Shiv Ganesh

BOUNDARYLESS CAREERS: BRINGING BACK BOUNDARIES

Boundaryless career theories are increasingly prominent in career studies and management studies, and provide a new ‘status quo’ concerning modern careers. This paper contextualizes the boundaryless careers literature within management studies, and evaluates its contributions, including broadening concepts of career and focusing interorganizational career phenomena. It acknowledges the considerable stimulus given to career studies by this literature, but also offers a critique based on five issues: inaccurate labelling; loose definitions; overemphasis on personal agency; the normalization of boundaryless careers; and poor empirical support for the claimed dominance of boundaryless careers. Because these problems render the boundaryless career concept increasingly obsolete as a ‘leading edge’ construct in career studies, we offer new directions for theory and research. In particular we re-examine the role of career boundaries, and suggest the development of new, boundary-focused careers scholarship based on boundary theory, to facilitate studies of the processes whereby career boundaries are created, and their effects in constraining, enabling and punctuating careers.

Transforming Resistance, Broadening Our Boundaries: Critical Organizational Communication Meets Globalization from Below

This essay addresses the need for organizational communication scholarship to come to terms with the contested nature of globalization through analyses of collective resistance. We argue that organizational communication has largely situated the study of resistance at the level of the individual, and characterized it as an element of micro-politics located within organizational boundaries. Thus, resistance has been considered in localized, interpersonal terms, without full appreciation of its political and ideological significance. This essay builds a case for reconsidering resistance in order to study “globalization from below” and highlights protest movements as exemplars of transformative resistance. Finally, the essay advances a study of organizational communication with expanded disciplinary engagement with respect to globalization.

Empowerment, Constraint, and the Entrepreneurial Self: A Study of White Women Entrepreneurs

Discourses of entrepreneurship and research on women entrepreneurs have proliferated in the last two decades. This study argues that a particular conception of an entrepreneurial self underlies much literature on women entrepreneurs and their empowerment, and identifies several key assumptions of this entrepreneurial self. The study then assesses the motivations and experiences of several white women entrepreneurs in a northwestern state in the United States, finding that aspects of the entrepreneurial self are most evident in the reasons that women provide about why they became entrepreneurs. However, the experiences the women narrate reveal a more constraints-centered discourse, which features a particular interpretation of the frontier myth of the American West, and bears traces of an emergent, collective notion of empowerment. The authors explain such empowerment from critical and feminist perspectives, offering the concept of bounded empowerment as a lens through which to examine entrepreneurship and gender, and discussing its practical implications.

Neoliberalism and knowledge interests in boundaryless careers discourse

Decades of critical research have established that economic and political ideologies permeate and shape thought, text and action, and academic knowledge production is no exception. This article examines how ideologies might permeate academic texts, by assessing the reach and influence of neoliberalism in research on boundaryless careers. Specifically, it asks: did the emergence and growth of scholarship on boundaryless careers support, challenge, or merely run parallel to the rising dominance of neoliberal ideology? It was found that a diversity of knowledge interests, including managerial, agentic, curatorial and critical interests underlie the production of research on boundaryless careers. However, all four of these knowledge interests are complicit in discursively constructing and aligning the notion of boundaryless careers with neoliberalism in two specific ways. Implications for scholarship on careers and work are discussed.

Organizational Narcissism Technology, Legitimacy, and Identity in an Indian NGO

This article is a critical examination of discourses on technology in a nongovernment organization (NGO). In it, the author elaborates on the organization’s use of “appropriate technology” discourse, its framing of information and communication technology (ICT) in the NGO, and the development of a for-profit ICT system in the organization. The author argues that the NGO’s use of appropriate technology discourse serves to produce and perpetuate an overall market bias. Alongside this, a limited conception of information and communication results in the NGO defining its rural constituents in terms of a passive market. This has consequences for the NGO’s identity, which it conceives of in terms of its own legitimacy rather than public accountability. The term organizational narcissism is used to explain this phenomenon. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Positioning Intercultural Dialogue—Theories, Pragmatics, and an Agenda

