Apologies for any cross-posting.
A new issue of Human Relations is available online: Human Relations December 2015; Vol. 68, No. 12 - we hope you enjoy reading these articles. The entire issue can be accessed online at http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/12?etoc .
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DECEMBER ISSUE ARTICLES
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Proposing a culture-centered approach to career scholarship:
The example of subsistence careers in the US Arctic
Rahul Mitra
Human Relations December 68(12): 1813‒1835, doi: 10.1177/0018726715570100
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/12/1813?etoc
Abstract
In this article, I draw from the culture-centered approach to explore contemporary negotiations of career and work, positing career as a form of cultural practice. Rooted in postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, the culture-centered approach examines the active accomplishment of culture through everyday communicative practices, amidst the structural conditions that frame lived experiences, and focusing specifically on marginalized groups. I first trace how culture is conceptualized in extant career studies, in the psychological, sociological and communicative streams. Identifying both key gaps and paradoxes in the literature, I outline the culture-centered approach, suggesting four key principles to reconceive career as cultural practice. Specifically: career draws on both structure and action; career agency is hybridized across individuals/collectives; career agency is layered and contested; and career is both discursive and material. The framework is illustrated using an example from an ongoing study on the negotiation of subsistence careers by Native Alaskans in the US Arctic.
Narrative identity construction in times of career change: Taking note of unconscious desires
Patrizia Hoyer and Chris Steyaert
Human Relations December 68(12): 1837‒1863, doi: 10.1177/0018726715570383
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/12/1837?etoc
Abstract
Working at the intersection of narrative and psychoanalytic theory, we present in this article an affective conceptualization of identity dynamics during times of career change, incorporating the notion of unconscious desires. We propose that frictions in career change narratives, such as the paradoxical co-existence of coherence and ambiguity, allude to unconscious subtexts that can become 'readable' in the narrative when applying a psychoanalytic framework. We point to the analysis of 30 life story interviews with former management consultants who report upon a past and/or anticipated career change for illustration. By linking three empirically derived narrative strategies for combining coherence and ambiguity (ignoring the change, admitting the ambiguity and depicting a wishful future) with three conceptually informed psychoanalytic ego-defenses (denial, rationalization and sublimation), we provide an analytic framework that helps to explain why workers in transition may try to preserve both coherence and ambiguity when constructing a sense of self through narrative. The analysis of unconscious subtexts reveals that, in times of career change, people's identity constructions are driven by conflicting unconscious desires for self-continuity on one hand and openness on the other.
Careering through academia: Securing identities or engaging ethical subjectivities?
Caroline A Clarke and David Knights
Human Relations December 68(12): 1865‒1888, doi: 10.1177/0018726715570978
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/12/1865?etoc
Abstract
This article reflects upon careering, securing identities and ethical subjectivities in academia in the context of audit, accountability and control surrounding new managerialism in UK Business Schools. Drawing upon empirical research, we illustrate how rather than resisting an ever-proliferating array of governmental technologies of power, academics chase the illusive sense of a secure self through 'careering'; a frantic and frenetic individualistic strategy designed to moderate the pressures of excessive managerial competitive demands. Emerging from our data was an increased portrayal of academics as subjected to technologies of power and self, simultaneously being objects of an organizational gaze through normalizing judgements, hierarchical observations and examinations. Still, this was not a monolithic response, as there were those who expressed considerable disquiet as well as a minority who reported ways to seek out a more embodied engagement with their work. In analysing the careerism and preoccupation with securing identities that these technologies of visibility and self-discipline produce, we draw on certain philosophical deliberations and especially the later Foucault on ethics and active engagement to explore how academics might refuse the ways they have been constituted as subjects through new managerial regimes.
The longer your work hours, the worse your relationship? The role of selective optimization with compensation in the associations of working time with relationship satisfaction and self-disclosure in dual-career couples
Dana Unger, Sabine Sonnentag, Cornelia Niessen, and Angela Kuonath
Human Relations December 68(12): 1889‒1912, doi: 10.1177/0018726715571188
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/12/1889?etoc
Abstract
This two-wave panel study investigates the associations between working time, selective optimization with compensation in private life and relationship outcomes (i.e. relationship satisfaction and self-disclosure) in dual-career couples. We propose that one partner's selective optimization with compensation in private life either mediates or moderates the association of this partner's working time and relationship outcomes (i.e. relationship satisfaction and self-disclosure). Moreover, we postulate the crossover (i.e. transmission) of relationship satisfaction and self-disclosure within the couple. To test these hypotheses, we conducted an online study with a time lag of six months, in which 285 dual-career couples took part. We found evidence for selective optimization with compensation in private life as a mediator: working time spent by partners in dual-career couples was associated with selective optimization with compensation in their private life that, in turn, predicted relationship satisfaction and self-disclosure. Results did not support the assumption that one partner's selective optimization with compensation in private life moderates the association between working time and relationship satisfaction and self-disclosure. Relationship satisfaction, but not self-disclosure, crossed over within the couples. The results challenge the assumption that longer work hours have negative consequences for romantic relationships.
