Professor Slawomir Magala is a full professor of Cross-Management at the Department of Organization and Personnel Management in Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus…
Abstract
Purpose
Professor Slawomir Magala is a full professor of Cross-Management at the Department of Organization and Personnel Management in Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University (RSM, 2015). His education stems from Poland, Germany and the USA, and has taught and conducted research in China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Croatia, Estonia, the United Kingdom and Namibia. He is a former Chair for Cross-Cultural Management at RSM and has achieved many things, from being editor-in-chief of the Journal of Organizational Change Management (JOCM), to receiving the Erasmus Research Institute in Management (ERIM) Book Award (2010), for The Management of Meaning in Organizations (Routledge, 2009). It has received honors for being the best book in one of the domains of management research. It was selected by an academic committee, consisting of the Scientific Directors of CentER (Tilburg University), METEOR (University of Maastricht) and SOM (University of Groningen). All these research schools are accredited by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The paper aims to discuss this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a review of Professor Slawomir Magala’s contributions as editor of Journal of Organizational Change Management.
Findings
Slawomir (Slawek) Magala will be known for many contributions to social, organizational, managerial research, and it will be remembered that he has created a great legacy in the field of cross-cultural competence and communication on processes of sense making in professional bureaucracies. He has authored and co-authored many publications including articles, books, professional publications, book contributions and other outputs, and is an established professor of cross-cultural management at the Department of Organization and Personnel Management in RSM, Erasmus University. He will be known for his work as editor of Qualitative Sociology Review, and one of the founding members of the Association for Cross-Cultural Competence in Management, not to mention the Journal of Organizational Change Management. Many of his articles have appeared regularly in leading refereed journals, such as the European Journal of International Management, Public Policy, Critical Perspectives on International Business and Human Resources Development International. His greatest legacy is in the field of cross-cultural management, but branches out to many other management studies.
Research limitations/implications
The research is limited to his work in capacity of editor of Journal of Organizational Change Management.
Practical implications
This review provides a guide for positive role model of an excellent editorship of a journal.
Social implications
Magala’s legacy acknowledges this research and its power to create numerous papers and attract a lot of attention (Flory and Magala, 2014). Because of these conferences, these empirical findings have led to disseminating the conference findings with JOCM (Flory and Magala, 2014). According to them, narrative research has become a respectable research method, but they also feel that it is still burdened with a lot of controversies on with difficulties linked to applying it across different disciplines (Flory and Magala, 2014).
Originality/value
The review covers the creative accomplishment of Professor Magala as editor.
Details
Keywords
Gerhard Fink and Daniel Dauber
The purpose of this paper is to show that Slawek Magala’s theory of management of meaning in organisations can be considered as a step towards a generic theory of organisational…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to show that Slawek Magala’s theory of management of meaning in organisations can be considered as a step towards a generic theory of organisational change.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors are integrating Slawek Magala’s views on the processes, which play a role in changing organisations (i.e. framing, reflecting, negotiating, and seeking new windows of opportunities) with the related types of narratives as developed by David Boje (2001, 2008) and with further extensions by Fink and Yolles (2012), which are based on a model of paradigm change.
Findings
The authors develop a theoretical framework, which might serve as a basis for analysis of change processes emerging from different contexts within or outside a firm and offer some reflections about comparing research into issues of organisational change.
Research limitations/implications
This is a theoretical viewpoint paper.
Practical implications
The extension of Magala’s model offers a practical guide for research into organisational change processes.
Social implications
Magala’s model offers a deeper understanding of actual change processes.
Originality/value
To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time where a concept about emergent causality deriving from interaction between two conflicting agents (i.e. involved parties as, e.g. managers and subordinates) is applied to emerging stages in change processes.
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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Slawek Magala and the author have a great deal in common and that the author is putting the differences to an interesting use in…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Slawek Magala and the author have a great deal in common and that the author is putting the differences to an interesting use in the Erasmus Honors Program designed for the top students of all faculties of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. The model of education gaining the upper hand in contemporary universities should be balanced with the more fundamental humanist upbringing of students-citizens.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper has been written as an empirical report based on five years of participative observation, regular analysis and group discussion of student essays, and on the on-going application of qualitative techniques in designing a curriculum, running the program and joint evaluation of its intended effects with the main protagonist of the paper, namely the colleague Slawek Magala. The labels “traditionalist” and “postmodernist” have been codified according to the most frequent academic usage.
Findings
If Slawek manifests himself as a typical post-modernist who does not believe in stable identities, the author will be then the neo-traditionalist, who tries to connect identities to value choices and value choices to stable philosophies of virtue and moral choices. Both of them have multiple identities. Slawek is a Pole who has adapted the Dutch nationality. The author is a born Dutch who also carries an American passport. What brings them together intellectually, the author thinks, is a conviction that they have to bring culture into the scientific pursuits.
Originality/value
Very few academic studies pointed out that cultural repertoire of value qchoices involves an on-going cultural negotiation. The author has succeeded in legitimizing the concept of culture in the teaching and research. Other researchers may employ the notions of culture and value to develop a value-based approach to the economy. The paper helps to show that identities get stabilized, that people are in need of stabilizing their values, and with those their identities.
Frits van Engeldorp Gastelaars
The purpose of this paper is to outline the background and the plot of the academic career of Slawomir Magala, particularly from the point of view represented by the author who…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to outline the background and the plot of the academic career of Slawomir Magala, particularly from the point of view represented by the author who had co-created significant international conference on critical theory and the sciences of management which triggered off the critical management studies in the British and subsequently global academic research networks.
Design/methodology/approach
The content of the research is based on a mixture of a historical account of a conference on the Frankfurt school of social research, observations and participatory observations, qualitative content analysis and a bibliographical case study.
Findings
The long-term effects of an international networking event are hard to predict and almost never respect the academic borders and gate keepers.
Research limitations/implications
This paper is a very personal point of view.
Practical implications
This paper is a case study of academic school emergence.
Social implications
This paper is a case study of social and political relevance of managerial research.
Originality/value
The unique selling point of this paper is that it is based on a critical event in uncritical sciences.
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Flows of ideas and paradigmatic wars are easier to trace through informal memoirs than methodological drill manuals. Sc’MOI’s emergence, flourishing, and decline are linked to a…
Abstract
Flows of ideas and paradigmatic wars are easier to trace through informal memoirs than methodological drill manuals. Sc’MOI’s emergence, flourishing, and decline are linked to a floating group of social scientists with the ambition to introduce managerial research into the humanist fold. Elective affinities linked David Boje and the undersigned to the Chicago economist Deirdre McCloskey, the Cardiff critical theory analyst Hugh Willmott, and the Lund organizational sciences guru Mats Alvesson. The drift from the International Academy of Business Disciplines to the Standing Conference on Management and Organizational Inquiry was accompanied by the Journal of Organizational Change Management. Marginal? Perhaps? But evolution picks up random cultural drifts and turns them into destinies of knowledge production. The narrative, humanist turn survived and kicks forward.