An organizational approach to undoing gender: The unlikely case of offshore oil platforms

This case study of two offshore oil platforms illustrates how an organizational initiative designed to enhance safety and effectiveness created a culture that unintentionally released men from societal imperatives for “manly” behavior, prompting them to let go of masculine-image concerns and to behave instead in counter-stereotypical ways. Rather than proving how tough, proficient, and cool-headed they were, as was typical of men in other dangerous workplaces, platform workers readily acknowledged their physical limitations, publicly admitted their mistakes, and openly attended to their own and others’ feelings. Importantly, platform workers did not replace a conventional image of masculinity with an unconventional one and then set out to prove the new image—revealing mistakes strategically, for example, or competing in displays of sensitivity. Instead, the goal of proving one's masculine credentials, conventional or otherwise, appeared to no longer hold sway in men's workplace interactions. Building on West and Zimmerman's (1987: 129) now classic articulation of gender as “the product of social doings,” we describe this organizationally induced behavior as “undoing” gender. We use this case, together with secondary case data drawn from 10 published field studies of men doing dangerous work, to induce a model of how organizational cultures equip men to “do” and “undo” gender at work.     

The Obama Administration's Regulatory Review Initiative: A 21st Century Federal Regulatory Initiative?

On January 18, 2011, President Obama signed Executive Order 13563, Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review, which instructs federal regulators to do the following: coordinate their agencies activities to simplify and harmonize rules that may be overlapping, inconsistent, or redundant; determine whether the present and future benefits of a proposed regulation justify its potential costs (including taking into account both quantitative and qualitative factors); increase participation of industry, experts, and the public (“stakeholders”) in the formal rule‐making process; encourage the use of warnings, default rules, disclosure requirements, and provisions of information to the public as an alternative to traditional “command‐and‐control” rule‐making restricting consumer choice; and mandate a government‐wide review of all existing administrative rules to remove outdated regulations. Executive Order 13563 includes a qualitative “values” provision to be considered in the required cost–benefit analysis, which can potentially counteract the alleged regulatory reform rationale of President Obama. Furthermore, in Executive Order 13563, President Obama established a deadline of May 18, 2011, for all executive branch agencies to submit their plans to streamline their rulemaking operations and repeal those “overlapping, inconsistent, or redundant” rules. These two issues, along with complementary regulatory review proposals being discussed in the U.S. Congress, are evaluated in this essay.     

Coaching in der Pastoral der Diözese Speyer

Coaching in the pastoral of the diocese of Speyer. Internal coaching between office and independence A lack of priests and changes in social conditions are forcing the Diocese of Speyer to employ people on an honorary basis in executive functions of spiritual welfare. The permanent staff of the bishopric are now to coach those volunteers in order to accompany the process. For this they need a great deal of independence as ?new coaches“, which can however put their loyalty to the ecclesiastical office into question, as long as they fail to acquire appropriate forms of communicative plausibility. No one can on any account escape from the momentum sparked off through the use of coaching in a hierarchically structured operation — neither the operation nor the coaches.     

Aus Fehlern Iernen

Learning from blunders. Experiences of an executive coach with problems and solutionsNot too often, even rarely, we are in a situation to talk about blunders or shortcomings within our coaching community. That really is a pity, because a discussion like this combined with reflection and feed back is the best and only way for a coach to avoid professional mistakes in his future. So this article is “somehow another kind” of contribution. The author reports his own 18 years of “blunder-experience” as well as professional mistakes of other coaches which he observed in mentor coachings and supervisions, he suggests outcomes, consequences and solutions. Topics are: Anger, aggression and “struggles of power” within the coaching process; dependence versus (internal) independence of a coach; transference and counter-transference within the coaching process; peanut politics within a coaching process. Result: the coach himself, his core values, his boldness directed to social risks and to natural consequences — combined with appreciative conversation and respecting clients — makes out the core dissolving capacity. Without mentor coaching and professional supervision every coach would be trapped into his personal “trap of mistakes” — and even worse: without recognizing this dilemma.     

„Ich würde gern weitermachen“ Vom problemorientierten Coaching zur anlassfreien Beratungsarbeit über längere Zeit

?I would like to continue“. From the problem oriented coaching to an unintentional and open-ended counseling When coaching clients ask for more sessions even after the ?problem“ has been solved they might indicate a lack of reflective situations in their life. This creates an interesting dilemma for coaches to operate between the rules of the profession and the challenge to provide a peculiar space of conversation. Unintentional and open-ended, this reflective work may lead the client to surprising discoveries and unforeseen insights. Such a work confronts the guild of professionals with old-new questions of professional self-definition.     

