Drawing on institutional theory emphasizing translation and discourse, we explore outsider-driven deinstitutionalization through a case study of the abandonment of widespread, taken-for-granted ...practices of DDT use between 1962 and 1972. Our findings illustrate how abandonment of practices results from "problematizations" that—through subsequent "translation"—change discourse in ways that undermine the institutional pillars supporting practices. This occurs through new "subject positions" from which actors speak and act in support of problematizations, and new bodies of knowledge, which normalize them. We introduce the concept of "defensive institutional work" and illustrate how actors carry out disruptive and defensive work by authoring texts.
We examine post-inquiry sensemaking by emergency management practitioners following an inquiry into the most damaging bushfire disaster in Australia’s history. We theorize a model of post-inquiry ...sensemaking with four distinct but overlapping phases during which sensemaking becomes more prospective over time. In addition to providing important insights into what has, hitherto, been a neglected arena for sensemaking studies, i.e. post-inquiry sensemaking, we contribute to the understanding of sensemaking more generally. Specifically, we show the complex nature of the relationship between sensemaking and equivocality, explain how multiple frames enhance sensemaking, and explore temporality in sensemaking over time.
We examine how a new discourse shapes the emergence of new global regulatory institutions and, specifically, the roles played by actors and the texts they author during the institution-building ...process, by investigating a case study of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and its relationship to the new environmental regulatory discourse of ‘precaution’. We show that new discourses do not neatly supplant legacy discourses but, instead, are made to overlap and interact with them through the authorial agency of actors, as a result of which the meanings of both are changed. It is out of this discursive struggle that new institutions emerge.
We explore the discursive processes through which a field-configuring event can change an institutional field and organizations. Our case study is of the United Nations conference leading to the ...Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, which established new global regulations for several dangerous chemicals but excepted the insecticide DDT. Our study highlights how the production, distribution, and consumption of texts in the multiple discursive spaces generated by a field-configuring event allow new narratives to be told, and how, in turn, these narratives can lead to change in an institutional field and in organizations through three mechanisms: domination, interpretation, and translation.
Drawing on the work of Foucault, we develop an integrated framework for understanding how risk is organized in three different modes: prospectively, in real time, and retrospectively. We show how ...these modes are situated in a dominant discourse of risk that leads organizations to normalize risk in particular ways by privileging certain forms of knowledge and authorizing certain risk identities over others. In addition to identifying the common way risk is organized in each mode and showing how it is held in place by the dominant discourse, we propose alternative ways to organize risk that resist this dominant discourse, and we explain why they are difficult to enact. We then extend our analysis by theorizing how, even when it occurs, resistance to the dominant discourse of risk can contribute to "riskification," with more and more organizing undertaken in the name of risk because of intensification, discipline, and governmentality.
Discourse in a Material World Hardy, Cynthia; Thomas, Robyn
Journal of management studies,
July 2015, Letnik:
52, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We challenge recent assertions that discourse studies cannot de facto address materiality. We demonstrate how a Foucauldian theorization of discourse provides a way to analyse the co‐constitutive ...nature of discursive and material processes, as well as explore the power relations implicated in these relationships. To illustrate our argument, we identify exemplary studies that have effectively combined a study of discourse and different aspects of materiality – bodies, objects, spaces, and practices. In doing so, we show how discourse scholars are able to study both materiality and power relations.
We adopt a Foucauldian approach to discourse to show how power relations shape the constitution of strategy. By exploring two particular discourses associated with the strategy of a global ...telecommunications company, our study shows how the power effects of discourses are intensified through particular discursive and material practices, leading to the production of objects and subjects that are clearly aligned with the strategy. In this way, our study contributes to understanding: the mechanisms whereby discourse bears down on strategy through intensification practices; different forms of resistance; and the way in which strategy objects and subjects reproduce (or undermine) discourse.
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