Scandinavian Journal of Management最新文献

An increasing number of companies transform their traditional office spaces into open work environments, often as part of an effort for working relations to evolve away from rigid and hierarchical structures. Contrary to intentions, recent studies show how open office projects tend to re-produce social hierarchy and norms but say only little about how these socio-spatial structures come into being. In this study, we demonstrate how a workspace designed as ‘open’ is being (re-)produced and negotiated in everyday spatial practices. We investigate this question in an ethnographic research design using the example of office redesign at a German financial service company and from the perspective of social theories of space. First, we develop a critical perspective on the ‘new office’ by demonstrating that office work redesign is a political process. Through a focus on spatial practices of office work, we disclose movement and sound as crucial dimensions in the socio-political construction of ‘agile’ office work and of a social hierarchy in the open office. Second, based on our findings we propose that openness in organizational space, rather than being a design feature of a specific work environment, needs to be understood as a generative social process.

Higher education institutions (HEI) are maneuvering the competing institutional logics of academia and commerce, which provide widely conflicting bases for legitimacy ascriptions. HEI that try to internalize both competing institutional logics become hybrids, addressing the resulting internal tensions and conflicts through efforts of structural separation or blending. Whereas these generic approaches have been well described, also for HEI, their underlying, constituting organizational design remains unclear. We refer to the general organization design literature to suggest templates for hybrid HEI. Dependent on the relative strength attributed to the two competing logics, respectively, we specify typical organizational designs reflecting separation as well as blending solutions. We embed these hybrid organizational design types with the pure archetypes of both logics and offer implications for research and practice in the HE field.

This paper examines the translation of Leadership Pipeline in a Danish fire department. On the basis of a distinction between faithful and unfaithful imitation, we contribute to a better understanding of imitation as a driving force in translation processes. Rather than equating imitation with unfaithfulness, we show that translation can be guided by different and successive imitation modes over time and involve different degrees and combinations of ideational and organizational change. We connect different imitation modes with two translation outcomes; disalignment and reproduction, that have received little attention in previous research.

In the past decades, the number of female employees and managers has strongly increased in most developed countries. This demographic development emphasizes the importance to investigate gender dissimilarity between employees and their supervisor and how it can be managed to elicit beneficial gender dissimilarity effects on employees’ attitudes and interpersonal interactions. Past gender dissimilarity research often assumes women and men to have different values. Due to these value differences, women and men should be less satisfied with a supervisor who has a different gender. However, past research reported inconsistent gender dissimilarity effects on employees’ satisfaction and other work-related satisfaction variables. To clarify gender dissimilarity effects on employees’ satisfaction with their supervisor, we analyze the moderating role of an employee’s beliefs in gender equality. We further draw on social identity theory and investigate value fit with the supervisor and identification with the supervisor as underlying mechanisms of gender dissimilarity effects. To test our research model, we conducted a three-wave survey study with 463 employees. Value fit and identification with the supervisor mediated the relationship between gender dissimilarity and employees’ satisfaction with supervisor. This indirect relationship was only significant for employees with low beliefs in gender equality. This means high beliefs in gender equality can offset dysfunctional gender dissimilarity effects.

This paper adds to the recent interest in the link between cash and firm performance, by studying how this relationship varies across boom- and bust cycles. We use data of Norwegian firms from a broad range of sectors in the period 2005–2015, and both replicate and extend previous findings on the relationship between cash and performance over the business cycle. We find that i) cash has a positive, but weakly diminishing effect on operational firm performance (ROA) throughout the entire sample period, and ii) that the curvilinear relationship between cash and firm performance is the most pronounced in the pre-recession years, while it is virtually linearly positive in recessions and post-recession periods. We conclude that cash indeed has an impact on firms’ operational performance, and especially so in recessionary times.

