Sanne Frandsen

Organizational Image, Identification, and Cynical Distance Prestigious Professionals in a Low-Prestige Organization

This study examines how a negative organizational image influences organizational identification among prestigious professionals working in a low-prestige organization. A communicative perspective on identification is used to illustrate previously unexplored processes of cynical distancing and shifts in identification targets as ways for business professionals to cope with discrepancies between the organizational identity and the organizational image. These concurrent processes allow professionals successfully to diminish the potentially harmful impact of the negative image on their well-being and their positive work identity. On this basis, the article questions the assumption that the organizational image plays a pivotal role in impelling collective identity change process, as the findings here suggest that the business professionals’ communicative acts may uphold the negative organizational image.

Adopting sustainability in the organization: Managing processes of productive loose coupling towards internal legitimacy

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between sustainability adoption and internal legitimacy construction.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is designed as a critical inquiry into existing research and practice on sustainability adoption, illustrated by two corporate vignettes.Findings – Prior studies tend to assume that awareness raising is a sufficient means to create employee commitment and support for corporate sustainability programs, while empirical observations indicate that managerial disregard of conflicting interpretations of sustainability may result in the illegitimacy of such programs.Originality/value – The authors suggest that a loosely coupled approach to sustainability adoption is a productive way to understand internal legitimacy construction, as it appreciates complexity and polyphony.

Doing ethnography in a paranoid organization: An autoethnographic account

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine what we can learn from an autoethnographical approach about public administration. In this context it presents and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of autoethnography. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a case study of E-rail, a European national rail service subject to extensive negative press coverage. The autoethnographic accounts, based on interviews, observations, phone calls, e-mails, and other informal interactions with the organizational members, highlight the researcher’s entry to and exit of the organization. Findings – The paper mobilizes fieldwork access negotiation and trust building with participants as empirical material in its own right, arguing that challenges involving “being in the field” should be explored to provide new types of knowledge about the organizational phenomenon under study – in this case the rise of organizational paranoia. Originality/value – This paper uses autoethnography, which is rare in pub...

Faculty Responses to Business School Branding: A Discursive Approach

It is increasingly recognized that the branding of universities presents a different set of challenges from corporate, for-profit sectors. However, much remains unknown about how faculty in particular interpret and make sense of branding in this complex environment. This paper investigates faculty responses to branding through a qualitative interview-based study of four business schools. Our discursive approach to understanding faculty responses highlights the fluid and reflexive nature of brand engagement, in which faculty adopt a number of stances towards their school’s branding efforts. In particular, the study identifies three main faculty responses to branding: endorsement, ambivalence and cynicism. The study highlights the ambiguities created from higher education brand management efforts, and the multiple ways that faculty exploit, frame and resist the branding of their business schools. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for branding in university contexts.