Understanding Mechanisms Underlying Peer Effects: Evidence From a Field Experiment on Financial Decisions

Using a high‐stakes field experiment conducted with a financial brokerage, we implement a novel design to separately identify two channels of social influence in financial decisions, both widely studied theoretically. When someone purchases an asset, his peers may also want to purchase it, both because they learn from his choice (“social learning”) and because his possession of the asset directly affects others' utility of owning the same asset (“social utility”). We randomize whether one member of a peer pair who chose to purchase an asset has that choice implemented, thus randomizing his ability to possess the asset. Then, we randomize whether the second member of the pair: (i) receives no information about the first member, or (ii) is informed of the first member's desire to purchase the asset and the result of the randomization that determined possession. This allows us to estimate the effects of learning plus possession, and learning alone, relative to a (no information) control group. We find that both social learning and social utility channels have statistically and economically significant effects on investment decisions. Evidence from a follow‐up survey reveals that social learning effects are greatest when the first (second) investor is financially sophisticated (financially unsophisticated); investors report updating their beliefs about asset quality after learning about their peer's revealed preference; and, they report motivations consistent with “keeping up with the Joneses” when learning about their peer's possession of the asset. These results can help shed light on the mechanisms underlying herding behavior in financial markets and peer effects in consumption and investment decisions.     

Das Konzept Work-Life-Balance eingebettet in die beiden Hauptlebensbereiche „Arbeit“ und „Freizeit“

The concept of Work-Life-Balance embedded into the two main areas of life “work” and “spare time”Work-life-balance is a complicated subject in the scientific dispute. In order to deal with this balance, nevertheless, it is necessary to start with basic considerations to the two main areas of life, “work” and “spare time”. These considerations make clear, on the one hand, the difficulty to live a work-life-balance within the scope of social and economic development of our time. On the other hand, it is important to attain an insight about the relation between work and spare time which enables to develop concepts to work-life-balance in another perspective.     

In search of rigor, relevance, and legitimacy: what drives the impact of publications?

In this study, we introduce the concept of legitimacy to the rigor-relevance debate and investigate empirically how rigor, relevance, and legitimacy are related to the process of knowledge dissemination within a research field. We argue that this analysis has been a missing piece in the debate on rigor and relevance when institutional logics about what constitutes both elements lead researchers to act according to what they perceive to be appropriate behavior in the research field. We draw on insights from the micro and macro levels of institutional theory to show how researchers aiming to bestow legitimacy on their own work conform to these “rules of the game”. Using meta-analytical techniques, we focus on the field of strategic entrepreneurship and analyze how rigor- and relevance-related characteristics of studies in this field are linked to their legitimacy and therefore to the impact they have in the research community.     

THE MESSENGER BIAS: A RELATIONAL MODEL OF KNOWLEDGE VALUATION

How do managers value the knowledge that they encounter in organizations? A rational perspective assumes that managers carefully and accurately cull the best knowledge from their environments, while a random model situates managers in a chaotic organization, filled with preferences and solutions that are temporally matched. This paper develops a third view, a relational perspective, which describes how social relationships between knowledge messengers and knowledge receivers affect the way that managers evaluate new knowledge. We begin by focusing on two key dimensions of relational perception: social identification and threat appraisals. We then use these dimensions to derive a typology of six “relational schemas” that are commonly perceived between knowledge messengers and knowledge receivers at work. Next, we reveal how, holding knowledge content constant, these relational schemas bias the ways in which managers evaluate new knowledge. While network research demonstrates that relationships determine which knowledge managers see, this paper demonstrates that these relationships also have psychological implications by affecting how managers evaluate the knowledge that they see.     

