Martin Fougère

We Are the Champions: Organizational Learning and Change for Responsible Management Education

As the number of institutions adopting the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative grows, there is an overhanging risk that many of them will merely add “responsibility” as a topic to the existing curriculum. The authors contend that a serious reading of PRME should instead entail thinking in terms of a gradual transformation of management education. Such a serious reading poses a number of organizational learning (and unlearning) challenges. By relying on their own experiences at two PRME signatory business schools in France and Finland, they describe how faculty champions may face these challenges in implementing PRME, and specifically how they may overcome strategic, structural, and cultural barriers. The authors particularly emphasize political challenges at every level and the role of champions inducing reflexivity in overcoming some of the barriers. They argue that although faculty champions are not the most powerful actors within the business school, they are still well positioned to inspire and instill the needed transformation of management education. They conclude that faculty champions need to creatively “make do” within the constraints imposed by their organizational context.

Be(com)ing normal – not excellent

Purpose – Marketing “from the intra‐organizational perspective” has been comparatively untouched by the critical turn in organization studies. The objective of the present paper is to contribute to a critical examination of marketing as a change discourse by focusing on service management scholarship. In particular, the paper focuses upon the gap‐model.Design/methodology/approach – Foucaults disciplinary power concept is used to analyze how the gap‐model tends to objectify, subjectify and normalize.Findings – Focusing on service management contributes to the scarce critical examination of marketing in general and the almost non‐existent critical examination of service management in particular. Further, the paper contributes to the investigation of the potential production of subjectivity and normalization as an effect of marketing technologies.Research limitations/implications – This paper suggests empirical exploration of subjective responses to marketing discourse and associated technologies.Originalit...

Extension in the Subjectifying Power of Marketing Ideology in Organizations: A Foucauldian Analysis of Academic Marketing

In this article, we analyze the managerialistic ideology of marketing theory by focusing on “customerism”—the customer-oriented managerialism that characterizes marketing. As an ideology, customerism has made it possible for marketing to discursively compete with different management fields in directing the management of organizational members. We base our notion of managerialism in Foucauldian works on power and make a distinction between three forms of power/managerialism: sovereign, disciplinary, and pastoral. Our analysis displays how the forms of power underpinning the customeristic ideology inherent to marketing theory have changed over time, thereby contributing to the reproduction and extension of that ideology. In particular, we show how different articulations of marketing discourse have developed the managerialism of marketing in such a way that today (1) organizational members around the world are meant to be affected by it and (2) it is meant to affect these organizational members in a deeper way.

Perspectives on Code Forking and Sustainability in Open Source Software

The ability to create high-quality software artifacts that are usable over time is one of the essential requirements of the software business. In such a setting, open source software offers excellent opportunities for sustainability. In particular, safeguarding mechanisms against planned obsolescence by any single actor are built into the definition of open source. The most powerful of these mechanisms is the ability to fork the project. In this paper we argue that the possibility to fork serves as the invisible hand of sustainability that ensures that code remains open and that the code that best serves the community lives on. Furthermore, the mere option to fork provides a mechanism for safeguarding against despotic decisions by the project lead, who is thus guided in their actions to consider the best interest of the community.

A critical reading of the European Union’s social innovation policy discourse: (Re)legitimizing neoliberalism:

In this article, we conduct a critical reading of the European Union social innovation policy discourse. We argue that rather than being a transformative discourse within European Union policy, European Union social innovation policy discourse reinforces neoliberal hegemony by (re)legitimizing it. Inspired by post-foundational discourse theory and Glynos and Howarth’s logics of critical explanation, we analyse three central European Union social innovation policy documents. We characterize what kind of political project is articulated in and through European Union social innovation policy discourse, and uncover how it relates to neoliberal political rationality. Our contribution lies in showing (1) how the social logics of European Union social innovation policy can be understood as both ‘roll-out’ and ‘roll-with-it’ neoliberalization, thereby relegitimizing and naturalizing neoliberalism; (2) how the political logics of European Union social innovation policy pre-empt the critique of ‘roll-back’ neoliberalization and thus legitimize decreased public expenditure; and (3) how the fantasmatic logics make European Union social innovation policy ideologically useful in relegitimizing neoliberalism through the win-win-win fantasy and the ethical responsibilization of subjects. We argue that resisting the neoliberalizing power of European Union social innovation policy discourse implies resisting the fantasmatic grip of social innovation as carrying a sublime win-win-win. Instead of accepting social innovation as driven by a replication of best practices, we need to understand social innovations as conceived and suited for particular social issues in particular contexts: we call for a different win-win mindset that does not blind innovators to possible negative impacts of social innovations.

A critical reading of the European Union’s social innovation policy

In this paper we conduct a critical reading of the European Union’s social innovation (EUSI) policy discourse. We argue that social innovation has become a prominent element of European policy discourses and can be seen as a key component in an emerging hegemonic project. We therefore engage in a problematization of EUSI policy. Inspired by a governmentality perspective and Howarth’s framework for critical policy studies (2010) we examine the social, political, ideological, ethical and economic logics in three EUSI policy documents. Our contribution lies in (1) our problematization and critical study of social innovation policy discourse in the EU context; and (2) our expansion of Howarth’s framework with two additional logics that are at play in policy discourse: ethical logics and economic logics. The distinction between ideological and ethical logics helps us to expose how EUSI discourse is meant to grip subjects through both the fantasmatic promise of a win-win-win and the ethical injunction of responsibilization. The addition of economic logics helps us to reflect on the further incorporation of the social into the economy, as the economic valuation of social and environmental impacts becomes a key part of the vision for the future of the EU.