It is increasingly common to describe academic research as a publication game, a metaphor that connotes instrumental strategies for publishing in highly rated journals. However, we suggest that the use of this metaphor is problematic. In particular, the metaphor allows scholars to make a convenient, but ultimately misleading, distinction between figurative game-playing on one hand (i.e. pursuing external career goals through instrumental publishing) and proper research on the other hand (i.e. producing intrinsically meaningful research). In other words, the publication game implies that while academic researchers may behave just like players, they are not really playing a game. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we show that this metaphor prevents us, ironically, from fully grasping the lusory attitude, or play-mentality, that characterizes academic work among critical management researchers. Ultimately, we seek to stimulate reflection about how our choice of metaphor can have performative effects in the university and influence our behavior in unforeseen and potentially undesirable ways.
The research process and production of scientific knowledge has traditionally been understood to be based on abstract analysis and intellectual capacity rather than physical and emotional resources, promoting an understanding of academic practice as a detached, non-emotional and objective activity. Lately, several researchers have bemoaned this lack of recognition of the bodiliness of our work. In this study, we attempt to address this gap by exploring and conceptualizing some of the ways in which the embodied dimensions of academic research practices are intertwined with the articulation of ideas in the writing of scientific texts. In order to pursue our aim, we draw on experiences explicated through an autoethnographic approach, including the generation of personal narratives and in-depth conversations with 18 researchers from different universities in Europe and the US. The article contributes to the sociology of science and academic literacy literature, by conceptualizing the interconnectedness between sensuous and discursive understandings in this context. With the advancement of this theoretical approach, we illuminate how scientific practice is bound up with emotional, embodied, material, social, political and institutional forces. We also challenge the dichotomy between ‘knowledge work’ or theoretical tasks on the one hand, and ‘body work’ or physical labor on the other.
Innovative firms decentralize decision-making power to foster organizationallearning at the lower levels of the chain of command. However, abilities to capitalize onorganizational learning may be impeded by a concomitant process of organizationalforgetting. Empirical evidence concerning this process was gathered at the subsidiaries inSpain and Sweden of two large automobile manufacturing corporations. This evidenceshows the antecedents of organizational forgetting and how the process of forgetfulness occursafter a long Period of learning and success. It is argued that organizational structure andnational culture playa significant role in the relative success or failure of innovative projectsaiming at implementing organizational learning at the operational level.
As a result of their learning techniques, organizations tend to generate dominant behavior of either exploitation or exploration making a balanced attention to them hard to achieve. But how can the process through which this undesirable phenomenon develops be made more complicated? Largely this problem remains a neglected one in organizational learning theory. It is important to better understand how organizations can take measures to reduce the pathological effects that learning breeds. In this article I explore the idea of 'complicating the organization' in order to constrain organizations from becoming swiftly locked in learning behavior of excessive exploitation or exploration. I suggest that contemporary organizations should complicate their learning through various interorganizational collaborations. In interorganizational learning activities, organizations have the potential to learn slowly because of being poorly focused in their attention to their experiences. Hence, they may remain open to reflect upon their current operations. They will be learning, but not in a too simpleminded and myopic way by reducing the speed through which competency traps of exploitation and exploration develop.
How are historical, practice-oriented, and critical research perspectives in management affected by digitalization? In this article, we describe and discuss how two digital research approaches can be applied and how they may influence the future directions of management scholarship and education: Social Media Analytics and digital archives. Our empirical illustrations suggest that digitalization generates productivity improvements for scholars, making it possible to undertake research that was previously too laborious. It also enables researchers to pay closer attention to detail while still being able to abstract and generalize. We therefore argue that digitalization contributes to a historical turn in management, that practice-oriented research can be conducted with less effort and improved quality and that micro-level data in the form of digital archives and online contents make it easier to adopt critical perspectives.
Collaboration between academia and practice is crucial for addressing complex societal challenges and generating new knowledge. However, bridging the perceived gap between these two domains has proven challenging due to differences in language, expectations, and time horizons. In this article, we question the usefulness of framing these differences as a gap and explores alternative approaches to fostering academic–practice collaboration. With the help of organizational institutionalism and theory on configurational boundary work, we propose the concept of “institutional knots” to temporarily ease tensions and reconcile differences between researchers and practitioners. Drawing on two case studies, we examine how temporary knotting activities can support and enable collaboration without undermining participants’ distinct expertise and professional roles. By embracing and understanding the gap from such a perspective, we argue that institutional knots provide an alternative metaphor and valuable framework for organizing and managing academic–practice collaboration. The findings contribute to the literature on how collaborations may be organized by offering a complementary understanding of the gap metaphor and providing practical insights for researchers and practitioners seeking to navigate and leverage their differences.
When inviting contributions to a special issue of this journal titled ‘Management Learning and the Unsettled Humanities’ the guest editors did not simply encourage contributors to explore possibilities ‘for reciprocal integration’ between the two realms. Stressing that ‘the humanities . . . [are] facing a complex crisis on their own’, they stated that ‘the humanities . . . need to be enriched, nuanced, and critiqued through . . . the ideas and perspectives of organisational research’. While we may agree that all is not well in the humanities and share their scepticism towards ‘just prescribing the value of the humanities to ameliorate the ills of management education’, we are less confident that the humanities need management learning as much as we need them. As long as learning and scholarship in management and organisation studies continues to suffer from too much management, we doubt that ‘management education [may help] . . . unsettl[e] . . . the human within the . . . humanistic . . . disciplines’. Rather, students of management and organisation still have plenty to learn from the humanities, not least from its rich portrayal of human lives. It is on this basis we draw the conclusion that the humanities are not our patient.
The purpose of this article is to deepen the understanding of academic bullying as a consequence of neoliberal reforms in a university. Academics in contemporary universities have been put under pressure by the dominance of neoliberal processes, such as profit maximization, aggressive competitiveness, individualism or self-interest, generating undignifying social behaviours, including bullying practices. The presented story takes us – a junior academic and his conceptual encounterer – through our remembered experiences and field notes around a set of workday events in one European university reformed through managerial solutions as the object of the study. To do that, we employ co-authored analytic autoethnography to learn how neoliberal solutions reinforce paternalistic relationships as significant in career development, how such solutions enable the bullying of young academics and how neoliberalism in academia prevents young academics from contesting bullying. We are particularly interested in the bystander phenomenon: a person who shies away from taking action against bullying and thus strengthens bullying practices.