This paper develops an ordonomic approach to the governance of sustainable business model innovation (SBMI). We clarify the distinctive roles of optimization and governance for the management of sustainable value networks and develop a sustainability cube as a new management tool for the governance of SBMI. Our cube helps management to identify and overcome social dilemmas within value networks, i.e. to form and reform relevant business relationships, thus creating and tapping second-order win-win-win potentials. Furthermore, our cube encourages management to interpret negative externality problems as “missing markets”, i.e. as an entrepreneurial challenge and as a business opportunity to serve as yet unmet needs. Finally, our cube offers an avenue to develop and strengthen the specific management competencies that foster a successful governance of SBMI.

Drawing on the attention-based view, this study investigates the linkage of top management team (TMT) conflict to entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and the moderating effect of organizational structure in terms of formalization and centralization on the linkage. It finds that TMT cognitive conflict is positively related to EO, while affective conflict is negatively related to it. Furthermore, formalization positively moderates the linkage of TMT cognitive conflict to EO, while negatively moderates the negative linkage of TMT affective conflict to EO. Moreover, centralization does not significantly moderate the linkage of either TMT cognitive or affective conflict to EO. This study enriches our knowledge of the antecedents of EO, improves our understanding of the value of TMT conflict by distinguishing between TMT cognitive conflict and affective conflict, and introduces a novel insight—the attention-based view—to elaborate the TMT conflict-EO linkage.

Grand challenges, as they are currently discussed in management research, refer to societal problems that affect human affairs comprehensively. Tackling grand challenges must therefore be considered first and foremost as an overarching cultural effort. To understand how management theory fits into this effort, the article drafts a new epistemic approach to theory development. The approach is based on the school of Methodical Culturalism in the philosophy of science. It turns the attention to the pragmatic roots of scientific insight in daily life. From the review of extant literature associated with Methodical Culturalism, the article extracts a list of questions to investigate how these pragmatic roots take effect in theory development. Using selected examples, the article gives a brief illustration of the change in perspective that results from the culturalist approach. It argues that management theory can be more closely related to grand challenges when the personal affectedness of scholars as human beings is better taken into account.

In the field of Organization Studies (OS), there has been strong interest in the use of the metaphor of rhizomes as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The merit of the rhizome metaphor is that it offers strong explanatory power in capturing the chaotic, unpredictable, and uncontrollable nature of organizations, which problematizes a managerial reading of organizational process that is often preoccupied with the managerial goals of performance, efficiency, and effectiveness. In the past two decades, with the development of the internet and social media, the concept of rhizome has been concretized as an organizational ontology but, ironically, we have witnessed that the features of rhizome may selectively be employed and developed into a military tactic, to serve a totalitarian interest of control. For instance, the idea of rhizome manoeuvre has widely been adopted by (terrorist) organizations that seek to justify the act of violence. This paper seeks to defend the rhizome and its emancipatory potential but suggests that the use of rhizome must have its provisional boundary. To substantiate this argument, the author conducted an ethnographical study in a social movement organization. The idea of a provisional boundary is in line with Deleuze and Guattari's view of provisional dualism. In this regard, the author suggests that rhizomatic organizations and their actions should be grounded in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical framework of "democracy-to-come", embedded in Bergson's open society. With the help of the empirical data, this paper identifies some tentative principles to inform the actions of rhizomatic organizations.

Branding has become a strategic tool for university management in competition for students, faculty, and funding. In this study, we explore university branding in its extreme form of grandiose branding and ask How can grandiose branding initiate a process that prompts ethically and morally questionable practices in organizations? Grandiose branding is characterized by an excessive use of superlatives that frame higher education institutions as “world-class universities.” Through a self- and autoethnographic single-case study conducted in a business school, our study shows that branding efforts that do not align with an organization’s actual quality and performance can lead to a counterproductive cycle of camouflaging top management’s failures and justifying ethically and morally questionable actions directed towards the institution’s primary stakeholders. The study contributes to the earlier literature on grandiosity in the context of higher education by taking a process perspective and explores the implications of grandiose branding from rhetoric through implementation.