Mihaela Kelemen

Multiparadigm Inquiry: Exploring Organizational Pluralism and Paradox

Organization studies is a robust field, replete with diverse, often contentious perspectives that may enrich understandings of pluralism and paradox. Yet polarization of modern paradigms and ruptures between modern and postmodern stances may inhibit researchers from tapping this potential. In response, this article delves into a provocative alternative - multiparadigm inquiry. First, we juxtapose modern, postmodern and multiparadigm approaches to contrast their underlying assumptions. We then review three multiparadigm strategies, exploring their objectives, exemplars and limitations. Our conclusion addresses how multiparadigm inquiry fosters greater reflexivity, while posing considerable challenges.

The Conventions of Management Research and their Relevance to Management Practice

This paper recognizes the failure of management research to communicate with practitioners, and speculates over the reasons why this may be the case. It is possible that the researchers’ interests may not always coincide with management practitioners’; however, even when such interests are congruent, it seems that relatively little management research is published in practitioner journals. We suggest that this is because academic research is written in a style that tends to alienate most practitioners. This paper isolates the stylistic conventions associated with research targeted to academics (typically published in academic journals) and research targeted to practitioners (typically published in practitioner-oriented journals). Such stylistic differences are illustrated through a study of organizational change whose findings have been published in both academic and practitioner format, namely in the Administrative Science Quarterly and the Harvard Business Review. We suggest that the gap between these two types of research could be narrowed through processes of translation (i.e. academic jargon could be translated in practitioner language). In addition we might consider greater use of Mode 2 research over Mode 1 research (academic). Mode 2 research presupposes that teams of academics and practitioners assemble to define the research problem and methodology in terms appropriate to a particular context and in a way that accounts for all existing interests so that translation processes are seamless. However, Mode 2 creates its own gap in that the knowledge is more contextual and may not reach a wide audience.

An Introduction to Critical Management Research

Why have certain theories shaped management research? Where do research theory and practice meet, if at all? To ask these questions is to think critically about management research. Mihaela L Kelemen and Nick Rumens explore the fundamentals of critical management theory and their influences on management research, and in doing so offer the student an illuminating introduction to what is often a disparate and complex array of issues. 10 expressive chapters examine theoretical foundations, including those most often sidelined in mainstream management theory; from postmodernism and deconstruction to American pragmatism, along with methodological choices and the intellectual issues each of these presents. Also provided is a timely consideration to the consequences and ethical concerns now inherent to any research issue.

The Crafting of Community: Recoupling Discourses of Management and Womanhood

The construction of organizations around images of masculinity makes the position of ‘women managers’ a problematic one which calls for ‘remedial work’ (Gherardi 1995). Women managers have sought to reconcile their dualistic positions by deploying various individual and collective coping strategies typically articulated within the boundaries of their organizations. In contrast, we research a group of senior women from a British city in the Midlands who attempt to renegotiate their conflicting identities as ‘female’ and ‘senior managers’ by creating a collective forum outside their organizations. Through the construction of a ‘learning set’, they created a space where members could explore their terms of participation, as women and as managers, in their respective work organizations and in the local community. This space was articulated implicitly and explicitly around values typically associated with ‘community’ (e.g. sharing, support, trust, loyalty), a controversial concept in feminist politics. The article documents the (fragile and contested) processes by which these women mobilize the imagery of community in order to create a safe space where ‘remedial work’ could be performed. The conclusion stresses the ambivalent effects of the learning set in both reproducing and transgressing gendered positions.

