership studies, this analysis argues that the field of cultural leadership studies requires an alternative research agenda focussed on language multiplicity that enables the field to move towards emic, qualitative research that helps to empower individual cultural voices and explore cultural intra- and interrelationships, tensions and paradoxes embedded in leadership processes. The article concludes by offering suggestions on methodological approaches for emic cultural leadership studies that are centred on the exploration of language as a cultural voice.

Italo Calvino and the organizational imagination: Reading social organization through urban metaphors

This article explores the way in which uses or abuses of urban metaphors can inform differing polities and ethics of human organization. From its earliest inception, the city has taken on a metaphorical significance for human communities; being, at one and the same time, a discursive textual product of culture and, reciprocally, a provider of artefacts and architecture that produces culture and meaning. The city can be interpreted as a trope that operates bidirectionally in cultural terms. It is a sign that can be worked to serve the principles of both metonymy and synecdoche. In metonymical or reductive form, the city has the propensity to become weighty and deadening. The work of Michael Porter on competitive strategy is invoked to illustrate this effect. In the guise of synecdoche, on the other hand, the city offers imaginative potential. Drawing inspiration from the literary works of Italo Calvino (in particular, his novel Invisible Cities), the article attempts to reveal the fecundity of the city for interpreting technologically mediated organizational life. Calvinos emphasis on the principle of ‘lightness’ provides a link to the social theoretical writing of Boltanski and Chiapello on the ‘projective city’. A synthesis of these two stylistically different literatures yields a novel way of critically approaching and understanding the reticular form and emerging ethics of contemporary human organization.

More than a method? Organisational ethnography as a way of imagining the social

ABSTRACT The authors – two anthropologists and an organisational theorist, all organisational ethnographers – discuss their understanding and practices of organisational ethnography (OE) as a way of imagining and reflect on how similar this understanding may be for young organisational researchers and students in particular. The discussion leads to the conclusion that OE may be regarded as a methodology but that it has a much greater potential when it is reclaiming its roots: to become a mode of doing social science on the meso-level. The discussion is based on an analysis of both historical material and the contemporary learning experiences of teaching OE as more than a method to our students.

Re-imagining business schools of the future as places of theorizing

In this chapter, we argue that one of the reasons of resisting the temptation of teaching what ‘we could do and perhaps should not do’ (Eco, 2014 [1980], 107) in university Business Schools is the emphasis on the application of theories to the exclusion of theorizing. We argue that Business Schools in the future should engage in and contribute to the intellectual practice of academic theorizing and not merely to be places of reproduction, application and enumeration of theories.

Journeying and the experiential gaze in research: Theorizing as a form of knowing

In this paper, we consider the implications of the ideas of journeying and the experiential gaze for research practice. We do so by drawing first upon Platos allegory of the Cave as a representation of the journey of the philosopher to see reality, invisible and unknown, but constituting the underlying truth of what we experience through our senses. We use this as a metaphor for research as a journey of discovery. Recognizing that, for some, ancient philosophy may not provide the most convincing model for a consideration of research practice, we suggest that a parallel process is evident in the approach of the eminent British psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion. We suggest that this metaphor offers a basis for understanding theorizing as a form of knowing that, while absent from a large proportion of modern scientific discourse, is again emerging in some recent developments in organizational research.

Relatedness, co-inquiring and imagination: mimetic images of recovery

The purpose of this paper is to explore the methodological challenges of developing a shared academic-student discourse of recovery with undergraduate students in their final year at a British business school. We reflect on the meaning of recovery and how it was negotiated and constructed by the relation established between students and academics, by analysing the visual- and text-based materials they produced and the discussions provoked by these materials using symmetric ethnology and content analysis. The main finding is that students tended to reflect on the real, particularly the social, by creating copies and replicas; we as academics, engaged with this practice with ambivalence. The article concludes that this as an attempt to manage what is felt to be unmanageable, echoing what some authors consider to be a contemporary practice of social justification (Boltanski and Thevenot, 1991) and others consider to be a well established cultural practice (Taussig, 1993). The paper contributes (1) to a better understanding of how relatedness and reflexive inquiry become essential for when teaching and that is linked with academics being able to be openly related with students and their situation; (2) to a better understanding of recovery and how it can be co constructed by academics and students through a share narrative; (3) to a methodology for the analysis of text and images, and its appropriateness for the study of ways in which imagination of the future may be co-constructed; (4) and to an understanding of mimetic objects, replicas and copies. The paper suggests that this approach could have practical implications when applying co inquiry approaches of learning, the understanding of institutional and academic meaning of replication and relatedness in academic context of economic crisis. We conclude that academic relatedness and students-tutors engagement is constructed differently when re considering replication as a way of learning. Preference for copying and pasting found texts and images, rather than creating, served as a way of managing the unknown and of constructing recovery through a process of ‘mimeting’.