Linda Smircich

Strategic Management in an Enacted World

There is a debate within strategic management about organizational environments—are they objective, perceived, or both? Still another view of environments, derived from an interpretive worldview, claims that environments are enacted. This paper explores three major implications of the enacted environment concept for strategic management theory and practice: abandoning; the prescription that organizations should adapt to their environments; rethinking constraints, threats, opportunities; and considering the primary role of strategic managers to be the management of meaning.

Introduction: Spirituality, Management and Organization:

For at least a decade the press has reported on company leaders speaking about spirituality and business, while multiple publications have advocated links between corporate success and issues of the soul. There is some irony in this juxtaposition of business and spirituality if one reflects on the wave of corporate scandals that brought to light multiple ethical and legal lapses occurring during this same period. But perhaps one would be less cynical by framing this phenomenon as a response to contradictions faced by so many in organizations today. Spirituality, in fact, seems to be increasingly a topic of publications in the areas of business, management, and organizations, as well as a focus for academic conferences and management consultant practices.1 This issue of Organization joins the ongoing conversation. The general focus of the Themed Section on Spirituality, Management and Organization explores the contemporary significance of the ‘spirituality and organization’ discourse, and considers its historical, social, cultural, and political positioning. The two articles and three Speaking Outs share some concerns which perhaps express the significance of this discourse better than the questions we asked in our original call for papers. At the time, more than two years ago, we wanted to know: ‘Is the “spirituality and organization” discourse announcing a social movement or the latest managerial fad? Typical of soul searching when centuries turn? Essentially a conservative stance consistent with privatization and globalization? Part of an ethical renewal the world over? Linked to other more fundamental social changes?’ For the most part, we found few answers to these questions. Perhaps they were, indeed, the wrong questions. What we found, instead, were some shared concerns regarding the limits of science as a mode of understanding, laments about the lack of meaning in work and a sense of lack of purpose in the workplace, and an interest in connecting work with love and social justice. Altogether, it appears that the ‘spirituality and organization’ discourse is conceived as a means to counteract self-interest at a time when all other messages seem to point in the opposite direction. Volume 10(2): 327–328 Copyright

“Woman” on the move: mobile subjectivities after intersectionality

Purpose –The paper originated in challenges trying to theorize and research practices and processes of actors engaged in transnational activities for business and everyday life. Key concern was the assumption that actors’ identities remain the same regardless of time/space. While intersectional analysis once seemed a reasonable analytical approach the authors wondered about starting from identity-based categorical schemes in a world where mobility may be ever more the ontological status of everyday experiences and social structuring. Thus, the paper addresses limitations of intersectional analysis in such situations and advances its recasting via mobile conceptualizations, redressing its analytical purchase for contemporary subject formation. Design/methodology/approach – Discusses emergence of intersectionality at a particular point in time, its success and proliferation, and more recent critiques of these ideas. Develops alternative conceptualization – mobile subjectivities – via literatures on mobiliti...

TO BE DONE WITH PROGRESS AND OTHER HERETICAL THOUGHTS FOR ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT STUDIES

In a paper written for a theory development forum (Calas & Smircich, 1999) we insisted that the postmodern moment, in its association with poststructuralist analyses, brought much of value to organization and management studies. At the time we observed that although such a moment may have already passed, its traces continued to be seen and expressed in several important intellectual developments. In particular, we identified poststructuralist feminist theories, postcolonial theory, actor-network theory, and narrative approaches to theory as productive heirs of the postmodern moment in organization and management studies.

Organization@21 The journal of disconcerting organization theory and action

Organization after 20 will not be for all academics concerned with organizations; only for those who are both interested in doing critical organizational work and who believe in the emancipatory potential of that work for themselves and for others. Academics who not only talk about defying ‘playing the game’ but who do so in text and action; at a minimum actions to refuse ‘playing the game’ and, concurrently writing/calling ‘the game’ by its proper name: concerted actions that squash critique. Organization@21’s key role, thus, would be calling others to actions against ‘the game’, conceiving interventions and facilitating them.

Drafting “foot soldiers”: The social organization of the war for talent

The “global war for talent” refers to the increasing competition among organizations and regional governments for top employees. The concept of “war” in this context acts as a powerful metaphor, heightening the intensity with which organizational and regional leaders mobilize their efforts to create, attract, and retain “top talent.” However, this article argues that the “war for talent” is not a distant practice articulated between corporate and state spheres of action but a set of activities directly connected to those in higher education institutions. Framed through the theoretical and methodological approach of Institutional Ethnography, this study tracked students’ activities and experiences with a university’s economic development initiative, Generation Now, showing how the students’ experiences are connected to the global war for talent, how they become its foot soldiers, and with what consequences. More generally, tracing these connections is critical for making sense of contemporary modes of organizing in university classrooms, furthering class hierarchies and neoliberal rationales not necessarily related to students’ educational expectations in the conventional sense. Specifically in this case, experiences derived from classroom activities drafted and differentiated students for a war not of their making while naturalizing their “rightful” places in the global economy.

Hot Words and the Politics of Language

We argue that to talk about “the power of words” requires as a first step understanding how words become empowered or disempowered, as well as examining how and why this happens, and with what effects. This symposium addresses these processes as ‘a politics of language’ and illustrates them by focusing on several key words that have become popular in the recent past –i.e., that have become “hot words”. In two instances our “hot words” initially heralded emancipatory possibilities in/for organizations and society and were soon co-opted by normative uncritical understandings –“social entrepreneurship” and “sustainability” in this case. Another emerged from market based understandings and has later been re-claimed through contestations of those same understandings --“the new economy” in this case. We conclude that there is much value in keeping “hot words” hot, either as fashionable or as dangerous, such that they never become normative and remain always open to reinterpretation – that is, guiding our imagin...