Leanne Cutcher

Discourse and Resistance: Targets, Practices, and Consequences

This article highlights the contributions that discourse analysis can make to the study of organizational resistance. Specifically, it demonstrates how using a discursive lens can provide insights into the targets, practices, and consequences of resistance. First, discourse analytic approaches can reveal how acts of resistance target multiple organizational audiences simultaneously, often developed through diverse texts directed to internal and external stakeholders. Second, discourse analysis enables researchers to examine the complex, dynamic, and interconnected nature of resistance practices and to avoid constructing simple dichotomies between such features as covert and overt forms of resistance or individual and collective resistance. Third, discourse analysis highlights the intended and unintended consequences of resistance by examining how organizational members engage with, adapt to, and transform organizational practices. Future directions are proposed for research on discourse analysis and organizational resistance.

A Pregnant Pause: Paid Maternity Leave in Australia

Abstract It is more than 50 years since the International Labour Organisation recommended paid maternity leave for working women, yet Australia still lacks such legislation. This paper provides a context for the current debate about paid maternity leave in Australia. We argue that a discernible shift in locating the responsibility for paid maternity leave from the public arena to enterprise bargaining and further to the confidential domain of company policy has occurred in Australia. This shift is not improving the position of women in the workforce. The data presented demonstrates the limits of enterprise bargaining for equitably providing paid maternity leave. We also question the efficacy of a reliance on business case strategies. We suggest that to overcome this pregnant pause in the provision of paid maternity leave for Australian working women a broader-based approach is required. In this model, regulation strategies, both legal and industrial, play a part alongside business case strategies.

RESISTANCE CHANGE FROM WITHIN AND WITHOUT THE ORGANIZATION

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute further to the understanding of why and how employees resist workplace change. Building on previous studies exploring the link between worker subjectivity and workplace change, the paper highlights both the spatial and temporal dimensions of tactics of resistance.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on case study evidence from an Australian credit union that had implemented significant changes to its service strategy, and identifies employee responses to these changes.Findings – The case study identifies the way in which tradition and place can be discursive resources with which employees resist changes to work practices and roles which threaten to disrupt workplace and gender identities.Originality/value – To date, the literature has focused on tactics of resistance that draw on temporal and spatial narratives from inside the organization. This paper extends the understanding by showing how individuals also draw on narratives from outside the ...

What’s Age Got to Do With It? On the Critical Analysis of Age and Organizations

Age, as an embodied identity and as an organizing principle, has received scant attention in organization studies. There is a lack of critical appreciation of how age plays out in organizational settings, the material and discursive dynamics of age practices, how age discourses impact on the body, and how age and ageing intersect with other identity categories. This is curious since age works as a master signifier in contemporary society and is something that affects us all. In this introductory essay, we show how the papers in this special issue redress this lacuna by enhancing and challenging what we know about age and organizations. We also set out an agenda for stimulating research conversations to bring an age-sensitive lens to organizational analysis. We structure our analysis around two focal points: age as an embodied identity, and the symbolic meanings of age within organizing practices. In doing so, we aim to provide a catalyst not only for research on age in organizations but also about the aged nature of organizing.

Built to last: ageing, class and the masculine body in a UK hedge fund

This article explores the ways in which male traders negotiate ageing in the highly competitive world of finance. It draws on a study of a UK hedge fund to show how ageing processes intersect with masculinity and class-based bodily practices to reproduce market-based ideals of the sector. Through developing the concept of body accumulation, this article provides a new framework for exploring ageing in an organizational context by demonstrating how masculinity, class and organizational values are mapped onto the traders’ bodies over time and in ways that require individuals to continually negotiate their professional value. This not only significantly advances current understanding of how one group of professionals navigate growing older at work, but also highlights the importance of understanding ageing as an accumulation process that takes into account temporal, spatial and cultural dimensions.

Mining the Discourse: Strategizing During BHP Billiton's Attempted Acquisition of Rio Tinto

Using a discourse‐analytic approach, we examine the strategizing that occurred during an attempted acquisition in 2007/08 of Rio Tinto by BHP Billiton. In doing so, we contribute to discursive studies of mergers and acquisitions in two significant respects. First, we show the importance of studying how actors external to, as well as those internal to BHP, exerted influence over the acquisition process and outcome. Their influence can be attributed, in part, to their use of rhetorical strategies during the negotiation of the meanings of three constructs that were central to the acquisition discourse. Second, our study shows how these rhetorical strategies were put into effect using not only linguistic, but also non‐linguistic modes of discourse such as imagery, indicators, and location. We conclude that obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the role of discourse in relation to a strategic activity – in this case an attempted acquisition – requires consideration of the multi‐modal rhetorical strategies brought to bear by both external and internal actors.