Empathy wages?: Gratitude and gift exchange in employment relationships

Economists have argued that employers sometimes pay above-market premiums (efficiency wages) in order to attract, motivate, and/or retain valued personnel. Drawing on recent work examining reciprocity and gift exchange, this paper proposes the notion of “empathy wages,” in which the effect of the premium paid depends on the extent to which it elicits gratitude from recipients. We argue that a particular gift (monetary or otherwise) offered by an employer is likely to elicit more gratitude among “non-stars”: workers who are relatively disadvantaged and in the lower part of the performance distribution. In contrast to “stars,” “non-stars” are likely to compare the treatment they receive to the inferior opportunities or treatment they (might) have received outside of their present employment situation. Star workers, in contrast, are likely to believe that they are worth whatever they can command. The economic viability of such “empathy wages” thus depends on how much star versus non-star workers vary in gratitude, relative to how they differ in output and compensation. We explore a variety of data bearing on how much stars differ from non-stars in their respective output and earnings (in star contexts such as professional sports and real estate sales). We then review or reanalyze some prior studies on gift exchange, documenting that those who are relatively disadvantaged and/or low performers do appear more grateful (or inclined to reciprocate gifts) than stars. Indeed, the magnitude of the difference is sufficiently large that it could offset quite marked differences in productivity or quite small differences in compensation (both of which would make stars relatively more attractive to employers). We suggest some conditions under which gratitude-based employment systems are more likely to flourish in real-world settings, as well as some fruitful lines for future research on these topics.     

TRUST,SOCIAL CAPITAL,AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Many argue that elements of a society's norms, culture, or social capital are central to understanding its development. However, these notions have been difficult to capture in economic models. Here we explore a possible role for “trustworthiness” as corresponding to social capital. Individuals are trustworthy when they perform in accordance with promises, even if this does not maximise their payoffs. The usual focus on incentive structures in motivating behaviour plays no role here. Instead, we emphasise more deep‐seated modes of behaviour and consider trustworthy agents being socialised to act as they do. To model this socialisation, we borrow from a process of preference evolution pioneered by Bisin and Verdier (2001). The model developed endogenously accounts for social capital and explores its role in the process of economic development. It captures in a simple, formal way the interaction between social capital and the economy's productive processes. The results obtained caution against rapid reform and provide an explanation for why late‐developing countries may not easily be able to transplant the modes of production that have proved useful in the West. (JEL: O1, O3, O4, Z1)     

Joined-Up Government for Welfare Administration Reform in Norway

One of the largest public sector reforms in Norway is the welfare administrative reform of 2005. The aims are to get passive beneficiaries back into work and to make the administration more user-friendly, holistic and efficient. The aims are to be achieved by increasing the administration’s capacity to address “wicked issues” by cutting across existing policy fields and administrative levels. This joined-up-government approach poses three main challenges: 1) to get a merged central government agency to work, 2) to establish constructive cooperation between the central and local authorities and 3) to coordinate front-line services with user-oriented employment and welfare offices. The article shows that increasing the capacity of government to cut across existing policy fields and handle transboundary wicked issues are still struggling to be implemented. Cooperation between sectors is however easier to achieve than cooperation between levels. The joined-up-government-approach also tends to make accountability relations more ambiguous.     

‘Präsenz- und Voice-Coaching für Frauen

One maxim of career is “the lower the pitch of voice the higher the income.” In this regard Voice-Coaching is of definite interest especially for women in business. This article focuses on small-group coaching, a holistic approach combining Voice and Psychology. The course includes abdominal breathing to improve both the sound of the voice and self-assurance in presentations; the use of the natural pitch of the voice; dynamics of voice; care of the voice for professional speakers and improvised speaking. In addition to the exercises, the participants are encouraged to reflect on their own experience of “social stage” in business, their social roles and opportunities to exert their influence and improve the image they portray.     

Three Lenses on Occupations and Professions in Organizations: Becoming,Doing, and Relating

Management and organizational scholarship is overdue for a reappraisal of occupations and professions as well as a critical review of past and current work on the topic. Indeed, the field has largely failed to keep pace with the rising salience of occupational and professional (as opposed to organizational) dynamics in work life. Moreover, not only is there a dearth of studies that explicitly take occupational or professional categories into account, but there is also an absence of a shared analytical framework for understanding what occupations and professions entail. Our goal is therefore two-fold: first, to offer guidance to scholars less familiar with this terrain who encounter occupational or professional dynamics in their own inquiries and, second, to introduce a three-part framework for conceptualizing occupations and professions to help guide future inquiries. We suggest that occupations and professions can be understood through lenses of “becoming”, “doing”, and “relating”. We develop this framework as we review past literature and discuss the implications of each approach for future research and, more broadly, for the field of management and organizational theory.     

