Thibaut Bardon

A Nietzschean reading of Foucauldian thinking: constructing a project of the self within an ontology of becoming:

As influential as Michel Foucault may be in organization theory, several critics have seriously questioned the epistemological foundations of the Foucauldian philosophical project (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1995, 1999; Caldwell, 2007; Habermas, 1990; Newton, 1994, 1998; Reed, 2000; Thompson, 1993). If these remain unanswered, the Foucauldian approach could be relegated to a self-contradictory, ultra-relativist and partial reading grid of ‘reality’. In this article, we develop a Nietzschean reading of Foucault’s thinking that offers answers to these criticisms, and reinstates it as an independent philosophical project grounded in epistemological assumptions that are coherent with its ontology and methodology. Finally, we suggest that, following Nietzsche, the whole Foucauldian project can be approached as a genealogy of morals. Subsequently, we call on scholars to further explore the ‘third generation’ of Foucauldian studies which would study management practices as morals understood as an ‘art de vivre’.

Beyond nostalgia: Identity work in corporate alumni networks

Although corporate alumni networks are a developing practice, academia has said very little about them and their members. In this article, our goal is to provide an account of how members of such networks construct themselves as alumni. To that end, we adopt a narrative approach to identity construction and empirically explore the identity work that the members of one corporate alumni network carry out in order to sustain their identification with a past organizational setting. Our case study leads us to document four ‘identity stratagems’ (Jenkins, 1996) through which members incorporate elements of their past professional experience into their self-narratives: nostalgia, reproduction, validation and combination. It thus allows for a better understanding of corporate alumni networks and their members, while also contributing to the broader identity literature by further documenting how organizational participants can incorporate elements of a past professional experience into their self-narratives.

Identity regulation, identity work and phronesis:

How do corporations attempt to regulate the ways middle managers draw on discourses centred on ‘effectiveness’ and ‘ethics’ in their identity work, and how do these individuals respond? We analyse the discursive struggle over what it meant to be a competent manager at Disneyland, where middle managers were encouraged to construe their selves in ways that emphasized ‘being effective’ over ‘being ethical’, and managers responded with identity work that positioned them as searching for the practical wisdom (phronesis) to make decisions that were both effective and moral. The theoretical contribution we make is twofold. First, we analyse processes of identity regulation and identity work at Disneyland, highlighting divergences between corporate injunctions and middle managers’ appropriations of them, regarding what it meant to be a practically wise manager. Second, we discuss a phronetic identity narrative template, contestable both by organizations and managers, in which people are positioned as questing for the practical wisdom to make decisions that are both moral and effective, and phronesis as an image by which scholars may analyse identities and identity work. This leads us to a more nuanced understanding of middle manager identities and the scope they have to constitute their selves as moral agents.

Communities of practice: control or autonomy?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the question of how two seemingly opposite principles – managerial control and autonomy – simultaneously affect, positively and negatively, managers’ motivation to develop together innovative practices in a community of practice (the Custoprog community). Design/methodology/approach – A single-case study was conducted in the Custoprog community, during which 22 semi-directive interviews with Custoprog members were conducted over a period of eight months. Members are all EuroAirport middle managers of EuroAirport (a Western Europe international airport). Findings – The findings highlight how Custoprog members experience the conflicting situation of enjoying some autonomy (granted by top management), while being subjected to some degree of managerial control. Our results focus on how these two opposite principles (control and autonomy) simultaneously (positively as well as negatively) affect the motivation of Custoprog members to develop innovative practices...

Networks as Media for Nostalgia in an Organisational Context

Nostalgia is popularly associated with the idea of the difficulty of letting go of a past when life was somehow ‘better’ (Gabriel, 1993). Such a perspective is reflected in the organisational literature, for example through the work of Strangleman (1999), Brown and Humphreys (2002) or McCabe (2004), who show how nostalgia can be present in an organisational setting. These works also highlight that nostalgia is a social emotion that is shared and co-constructed; it follows that nostalgia is to be experienced not only individually, but also with others, and thus through a variety of media. This idea that nostalgia is a social emotion has notably been leveraged in marketing, and is discussed in the related literature (see, for example, Cutcher, 2008; Kessous and Roux, 2008), but there is no discussion of the media aspect. Thus, these literatures fail to inform us about how nostalgia is mediated in organisational contexts. Given the general lack of scholarship about the functional relationship between media and nostalgia (see volume Introduction by Niemeyer), this is hardly surprising.