The Customer as Ally: The Role of the Customer in the Finance Sector Union's Campaigning

In recent years the Finance Sector Union has pursued a range of strategies which rely on the incorporation of customers into its campaigns. These strategies extend from the employment of a discourse of shared worker and customer concerns in its communications with union members and the public through to the development of alliances with consumer and community groups. While easy to advance in an industry where customer disillusionment and frustration is widespread, these appeals for solidarity and the formation of alliances are not unproblematic. In the light of lessons drawn from US literature on community campaigning and the experiences of other Australian unions, this article explores the limitations and potential of union strategies that seek to incorporate the customer and evaluates the alliances formed between the Finance Sector Union and community groups.

Finance capitalism's perpetually extinguished pasts: Exploring discursive shifts 2007-2011

When we published the call for papers for this special issue in early 2010, we invited authors to submit work that somehow could elucidate the discursive shifts of finance capital in the broader context of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Over the period of mid-2009 to mid-2011, we witnessed a transition from ubiquitous narratives about a dystopian collapse of our socio-economic system to pervasive claims that what we had lived through was simply a temporary blip in a self-correcting free-market system and that what was needed was little more than a perfecting of what was in situ. In this new discourse, finance capital was rehabilitated and the state systems which actually rescued the financial system became the main target of critique. A combination of emergency liquidity supplies to financial institutions (which in a significant number of high profile cases involved recapitalization by the state) and a quick dose of Keynesian public spending had come at great cost to the public purse and were followed by an official strategy of deficit-cutting austerity. Moreover, this strategy was framed in terms of a ‘taking advantage of the crisis’ discourse, advocating structural reforms in social provision and pensions. Morgan et al. (2011, 148) seemed to capture a mood of exasperation among critical scholars when they exclaimed: ‘How did we get from the politics of the financial crash, from the “end of the world” rhetoric of late 2008 to this’? But, by and large, this discourse of returning to ‘business as usual’ as quickly as possible was hardly questioned despite the fact that its associated measures have yet to show any sign of working. Again, financial markets have been ‘raised to the status of omniscient and implacable forces of inevitable (and ultimately benign and productive) economic logics’ (Morgan et al. 2011, 148). At the same time, while our collective dependence upon the banks is now greater than ever (a dependency captured by the motto ‘too big to fail’) and the political influence of the financial sector seems undiminished (Willmott 2011). The period 2007–2011 thus seems to bear out the Marxist reading of Capital as a ‘machine constantly breaking down, repairing itself not by solving its local problems, but by mutation onto larger and larger scales, its past always punctually forgotten. . .’ (Jameson 2011, 7). As Prichard and Mir (2010, 508) have pointed out, it is precisely this forgetfulness, a ‘collective absent mindedness’ that lies at the very core of the economic regime that creates the conditions for ever more frequent and intensive crises. Fredric Jameson’s (2011, 106) description of our current historical moment as ‘the eternal virginity of capitalism and its perpetually extinguished pasts’ seems particularly apposite in this context. Given the significance of what has taken place in the finance capital arena over the last few years, it is somewhat surprising that our field has devoted so little attention to the GFC and its aftermath. For example, Prichard and Mir (2010, 509) documented how ‘key gatherings of the critically-inclined management and organization studies community’ failed to pay much attention to ‘the major economic events of the day and the

Financing communities: the role of community banks and credit unions in re-establishing branches in Australia

Following large-scale closure of bank branches by the major retail banks in the 1990s credit unions and community banks have been active in re-establishing branches in communities across Australia. Credit unions and community banks promote themselves as offering a very different kind of financial service: one much more focused on meeting the needs of local communities. On the face of it, their service to these communities appears to be motivated by very similar objectives. However, examining their current practices against the backdrop of their different histories reveals important differences in their approach to helping communities help themselves.

‘Not So Clear Cut’: The Link Between Skill Recognition and Higher Wages:

Feminists and labour process theorists have emphasised skill recognition as a crucial determinant in the way that work is organised and rewarded. However, the case of hairdressers challenges assumptions about the link between skilled status and higher wages. Hairdressers have had trade status for over 50 years and yet wages in the industry are significantly lower than wages of many unqualified workers. A range of labour and product market factors stand between hairdressers’ formal skill recognition and equitable wages. A distinction is drawn between institutional skill recognition and industrial skill recognition. This distinction is important because the assumed link between skilled status and higher wages has informed pay equity strategies that have focused on reform at the institutional level. An examination of the hairdressing industry shows that pay equity strategies need to operate at both the institutional and workplace level.