Selbstreflexivität – Annäherungen an eine zentrale Haltung in Coaching- und Beratungsprozessen

This article explores “self-reflexivity” as a key competence and general attitude in all contexts of coaching and supervision. Three main perspectives are used approaching self-reflexivity: the “where from”, “what for” and “how-to”. Thus starting from etymology the importance of the subject in the practice of coaches and counselors is explored. Based on two models it is shown what kind of interaction between client and coach is beneficial when wanting to activate self-reflexivity. The article is rounded up by a note on self-care—one important aspect of self-reflexivity.     

Die Supervision auf dem Weg zur Profession? Professionalisierung im Spannungsfeld zwischen Expansionsbestrebung und Selbstbescheidung

In contrast to the general trend of deprofessionalization, supervision has established some criteria for professions during the last twenty years: wide ranges of quality standards, standardized educational programs, professional ethics etc. This development toward this trend needs explanation. It is argued, that the approach of the development of profession could be successful, because supervision became a successful “parasite” of its “host” social work. The introduction of supervision in social work, however, was responsible for the introduction of coaching as a new profession in the area of organizational consulting. The question is which effects the expansion of supervision towards team and organizational development will have on the establishing of its further professionalization. There appears to be some tendencies toward the idea that supervision will become a part of the development of professionalization as the “perfect nanny of organizations”.     

Are we going towards a society of “activity” or “work”?*

Abstract. The aim of the article is to discuss the perspective of a decline in dependent work - which Dahrendorf and Braverman had argued was coming - either due to an emerging society of “activities” or a process of work “degradation”. Why did such a scenario not prove to be realistic? The author shows from which concepts such a downgrading stems and points out the responsibility of approaches that do not see work as a social activity and see technology as a deus ex machina. As a matter of fact, the western world is not experiencing a dissolution but, rather, a persistent (if not growing) importance of work. The author sketches the great technical and organizational transformation in the ongoing production patterns and work schemes in contemporary society. He maintains that these processes, decreasing the homogeneity and increasing the heterogeneity of work, make a society of “works” more likely than one of “activities”.     

„Er ist als Wissenschaftler eine Niete und hat sich deshalb der Universitätspolitik verschrieben“

In the university three cultures are converging, as illustrated in the film “The Campus”: the “old” culture of the savant who is interested in truth, painted in a idealized manner; the “new” culture of the politicized group university, painted in a satirical manner, and the culture of neutral rules of law, represented in the administration. Science, politics and law could inspire each other, but for it a power would be needed which could connect them with their properties. Because of the absence of this power, a continuous politicization of the university develops which loses their identity as organization of science and his cultural core.     

“Seeing to be seen”: The manager’s political economy of visibility in new ways of working

Recent changes in the world of work have modified the conditions of the exercise of management in ways that challenge managers’ traditional authority and identity, both symbolically and physically. In this context, we analyse the “visibilizing process” of managers, through which they attempt to make themselves more visible, in ways that reaffirm their authority and restore their identity as managers. To that end, we develop a Foucauldian framework on power and visibility, which sheds light on the “political economy of visibility” of the manager. We apply this framework to a case study that encouraged a re-spatialization of remote work in coworking spaces. The findings show how the manager in our case study staged his own visibility, by enhancing managerial control, to manage his invisibility and shape his intertwined identities. Through the visibilizing process, the manager legitimated his role, materialized his function, and restored his authority.     

Industrial Safety and Utopia: Insights from the Fukushima Daiichi Accident

Feedback from industrial accidents is provided by various state or even international, institutions, and lessons learned can be controversial. However, there has been little research into organizational learning at the international level. This article helps to fill the gap through an in‐depth review of official reports of the Fukushima Daiichi accident published shortly after the event. We present a new method to analyze the arguments contained in these voluminous documents. Taking an intertextual perspective, the method focuses on the accident narratives, their rationale, and links between “facts,” “causes,” and “recommendations.” The aim is to evaluate how the findings of the various reports are consistent with (or contradict) “institutionalized knowledge,” and identify the social representations that underpin them. We find that although the scientific controversy surrounding the results of the various inquiries reflects different ethical perspectives, they are integrated into the same utopian ideal. The involvement of multiple actors in this controversy raises questions about the public construction of epistemic authority, and we highlight the special status given to the International Atomic Energy Agency in this regard.