Mette Vinther Larsen

Using management inquiry to co-construct other memories about the future

The focal point in this article is to explore how management inquiry in the context of reflexive dialogical action research can be used as a way for researchers and managers to jointly construct knowledge that partakes in developing organizational life from “within.” This article builds on the acknowledgment that people in organizations have memories of the future. And it is argued that the prospective memories managers have of how an organizational dilemma will unfold in the nearby future shape their actions and co-construction of meaning in the present. In the article, we exemplify and explore how researchers and managers by using “unadjusted responses” and “social poetics” as ways of gesturing and responding can engage in management inquiry and enhance the future managers remember to make room for more desirable future memories to emerge that expand managers’ possible space for action in the present.

When unforeseen event become strategic

Abstract This article acknowledges that strategising processes revolve around allowing for continual shifts in an uncertain environment to constructively shape the ways in which managers strategise. The research question pursued in this article is: ‘How do unforeseen events shape managerial strategising?’ The theoretical background for this article is inspired by research done within the strategy-as-practice and strategy-in-practice communities and uses concepts such as strategic intent, wayfinding/wayfaring and temporal work to explore how the managers from the small Danish Software Company cooperated with actors in the mining industry. This cooperation was initially perceived as an unforeseen event but, incrementally and retrospectively, it became strategic. The main theoretical and practice-anchored findings draw attention to the roles that unforeseen events can play in shaping strategising. These findings underline the significance of prioritising micro-founded actions carried out contextually by strategists when learning more about the who, what and how of strategising.

Exploring how social poetics can be used to understand processes of management learning

The purpose of this article is to explore what can be learned about management learning when social poetics is used as a perspective to make sense of how seven leaders, during a year-long top leader competence development course, constructed meaning with each other, with consultants and with researchers about what leading in ‘Cullinan ways’ means. The article is based on a relational constructionism perspective, and we bring in two aspects of social poetics – the notion of metaphors and engaging in reflexive critique – to present and discuss how the understanding and use of the concept ‘Cullinany’ continually changed and was reworked based on the conversations the seven leaders had with each other. The purpose of this presentation is to initiate a discussion about how formal management learning programmes can be understood (and possibly also designed) from a perspective in which the ontological and social poetic aspects of language are assigned primacy.

Communication as Relational Practice of Leading

The fact that communication — conscious and unconscious, verbal and non-verbal, formal and informal, local and global and so on — plays a central role in the daily practice of leading is hardly a surprise. Cunliffe has expressed it this way at a seminar in Copenhagen in June 2012: ‘We’re always embedded in the social’, and it is through our communication with one another that we understand and continuously construct reality (Gergen 2009). Leaders spend a great deal of their time at work communicating — in meetings, on the phone, via the Internet and through social media. A brief web search for communication courses for leaders will show that there are many such activities.

Leaders’ Use of Maps, Guiding Images and Momentary Meaningful Actions

In the book’s previous chapters, we have argued that people’s shared efforts to make sense of the variability of everyday life and to come up with meaningful actions can help us understand the different local, cultural and relational realities that come together to constitute an organisation. In this chapter, we build upon this perspective, with particular emphasis on the unpredictable incidents of everyday life: How are they understood and handled? How are relationally based attempts to make sense of the unpredictable — and at times the coincidental — part of developing and shaping the organisation?