Shadows and light: Diversity management as phantasmagoria
Christina Schwabenland and Frances Tomlinson
Human Relations December 68(12): 1913‒1936, doi: 10.1177/0018726715574587
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/12/1913?etoc
Abstract
Within the field of critical diversity studies increasing reference is made to the need for more critically informed research into the practice and implementation of diversity management. This article draws on an action research project that involved diversity practitioners from within the UK voluntary sector. In their accounts of resistance, reluctance and a lack of effective organizational engagement, participants shared a perception of diversity management as something difficult to concretize and envisage; and as something that organizational members associated with fear and anxiety; and with an inability to act. We draw on the metaphor of the phantasmagoria as a means to investigate this representation. We conclude with some tentative suggestions for alternative ways of doing diversity.
Reviewer of the Year Award 2015 and thanks to our reviewers
Human Relations December 68(12): 1937‒1947, doi: 10.1177/0018726715612986
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/68/12/1937?etoc
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NOVEMBER FREE ACCESS ARTICLE
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Free to access until 30 November 2015:
An 'emerging challenge': The employment practices of a Brazilian multinational company in Canada
Roberta Aguzzoli and John Geary
Human Relations May 2014, Vol. 67(5) 587–609
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/67/5/587.full
Abstract
Although the literature in international human resource management has developed greatly over recent years, our understanding of the dynamics of the transfer of HR practices in multinational companies (MNCs) from emerging economies with subsidiaries in advanced economies is found wanting. This study addresses this gap in our knowledge by investigating the transfer of employment policies of a Brazilian MNC to its Canadian subsidiaries. It examines interrelated questions about the influence of an emerging-economy parent-business system and how this interacts with the well-developed institutional regulation of the host country in a context of complex relations of dependence and dominance. Our prior expectation that the MNC would have had to adapt its policies to the 'Canadian way' was not borne out by the evidence. Instead the Brazilian MNC was found to be adept at capturing significant components of the host country's institutional setting in a manner that gave it the space to determine the 'rules' for its own advantage. That it was able to do so was, in large part, shaped by the market context of the firm and by Canada's dependence on foreign investment and, in turn, by the political relations of dependence that such reliance engendered. Broader lessons from the case analysis are offered.
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WHY PUBLISH IN HUMAN RELATIONS?
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Human Relations is an A* journal – the highest category of quality – in the Australian Business Deans Council (ABCD) Journal Quality List 2013. It is also ranked 4 in the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS) Academic Journal Guide 2015. Human Relations is a top 5 interdisciplinary social sciences journal:
2-year impact factor: 2.398 - Ranked: 35/185 in Management and 5/95 in Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary
5-year impact factor: 3.187 - Ranked: 37/185 in Management and 3/95 in Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary
Source: 2014 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2015)
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CALLS FOR PAPERS
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Special issue: Conceptualising flexible careers across the life course – submit by 1 March 2016
http://www.tavinstitute.org/humanrelations/special_issues/Flexible%20careers.html
Special issue: Global supply chains and social relations at work – submit by 30 April 2016
http://www.tavinstitute.org/humanrelations/special_issues/Global%20supply%20chains.html
NEW: Special issue: Politicization and political contests in contemporary multinational corporations – submit by 30 September 2016
http://www.tavinstitute.org/humanrelations/special_issues/Politics%20and%20MNCs.html
NEW: Special issue: Organizing feminism: Bodies, practices and ethics – submit by 30 November 2016
http://www.tavinstitute.org/humanrelations/special_issues/Organizing%20feminism.html
Human Relations welcomes critical reviews and essays:
- Critical reviews advance a field through new theory, new methods, a novel synthesis of extant evidence, or a combination of two or three of these elements. Reviews that identify new research questions and that make links between management and organizations and the wider social sciences are particularly welcome. Surveys or overviews of a field are unlikely to meet these criteria.
- Critical essays address contemporary scholarly issues and debates within the journal's scope. They are more controversial than conventional papers or reviews, and can be shorter. They argue a point of view, but must meet standards of academic rigour. Anyone with an idea for a critical essay is particularly encouraged to discuss it at an early stage with the Editor-in-Chief.
