Willie Seal and Liz Croft
The paper employs a critical version of Abbott’s “system of professions” in order to analyse how new management practices in UK clearing banks have been influenced by competing…
Abstract
The paper employs a critical version of Abbott’s “system of professions” in order to analyse how new management practices in UK clearing banks have been influenced by competing bodies of expert knowledge promoted by the banks’ own profession, their senior management and outside professions. The main loser in this contest has been the professional expertise represented by the Chartered Institute of Bankers (CIOB). For most of the last 100 years the banks based their management control systems on cultural controls embedded in the branch system. In the 1970s and 1980s, the branch culture was challenged by a new marketing ethos and by the impact of new technology. In the early 1990s, changes in the structure of banks plus a continuing profits crisis induced further changes that saw the introduction of new management accounting techniques such as activity‐based costing. Finally, notes that, while recent commercial and regulatory problems offer potential opportunities for the non‐accountancy finance professions, the banks are unlikely to allow the emergence of a more independent profession within their own organizations.
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This paper reports a small pilot study exploring ways that staff providing mental health services experience change. Group discussions focused on the drive toward service user…
Abstract
This paper reports a small pilot study exploring ways that staff providing mental health services experience change. Group discussions focused on the drive toward service user involvement in mental health services. Discussions were held with two teams of professionals and indicate that mental health professionals experience a tension in balancing service user involvement with other dimensions of their roles and identities. Key issues include:• staff as potential, or past, service users themselves• service user involvement as a challenge to professional identities• change as being inherently difficult within ‘stuck’ systems• change as having an emotional, as well as instrumental, effect.Implications for practitioners in engaging with the involvement agenda are discussed, and highlight key issues for workforce training.
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Sharon Schembri and Jac Tichbon
The purpose of this paper is to address the question of cultural production, consumption and intermediation in the context of digital music.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to address the question of cultural production, consumption and intermediation in the context of digital music.
Design/methodology/approach
This research adopts an interpretivist, ethnoconsumerist epistemology along with a netnographic research design combined with hermeneutic analysis. Interpreting both the text view and field view of an ethnoconsumerist approach, the netnographic research design includes participant observation across multiple social media platforms as well as virtual interviews and analysis of media material. The context of application is a digital music subculture known as Vaporwave. Vaporwave participants deliberately distort fundamental aspects of modern and postmodern culture in a digital, musical, artistic and storied manner.
Findings
Hermeneutic analysis has identified a critical and nostalgic narrative of consumerism and hyper-reality, evident as symbolic parallels, intertextual relationships, existential themes and cultural codes. As a techno savvy community embracing lo-fi production, self-releasing promotion and anonymity from within a complexity of aliases and myriad collaborations, the vaporous existentialism of Vaporwave participants skirts copyright liability in the process. Accordingly, Vaporwave is documented as blurring reality and fantasy, material and symbolic, production and consumption. Essentially, Vaporwave participants are shown to be digital natives turned digital rebels and heretical consumers, better described as cultural curators.
Research limitations/implications
This research demonstrates a more complex notion of cultural production, consumption and intermediation, argued to be more accurately described as cultural curation.
Practical implications
As digital heretics, Vaporwave participants challenge traditional notions of modernity, such as copyright law, and postmodern notions such as working consumers and consuming producers.
Social implications
Vaporwave participants present a case of digital natives turned digital rebels and consumer heretics, who are actively curating culture.
Originality/value
This interpretive ethnoconusmerist study combining netnography and hermeneutic analysis of an online underground music subculture known as Vaporwave shows digital music artists as cultural curators.
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Abstract
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Bob Doherty and Sophi Tranchell
The purpose of this paper is to further develop the recent discourse surrounding the mainstreaming of fairtrade (FT) products, particularly the concepts of “radical…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to further develop the recent discourse surrounding the mainstreaming of fairtrade (FT) products, particularly the concepts of “radical mainstreaming”, “clean‐wash” and “the Alternative High Street”. The research investigates the pros and cons of mainstreaming FT in the concentrated UK retail sector via the exemplar of The Day Chocolate Company.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on a longitudinal case study of one of the original “trail blazers” for FT in the mainstream, the 100 per cent FT social enterprise, The Day Chocolate Company (Day). The authors possess special insight to this pioneering FT model due to their unique experience of working at Day and the lead author's research, which includes findings from a series of in depth semi‐structured interviews with key informants.
Findings
With particular reference to the concepts Clean‐wash/ “Fair Trade Lite” the paper critically analyses the advantages and disadvantages of mainstreaming FT. The paper demonstrates how radical mainstreaming by 100 per cent FT companies can actually strengthen the transformative message of FT and not undermine the original ethical interest. Their ability to communicate a more complex deep message to a wider audience via unique FT brands allows radical mainstreaming companies to raise the bar and avoid the dangers of Clean‐wash. Finally the paper illustrates the significance of the Alternative High Street for radical mainstreaming companies.
