Janet Sayers

Organizational Culture, Change and Emotions: A Qualitative Study

Change triggers emotions as employees experience the processes and outcomes of organizational transformation. An organizations affective culture, which shapes the way emotions are experienced and expressed, plays a particularly important part during changes to the culture and other aspects of organizational life. This article contributes to the literature by illustrating the relationships between culture, change and emotions and presents the results of a qualitative study. The study found that when participants’ values were congruent with those of the organization, they tended to react to change more positively. Cultural change provoked emotional reactions, often of an intense nature. When emotions were acknowledged and treated with respect, people became more engaged with the change. Attitudes to existing culture also produced emotional responses to aspects of change.

''Taking the piss'': Functions of banter in the IT industry*

Abstract This paper shows how banter helps forge organizational culture by facilitating socialization of work group members and presents original research conducted in three IT companies. Informants identified their style of humor as “taking the piss,” a colloquial term meaning to use jocular abuse to deflate someone elses ego to bring them to the same level as others. The IT organizations studied were young, creative and energetic and the banter was lively and almost always enjoyed. Six main functions of banter were identified: making a point, boredom busting, socialization, celebrating differences, displaying the culture, and highlighting and defining status. Banter occurred more readily when it involved popular and well-liked colleagues that were fully socialized into the organizational culture. Personal characteristics and traits—such as ethnicity, gender, age, height or dress style—were the target of much banter. Much of the literature discussing banter has focused on the negative effects of jocular abuse at work. This paper emphasises how banter helped facilitate functioning cultural systems in the organizations studied. However, for those not socialized through the banter into the in-group, banter was often experienced as painful, exclusionary and even insulting.

Emotional Responses to the Speed, Frequency and Timing of Organizational Change

This article reports on a qualitative study which investigates the role of time in the emotions experienced during organizational change. Whereas much empirical research on emotions and time has been conducted in highly controlled experimental settings, this study discusses subjects’ emotional experiences during real-life change events related to three temporal dimensions: speed, frequency and timing. Three themes emerge from our findings: the relationship between time, major change and negative emotion; the relationship between time and perception of control; and other factors such as fairness, disposition and emotional intelligence. This study’s contribution is to focus specifically on time, emotion and change in real-world contexts, and to derive implications for managing change and for future research based on social theories recognizing time’s subjective nature.

Home-Based Internet Businesses as Drivers of Variety

The paper shows how and why Home-Based Internet Businesses are drivers of variety. This paper argues, by means of five theoretical perspectives, that because of the variety HBIBs generate, they contribute to the economy over and above their direct and indirect contributions in terms of revenue and employment. A multiple case study approach is employed studying the best practices of eight HBIBs. It is found that HBIBs generate variety because of the unique way in which they operate, and because of the reasons why they are started. How HBIBs operate can be captured in the acronym SMILES: Speed, Multiple income, Inexpensive, LEan, and Smart. They are founded (amongst other motives) for reasons of autonomy, freedom and independence. Both aspects - the how and why - of HBIBs are conducive to the creation of variety as they facilitate trial-and-error commercialization of authentic ideas. Five theoretical perspectives posit that variety is important for the industry and the economy: evolutionary theory, strategic management, organic urban planning, opportunity recognition, and the knowledge economy. The findings are discussed in the context of each perspective.

A report to an academy: On carnophallogocentrism, pigs and meat-writing

How can organisational studies theory respond to the call of nonhuman animals? This article argues there is ‘too much humanism’ in organisational studies and defines the problem as originating in language practices. The example of factory-farmed pigs is used to illustrate the argument. Derrida’s term carnophallogocentrism is used to suggest that ethical thinking about the animal be moved from face-to-face encounters through the eyes to the mouth and that by adopting methods used in literature and ‘feminist dog-writing’ ways can be found to co-constitute human and nonhuman species in academic writing practices. The term meat-writing is offered as a practice of challenging carnophallogocentrism.

Home-based businesses in the city

Abstract This paper discusses the significance of HBB to metropolitan areas by drawing on recent developments in economic and human geography concerned with relationships between people, place and cyberspace in cities, and previous research examining HBB in Auckland, New Zealand. This paper argues that although urban HBB have distinct characteristics, they should be conceptualised relationally to other places of business conduct, including the Internet, third places such as cafés, and business precincts. HBB types and owner characteristics are highly differentiated in cities and so HBB ‘pathways’ is suggested as a useful concept to frame further research and policy development.

Culture shock! Cultural issues in a tertiary course using reflective techniques

This paper discusses the rapid internationalization (mainly by Chinese students) of a business degree and its impact on one course in that degree programme. The purpose of the course is to develop reflective capabilities in students and the paper considers how staff involved in the course reflected on their own practice and made changes to the course to accommodate the new contingent of students from outside the host country. Initial perceptions by staff of the Chinese‐originating students are described, as are tensions that emerged regarding the philosophical/cultural assumptions under‐pinning the course. The paper shows how staff reconsidered their teaching practices and assessment tools and reports on an empirical study conducted to explore how students experienced the course’s teaching methods and assessment. The course’s reflective philosophy was adjusted to accommodate the new student cohort.

Art Rules? Brokering the Aesthetics of City Places and Spaces 1

In a narrative built around our experience of art placed in the lobby of a corporate edifice, we argue that a city bureaucracy is actively participating in the legitimised abduction of community resources by urban developers: that however well‐intentioned, subscription to the notion that social, environmental, and aesthetic responsibilities can be expected of, and accounted for, by corporate business, is naïve. Our intention is to signal the outcome—corporate control of our aesthetic environment—that our discussion foreshadows.

Finding Beauty in the Banal: An Exploration of Service Work in the Artful Classroom

Artists derive inspiration from daily life. According to John Dewey (1934), common experiences are transformed into works of art through a process of compression and expression. Our paper adopts Deweys frame to demonstrate that experience in the artful classroom plays a valuable role in management education. We asked students to reflect on their work experience and then to provide an artful expression of their reflections. For this exercise we defined artfulness as a process which relies on the discursive practices of satire, and in particular irony and parody. Offering a service management class as an exemplar we demonstrate the use of these rhetorical techniques as reflective learning tools. A class of students were first prompted to consider their common experiences as both customers and service providers, and were then asked to create an ironic artefact. Our paper, which analyses a cartoon sequence produced by students in response to this assignment and in which they parody the fast-food service experience, illustrates how a business studies classroom can be transformed into an artful space.

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.