JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT INQUIRY – October 2019
Apologies for cross-postings. Articles from the October 2019 issue of the Journal of Management Inquiry are now available. Please enjoy free access through November 8th by clicking on the URL for each article.
Open access to Getting to the CORE: Putting an End to the Term 'Soft Skills' (J. Parlamis & M. Monnot, Vol. 28(2): 225-227; https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492618818023) and the Editors' Choice five-paper series starting with My Presidency of the Academy of Management: Moral Responsibility, Leadership, Governance, Organizational Change, and Strategy (A. McGahan, Vol. 28(3): 251-309; https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492619850900) will continue indefinitely.
OCTOBER 2019 ISSUE
ESSAYS
Case Studies as Narratives: Reflections Prompted by the Case of Victor, the Wild Child of Aveyron
Yiannis Gabriel
JMI 2019, Vol. 28(4): 403–408
https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492617715522
Drawing on a celebrated case study of a feral child in France, the author argues that there are similarities between stories and case studies as types of narrative and that they are both capable of acting as insightful tools of management inquiry. Both case studies and stories call for narrative imagination to develop meaningful narratives. Serendipity, the accidental discovery of meaning or purpose in what seems random and purposeless, is an important part of narrative imagination. As meaningful narratives, both case studies and stories follow a structure of interwoven actions and events with beginnings, middles, and ends. However, where storytellers enjoy poetic license to distort facts for effect, case study researchers are more constrained by factual accuracy. The beginnings and ends of case studies are not as clearly defined as those of stories and fictional narratives.
Keywords: case study, story, management learning, narrative, feral children, serendipity, narrative imagination, affordance theory
Are Logics Enough? Framing as an Alternative Tool for Understanding Institutional Meaning Making
Jill Purdy, Shaz Ansari, and Barbara Gray
JMI 2019, Vol. 28(4): 409–420
https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492617724233
Understanding institutions requires attending both to their social fact qualities and to the bidirectional nature of institutional processes as they influence and are influenced by actors. We advocate for frames and framing as tools to elucidate meaning making activities, and to explain whether and how meanings subsequently spread, scale up, and perhaps become widely institutionalized. Frames as cognitive structures provide resources for actors and shape what they see as possible, while framing as an interaction process is a source of agency that is embedded in the everyday activities of individuals, groups, and organizations. In making the case for the framing approach, we consider how the extensive use of the logics approach in organization theory research has created confusion about what logics are and how they accommodate both structure and agency. We conclude with a discussion of the phenomenological and ontological potential of frames and framing.
Keywords: institutional theory, communication, cognitive perspectives
Promethean Business: From Financial Hedonism to Financial Eudaimonia
Steven A. Edelson
JMI 2019, Vol. 28(4): 421–426
https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492617725201
The story of Prometheus and Pandora serves as an apt analogical device through which to demonstrate the impact that publicly traded corporations, and the shareholder primacy approach to corporate governance has created unintended consequences. Prometheus's benevolent gift of fire led to the collateral damage of Pandora's Box unleashing ills on mankind. Similarly, incorporation was a positive development that supported businesses lasting beyond one generation of owners, and led to businesses thriving and creating innovations that improve our lives. However, with these innovations and the related
consumption has come a figurative Pandora's Box of ills to society, including but not limited to widening income inequality, greater personal debt, and environmental degradation. In this critical essay, Greek mythology and classical philosophical approaches to happiness are intertwined with corporate approaches to stakeholder and shareholder optimization.
Keywords: sustainability, corporate social responsibility, environmental responsibility, corporate governance
GENERATIVE CURIOSITY
Employers and the Reintegration of Formerly Incarcerated Persons
Jerry D. Goodstein
JMI 2019, Vol. 28(4): 427–431
https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492619856434
In this initial submission, I argue for the importance of management researchers pursuing scholarly inquiry and research on the topic of employer reintegration of the formerly incarcerated. Around the world, there is growing political and social interest in criminal justice reform and rising expectations for businesses to respond to these changes. While criminologists have documented significant barriers contributing to employer resistance to hiring the formerly incarcerated, far less attention has been paid to employer hiring and retention of formerly incarcerated individuals. I suggest some possibilities for how understanding the dynamics and implications of employer hiring and retention of formerly incarcerated individuals can generate new conceptual and empirical insights of academic and practical relevance.
