Raza Mir

Strategic management and the philosophy of science : The case for a constructivist methodology

In this paper, we suggest that constructivism has the potential to inform research in strategic management. The realist paradigm currently dominates strategy research, and constructivism, a well-established tradition in the philosophy of science, is often ignored. However, a study of strategy literature and research reveals that it is drawn upon more frequently than is explicitly acknowledged. Constructivism occupies a methodological space characterized by ontological realism and epistemological relativism. Ontological realism is an important cornerstone of a field as applied as strategy, while epistemological relativism helps us explore the constructed nature of the field, where the researcher is an active participant rather than a reactor or information processor. In this paper, we demonstrate the precedents and possibilities for constructivist research in strategic management. We examine some of the existent constructivist works in the strategy literature, and point to specific techniques, including historical analysis, to demonstrate how this perspective may advance the boundaries of strategy research. Copyright

The New Age Employee: An Exploration of Changing Employee-Organization Relations

This article examines the employee-organization relationship in the current industrial landscape. “New age employees” have substantially different expectations from organizations—stemming from their own articulateness about their career needs as well as mistrust of organizational loyalty in the aftermath of the recent waves of organizational downsizing. The changing employee-organization relationship is explored through the theoretical lens of organizational commitment; a series of propositions about the commitment levels of new age employees is advanced; and a framework to assist HR managers in their attempts to recruit, train and retain the new age employee is offered. The article concludes with an explanation of the implications of this framework on human resource management in the public sector.

The Organizational Imagination: From Paradigm Wars to Praxis

The authors use the insights of C. Wright Mills and his book The Sociological Imagination to argue for a more socially engaged organizational research. Although epistemological and methodological discussions about organizational research have opened up a space for alternate and critical theorizing, management scholarship needs to continue its search for effectiveness by developing an organizational imagination. This imagination will allow researchers to make linkages between history, structure, and individual lives in the service of an intellectual and political transformation. It will therefore push the boundaries of organizational theory to include an active engagement with the institutional forces that seek to contain and domesticate it.

Hegemony and its discontents: a critical analysis of organizational knowledge transfer

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the phenomenon of knowledge transfer within multinational corporations (MNCs), and how the imperatives of thought and action that constitute new knowledge are received in the terrain that constitutes the MNC subsidiary.Design/methodology/approach – This study employs an ethnographic approach, and juxtaposes primary data collection with a variety of secondary data sources.Findings – The data are analyzed in light of the theoretical construct of hegemony, and three themes theorized that underlie the process of knowledge transfer. These include knowledge loss at the local level, the coercive practices that ensure knowledge transfer, and the invocation of imperial subjectivities by the headquarters of the MNC when dealing with subsidiaries from poorer nations.Originality/value – This paper goes beyond the mainstream approaches into organizational knowledge transfer, by analyzing these issues in light of political economy, and the changing landscape of industri...

‘One mirror in another’: Managing diversity and the discourse of fashion

In this article, we report on a multi-sited ethnographic study that investigates how the discourse of fashion influenced the design and implementation of workplace diversity management programs in six organizations. These organizations, from the Canadian petroleum and insurance industries, were manipulated by an institutional field of consultants and experts into adopting relatively superficial initiatives that lacked local relevance, and produced a high level of organizational cynicism regarding diversity. In our analysis, we particularly explore one adverse effect of this discourse of fashion; that it may trigger a form of meaningless imitation by organizations adopting diversity management initiatives, resulting in superficiality and organizational cynicism. At the same time, the discourse of fashion may also hold the key to enable meaningful change, for it has a powerful influence on organizational practitioners. Our article suggests that organizations need to be aware of the institutional field, and engage with it in a manner that imbues their initiatives with local relevance, for their initiatives to contribute to meaningful organizational change.

From the Colony to the Corporation Studying Knowledge Transfer Across International Boundaries

In this article, the authors empirically study the transfer of knowledge across international boundaries through a case study. Using data from field-based research in India, they comment on the similarities between the encounter between a multinational corporation (MNC) and its contractor located in the third world and older relationships between institutions in the era of colonialism. The authors contend that even though the MNC was able in this case to appropriate a value-creating process from its contractor over the short term, its actions are still potentially counterproductive in the long run. They analyze this episode of knowledge transfer using the theoretical constructs of signification and hegemony, where dominant social groups seek to manufacture the consent of subordinate groups, an act that often remains incomplete and contested.

Toward a Postcolonial Reading of Organizational Control

The notion of organizational control has been a constant theme in the construction and representations of euromodern1 organizations. The discourse of control has been justified in organizational theory on a variety of counts, such as the need to eliminate stubborn “soldiering” by recalcitrant employees (Taylor, 1911), the inducement of collaborative enterprise (Barnard, 1938), the curtailment of opportunist practices in organizational transactions (Williamson, 1985), the management of bounded rationality (Simon, 1957), the development of adaptive mechanisms (Hannan & Freeman, 1977), the facilitation of diverse organizational conversations (Srivastava & Cooperrider, 1990), the management of organizational knowledge (Davenport & Prusak, 1998), or even the need to create a paradigmatic consensus in organizational research (Pfeffer, 1993). On the other hand, mainstream theories of organizational control have been critiqued as being coercive (Braverman, 1974), insensitive to noncontractual trust-based control systems (Perrow, 1979), or unmindful of the fundamental causal determinants of conflict (Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994). Scholars have pointed to the enacted nature of organizational reality (Weick, 1979), the constructed nature of academic practices (Canella & Paetzold, 1994), and the anthropocentric biases that have dominated management research (Shrivastava, 1996), thereby seeking to destabilize the platform of positivism on which much of the mainstream discourse of organizational control stands.

The colony writes back: Organization as an early champion of non-Western organizational theory:

It is perhaps a truism that modern organizational theory has tended to objectify the colonized nations, and the subjects of imperialism. Even the critical traditions in OT tend to be mired in Eurocentric assumptions, and many of the issues that affected the ‘victims of globalization’ simply did not figure in OT debates till the 1980s. In the 1990s, when organizational theorists focusing on workers and subjects from the poorer South began expressly to ‘write back’, i.e. theorize eloquently on how they could restore their own agency in organizational life, they found a contingent ally in Organization. Not that the Journal did not have its blind spots in this regard, but since its inception in 1994, it has published a number of articles that sought to give voice to those who decentred OT’s Eurocentric assumptions. In this brief essay, we attempt to chart that partnership, and speak about a possible role for Organization in furthering this quest.

The Codes of Migration Contours of the Global Software Labor Market

This paper presents a case study of the software industry in India and the US as a step toward an ethnography of transnational migration. By focusing on the subject positions and forms of work created by the new international division of labor, contemporary theories of global culture and difference are brought into question through a political economy of globalization. The analysis suggests that the phenomena of postnational deterritorialization may be less important than the emerging forms of labor polarization within and across nation-states.

Editorial: Organizing value

In this essay, we argue that the recent financial collapse, the ensuing recession and the work of key social movements have created conditions for a reengagement of critically-inclined organizational theorists with various forms of value analysis. We then introduce the seven articles in this special issue and highlight how each makes a contribution to this reengagement.