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RECENT ONLINEFIRST PREVIEW ARTICLES
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The labour market for jazz musicians in Paris and London: Formal regulation and informal norms
Charles Umney
Human Relations 0018726715596803, first published on October 26, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0018726715596803
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/24/0018726715596803.abstract
Abstract
This article examines the normative expectations freelance jazz musicians have about the material conditions of live performance work, taking London and Paris as case studies. It shows how price norms constitute an important reference point for individual workers in navigating the labour market. However, only rarely do they take 'stronger' form as a collective demand. Two further arguments are made: first, that the strength of norms varies very widely across labour markets, being much stronger on jobs where other qualitative attractions (such as the scope for creative autonomy) are weak. Second, in the Paris case, an ostensibly solidaristic social insurance mechanism (the Intermittence du Spectacle system) had the seemingly paradoxical effect of further weakening social norms around working conditions. Workers' individual efforts to meet the system's eligibility criteria often disrupted the emergence of collective expectations around pricing, and in some cases the existence of formal regulation itself was stigmatized as stifling creativity.
Rethinking the benefits and pitfalls of leader–member exchange: A reciprocity versus self-protection perspective
Jeremy B Bernerth, H Jack Walker, and Stanley G Harris
Human Relations 0018726715594214, first published on October 26, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0018726715594214
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/24/0018726715594214.abstract
Abstract
Existing literature assumes employees sharing high-quality relationships with supervisors hold advantageous positions over their peers under the leader–member exchange model. We propose environmental conditions limit the generalizability of this logic. Our framework is based on the idea that certain environments threaten the cycle of resource exchange and reciprocity, a foundational assumption in existing leader–member exchange models. To demonstrate this effect, we integrate social exchange and self-regulation theories to define four generalized environmental conditions we label appetitive alignment, appetitive misalignment, aversive misalignment and aversive alignment. We discuss accompanying propositions including both theoretical and practical implications of a contextualized leader-member exchange model to help future researchers anticipate when the benefits associated with high-quality leader–member relations and the pitfalls of low-quality relationships are attenuated by the environment.
Ethos at stake: Performance management and academic work in universities
Kirsi-Mari Kallio, Tomi J Kallio, Janne Tienari, and Timo Hyvönen
Human Relations 0018726715596802, first published on October 26, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0018726715596802
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/24/0018726715596802.abstract
Abstract
Higher education has been subject to substantial reforms as new forms of performance management are implemented in universities across the world. Extant research suggests that in many cases performance management systems have disrupted academic life. We complement this literature with an extensive mixed methods study of how the performance management system is understood by academics across universities and departments in Finland at a time when new management principles and practices are being forcefully introduced. While our survey results enabled us to map the generally critical and negative view that Finnish scholars have of performance management, the qualitative inquiry allowed us to disentangle how and why our respondents resent the ways and means of measuring their work, the assumptions that underlie the measurement, and the university ideal on which the performance management system is rooted. Most significantly, we highlight how the proliferation of performance management can be seen as a catalyst for changing the very ethos of what it is to be an academic and to do academic work.
The cultural grammar of governance: The UK Code of Corporate Governance, reflexivity, and the limits of 'soft' regulation
Jeroen Veldman and Hugh C Willmott
Human Relations 0018726715593160, first published on October 19, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0018726715593160
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/16/0018726715593160.abstract
Abstract
We identify limits of 'reflexive governance' by examining the UK Code of Corporate Governance that is celebrated for its 'reflexivity'. By placing the historical genesis of the Code within its politico-economic context, it is shown how its scope and penetration is impeded by a shallow, 'single loop' of reflexivity. Legitimized by agency theory, the Code is infused by a 'cultural grammar' that perpetuates relations of shareholder primacy as it restricts accountability to narrow forms of information disclosure directed exclusively at shareholders. Engagement of a deeper, 'double loop' reflexivity allows account to be taken of the historical conditions and theoretical conceptions that shape practices and outcomes of corporate governance. Only then is it possible to disclose, challenge and reform narrow conceptions, boundaries and workings of 'reflexive governance'.
Challenge and hindrance stressors and wellbeing-based work–nonwork interference: A diary study of portfolio workers
Stephen J Wood and George Michaelides
Human Relations 0018726715580866, first published on October 15, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0018726715580866
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/14/0018726715580866.abstract
Abstract
Stress-based work–nonwork interference, or negative spillover, is associated with transference of negative emotions from the work to the nonwork domain. It is argued that work–nonwork interference resulting from high work demands does not necessarily entail the reproduction of any affective states. First, calmness can result in lower work–nonwork interference and enthusiasm in higher levels. Second, hindrance stressors can be negatively related to enthusiasm and calmness, while challenge stressors are positively associated with them. Hypotheses about the relationship between stressors and interference that reflect this rationality are developed and tested using longitudinal data from a six-month diary study of portfolio workers. The results offer some support for them and indicate that both challenge and hindrance stressors are positively related to interference. However, for hindrance stressors the indirect effect is positive when mediated by calmness and negative for enthusiasm. In contrast, for challenge stressors the indirect effect is negative when mediated by calmness and positive when mediated by enthusiasm. The mediation paths are significant only for transient effects. Thus, there are indications that well-being can both increase or decrease interference depending on the nature of the stressor and whether it is mediated by calmness or enthusiasm.