Keywords: corporate social responsibility, legal issues and employment law, recruitment
MEET THE PERSON
Negotiation Lessons from Former Wiseguy, Michael Franzese
Christopher J. Meyer, Blaine McCormick, and Mark Osler
JMI 2019, Vol. 28(4): 432–441
https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492618818380
Thirteen years after his release from a federal penitentiary and after successfully walking away from a life in the Mafia, former crime boss Michael Franzese sat down with interviewers to discuss negotiation. The interviewers focused on the application of current academic thought to the unique negotiations in a Mafia-run business setting. The interviewers found a very competitive environment in the Mafia businesses, as was to be expected. However, an unexpected finding was that one of the most successful negotiators in this competitive environment was not competitive, but collaborative. In fact, the anecdotes related here will demonstrate that Mr. Franzese was a very successful negotiator in part, because he was a collaborative negotiator.
Keywords: conflict management, negotiations, power and politics
NON-TRADITIONAL RESEARCH
When Top Management Leadership Matters: Insights from Artistic Interventions
Ariane Berthoin Antal, Gervaise Debucquet, and Sandrine Frémeaux2
JMI 2019, Vol. 28(4): 442–458
https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492617726393
This article addresses how top management leadership behaviors matter in innovative interventions in organizations. A comparison of six cases of artistic interventions in four countries reveals that lack of visible top management support and sense-making orientation during and after the process resulted in little added value for the organization in three cases. Three other cases show various ways in which top management can legitimize such experimentation, from which more positive outcomes flowed at the individual and collective levels. The implications are counterintuitive because top management faces two sets of tensions in innovative processes: presence/absence and providing orientation/being open to learning. The article suggests ways that top managers can address these tensions, including by engaging in constellations of distributed leadership, for which this article proposes a new definition.
Keywords: leadership, organizational learning, innovation, artistic interventions, sensemaking
How Materiality Enables and Constrains Framing Practices: Affordances of a Rheumatology E-Service
Anna Essén and Sara Winterstorm Värlander
JMI 2019, Vol. 28(4): 459–472
https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492618760722
Framing has been presented as a way for micro-level actors to change and diffuse innovations. However, most framing studies have given primacy to language, whereas the role of material artifacts has been largely ignored. The aim of this study is to conceptualize and illustrate how the materiality of technology enables and constrains framing practices. We use empirical data about the development and diffusion of an e-service in the Swedish rheumatology setting from 2000 to 2014. Our results show how three different material features of the technology (data content, user rights, and system integration) initially afforded two different framings of the technology: normalizing and radicalizing framings. The material features, however, lost their ability to afford radicalizing framings over time, along with changes in the collective-action frames governing the field studied.
Keywords: health care, technology, institutional entrepreneurship, institutional theory
The Failure of Internal Audit: Monitoring Gaps and a Case for a New Focus
Joe Christopher
JMI 2019, Vol. 28(4): 473–484
https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492618774852
Within the management and organization field, the internal audit function (IAF) plays an important role in enhancing good governance. Given the spate of corporate collapses over the last 20 years, this article draws on a multi-theoretical approach to governance and a critical review of the published literature to identify where IAFs have failed, and to provide a new focus to strengthen their role. Common themes regarding monitoring gaps by IAFs were identified as occurring across three governance levels. A contributory cause for these gaps is the poor structural and functional arrangements of the IAF, arising from the considerable flexibility afforded in its setup and delivery of services. A negative consequence of this flexibility is the ability of the board and management to manipulate the role of the IAF to the extent that it is not aligned with the intention of its setup as encapsulated in its definition.
Keywords: corporate culture, ethics, financial control, multilevel framework, organizational behavior
PROVOCATIONS & PROVOCATEURS
Twitter Women's Tips on Academic Writing: A Female Response to Gioia's Rules of the Game
Trisha Greenhalgh
JMI 2019, Vol. 28(4): 485–488
https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492619861796
This article, intended in a spirit of good humor, offers a critique of a paper by Gioia on how to get published. Based on a social media discussion to which 46 women academics from around the world contributed, we ask whether the recommendations in Gioia's original paper are based on gendered assumptions and stereotypes (the "lone wolf" male academic competing with colleagues for a slot in a prestigious journal). Drawing on feminist scholars such as Mary Wollstonecraft ("Virtue can only flourish among equals"), we offer some additional recommendations which emphasize the importance of reflection, collaboration, acceptance of ambiguity, attention to audience and context, and nurturing self and others.
Keywords: publishing, rules, gender
To Access the Gioia paper (Gioia's Rules of the Game, JMI 2019, Vol. 28(1): 113-115; https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492618789864)
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The Editorial Board of JMI thanks Sage Publications for its generosity in sharing published articles openly.
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Richard Stackman
Professor
University of San Francisco
San Francisco CA
(415) 422-2148
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