Managing as Designing explores "the design attitude," a new focus for analysis and decision making for managers that draws on examples of decision making and leadership in architecture, art, and design. Based on a series of conference papers given at the opening of the Peter B. Lewis Building...

The title of this text alludes to the legend of Baron Munchausen, who reportedly did many impossible things. A change of a system by the same system belongs to such impossible tasks, as shown by Niklas Luhmann's theory of autopoietic systems. Reforming organizational structures and processes is...

In this text, we examine Donna Haraway’s idea of a liberating potential of cyborgization first in the subsequent versions of Stepford Wives (the novel, the 1975 movie, and the 2004 movie), and second in the evolution of the character of a cyberwoman, from the book, Do androids dream electric...

This paper suggests a way of framing gender production in workplaces as a negotiation with varying results. The basis for such a frame is a combination of the notions of ”positioning” (the discoursive production of selves, as suggested by Davies and Harré, 1990), ”doing gender” (gender...

The impetus for this study was an observation that many of the women who obtained the first chairs at European universities were foreigners. Our initial attempt to provide a statistical picture proved impossible, because there were numerous problems deciding the contents of such concepts as...

In the present text, an institution is understood to be an (observable) pattern of collective action, justified by a corresponding social norm. By this definition, an institution emerges slowly, although it may be helped or hindered by various specific acts. From this perspective, an...

This text begins with a brief summary of problems resulting from the traditional framing of the term “organizations”. It ignores organizing without organizations, organizing between organizations, and the fact that organizations can be obstacles to organizing. The text continues with the...

This text focuses on the wealth of insight that Tarde has to offer organization theory. It revolves around three pairs of concepts: –imitation and invention, identity and alterity, custom and fashion, illustrating their relevance for understanding organizing by relating them to a study of big...

Although waste prevention is considered the best possible option in the European waste-hierarchy model, it is not always clear what is meant by “waste prevention”. This chapter presents three cases of waste prevention, selected to illustrate the variety of these practices: a waste-management...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze common emplotments of interpretations of the financial crisis of 2007-2010. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a text analysis. Findings – The paper finds that the same “strong plots” are commonly used to explain financial...