Research limitations/implications
The radical mainstreaming innovation in the paper demonstrates the value of intangibles such as relationships and networks. This means companies such as Day, could be better positioned than their private sector rivals to take advantage of the new dominant logic of marketing as it uses more operant resources to co‐create value between producers, retailers and consumers. Further research will investigate in more depth the nature of those operant resources.
Originality/value
This paper will be of interest to all key stakeholders within the FT movement including marketing professionals and other “values‐driven organisations” such as social enterprises. This research shows that sales in the UK mainstream retail market are not enough in maintaining the original ethical interests of FT; you need business models such as Day, that share power and value added between Southern and Northern partners. Further development of such radical mainstreaming business models is key to strengthening both sales and the original transformative message of FT.
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This paper aims to explore the relationship between internal communication and organizational learning from an interpretive perspective.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the relationship between internal communication and organizational learning from an interpretive perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
Following a review of the internal communication and organizational learning literature, an exploratory phenomenological methodology was designed to capture the “essences” of experiences relating to “communication” and “learning” among employees within a UK healthcare organization with an aspiration of becoming a “learning organization.” Transcripts of interviews were analyzed, coded thematically and the essences of experiences collectively synthesized into one description.
Findings
The paper concludes that internal communication may contribute to the development of organizational learning through sense‐making processes. For the participants in this study, these processes were personal letters and memos, line management interactions and interactions with other colleagues. “Learning” was associated with the acquisition of knowledge through day‐to‐day interactions, self‐development and studying. However, some sense‐making activities designed to engage employees in organizational change were less relevant to participants.
Practical implications
The research highlights the need for internal communication strategies that match meanings to context, based upon research that recognises the social and culturally diverse nature of organizations; the interactions and identities of occupational groups; and how these groups in turn construct and reproduce their social world through discursive practices.
Originality/value
This paper demonstrates the relevance of interpretive approaches to corporate communication research that gives prominence to the everyday, subjective experiences, perceptions and feelings of organizational members.
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Liz Stanley, Kate Mackenzie Davey and Gillian Symon
The purpose of this paper is to explore how two kinds of UK-based media positioned investment banking as dirty work during the financial crisis, thereby engaging in moral…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how two kinds of UK-based media positioned investment banking as dirty work during the financial crisis, thereby engaging in moral enterprise (Becker, 1963) and contributing to the shaping of society's normative contours (Cohen, 1972).
Design/methodology/approach
The authors employ rhetorical analysis to explore how newspaper editorials and an online blog portray investment banking as tainted between April 2008 and October 2009.
Findings
These media sources construct the values and behaviours of investment bankers, rather than the tasks of their occupation, as morally tainted. Through specific rhetorical strategies the authors advance three key arguments: bankers are morally tainted because their wealth is excessive; because their wealth is not earned; and because they are selfish and materialist.
Originality/value
In investigating media designations of investment banking as dirty work, the paper addresses two aspects of dirty work which are underexplored. First, it examines a high-prestige occupation and second, investigates the construction and attribution of taint to a previously untainted occupation. It makes two methodological contributions to the literature: contributing to the nascent interest in the media's construction of dirty work (e.g. Grandy and Mavin, 2012); and using rhetorical analysis to study the construction of taint.
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Sally Helen Stone and Laura Sanderson
This paper considers the exhibition: UnDoing. This research-through-curation project examined interactions within existing spaces and situations. This established links between…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper considers the exhibition: UnDoing. This research-through-curation project examined interactions within existing spaces and situations. This established links between the selected exhibits, the gallery, the city and with the continuum of the previous exhibition.
Design/methodology/approach
Carefully selected architects, designers and artists were invited to contribute—those who pursued a contextual approach; whose practice explored the way buildings, places and artefacts are reused, reinterpreted and remembered.
Findings
Through the act of curation, this research uncovered a series of different approaches to constructed sites and existing buildings, from layered juxtaposition, the refusal to undo, to interventions of new elements within architectural works.
Research limitations/implications
Curation offered the opportunity to consider works of architecture and of art through the same lens, for direct comparisons to be made and the influence of one upon the other to be comprehended.
Practical implications
The examination processes the architect employs is similar to that of the artist; the development of an understanding of place, and from this synthesis, creative interpretation. However, despite the similarities in the starting position, the elucidation developed by the artist can be vastly different to that of the architect.
Social implications
The juxtaposition and new classifications created by the exhibition encouraged visitors to look at art, architecture and the city in a different way; to grasp the direct link between the different subjects; and the possibilities created.
Originality/value
The two driving factors for UnDoing were places of previous occupation and the city of Manchester. The qualities of surrounding constructed environment combined were combined with attitudes towards existing structures and places.