Examines teleworking schemes at Rotherham and Doncaster councils, in South Yorkshire, England. Takes account not only of employees actually undertaking teleworking, but also of…
Abstract
Purpose
Examines teleworking schemes at Rotherham and Doncaster councils, in South Yorkshire, England. Takes account not only of employees actually undertaking teleworking, but also of their office‐bound colleagues.
Design/methodology/approach
Presents some of the conclusions of a two‐year Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)‐funded study into home‐based telework, led by Dr Susanne Tietze, of Bradford University School of Management, with Dr Gill Musson, of the University of Sheffield School of Management, and with Dr Tracy Scurry, of Newcastle upon Tyne University, UK as research fellow.
Findings
Reveals the results of pilot studies conducted to promote understanding of the complexities of this form flexibility and the effects of teleworking on a wide group of organisational stakeholders. Shows that the home‐workers were more productive, had greater feelings of well being, reported improvements in their work‐life balance and a reduction in stress. Colleagues sometimes felt sidelined and ignored, as did at least some of the team leaders who felt left alone in dealing with additional and more complicated co‐ordination tasks and addressing the emotional fall‐out. Points to the importance of running pilot studies to identify potential problems before long‐term implementation.
Practical implications
Serves as a useful reminder to take account of the concerns of employees who are not able to take part in teleworking.
Originality/value
Provides plenty to interest any large organisation considering whether to implement teleworking among at least some of its employees.
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Susanne Tietze and Gill Musson
This paper seeks to show how the shift of paid work from traditional locations into the home environment raises serious questions of identity for managers who have started to work…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to show how the shift of paid work from traditional locations into the home environment raises serious questions of identity for managers who have started to work from home and who have to “cope with” the sometimes conflicting demands imposed by different socio‐cultural spheres.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on an empirical study of working from home, three case studies are presented, which articulate and summarise different modes of engagement with both paid and domestic work and respective identity issues.
Findings
Adding to the extant literature on working from home, the findings indicate that the success or failure of working from home is intrinsically tied into issues related to homeworkers” identity.
Research limitations/implications
The empirical data are taken from a period when homeworkers had to “learn” how to cope with being both “at home and at work”. Further empirical enquiry might focus on longitudinal aspects of the relationship between working from home and identity.
Practical implications
With regard to working from home policies it is advisable to take into account questions of identity, rather than applying exclusively task‐based or technical aspects when considering the organisational benefits of this form of spatial and temporal flexibility.
Originality/value
In conceptualising working from home from an identity perspective, new insights have been gained into the reasons why this mode of work sometimes fails to deliver on its promises, yet proves outstandingly successful on other occasions.
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Paul Hodgkin, Rosalind Eve, Ian Golton, James Munro and Gill Musson
This paper dicusses the experience of a team in Sheffield who have established a 3‐year programme, the FACTS project, which aims to develop a framework for changing clinical…
Abstract
This paper dicusses the experience of a team in Sheffield who have established a 3‐year programme, the FACTS project, which aims to develop a framework for changing clinical practice in primary care. The lessons learnt from the project, which involves a variety of change techniques, are described including the need to tailor programmes to local needs and cultures as well as the use of marketing as a strategy for change.
Susanne Tietze, Gill Musson and Tracy Scurry
The purpose of this paper is to systematically summarise and evaluate recent articles on modern homebased work (2000‐2009). In identifying the key recurrent themes and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to systematically summarise and evaluate recent articles on modern homebased work (2000‐2009). In identifying the key recurrent themes and commonalities in the existing research, it brings order to the variety of contributions to provide future directions for inquiry and knowledge production.
Design/methodology/approach
Papers are identified through systematic keyword searches of multi‐disciplinary databases. The aim is to identify papers that explore the social/organisational embeddedness of homebased work, rather than framing it as a technology related phenomena/problem.
Findings
The review highlights some contradictory evidence about the potential for change entailed in homeworking practices and an absence of studies which focus on “less visible” workers engaged in homebased production. It also argues that few longitudinal studies exist which could address the question of the ability of homebased work to initiate change.
Practical implications
The paper provides an evaluation of the literature to make sense of the diversity of themes and issues within existing research. The insights gained are of use to both academics researching this form of working and practitioners implementing it. Gaps within existing knowledge and directions for future study are also identified.
Originality/value
This paper is a timely review of the recent articles that have been published on homebased work.
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Susanne Tietze and Gill Musson
Drawing on an empirical investigation situated in 25 households of professional managers, who worked regularly at home, this article explores how internalised time discipline is…
Abstract
Drawing on an empirical investigation situated in 25 households of professional managers, who worked regularly at home, this article explores how internalised time discipline is evoked, appropriated and challenged through and in home‐based telework. The notion of clock‐time is opposed with the notion of task‐time and it is shown how both temporalities inform the organisation of paid and unpaid work. It is shown that in some households the simultaneous co‐presence of conceptually different temporalities led to an increasing bureaucratisation of time as boundaries between “work” and “the household” had to be maintained and protected. In other households such co‐presence resulted in the emergence of more task‐based approaches to the co‐ordination of all activity and more elastic temporal boundaries drawn around them.
