Organization Studies

This paper argues that Karl Popper's notions in his work The Open Society and Its Enemies offer an approach to under-explored issues in organizational research, independent of Popper's epistemology. Popper's thoughts on the philosophy of science have largely been rejected in organization studies, and his socio-philosophical notions have hardly been considered. Yet they provide a frame of reference for viewing management trends, such as anti-bureaucratism and collectivist forms of work organization, in a different light. Popper's socio-philosophical notions suggest that `closed' patterns of thinking are detrimental to a liberal-democratic social order. The paper argues that an outline of the philosophy of openness and closedness and an application to managerial concepts allows for insights into whether certain types of managerial thinking stand in contrast to, or in accordance with, a liberal-democratic order. It is concluded that, through the Popperian lens, some supposedly liberationist movements of management (liberation from bureaucracy or from a lack of belonging and emotion at work) possess clear traits of closedness and thus resemble the intellectual underpinnings of totalitarianism.

The adoption of the incorporated form of ownership in preference to partnership is linked to the shift to a more modem organizational archetype in professional firms. Yet existing empirical research offers insufficient insight into the organizational processes of this transformation in different professional arenas. Where ownership and control become separated, there is a clearer theoretical explanation of the implications for the way the firm is run. Where ownership and control remain inside the firm, however, the consequences are not so clear and have not been well explored. Using survey and interview materials derived from a study of architecture practices, we examine the processes by which differences based on ownership emerge. Then, by drawing on Weberian theories, where they are concerned with professionalization as a project with material and social rewards, we specify more clearly the context for change in professional firms' archetypes. This, we conclude, provides a stronger basis for understanding the change trajectories of firms within professions and comparative organizational analysis between professions.

This article concentrates on the discursive construction of success and failure in narratives of post-merger integration. Drawing on extensive interview material from eight Finnish-Swedish mergers and acquisitions, the empirical analysis leads to distinguishing four types of discourse — `rationalistic', `cultural', `role-bound' and `individualistic' — that narrators employ in recounting their experiences. In particular, the empirical material illustrates how the discursive frameworks enable specific (discursive) strategies and moves for (re)framing the success/failure, justification/legitimization of one's own actions, and (re)construction of responsibility when dealing with socio-psychological pressures associated with success/failure. The analysis also suggests that, as a result of making use of these discursive strategies and moves, success stories are likely to lead to overly optimistic or, in the case of failure stories, overly pessimistic views on the management's ability to control these change processes. These findings imply that we should take the discursive elements that both constrain our descriptions and explanations seriously, and provide opportunities for more or less intentional (re)interpretations of postmerger integration or other organizational change processes.

In this article, we put forth a comparative study of gender distinctions and relations within the processes of organizational reform in a German and a Finnish bank. We demonstrate how these processes are interwoven with assumptions about the `ideal worker' (cf. Acker 1990; 1992) that organizational members are measured against in management. We argue that the `ideal worker', even though, in general, a masculine notion, should not be perceived as a universal or as a static category. We suggest that notions of the `ideal worker' not only vary within different models of work organization, but that they vary across societal contexts. These notions are based on different gender orders (cf. Connell 1987) which penetrate organizational life and become incorporated in different, though predominantly masculine, conceptions. `Ideal worker' is also not a static category. If we consider gender distinctions and relations in organizations as produced, reproduced and redefined through continuously ongoing social interaction, there is a need to analyze how the notion of the `ideal worker' evolves in time — when organizations become subject to change efforts through reforms.

This study explores the ways in which the expression and management of emotion influence organizational action. The interview sample consisted of 21 volunteer leaders of a non-profit professional association. The triangulated design included interviews, observations, and document analyses. Emotion expression was primarily associated with externally oriented organizational actions, such as mission; emotion management was primarily associated with internally oriented organizational actions, such as culture. This expression and management combined to form a reciprocal connection between the volunteers and the organization that resulted in emotion structuration that masked the need for the organization to consider cultural change.