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1 – 10 of 26This study of job advertisements for internal communication practitioners aims to investigate the signals that organisations are sending the profession about what is required of…
Abstract
Purpose
This study of job advertisements for internal communication practitioners aims to investigate the signals that organisations are sending the profession about what is required of these roles. The concept of corporate voice – the “voice” of the organisation – is problematised to explore tensions in vocality. The aim is to support communication practitioners to navigate multi-vocality in the evolving professional context of digital communication technologies and changes in the workplace.
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative study considers the role of voice in corporate communication practices and offers insights into “digital disruption” and the discursive pressure of employers' priorities on the profession and its practices. Job advertisements for internal communication practitioners were examined during 6-month periods in 2018, 2020 and 2022, which was a significant time of change for the profession with the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Findings
Qualitative content analysis of 514 internal communication job advertisements identifies that control and consistency are valorised, and continue to dominate descriptions of internal communication skills and responsibilities. The digital affordances that communication practitioners rely on has not changed significantly and a preference for “broadcasting” is evident.
Originality/value
This study provides insights into how Australian organisations shape and sustain univocal corporate communication practices, and the incompatibility of narrow configurations of voice with emerging organisational challenges such as social connectedness.
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Kenneth Gergen and Mary Gergen
Mary: To begin, I think it is important that we take into account some milestones in the development of multivoiced organizing. This will also set the stage for our extension into…
Abstract
Mary: To begin, I think it is important that we take into account some milestones in the development of multivoiced organizing. This will also set the stage for our extension into the realm of polyvocality. For example, we owe a debt here to work that René Bouwen did with Chris Steyaert (1999) on global organizing. They were among the first to promote multivoicedness in describing how an organization might be affected through the inclusion of many voices. They distinguished four metaphors that were useful in exploring how multivoicedness could influence global organizing: “building the Tower of Babel,” “dialogical imagination,” “polyphonic chorus,” and “strangers’ meeting.”
Lesley Treleaven and Chris Sykes
This paper seeks to explore the loss of organizational knowledge during organizational change processes from a knowledge perspective.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to explore the loss of organizational knowledge during organizational change processes from a knowledge perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
Recent developments in the fields of organizational change and organizational knowledge are reviewed, then the relation of organizational knowledge to discourse and power is drawn out. Using critical discourse analysis, dominant and marginalized discourses are foregrounded, different types of organizational knowledge loss distinguished, and their effects in a human services organization identified.
Findings
The analysis shows how the linguistic and discursive practices of financial management are marginalizing and displacing practitioners' organizational knowledge. An illustration is given of how situated and heuristic organizational knowledge is vulnerable to marginalization, and hence loss, as organizations seek to codify knowledge into generalizable abstractions. It is concluded that these losses of organizational knowledge are the effects of re‐organizing around corporate managerialism without attention to multi‐vocality and differential evaluations of worth.
Research limitations/implications
These findings, within a large community services not‐for‐profit organization, may differ in business organizations where research into knowledge management has typically focused. However, the findings are worth examining in other sites, given the migration of corporate managerialism.
Practical implications
Organization development practitioners, consultants and leaders need to take into account both the emergent nature of change itself and how re‐organizing around corporate managerialism can marginalize or lose organizational knowledge that is valued differentially.
Originality/value
The paper's contribution is its understanding of discursive change processes as tensions between competing bodies of knowledge. Re‐conceptualizing organizational change to address such multi‐vocality opens up new ways of examining how organizing and re‐organizing processes in organizations affect organizational knowledge and thus organizational capability.
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The purpose of this paper is to explore how employees' work-related communication is managed in knowledge-intensive organizations.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how employees' work-related communication is managed in knowledge-intensive organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
The study was conducted by applying an exploratory, qualitative approach. The data were collected from six knowledge-intensive organizations operating in the professional service sector in Finland, and the data set used included altogether 23 interviews.
Findings
The interviews confirmed that employees' work-related communication on social media is regarded as an increasingly important area, and that it has required companies to establish new managerial processes that are aimed to affect employees’ communication behaviors (ECB) either as enablers or motivators. How companies apply these processes depends on contextual factors, and three different managerial approaches were identified, namely, individual-, corporate- and business-oriented approaches.
Research limitations/implications
Based on the findings, this article proposes a new field for the communication management literature, management of the communicative organization (MCO), which builds on behavior management knowledge and focuses on managing employee communicators in multivocal organizational communication systems (MOCSs) that are dependent on employee-generated content.
Originality/value
The study advances the field of communication management and ECB by empirically proving that organizations manage their employees' work-related communication and the management processes and practices identified derive from behavioral management tradition. The proposed MCO framework introduces a novel area for academic discussion on how communication management affects ECB and attitudes, such as motivation.
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Alexander J.J.A. Maas, Erik M. Manschot and Ton J. Roodink
Illustrates a core concept: multiple inclusion or the process of multiple including. Offers a perspective of configuring human beings who organize simultaneously “worlds of…
Abstract
Illustrates a core concept: multiple inclusion or the process of multiple including. Offers a perspective of configuring human beings who organize simultaneously “worlds of difference”, or “realities” and the perspective from the point of view of an actor, in relation to others. Each appearance of an actor’s participation or “inclusion” thus becomes related to a specific context. Claims this social space always has a multiple character. To an actor, it is an area of tension which contains various dimensions. It is crucial that another inclusion or a new definition of a situation can be introduced, as an indication of the variety of contexts. An actor may evoke or find an inclusion at the social‐ or cognitive‐structural levels. Both can be called on at once. But the moment variety is no longer allowed, problems of power can emerge. Utilizes a previous study of the Utrecht Jazz Orchestra for consequences of this stand for diagnosis in an organizational context.
