Most contemporary total quality management (TQM) practice is influenced, directly or indirectly, by structured, acontextual and standardized quality models. The present paper focuses on the strategic introduction of one such model, namely the Swedish Institute for Quality (SIQ) model for...

Literary approaches problematize the practice of knowing in relation to managing. Drawing on Kafka, Lyotard, Rorty and others, our overarching objective here is to widen and deepen linguistic approaches to management and organization studies. We elaborate the concept of the polyphonic...

In this paper, we show how a middle manager interprets the action of two employees as problematic and how he solves it by using the company's code of ethics as the basis for firing them. Our telling of the story unmasks a darker side of codes and we conceptualize it in terms of power and...