Renate E. Meyer

Changing Institutional Logics and Executive Identities A Managerial Challenge to Public Administration in Austria

In this article, the authors analyze whether and to what extent an “old” administrative orientation is being replaced by a new managerial logic in the Austrian public sector. They illustrate that shifts in institutional logics can be analyzed by the extent to which actors draw on the social identities derived from the competing logics and show that the vocabularies and accounts the actors employ to communicate their identity claims reflect the local translation of global logics.

The Visual Dimension in Organizing, Organization, and Organization Research: Core Ideas, Current Developments, and Promising Avenues

With the unprecedented rise in the use of visuals, and its undeniable omnipresence in organizational contexts, as well as in the individuals everyday life, organization and management science has recently started to pay closer attention to the to date under-theorized “visual mode” of discourse and meaning construction. Building primarily on insights from the phenomenological tradition in organization theory and from social semiotics, this article sets out to consolidate previous scholarly efforts and to sketch a fertile future research agenda. After briefly exploring the workings of visuals, we introduce the methodological and theoretical “roots” of visual studies in a number of disciplines that have a long-standing tradition of incorporating the visual. We then continue by extensively reviewing work in the field of organization and management studies: More specifically, we present five distinct approaches to feature visuals in research designs and to include the visual dimension in scholarly inquiry. Su...

Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change

This paper examines the framings and identity work associated with professionals’ discursive construction of climate change science, their legitimation of themselves as experts on ‘the truth’, and their attitudes towards regulatory measures. Drawing from survey responses of 1077 professional engineers and geoscientists, we reconstruct their framings of the issue and knowledge claims to position themselves within their organizational and their professional institutions. In understanding the struggle over what constitutes and legitimizes expertise, we make apparent the heterogeneity of claims, legitimation strategies, and use of emotionality and metaphor. By linking notions of the science or science fiction of climate change to the assessment of the adequacy of global and local policies and of potential organizational responses, we contribute to the understanding of ‘defensive institutional work’ by professionals within petroleum companies, related industries, government regulators, and their professional association.

Influencing Ideas: A Celebration of DiMaggio and Powell (1983)

Few papers achieve the success of DiMaggio and Powells 1983 “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” The impact of the paper, as indicated by its citation count and its influence on a wide range of disciplines, has been extraordinary. Furthermore, the papers influence continues to increase. Here we celebrate this exceptional paper and offer observations on how ideas become adopted, institutionalized, and sometimes translated in ways not necessarily intended by their authors. We also note the vagaries of the process by which journals assess the caliber of papers submitted to them—after all, this paper was initially rejected!

Public Management Reform: An Identity Project

Based on an executive survey this article analyses the extent to which a new managerial logic has replaced traditional administrative values and identity in Austria. We do not find any strong evidence of a new managerial logic but rather modifications, local translations and the emergence of a hybrid identity.

Exploring European-ness in Organization Research

We take the 30th birthday of Organization Studies, the publication outlet of the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS), as an opportunity to reflect on what European-ness in organization research means at times of globalization where territory and geographic boundaries increasingly lose their relevance for scholarly identity. In particular, we explore the openness of scholars and journals for grand ideas from different linguistic communities and the distinct profile of Organization Studies in this respect. We confirm that research building on ‘grand’ thinkers represents a central feature of European organizational scholarship and Organization Studies in particular.

Contextualizing Influence Activities: An Objective Hermeneutical Approach

Influence activity is a central aspect of organizations and has attracted a wide range of theoretical and empirical research. Most studies in this field rely on categorization schemes to classify either actors or acts. This article draws on the notion of organizations and actors as socially constructed phenomena and understands influence activities as social practices whose shape and meaning is derived from the social contexts they are embedded in. In this paper, we argue that it is necessary to gain an understanding of the activities’ diverging meanings in their organizational contexts before generalized typologies of tactics and strategies can be fruitfully applied. By drawing on ‘objective hermeneutics’ as methodology, our analyses focus on influence activities within three organizational contexts.

Laying a smoke screen: Ambiguity and neutralization as strategic responses to intra-institutional complexity

Our research contributes to knowledge on strategic organizational responses by addressing a specific type of institutional complexity that has, to date, been rather neglected in scholarly inquiry: conflicting institutional demands that arise within the same institutional order. We suggest referring to such type of complexity as “intra-institutional”—as opposed to “inter-institutional.” Empirically, we examine the consecutive spread of two management concepts—shareholder value and corporate social responsibility—among Austrian listed corporations around the turn of the millennium. Our work presents evidence that in institutionally complex situations, the concepts used by organizations to respond to competing demands and belief systems are interlinked and coupled through multiwave diffusion. We point to the open, chameleon-like character of some concepts that makes them particularly attractive for discursive adoption in such situations and conclude that organizations regularly respond to institutional complexity by resorting to discursive neutralization techniques and strategically producing ambiguity.

When Bureaucracy Meets the Crowd: Studying “Open Government” in the Vienna City Administration

Open Government is en vogue, yet vague: while practitioners, policy-makers, and others praise its virtues, little is known about how Open Government relates to bureaucratic organization. This paper presents insights from a qualitative investigation into the City of Vienna, Austria. It demonstrates how the encounter between the city administration and “the open” juxtaposes the decentralizing principles of the crowd, such as transparency, participation, and distributed cognition, with the centralizing principles of bureaucracy, such as secrecy, expert knowledge, written files, and rules. The paper explores how this theoretical conundrum is played out and how senior city managers perceive Open Government in relation to the bureaucratic nature of their administration. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to empirically trace the complexities of the encounter between bureaucracy and Open Government; and second, to critically theorize the ongoing rationalization of public administration in spite of constant challenges to its bureaucratic principles. In so doing, the paper advances our understanding of modern bureaucratic organizations under the condition of increased openness, transparency, and interaction with their environments.

Ideology and institutions: Introduction

In this brief review, we do not attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of how the concept of ideology has developed in the different perspectives; this has been done in several publications that classify and discuss ideology in great detail (see Chiapello, 2003; Thompson, 1996; Eagleton, 1991; Lenk, 1984; Therborn, 1980; Larrain, 1979, among many others). However, the brief sketch below is intended to help us find venues for combining theories of ideology and institutions. Furthermore, it helps us to place the chapters of this volume in this broader context.