Search results

This paper presents a reflection in memory and tribute to the work and life of Professor Barbara Czarniawska (1948–2024).

We invited those colleagues whom we knew to be close to Barbara to submit reflections about her contributions to academia alongside their memories of her as a person. We present these reflections in the order we received them, and they have only been edited for minor grammatical and punctuation issues to preserve the voice of the contributing authors.

The reflections in this paper represent different translations of Barbara’s academic and theoretical contributions. However, she also contributed to people. While we can count the number of papers, books and book chapters she published, we must also count the number of co-authors, Ph.D. supervisions, visiting professorships and conference plenaries she touched. This (ac)counting tells the story of Barbara reaching out to work and interact with people, especially students and early career researchers. She touched their lives, and the publications are an artefact of a human being, not an academic stuck in an ivory tower.

A paper in Barbara Czarniawska’s honour where some of her closest colleagues can leave translations of her work through a narrative reflection, seems to be a fitting tribute.

This paper argues for an increased volume of references to Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel in the field of organization sociology. The text emphasizes the importance of these two sociologists in understanding the role of imperfection in organizing and the phenomena of fashion and imitation in contemporary organizations. Tarde’s theory challenged the antinomy between continuity and discontinuity, considering finite entities as cases of infinite processes and stable situations as transitory. Simmel’s theory of fashion explores the democratic and democratizing nature of fashion, which satisfies the demand for social adaptation and differentiation. They both saw fashion as a selection mechanism for organizational forms and managerial practices. Furthermore, referring to Tarde and Simmel can help counter the overemphasis on identity construction and the neglect of alterity in social sciences. The construction of identity often overlooks the inevitability of difference and alterity, which are essential aspects of collective projects. Lastly, this paper discusses Simmel’s concept of the stranger and its relevance in analyzing the experiences of foreigners and their potential advantages as “double strangers” in academia and society. The conclusion is that Tarde and Simmel’s contributions offer valuable insights for understanding the dynamics of management, organizing, and social interactions in contemporary organizations.

This study explores the integration of corporate reporting by Mitsubishi, a large Japanese company, using a culturally sensitive narrative that combines and reconciles Japanese and Western corporate values in one story.

We use an analytical framework drawing on insights borrowed from narratology and the notion of wrapping – the traditional art of packaging as communication.

We find that Mitsubishi is a survivor company that uses different corporate reporting frameworks during its reporting journey to construct a bespoke narrative of its value creation and cultural values. It emplots narratives to convey a story presenting the impression that Mitsubishi is a Japanese corporation but is compatible with Western neo-liberal ideology, making bad news palatable to its stakeholders and instilling confidence in the future.

Wrapping is a culturally sensitive form of impression management used in the integration of corporate reporting. Therefore, rather than assuming that companies blatantly manipulate their image in corporate reports, we suggest that future research should focus on how narratives are constructed and made sense of, situating them in the context of local culture and traditions.

The findings should interest scholars, report preparers, policymakers, and the IFRS, considering the recent release of the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards designed to reduce the so-called alphabet soup of corporate reporting. By following Mitsubishi’s journey, we learn how and why the notion of integrated reporting was adopted and integrated with other reporting frameworks to create narratives that together convey a story of a global corporation compliant with Western neoliberal ideology. It highlights how Mitsubishi used integrated reporting to tell its story rather than as a rigid reporting framework, and the same fate may apply to the new IFRS Sustainability Reporting Standards that now include integrated reporting.

The study offers a new perspective on corporate reporting, showing how the local societal discourses of cultural heritage and modernity can shape the journey of the integration of corporate reporting over time.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the development and use of social sustainability performance measurement practices at the city level. This purpose is achieved by addressing the following research question: How do city actors translate social sustainability strategies into performance measurement practices?

An extensive ethnographic study was conducted with a focus on how social sustainability – as defined in the vision and related strategies of the Swedish city of Gothenburg – was translated into performance measurement practices and how performance indicators and assessment tools were transformed over time in the pursuit of social sustainability goals. Findings were interpreted through the lens of Actor Network Theory concept of translation.

Findings reveal how, through a chain of translations, social sustainability and related performance indicators and other assessment tools evolve over time. Social sustainability deviated from the original politically decided definition, as stated in the strategy, because it was transformed by the human and nonhuman actors engaged with it. Social sustainability performance measurement practices lost relevance as internal steering tools and became a means for gaining external legitimacy.

Performance measurement and assessment tools initially intended to monitor the achievement of social sustainability goals lose their meaningfulness when their main use becomes a formal accomplishment rather than an opportunity for improvement.

This paper highlights how translations which destabilize social sustainability can affect the city management and influence the overarching social sustainability aims of the whole city. The presence of many actors gives room to “theoretical” and “practical” translations which deviate the course of actions.

The purpose of this paper is to present how my positionality as a researcher aligned with the works of Latour in terms of methodological inspirations and allowed me to develop a critical vantage point and simultaneously adopt a heterogeneously rather than hierarchically informed approach to ordering the world, which I argue serves as a basis for a more inclusive study of management systems.

I reflect on my own positionality as a researcher and share how my interpretation of Latour's ontology through some of his ideas and concepts, particularly symmetry, power, translation and agency, allowed me to incorporate and organize heterogeneous actors depicted in different empirical materials into space-time contexts and subsequently theorize organizing and management practices as agential, multiple and becoming.

A base in Latour’s ontology has equipped me with openness towards empirical settings, which I argue retains a democratic approach to theorization, i.e. theorization, which remains mindful of inadvertent assumptions about power, hierarchy or the taken for granted. This approach has also given me a form of personal resilience as a researcher.

The originality of this paper lies in presenting and developing the concept of method as democratizing. I argue that Latour’s approach to the empirical allows for at least two forms of active democratizing, one relating to the researcher as self and the other in how it incorporates the empirical actors into research, making possible the inclusivity of heterogeneity in analyses of organizations and organizing.