M@n@gement

Taking Part, Contributing, Benefiting: Toward a Democratic Model of Employee Participation

Benjamin Chapas — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0700

Employee participation has long been a central challenge facing the management and governance of any company. It is considered a success factor for companies, as well as an important condition for employee empowerment and emancipation. However, most scholarship in this field tends to position employee participation as a simple add-on policy, rather than a reconceptualization of the collective work environment that can enable the convergence of individual needs and the common good. The challenge, therefore, is to better value the capacity of employees to manage their work environment in a collective and responsible manner. Our goal in this essay is to address this challenge by sketching a political perspective on employee participation. We rely on Zask’s work on contributive democracy in this regard. We begin by discussing some of the limitations of the dominant approach to employee participation, especially financial participation. We then present the three different dimensions of participation highlighted by Zask to show how all three taken together can constitute a promising model of social control and self-government by employees. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and managerial implications of this model.

Questioning ‘Feminine Managerial Behavior’ – A European Study Considering Gender Ideology

Clotilde Coron — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800

The concept of a ‘feminine managerial behavior’, which implies that women in managerial positions behave differently to men in similar positions by exhibiting a more supportive management style, is both widespread and controversial. To gain new insight into the debate, this study looks at the role national gender ideology plays in structuring the relationship between sex and perceived managerial support. Based on a representative sample of 22,391 employees from 26 European countries, our findings reveal that, on average, perceived managerial support is higher when supervisors are women. However, if we control for the moderating role of national gender ideology, this difference disappears. Therefore, this article contributes to the nature/nurture debate by showing that gender differences in perceived managerial support stem primarily from persistent gender stereotypes.

Mal du Siècle. From the Disenchanted Youth of the Romantic Age to the Disillusionment of Today’s Young Graduates

Thomas Simon, Marion Cina, Xavier Philippe — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Organisational absurdity is an emerging field of study in management sciences. Often described in conceptual terms in the existing literature as a loss of meaning arising from the collapsing frontiers of rationality, there have been few attempts to engage empirically with this absurdity, particularly from the perspective of new recruits joining organisations, and more specifically those who have recently completed their studies. Our research seeks to explore the ways in which young graduates respond to organisational absurdity and its consequences. To do this, we use an original empirical approach, which has been recognised elsewhere as a pertinent means of tackling absurdity, namely, fictional analysis. We thus propose an analogy between today’s young graduates and the young Romantics of the 19th century, invoking a number of literary references for heuristic ends, in order to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon in question. Now as in centuries past, upon coming face-to-face with absurdity, a considerable number of young people respond by retreating from their professional responsibilities. This state of affairs is illustrated by a series of 35 interviews, revealing a profound sense of disenchantment, which, in many cases, can lead young professionals to turn inwards and withdraw from their professional environments. In the face of this distress, our research invites organisations to rethink the way they manage young graduates.

Sense-Remaking: Unpacking Ethical Judgment Change in a Business Ethics Course

Loréa Baïada-Hirèche, Lionel Garreau, Jean Pasquero — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0700

While business ethics (BE) courses have increasingly formed part of business school curricula, we still do not know much about how these courses can change students’ capacity to deal with ethical issues. Drawing on a sensemaking perspective, we conducted an action research study with 66 business professionals enrolled in an executive training program at a French university. The aim was to investigate the processes underlying ethical judgment (EJ) change through a BE course. Participants were invited to pick a significant ethical issue they had personally experienced at work. They were then asked to make sense of it, in writing, at the beginning and at the end of the course, 3 months later. In comparing pre-course and post-course judgments, we concluded that the structure and contents of the respondents’ initial judgment had indeed been modified. This change could be accounted for as the outcome of four ‘sense-remaking’ mechanisms, which we theorize as complexifying, reprioritizing, conceptualizing and contextualizing. Our study contributes to the literature on BE education by demonstrating the benefits of a sensemaking approach. It also offers an original process-based model of EJ, specifying the mechanisms at play in EJ change. Finally, it contributes to the field of sensemaking studies by introducing the concept of sense-remaking, shedding new light on the evolutive dimension of sensemaking.

Institutions and the Common Good. Reconceptualizing Institutional Values as Virtues

Elke Weik — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800

This paper addresses the critique regarding the apolitical nature of institutionalist theorizing by developing the concept of virtuous institutions. I start from the observation that current public discourses are often characterized by a destructive pitting of ‘my values’ against ‘your values’. Values, in this usage, represent personal emotion-laden beliefs that are ultimately incompatible. In addition to fueling destructive public discourses, incompatible values (a feature that is central to institutional value theorizing) make system integration (a feature that is also central to institutional theorizing) very difficult. I therefore propose to reconceptualize values as virtues. Drawing on the communitarian ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre and the concept of institutional valuation of Roger Friedland, I suggest a reconceptualization of institutional values that introduces the notion of a common good, understands institutional practices as co-constitutive with such a good, and abolishes the assumption that values are fundamentally irrational and beyond reasoning.

How Management Situations Change Dispositives : Public Management in the case of Animal Epidemics

François Charrier, Marc Barbier, Nathalie Raulet-Croset — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 12:18:31 -0700

Against a backdrop of change in the French public health governance system, this article examines the dynamics of public-sector dispositives in managing livestock epidemics, situations that are typically fraught with doubt and often lead to crises of governance (‘mad cow’ disease, ‘bird flu’, foot-and-mouth, etc.). In such complex, interorganizational situations, marked by uncertainty and tight management time frames, fresh organizational and managerial activity is constantly required, making it a challenging task to characterize and understand the dynamics of the management dispositives that are activated along the way.

In order to produce a detailed and dynamic mapping of dispositives, we draw on the theoretical framework of ‘dispositional analysis’, developed by recent rereadings of Michel Foucault’s concept of the dispositive. To this, we bring the micro and situated perspective of the ‘day-to-day administering of lives’, introducing Jacques Girin’s concept of the ‘management situation’. We thus hypothesize that management situations are sites of intensive dispositive recombination and offer a useful interpretive frame for dispositive dynamics. Our methodology is based on a longitudinal and comparative analysis of three animal health disease management situations in a particular region (a health crisis, the reemergence of a disease, and an endemic disease situation).

Our analysis reveals an architecture of health dispositives whose relationships change as the management situation evolves. Three modes of recombination are identified, produced through the mechanisms of problematization (reformulating the problem) and stakeholder participation. This article makes visible the complex links between the evolution of the situations and the dynamics of the dispositives and provides food for thought in building a more robust governance of public animal health problems, combining situational and planning approaches.

Liberate the Article! Proposals for Simplified Scientific Writing Conventions

Hervé Laroche — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 12:23:24 -0700

A huge amount of advice and guidance has been provided on how to craft articles for top-tier journals. Simultaneously, research publications themselves have been criticized as formulaic or even nonsensical by some scholars. Despite this heated debate, the structural aspects of scientific texts have received little attention. The typical structure that articles are expected to follow and the typical story they are supposed to recount are presented as mere conventions that bear no consequences. In this essay, I discuss these taken-for-granted assumptions and analyze the significant costs and burdens generated by these conventions. I then propose to simplify writing conventions by focusing on the basic ingredients of research rather than the imposition of a rigid structure and a standard story. I argue that more freedom should be given to authors in the way they organize their papers. Such a reform would be easy to implement and would have mostly positive implications for all stakeholders.