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The implications of multiple organizational identities for branding research have been scarcely considered. This paper aims to explore what sources of identity internal…
Abstract
Purpose
The implications of multiple organizational identities for branding research have been scarcely considered. This paper aims to explore what sources of identity internal stakeholders use to construct organizational identities and corporate identities, and identify how diversity emerges in the perceived identities across various stakeholders.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical study includes 59 in-depth interviews with internal stakeholders in a business-to-business service company.
Findings
Employees may perceive identity diversity as a strategic benefit for the company, and employees may not identify with a uniform corporate identity. The corporate identity could become more identifiable for employees through managerial recognition of different dimensions of identity diversity, such as multiple professional and locational identities.
Originality/value
The study bridges insights between organizational identity and corporate identity and problematizes identity coherence and consistency as strategic principles for corporate branding by proposing an alternative approach guided by identity diversity. Additionally, the study discusses identity diversity-based approaches to internal branding and co-creation in branding.
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Ram Narasimhan, Thomas J. Kull and Abraham Nahm
Globalization and accelerating product life cycles require use of time‐based manufacturing practices (TBMP) accompanied by organizational integration. Evidence has suggested that…
Abstract
Purpose
Globalization and accelerating product life cycles require use of time‐based manufacturing practices (TBMP) accompanied by organizational integration. Evidence has suggested that cultural integrative beliefs (IB) influence the presence of TBMP but research has not investigated two alternative theory‐based views: TBMP influences the formation of integrative beliefs; and TBMP and integrative beliefs interact to enhance performance. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between espoused values, TBMP and performance.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors empirically re‐analyze work carried out in 2004 by Nahm et al., using structural equations modeling and factor scores regression.
Findings
Support is found for the competing model that implies IB is a consequent of TBMP rather than an antecedent. This new theoretical perspective is not reconciled via the interaction model.
Practical implications
The authors' re‐examination suggests TBMP and IB are mutually reinforcing, implying that resources can be devoted to simultaneously implementing TBMP and IB, rather than a time‐consuming sequential strategy.
Originality/value
The paper is the first to empirically test three perspectives on how organizational culture and operations management practices interrelate. Conventional conceptions of cultural beliefs' role are questioned and a new perspective is offered. Additionally, the FSR method gives a structured approach to latent variable interaction modeling.
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Draws attention to the need for managers to re‐examine the dominantworld view paradigm within which managing currently takes place. Usesthe analogy of a salmon struggling up river…
Abstract
Draws attention to the need for managers to re‐examine the dominant world view paradigm within which managing currently takes place. Uses the analogy of a salmon struggling up river to show management today as an uncertain journey from the narrow convergence of the paradigm downstream to the open divergence which is upstream, culminating in the birth of new perspectives and fresh ideas. Represents upstream thinking as a process of continual change which organizations must embrace, otherwise organizational performance will remain limited.
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Alex Faria, Sergio Wanderley, Yuna Reis and Ana Celano
We engage in a particular way the Anglo-American claim that a more performative Critical Management Studies (CMS) is needed to foster transformations in the “world out there” by…
Abstract
Purpose
We engage in a particular way the Anglo-American claim that a more performative Critical Management Studies (CMS) is needed to foster transformations in the “world out there” by putting into practice our learnings from a case study at Galpão Aplauso (GA), an NGO located in Brazil, which main role is to (re)socialize dispossessed youngsters through a critical methodology informed by anthropophagy.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing upon an engaged investigation informed by both performative CMS and decoloniality from Latin America we embody a performative CMS “otherwise.” Through the engagement with GA, and corresponding disengagement with our institutions, we propose decolonial anthropophagy as a way to move beyond Eurocentric critiques of Eurocentrism and decolonial work monopolized by full-time academics.
Findings
From a decolonial perspective it is shown that the performative turn within CMS could be used as a way of bringing “critical development” and “critical knowledge” to “subalterns” and the “rest of the world” from a perspective of coloniality. An anthropofagic perspective on decoloniality and critique shows that “subalterns” have much to teach us and our institutions and represents a way to decolonize theory-practice and academic-nonacademic divides.
Originality/value
The critical-decolonial anthropophagic perspective put forward in this chapter may represent an opportunity for CMS to move beyond much of its Eurocentric traditions, thus enlarging its geographic and cultural references. It may offer CMS an alternative critical performativity concept from the South which enables CMS to become a “re/disconnector,” instead of a connector, between the Euro-American traditions and the “rest of the world,” and making things happen “otherwise.”
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The establishment of academic voice, authority and identity in international fora, this chapter argues, is both a central challenge and a central benefit of international academic…
Abstract
The establishment of academic voice, authority and identity in international fora, this chapter argues, is both a central challenge and a central benefit of international academic relations. For the presentation (of new ideas, papers, paradigms: the lifeblood of academic interchange) entails the mediation not just of a text but also of persona: both must be ‘translated’ for the ‘foreign’ and host audience; both are changed in the process. As always, that which is found, as well as lost, in translation reveals much about the essential qualities of the ‘original’: here the author's ‘original’ academic voice and identity.
This chapter draws on ethnographic and inter-cultural representational models to explore the proper form of recording and reflecting/reflecting on one particular intercultural academic encounter. It uses explanatory models drawn from Academic Literacies, Sociolinguistics and Translation Studies to try to analyse and understand the process, effect and implications of that encounter. In order to establish that which is performative in academic identity, it gives an evaluative account of what it means to lose, and regain, one's academic voice.