Sally Riad

The Power of 'Organizational Culture' as a Discursive Formation in Merger Integration

This paper argues that knowledge on ‘organizational culture’ has acquired authority and constitutes a ‘truth’ on mergers, a truth imbued with both enabling and constraining power effects. Taking a Foucauldian perspective, the paper theorizes ‘organizational culture’ as a discursive formation that is implicated in a regime of truth. This regime has involved a process of disciplinary normalization in merger integration with the result that ‘culture’ has become naturalized to ‘organization’. Drawing on ethnographic research into merger integration, these arguments are illustrated through two vignettes titled ‘surveillance’ and ‘sanctuary’. These represent the reproduction of, and resistance to, the truth effects of ‘organizational culture’. The implications of critically examining ‘organizational culture’ in this way are twofold: first, it opens up space for other merger discourses, and second, it enables positioning of merger accounts within cultural discourses in a way that forwards productive rather than divisive effects in theory and practice.

Varieties of national metonymy in media accounts of international mergers and acquisitions

International mergers and acquisitions (M&As) often invoke national identification and national cultural differences. We argue that metonymy is a central linguistic resource through which national cultural identities and differences are reproduced in media accounts of international M&As. In this paper, we focus on two revealing cases: the acquisition of American IBM Personal Computer Division (PCD) by the Chinese company Lenovo and the acquisition of American Anheuser-Busch (A-B) by the Belgian–Brazilian company InBev. First, we identify the forms, functions, and frequencies of national metonymy in media accounts of these cases. We present a typology that classifies varieties of national metonymy in international M&As. Second, we demonstrate how these metonyms combine with metaphor to generate evocative imagery, engaging wit, and subversive irony. Our findings show that national metonymy contributes to the construction of emotive frames, stereotypes, ideological differences, and threats. Combinations of national metonymy with metaphor also provide powerful means to construct cultural differences. However, combinations of metonymy with wit and irony enable the play on meanings that overturns and resists national and cultural stereotypes. This is the first study to unpack the deployment of metonymy in accounts of international M&As. In doing so, it also opens up new avenues for research into international management and the analysis of tropes in management and organization.

Of mergers and cultures: “What happened to shared values and joint assumptions?”

Purpose – This paper signals departure from a theoretical perspective on organizational culture in mergers and acquisitions based on a binary opposition between coherence and pluralism. The paper aims to outline another, dialogic perspective on cultural transformations in mergers and acquisitions, based on an assumption that individuals occupy temporary positions in dynamic dialogue, negotiating equally transitory, but temporarily cohesive allegiances.Design/methodology/approach – The dialogic perspective derives from a constructionist approach and involves ethnographic research methodology. It is developed to track the complex contests of interests in post‐merger pluralist cultures and to reconstruct their dynamics. While some events in the merger process contribute to cultural pluralism and contest of interest, others appear to render allegiance to cohesive cultural elements seductively appropriable.Findings – Two situations are presented. The first poses a view of culture during mergers in which contes...

The Intertextual Production of International Relations in Mergers and Acquisitions

While studies on international management have focused on cultural differences and examined institutional specificities in various national business systems, conceptions of international relations have been left relatively underexplored. We argue that representations of international relations are relevant to international M&As and contend that intertextuality offers a novel approach to examine these relational features of international management. Our analysis focuses on Sino–US relations in the context of the acquisition of American IBM’s Personal Computer Division (PCD) by the Chinese company, Lenovo. We demonstrate the ways in which facets of international relations are produced in media accounts of this acquisition, and analyse the intertextual dynamics entwined with their production. The analysis consists of three sections: constitutive intertextuality, manifest intertextuality and intertextual ideological undercurrents. These illustrate the variation in producing international relations through discursive themes (threat to security/peaceful rise), emotion rhetoric (fear/cheer) and ideology (cold war/globalism). In summary, the paper elucidates the ways in which international M&As are immersed in a seascape of intertextual international relations.

Under the Desk: On Becoming a Mother in the Workplace

The field of organization studies has embraced the metaphor of organizations as ‘cultures’, but there has been no consideration of why these particular ‘cultures’ appear childless. Premised in social constructionism, specifically its contribution to relational theorizing, this paper explores themes on mothering and the workplace. It is written in two parts as an autoethnography, adopting elements from creative writing to represent a series of discussions, interactions and impressions, with the aim of illustrating the complexities of coping and feeling resolved. Inquiry is predominantly into embodied mothering and paid work, with specific considerations of material, cultural and institutional repressive dynamics. The first, and main, part focuses on conflicts shaping mothers’ work lives, particularly the repression of meaningful relationships to represent a strong ‘individual’. The second part, a postscript, opens up space for future organizational research; it argues for possibilities of changes that allow for the traversal of spatial and disciplinary binaries—changes in both the focus of inquiry and domain interests. Together, these constitute a project of writing children into organizational studies.

