Winston Kwon

‘Getting people on board’: Discursive leadership for consensus building in team meetings:

Meetings are increasingly seen as sites where organizing and strategic change take place, but the role of specific discursive strategies and related linguistic-pragmatic and argumentative devices, employed by meeting chairs, is little understood. The purpose of this article is to address the range of behaviours of chairs in business organizations by comparing strategies employed by the same chief executive officer (CEO) in two key meeting genres: regular management team meetings and ‘away-days’. While drawing on research from organization studies on the role of leadership in meetings and studies of language in the workplace from (socio)linguistics and discourse studies, we abductively identified five salient discursive strategies which meeting chairs employ in driving decision making: (1) Bonding; (2) Encouraging; (3) Directing; (4) Modulating; and (5) Re/Committing. We investigate the leadership styles of the CEO in both meeting genres via a multi-level approach using empirical data drawn from meetings of a single management team in a multinational defence corporation. Our key findings are, first, that the chair of the meetings (and leading manager) influences the outcome of the meetings in both negative and positive ways, through the choice of discursive strategies. Second, it becomes apparent that the specific context and related meeting genre mediate participation and the ability of the chair to control interactions within the team. Third, a more hierarchical authoritarian or a more interpersonal egalitarian leadership style can be identified via specific combinations of these five discursive strategies. The article concludes that the egalitarian leadership style increases the likelihood of achieving a durable consensus. Several related avenues for research are outlined.

Organizational decision-making, discourse, and power: integrating across contexts and scales:

Research has downplayed the complex discursive processes and practices through which decisions are constructed and blurs the relationship between macro- and micro-levels. The article argues for a critical and ecologically valid approach that articulates how discursive practices are influenced by, and in turn shape, the organizational settings in which they occur. It makes a methodological contribution using decision-making episodes of a senior management team meeting of a multinational company to demonstrate the insights that can be obtained from embedding the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) within a longitudinal ethnography. The approach illuminates the latent and intricate power dynamics and range of potentials of agents, triangulating micro-level discursive strategies with macro-level historical sources and background knowledge on the social and political fields. The article also makes a theoretical contribution by demonstrating the dependency of decision outcomes on often unpredictable and subtle changes in the power—context relationship.

A Context-sensitive Approach to Analysing Talk in Strategy Meetings

The talk of managers in meetings is central to organizational life and crucial to research in strategic management, as well as managerial and organizational cognition, sensemaking and decision-making. To achieve full understanding, both the text and the context of discussion require systematic analysis, but most approaches treat context as everything that is known and observed beyond the immediate text. This obscures different readings of the text of meetings. To resolve this problem, the discourse historical approach (DHA) to critical discourse analysis is outlined as a framework within which researchers can analyse the text and context of talk in meetings. The primary contribution of this paper is to isolate four ‘levels of context’ as a heuristic framework within which discursive practices, strategies and texts can be located. By making explicit the levels of contextual analysis that are implicit in other methods, and illustrating the DHA using an episode of strategic discussion from a multinational company, this paper shows how researchers can use the approach to analyse the naturally occurring talk of senior managers in meetings, which is arguably the most important but yet under-explored venue for strategizing.

Conceptualizing the role of evaluation systems in markets: The case of dominant evaluators

Evaluation is usually an internalized process that is intrinsic to the activities of market actors. Producers evaluate what goods to produce, intermediaries such as distributors and retailers evaluate what goods to promote and stock, while consumers evaluate what goods to buy. In some cases, however, a secondary evaluation market controlled by an external evaluator can emerge as a de-facto gatekeeper exerting a powerful influence over the activities of market actors in the primary market. This article develops a conceptual model of external evaluation that describes: (i) the factors common to primary markets that are dominated by evaluation markets; (ii) the characteristics common to dominant evaluators and their evaluation markets; and (iii) the dynamic processes through which an evaluator can become entrenched in a position of dominance over other market actors. This conceptual model is illustrated through examples drawn from three dominant evaluators and the markets they dominate.

Ideology and Moral Reasoning: How wine was saved from the 19th century phylloxera epidemic:

Extant organizational research into crises has focused on the efforts of different actors to defend and legitimate their ideologies towards particular actions. Although insightful, such research has offered little knowledge about the moral reasoning underlying such action. In this paper, we explore how moral reasoning from different ideological viewpoints can lead to polarized debates and stalemate within the context of ecological crises. We apply our conceptual framework in an analysis of the 19th century French phylloxera epidemic. Drawing upon this analysis, we argue that, by adapting their moral reasoning, opposing stakeholder groups could maintain their underlying ideology, while at the same time pragmatically changing their actions towards the crisis. We discuss the theoretical implications of our analysis for historical research in organizational studies and research on organizations and the natural environment.

Strategic change: A dynamic perspective on the framing strategic initiatives

This paper elaborates the role of managerial framing activity during processes of strategic change in order to build the critical level of support across coalitions of competing interests to mobilize collective action towards change. Through a longitudinal 21-year qualitative study we examine the creation of a new business school through five strategic initiatives. Drawing on a Social Movement Organization perspective we analyze how frames are used by protagonists and antagonists to influence the development of the change initiatives over time. We develop a model that exposes the dynamics of diagnostic, prognostic and motivational framing in collective action frame development within specific strategic change initiatives, but also how the frames of new change initiatives are linked with and develop from previous framings.