Internal marketing: a qualitative study of culture change in the UK banking sector

This paper discusses the findings of a qualitative study carried out in the UK retail-bank sector on the implementation of Internal Marketing (IM). While the overall aim of Internal Marketing is the creation of a unified culture around the values of customer service, employee empowerment and service quality, the evidence suggests that Internal Marketing is perceived and enacted in ways that at times contradict such managerial rhetoric. The paper sheds light on what internal marketing is (its underlying principles within the organisations studied), the ways in which the banks studied use it in order to change their organisational culture as well as the difficulties encountered in implementing IM as a culture change agent. It concludes that the implementation of Internal Marketing in the banks under the study is problematic and does not result into a unified organisation culture. Indeed, implementing Internal Marketing is a process fraught with difficulty, which at times leads to divisions, ruptures and ambiguity in the newly created organisational culture.

Disorganization theory; explorations in alternative organizational analysis

Part I Alternative knowledge 1 Paradigm plurality and its prospects 2 Organizational knowledge: production and consumption 3 Escaping the confines of organization theory (with Ian Atkin) Part II Alternative concepts 4 Actor-networks and sociological symmetry (with Christine McLean) 5 Identity and fluidity (with Beverly Metcalfe) 6 Time and temporality 7 Decoration and disorganization (with Stella Minahan)8 Governmentality and networks Part III Alternative methodology 9 Actor-networks, research strategy and organization (with Nick Lee) 10 Rethinking triangulation 11 Critical retrospective research 12 Concluding remarks: a future agenda for alternative organization studies

Can culture be changed? a study of internal marketing

The article explores the ways in which internal marketing initiatives work in a number of UK retail banks from the point of view of both managers and employees. It suggests that although internal marketing attempts to function as a culture change mechanism, the resulting organisational cultures rather than being homogenous and united around the imagery of the consumer and service quality are in fact fragmented, ambiguous and contested by a variety of organisational stakeholders.

The Myth of Restructuring, ‘Competent’ Managers and the Transition to a Market Economy: a Romanian Tale

A great deal of rhetoric surrounds the transformation from socialism to free-market capitalism. This paper explores to what extent the restructuring of Romanian companies has been an attempt to pay lip-service to prevailing rhetoric and to what extent it has been premised upon economic rationality. To restructure along structural, technological, financial but primarily managerial fronts has become a cultural value which is applauded, praised and heralded as the only way forward by the Romanian institutions of the transition. The companies under the study subscribe to such rhetoric only when they regard it as being embedded in economic rationality, as is the case with structural, financial and technological restructuring. Managerial restructuring, on the other hand, is not regarded as a technical necessity, given the view held by existing senior managers that skills and qualities acquired in the socialist regime are still appropriate to run a business successfully in the free-market economy.

Pragmatism and heterodoxy in organization research:Going beyond the quantitative/qualitative divide

Purpose – The aim of this special issue is to bring together contributions from diverse perspectives interested in challenging the quantitative/qualitative divide within organisation and management research.Design/methodology/approach – The papers in this special issue explore at a methodological or paradigmatic level (rather than at the level of particular research methods) the possible ways in which different research methodologies converge, diverge and overlap. Rather that asking questions about the validity and intrinsic value of certain methodologies, we are encouraged to shift gear towards assessing how useful these methodologies are in terms of carrying us from the world of practice to theory and vice‐versa. If methodologies help us to progress our thinking and our practices, they are “true” in a pragmatist sense. If they stall our thinking and do not influence in any way our practices, then they are probably untrue.Findings – It is hoped that the papers presented in this special issue help us proc...

Spirituality: A Way to an Alternative Subjectivity?

This paper emphasizes the contribution of Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot to discussions of workplace spirituality. It is argued that their understanding of spirituality differs significantly from the mainstream management contributions: they view spirituality as a distinct form of post-modern subjectivity in organizations and regard the subject as continuous flow emerging and being constructed not so much at the crossroad of institutions and macro-structures but from within, with the help of self-formation practices. We term the latter spirituality and argue, firstly, that there are strong (albeit controversial) connections between spiritual practices, the history of Christianity, and the philosophy of antiquity. Secondly, we suggest that spirituality as a relationship of the self to the self can only take place once the individual removes him/herself from the demands of the future or the shackles of the past and focuses entirely on the present with the help of technologies of the self.