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Rosalind Eve, Ian Golton, Paul Hodgkin, James Munro and Gill Musson
There is widespread recognition that simply publishing research findings is not enough to ensure that they are carried into clinical practice. One response to this has been the…
Abstract
There is widespread recognition that simply publishing research findings is not enough to ensure that they are carried into clinical practice. One response to this has been the burgeoning “guidelines movement” of recent years, which has now reached the stage of generating guidelines for the production of guidelines. Argues that guidelines, and other forms of intervention to change clinical practice in an evidence‐based direction, will succeed only to the extent that they engage actively with the real world of clinical decision making. This world is more complex than guidelines writers acknowledge, and includes economic, administrative, professional and personal incentives as well as those provided by research evidence. Engaging with this real world may be difficult, but it opens up new possibilities for understanding how clinicians act and how evidence may be used to inform clinical practice. Such possibilities include social influences, educational outreach, providing information to patients, negotiating local coalitions on specific issues and changing the administrative environment.
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Heidi Hirsto, Saija Katila and Johanna Moisander
The purpose of the paper is to discuss and illustrate how contemporary market discourses rearticulate socio-political relationships and identities, including the rights, duties…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the paper is to discuss and illustrate how contemporary market discourses rearticulate socio-political relationships and identities, including the rights, duties, and opportunities of individuals and categories of individuals as citizens. More specifically, the purpose is to analyze how “economic citizenship” is articulated and negotiated in the intersection of (Nordic) welfare state ideals and shareholder-oriented market discourses. The paper further elaborates on how different identity markers, especially gender and class, intersect in these articulations and contribute to exclusionary practices.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper approaches the articulation of economic citizenship through an empirical study that focusses on business media representations and online discussions of a major factory shutdown in Finland. Drawing from discourse theory and the notions of representational intersectionality and translocational positionality, the paper analyzes how gender and class intersect in the construction of economic citizenship in the business media.
Findings
The study illustrates how financialist market discourses render citizenship intelligible in exceedingly economic terms, overriding social and political dimensions of citizenship. The business media construct hierarchies of economic citizens where two categories of actors claim full economic citizenship: the transnational corporation and the transnational investor. Within these categories, particular systems of privilege intersect in similar ways, rendering them masculine and upper middleclass. Whether interpreted as hegemonic or counter-hegemonic, the financialist discourses rearticulate the social hierarchies and moral landscape in Finnish society.
Originality/value
The paper contributes to critical/feminist management studies by elaborating on the role of the business media as an important site of political identity work, positioning, and moral regulation, where neoliberal ideas, based upon and reproducing masculine and elitist systems of privilege, appear as normalized and self-evidently valued.
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Felicity Mendoza, Tracey M. Coule and Andrew Johnston
The entrepreneur is often conceptualised as an individualistic hero (Essers & Benschop, 2007; Gill, 2017). Although this portrayal has been criticised as highly romanticised (Acs…
Abstract
The entrepreneur is often conceptualised as an individualistic hero (Essers & Benschop, 2007; Gill, 2017). Although this portrayal has been criticised as highly romanticised (Acs & Audretsch, 2003) it is still influential in the contemporary entrepreneurship literature (Down, 2010). Consequently, prevailing social discourses around entrepreneurship may restrict and even prevent an individual to develop their own entrepreneurial identity (Down & Giazitzoglu, 2014; Gill, 2017). In order to explore this issue, this chapter presents insights into the entrepreneurial experience of student entrepreneurs by exploring the role of entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial identities in new venture creation. In-depth interviews were carried out with 11 student entrepreneurs who had, individually or in partnership with others, started a venture whilst they were enrolled in higher education courses.
These findings challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions entrenched in the characterisation of the homogenous entrepreneur (Jones, 2014) and suggest that individuals can arrive at entrepreneurship in different ways. In order to demonstrate the diversity of entrepreneurial identities, the chapter highlights those that fit the orthodox depiction of entrepreneurs through vignettes from Nicole and Georgie. This is then contrasted with alternative depictions through vignettes from Joanna, Christa, Darcie and Paige. The experience of the latter demonstrates how entrepreneurial identities are formed through role enactment and socialisation into entrepreneurial communities. The findings propose universities can support student entrepreneurship through both formal and informal activities. The broader conceptions of entrepreneurial identities with respect to the role of universities and enterprise education are considered.
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Koray Caliskan and Michael Lounsbury
This paper contributes to a growing literature that examines entrepreneurship with a critical perspective, arguing for a research agenda that makes entrepreneurialism as discourse…
Abstract
This paper contributes to a growing literature that examines entrepreneurship with a critical perspective, arguing for a research agenda that makes entrepreneurialism as discourse visible. We define the discourse of entrepreneurialism as a style of thinking and economic intervention that invites actors to pursue their interests by drawing on a limited notion of agency that locates itself in an imaginary economic universe independent of institutions, broad social contexts, and identity considerations. Associated with the global rise of neoliberalism, entrepreneurialism provides actors with tools and competences to imagine organizations in narrow, instrumental terms and with an idealized notion of agency. We argue that seeing entrepreneurial capacity in such a limited way makes it impossible to fully understand entrepreneurship as a phenomenon. Highlighting the adverse consequences of entrepreneurialism, we map areas of inquiry that can contribute to the emergence of a more effective and comprehensive critical research agenda concerning entrepreneurialism.
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In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of…
Abstract
In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.