Terms of engagement: On the differential effects of metaphoric utterances in relational stories of organization

This paper approaches the nexus of metaphor and story from a novel angle, one that underlines the varying dynamics of metaphoric utterances (metaphors in segments of speech) within stories on organization. Drawing on Bakhtins theoretical contribution, it examines the dialogism in metaphor, illustrating it with material from different stories that discuss the same inter-organizational relationship. The paper sets out simultaneous contradictions inherent in four metaphorical utterances (‘cash cow’, ‘dragging a child kicking and screaming’, ‘big brother/Big Brother’ and ‘family’). It illustrates how the same metaphoric utterance can be used in different stories to generate different effects (the double voice and intonation in metaphor) or to yield different meanings altogether (the polysemy in metaphor). The paper forwards an ongoing interrelationship between story and metaphor: metaphoric utterances serve as a means of surfacing value judgments and illustrating both resonance and dissonance in organizational stories, while stories define the meaning and the significance of a metaphoric utterance.

Invoking Black Athena and its debates

Purpose – The authors use the debates instigated by Bernals Black Athena to rethink the concepts of “race”, “culture” and “diversity” in organization and aim to examine their intersection with academic authority.Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on the works of Derrida and Hegel, the authors question the pursuit of origins and illustrate its role in essentializing race, culture and diversity. The paper examines these through binaries including white/black, nature/culture, purity/diversity and diversity/university.Findings – First, both the Black Athena debates and the organizational literature turn to origins to ground concepts of difference. This attests to the power of narratives of descent in defining current interests. Second, organization studies have relied on images of a clear past which had eliminated racialization and its implications. Whereas culture is considered progressive, as a user‐friendly term it has served as a “surrogate” or “homologue” for race. Diversity, in turn, has been deploy...

Introduction to First Person research: on teaching and becoming

This article does not have an abstract.

The role of visual metonymy in leadership symbolism: Mapping its dynamics through the Sphinx:

Despite the long-standing relevance of symbols in culture studies on leadership, research has rarely examined significations of leadership through metonymy, an important trope that pervades symbolism but is often overlooked. This paper offers a typology of visual metonymy that outlines forms pertinent to leadership. The study draws on the Sphinx in cultural history to map out various metonymies and chart their dynamics. It then traces these metonymies in historical and recent political cartoons on leadership in contexts of colonization, nation building, and revolution. The work also delineates patterns in composite metonymy and its combination with metaphor. Metonymy has paradoxical effects on the discursive construction of leadership, both maintaining and changing extant values and views. So visual metonymy facilitates iconoclasm, the destruction of images or statues, based on shifts in value judgments of leadership and its symbols. These findings compel us to think differently about symbolism and leadership. They show how a symbol’s meaning and value are positional and provisional, temporarily located within multiple relationships and realities. Similarly, leadership is wrought through positionality and provisionality, constantly reshaped by various contextual positions and contingent relationships that render it inherently fluid and contested. The paper further contributes to theorization on leadership by offering new grounds for its visual analysis and a fresh perspective through which to explore its embodiment. Altogether, the work instigates us to rethink extant adages on “leaders using symbols” and “leaders as symbols.” It calls for research on leadership that supplements the interest in symbols with an emphasis on symbolization.

Engaging With Paradox, Striving for Sustainability: Relating to Public Science and Commercial Research:

Though paradox has pervasive effects on science work and sustainability in scientific research, it remains underexplored at the intersection of these contexts. The article addresses this nexus and contributes to the relational perspective on paradox by supplementing the emphasis on systemic relations with human relationships. The study examines experiences of research scientists with striving for sustainability and explicates the tensions they confront between public science and commercial research. It identifies three relational paradoxes: service ethos, role identity, and professional integrity; and it outlines how scientists manage them through approaches premised on differentiation and integration. Through its grounds in relationality, the work affirms the salience of extant themes on paradox for sustainability in science work and poses new theoretical contribution by showing how both paradoxes and responses are embedded in social relations. In effect, scientists address sustainability while engaging with paradox whereby they relate to both public science and commercial research.