Scandinavian Journal of Management最新文献

Despite previous efforts to deal with the ontological split between human subjects and reality, sensemaking has remained human-centered. We argue that human-centered sensemaking risks omitting constitutive elements of reality. To escape the ontological split, we decenter sensemaking and thus extend it in such a way that it allows seemingly unrelated and independent humans and nonhumans to become connected and interdependent with what is made sense of. Doing so allows us to demonstrate how a decentered understanding of reality can produce a radically different understanding of research phenomena. As a means to show the consequences of a decentered sensemaking, we revisit the Mann Gulch disaster and show that not all disasters can be avoided by better sensemaking or good management.

This introduces the reader to the Great Reset of management and organization theory. Concepts are discussed and six cases are presented, provoking thought, debate, and dialogue for or against a Great Reset of management and organization theory. We conclude that management and organisation theorists might rather study than advocate or co-perform resets great or small that aim at privileging this development goal or that minority over others.

Situated in the car insurance sector, this study investigates the implementation of a smartphone app interface aimed to realise an IT-enabled competitive advantage by engaging customers whilst simultaneously collecting data for a future transformation of the company’s control systems. Unfolding three dimensions of the performativity of the app, namely codes, visualisations, and narrations, the study shows how different actors and interests, within and outside the organisation, negotiated the features, scope, and value of the digital offering. The study finds that the company favoured marketing concerns over internal control concerns because the analytical possibilities of the data collected were too uncertain. The results suggest that digital innovations are accompanied by an increased agency of the customers that can cause negative intra-organisational control consequences and, thus, can contradict the general promise of digital offerings, hindering a realisation of a competitive advantage.

While there is a lot of research on emotions at the small group level, we lack an understanding of the role of emotions at the large group level, including in interorganizational relationships. This study contributes to filling this important gap in the literature by studying the emotions in an interorganizational network longitudinally over a period of six years. The data reveal how the network offers a particular kind of space in which relational energy emerges, amplifies, can deplete, and can be re-set and turned around. The findings show how network emotions are recursively related to network outcomes, specifically the extent to which the common goal is achieved. This paper contributes to the growing literature on emotions in organization studies by shifting attention toward the important role of context, and it theorizes the interorganizational network as a particular kind of context where individuals interact in a semi-structured manner, with important implications for the interdependent relationship between individual emotions, relational energy, and network properties and outcomes.

Regardless of the best intentions to address the issue among policy makers, affordable housing remains one of the most underprovided assets in advanced economies, otherwise characterized by an ample supply of product offerings. The paper addressed the question of how affordable housing can be provided on basis of new housing production. The study is premised on the theoretical proposition that excellence is not primarily a matter of working “harder” or “smarter” than competitors do, but is rather an effect of small, yet discernable qualitative changes (being the basis for the management of the “mundanity of excellence”) that generate benefits and returns in excess of what may be originally expected. The value of such “small wins” are of general relevance for any organized activity or managerial pursuit. Drawing on a study of two low-cost producers operating in the Swedish market and (in one of the cases) abroad, it is shown that to make newly produced homes affordable (defined in local terms on basis of documented housing sales and their buying price), the planning, production, and sales cost need to be minimized throughout the whole process. Affordable housing is thus provided on basis of a full organizational and wider institutional commitment to serve households with limited budget headroom, and this work demands a long-term commitment to stated business objectives and enacted housing policies.

Translation studies increasingly foreground the significance of local actors as agentic translators. Drawing on a brokerage work perspective, this article seeks to advance our understanding of managerial agents as translators by examining how and why these may vary in their role as intermediary or ‘strategic third’, and how these roles are associated with different patterns of translation. Examining qualitative data from a study of individuals tasked with implementing Lean in hospital contexts, we identify three brokerage modes of translation these actors may engage in (stretching, shielding and synthesizing), their main conditions, and the specific translation tactics they use within these modes (positioning, labeling and channeling). Our study extends our understanding of micro-level translation and reveals that purposeful ‘misalignment’ may be a significant and under-theorized part of the translation process.

This article is a reply to Foss et al.’s (2022) contribution to the special issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Management on The Great Reset of management and organization theory. In their article, the authors make a strong case that “reset thinking” geared towards a more “sustainable” redesign of the global economy promotes extensive state interventionism and cronyism capitalism, and therefore reject the idea of a need for “a fundamental rethink of existing management theory”. Whereas I do agree with the authors on most points, I am less convinced that “existing management theory” will suffice to address the problem of “reset thinking”. In this article, I demonstrate that the economy-bias of existing theories is a gateway for “reset thinking” geared towards an allegedly necessary re-/socialisation of management and organisation. A research agenda on cronyism must therefore be complemented by one on privilege and hierarchy not only as undesirable side-effects of cronyism, but also as desired outcomes of advocacy for specific minorities or missions. As self-identifications with group interests or calls for missions have become popular in management theory, I conclude that this new appetite for privilege might undermine not only the higher ideals of many management theorists, but also the foundations of modern society.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world in March 2020, it impacted all areas of society. Most conspicuous were the lockdowns that were quickly imposed in many countries along with other restrictions. These interventions into the everyday life of ordinary citizens were, perhaps not surprisingly, often met with resistance by citizens and businesses that felt their rights were being trampled on by governments. In this paper, we analyse reactions towards the far-reaching measures taken by the Danish government to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the fur industry and thereby prevent the development of new mutations of the virus: to cull all minks and temporarily ban mink production in Denmark. We argue that by studying this case, valuable lessons can be learned regarding how a business community reacts when faced with a great reset. Taking the current climate crisis into consideration, it must be expected that emission-heavy industries, like agriculture, will be faced with calls to radically change their mode of production in the near future. In this sense, we propose to view the Danish mink case as an early example of what a great reset could look like, how it is perceived by those who experience it first-hand, and how feelings of resentment and resistance can develop following a logic of (mis)recognition.

Data transcription is often depicted as an essential and critical stage in qualitative research. As most researchers have experienced, it requires significant time and human resource investment. We focus on transcription strategies, a topic typically missing from the methodology discourse. We explore the biases and challenges of each of the transcription strategies. By analysing 434 academic refereed papers from top journals, we underline the lack of scrutiny over the transcription process, its impact, and strategies taken to conduct it. We also interviewed some of the authors to better understand the challenges associated with transcription. This paper aims at contributing to more reflexivity on the existing strategies regarding transcription and how to increase transparency in qualitative research.

Recent scholarship focuses on new venture ideation—the process of generating and developing new venture ideas—separately from venture development, as the creation of new ventures begins with new venture ideas. In this study, we ask which practices are being enacted to carry out new venture ideation, and how and why are they constituted by aspiring entrepreneurs. By conducting a video ethnography, we find that aspiring entrepreneurs utilize six practices, i.e., ‘how might we’, ‘seeing’, ‘do you mean’, ‘yes, and’, ‘invitation’, and ‘but, what’ linked to the formulation, explaining, extending and questioning of new venture ideas. Our study extends the relational perspective of new venture ideation by detailing the relations between conversation, bodies and visual artefacts that facilitate the joint exercise of entrepreneurial imagination.