Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen

Conceptualising intellectual capital as language game and power

Purpose – The purpose of this paper, drawing mainly on insights from Foucault and Wittgenstein, is to conceptualise intellectual capital (IC) in very generalist terms as both language game and power in order to initiate a critical understanding of IC.Design/methodology approach – IC is viewed as knowledge about knowledge, knowledge creation and how such processes might be leveraged into value. It is argued that a critical understanding of IC requires a historical, contextual and linguistic understanding of how IC has emerged and how IC is used. Perceiving IC as language game and power is one way of initiating such critical understanding.Findings – IC is perceived as a social construction and the genealogical focus is on how actors, positions and interests influence this process of social construction.Practical implications – The paper offers concepts and methods that facilitate historical and contextual research on how IC emerges and how IC is used. Further historical studies are necessary in order to ref...

The meaning of local knowledges Genealogy and organizational analysis

Foucaults studies of the relations between power and knowledge provide an alternative methodology for the studies of knowledges and their organizing. A methodology, which is referred to as genealogy. Process and pluralism is at the heart of genealogy. It thereby challenges unitary sciences and emphasises the concrete, independent and contextual character of knowledges. It seeks the present in the history of struggles among differentials. It focusses on uncovering the different knowledges and their interaction that are behind organized patterns. Finally, it strongly encourages a focus on specific practices like techniques, projects, tasks etc. in and around which the differences play together and interact in specific ways. In these operations, genealogy turns science on its head, because it opposes any unifying narrative and allows knowledges to maintain their own identity. The analysis thus becomes of an ascending kind, where more general phenomena emerge through the detailed study of practices.

Resituating Narrative and Story in Business Ethics

In this article, we resituate a long-standing duality of (Western) narrative tradition over living story emergence and more linear narrative. Narrative, with its focus on linear beginning, middle and end coherence, retrospection and monologic, is too easily appropriated into managerialist projects. We focus on the web of living stories as a Derridian deconstructive move, which allows us to say something important about their relation to narrative and to develop a storytelling ethics. Our thesis is that resituating the relationship between narrative and living story invites exploration of the plurality of narratives that treat living stories as supplementary. We claim that this deconstructive move allows us to rethink politics and ethics anew. Storytelling ethics opens new spaces for marginalized other(s) voices and creates an awareness of our complicity and responsibility for others. Further, storytelling ethics allows for a more nuanced and varied understanding of business ethics and its inherent exclusionary truth and morality claims and paves the way for a more reflexive ethics.

Social Capital and HRD: Provocative Insights from Critical Management Studies

The problem and the solution. This article initiates a critical management studies evaluation of social capital in an HRD context by drawing on insights from Foucault and Habermas.This article presents alternative interpretations of three seminal social capital concepts—weak ties, structural holes, and social resources. Pragmatic, albeit critical, insights for HRD theory and practice are illustrated to counterbalance the managerialist appropriation of social capital in pursuit of largely economic ends. It is argued here that social well-being is as relevant to HRD practice as economic well-being. Ethical dimensions are noted and avenues of reflexivity for HRD practitioners are suggested.

Stories of Material Storytelling

Dariusz Jemielniak, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Management and the head of the Center for Research on Organizations and Workplaces (CROW) at Kozminski University in Poland. He held visiting appointments at Cornell University (2004-2005), Harvard University (2007 and 2011-2012), University of California Berkeley (2008). His research interests include workplace practices in knowledge intensive work, software development, as well as open collaboration communities (which he currently studies on the example of Wikipedia, through a long-term ethnographic project). He recently published a book on The New Knowledge Workers (2012, Edward Elgar). He is the editor-in-chief of Tamara Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry. Market: This premier publication is essential for all academic and research library reference collections. It is a crucial tool for academicians, researchers, and practitioners and is ideal forclassroom use. Dariusz Jemielniak (Kozminski University, Poland) & Abigail Marks (Kozminski University, Poland Heriot-Watt University, UK)

Against professionalizing leadership: the roles of self-formation and practical wisdom in leadership

Based on the concepts self-formation and phronesis (practical wisdom), this chapter argues against professionalizing leadership. Professionalization implies rules, guidelines, procedures and accreditation standards in relation to contents, curricula and the pedagogy of education. It thus misconceives the role of leadership education to be only a question of acquiring epistemic (rational and universal) knowledge and skills while it fails to acknowledge techne as craft and art, and local and situated awareness and sensitivity. Practical wisdom involves all dimensions. Leadership education is important because of its potential to nurture a creative, critical and responsible relation to the world. Leadership thus requires a practice-based educational program and a “free space” for experimentation, reflection and self-formation, which is inconsistent with turning leadership into a profession.

Bachelor Programs in Leadership: The Beginning of a Profession

Based on an integrative approach to practical wisdom and theoretical knowledge, the chapter proposes a bachelor program on leadership based on four somewhat controversial propositions: First, theoretical learning is relevant only to the extent that students have opportunities for applying theoretical knowledge in practice. Second, relevance is created by including extra-university communities of practice in teaching and education. Third, the major part of the curriculum is created by the students themselves in terms of analyses and practical experience emerging from the interaction with extra-university communities of practices. Fourth, in consequence, while a baseline of competencies is provided by the program, there is no uniform profile because each student specializes differently.

Ethics Perspective on Entrepreneurship

Bager, Svane, and Jorgensen, building on Arendt, Butler, and Bakhtin, propose a conceptual framework for understanding ethics in relation to entrepreneurship. The concepts of precarity, action, answerability, and space of appearance are used to conceptualize challenges and possibilities, as well as to problematize current neoliberal discourses concerning entrepreneurship. Their framework seeks to provide some signposts within which the question of entrepreneurial ethics can be located. It is also an alternative way of viewing ethics from the dominant neoliberal ethos; this is an ethics of answerability, action, and pluralism. Through their framework, the authors put the spotlight on what an ethical act is in terms of how it connects to the world but also the space of ethics and what that means in relation to making entrepreneurial ethics more likely.