In recent years, the term intercultural dialogue has gained considerable currency in both scholarly as well as policy-making contexts. The European Union declared 2008 to be the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, and the Council of Europe (2008) published a white paper on the subject, offering a blueprint for how people in the expanded European community might live together across diversity and difference. The increased public visibility and circulation of the term has also prompted academic discussion in multiple venues, including a 2009 National Communication Association summer conference in Istanbul, Turkey, and a preconference in Singapore in 2010, as part of the International Communication Association’s annual convention. In this special issue we aim to consolidate emerging interest in intercultural dialogue and inaugurate a productive exchange between scholarship on dialogue and intercultural communication studies, thereby setting an agenda for studies of intercultural dialogue. Extant studies of intercultural dialogue tend to reflect the perspective taken by the European Institute for Comparative Cultural Research, which formulated a working definition for the term:

From Wall Street to Wellington: Protests in an Era of Digital Ubiquity

The Occupy movement is said to represent a new generation of post-Seattle protests, driven by social networking, and breaking from organizing practices in previous eras. This study analyzes the Occupy Wellington protest to shed light on the role of protests in an era of digital media ubiquity. Based on the participant observation as well as 76 brief interviews, the study explores how activists used digital media, and examines the broader institutional logics that shaped organizing dynamics at the protest. The analysis discusses digital media saturation and the multiple institutional logics that activists drew from in their organizing, including collective action, connective action, aggregation, and networking. We argue that digital ubiquity marks the onset of a profound hybridity rather than an abrupt change in activist organizing practices.

Discourses of Volunteerism

Correspondence: e-mail: sganesh@waikato.ac.nz and kmcallum@waikato.ac.nz Public discourse often promotes volunteerism as a novel and empowering solution to social problems, and it is a signifi cant international phenomenon. In this chapter, we engage in an interdisciplinary review of the literature on the topic. We begin by clarifying three key terms around which we organize our review: volunteer, volunteering, and volunteerism. We take an explicitly discursive approach in our review, treating academic research on volunteerism as instantiations of discourses of representation, understanding, suspicion, and vulnerability (Mumby, 1997), and we use this framework to identify key areas of research and their possibilities and limitations. We conclude with some suggestions for future study.

Outsourcing as symptomatic: class visibility and ethnic scapegoating in the US IT sector

Purpose – This paper aims to analyze recent debates about outsourcing in the USA, using examples from IT sector, especially in the context of India.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a critical commentary and uses methods based in rhetorical criticism.Findings – The author argues that to fully understand the outsourcing issue, it has to be considered a symptomatic discourse rather than a causative one. Specifically, it is argued that the outsourcing debate in the context of IT work evidences class issues in as much as it involves white collar visibility. Moreover, the debate is also symptomatic of ethnic tensions in the form of ethnic scapegoating. Some implications of the debate are discussed.Originality/value – The paper is of value to those interested in debates about outsourcing, and highlights the importance of a communication‐oriented perspective.

Unraveling the Confessional Tale

Some of the most meaningful products of my academic life are the friendships that I have formed over the years with “respondents” and “participants.” Often, they have emerged from the research, but in other situations, they have driven the research itself. My PhD dissertation methods chapter provides an extended account of how my longstanding friendship with two people who were unhappy with the nongovernment organization in which they worked drove my interest and critique of that organization. Yet, when I put that fact into a manuscript that I eventually submitted more than a decade ago to this very journal, a colleague advised me to remove it. Even then, my “bias” met with critique. “There is too much emotion,” a reviewer intoned. “While I appreciate the direct attention to demonstrating the importance of this issue, the rhetoric is too heated and the tone is too dismissive.” Make no mistake: I actually cringed when I re-read the early version of the eventually published article (Ganesh, 2003). The voice in which I was speaking (or perhaps shouting) came off as shrill, the manuscript was clumsily put together, the writing was poor, and many arguments lacked nuance. I am deeply grateful to the reviewers who engaged that piece despite its flaws, and the revision process, trial by fire though it was, taught me a thing or two about writing for communication journals. One of those lessons was the notion that ideas needed to be presented in a considered, manifestly dispassionate, and quasi-realist tone. There are a host of robust warrants for this argument, including the need for methodological transparency and the need for qualitative research to be presented as rigorous,