Organization at the margins: Subaltern resistance of Singur
Mahuya Pal
Human Relations 0018726715589797, first published on October 15, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0018726715589797
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/14/0018726715589797.abstract
Abstract
Based on fieldwork and subaltern studies as a theoretical framework, this article engages organizational discourses of farmers in Singur, India. Opposing their land grab by the state for a corporate project, the farmers join the global struggle against land acquisition by subaltern communities, a prominent feature of the neoliberal economy. My conversations with the farmers reveal that discourses of violence and non-violence informed their organization of struggle. Further, their organization of resistance emerges as a self-organization, demonstrates the interplay of agency and structure, and follows an ethico-political ideology to challenge the imperial power produced by state-corporate nexus. In particular, cultural value frames of ahimsa (non-violence) and dharma (moral) guide their organizational principles centered on ethical considerations, justice and human dignity. This research brings forth the counter-hegemonic potential of the Singur resistance and suggests its possibilities to contribute to the process of change in the neoliberal economy. Ultimately, the peasant discourses decentralize the ways we think of the world in terms of its forms of organization and its social life in the neoliberal political order, and offer social imaginaries of a politically just society.
The paradox of inclusion and exclusion in membership associations
Nicholas Solebello, Mary Tschirhart, and Jeffrey Leiter
Human Relations 0018726715590166, first published on October 15, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0018726715590166
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/14/0018726715590166.abstract
Abstract
We use interviews and a focus group with leaders of a sample of nonprofit professional and trade membership associations based in the United States to understand what the leaders recognize to be their membership association's diversity challenges and initiatives. We identify incentives, identity and power challenges as fundamental influences on the diversity of potential and existing members. Our analysis reveals a paradox in which attempts to increase the association's inclusiveness are met with countervailing desires to maintain the membership association's exclusiveness. We find that leaders may attempt to manage the paradox through strategies that legitimize diversity initiatives, change the membership association's identity to reflect the valuing of diversity, and take advantage of organizational structures to embed diversity-related practices and accountability. These strategies have been discussed in the diversity management literature but without our paradox perspective. Additionally, paradox literature emphasizes the importance of ambidextrous ('both/and') approaches to paradox management, but these strategies may reflect an 'either/or' approach as leaders push their agenda forward, potentially in direct conflict with the desires of some current members.
Crafting one's leisure time in response to high job strain
Paraskevas Petrou and Arnold B Bakker
Human Relations 0018726715590453, first published on October 12, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0018726715590453
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/09/30/0018726715590453.abstract
Abstract
The present study addresses employee leisure crafting as the proactive pursuit and enactment of leisure activities targeted at goal setting, human connection, learning and personal development. Study 1 developed a measure for leisure crafting and provided evidence for its reliability and validity. In study 2, we followed 80 employees over the course of three weeks. We hypothesized that weekly leisure crafting would be more likely during weeks of high job strain (i.e. high quantitative job demands and low job autonomy) combined with sufficient autonomy at home, and during weeks of high activity at home (i.e. high quantitative home demands and high home autonomy). Furthermore, we predicted that weekly leisure crafting would relate positively to weekly satisfaction of basic human needs. Results indicated that leisure crafting was pronounced in weeks with high job strain combined with high home autonomy. However, an active home condition (i.e. high home demands and high home autonomy) was unrelated to leisure crafting. Weekly leisure crafting further related positively to weekly satisfaction of relatedness and autonomy (but not competence) needs. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings for the job crafting and leisure literatures.
The social potency of affect: Identification and power in the immanent structuring of practice
Mark Thompson and Hugh Willmott
Human Relations 0018726715593161, first published on October 12, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0018726715593161
http://hum.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/09/30/0018726715593161.abstract
Abstract
We address the centrality of affect in structuring social practices, including those of organizing and managing. Social practices, it is argued, are contingent upon actors' affectively charged involvement in immanent, yet indeterminate social relations. To understand this generative involvement, we commend a temporally-sensitive, critically-oriented theoretical framework, grounded in an affect-based ontology of practice. We demonstrate the relevance and credibility of this proposal through an analysis of the interactions of Board members in a UK consulting company.
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2-year impact factor: 2.398 - Ranked: 35/185 in Management and 5/95 in Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary
5-year impact factor: 3.187 - Ranked: 37/185 in Management and 3/95 in Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary
Source: 2014 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2015)