Leadership under construction: A qualitative exploration of leadership processes in construction companies in Sweden.

Leadership has increasingly been advocated as a potent organizing practice, linked positively to several performance dimensionsas well as successful organizational development and change. Despite these alleged promises, the specific characteristics of leadership proc-esses as they unfold in a construction context have not been fully captured by construction researchers. This paper is predicated on anidentified lack of methodological richness underlying leadership studies in construction. While a growing number of contributions havequantitatively tested the ideas and models of leadership scholars, few have qualitatively explored the experiences and interpretations ofthe actual people that practice leadership in their daily work in construction companies. Drawing on a rich qualitative interview study, thispaper analyzes open-ended stories about leadership in the largest construction companies in Sweden. The findings show how leadership styleshave been shaped to align with traditional work and organizing principles, but also how they, by the same token, pose a seemingly unresolvedtension with change initiatives that seek to reorganize to improve organizational performance. Altogether, these findings indicate that there aregrounds to question the transformative potential of leadership in construction companies, as practiced today. The paper concludes by outliningthe practical implications of these findings, together with some analytical generalizations that can serve as pointers for a strengthened lead-ership agenda in construction research, one that is characterized by an increased methodological richness and accentuated focus on thecontext-specific aspects of leadershi

Understanding Interorganizational Learning Based on Social Spaces and Learning Episodes

Different organizational settings have been gaining ground in the world economy, resulting in a proliferation of different forms of strategic alliances that translate into a growth in the number of organizations that have started to deal with interorganizational relationships with different actors. These circumstances reinforce Crossan, Lane, White and Djurfeldt (1995) and Crossan, Mauer and White (2011) in exploring what authors refer to as the fourth, interorganizational, level of learning. These authors, amongst others, suggest that the process of interorganizational learning (IOL) warrants investigation, as its scope of analysis needs widening and deepening. Therefore, this theoretical essay is an attempt to understand IOL as a dynamic process found in interorganizational cooperative relationships that can take place in different structured and unstructured social spaces and that can generate learning episodes. According to this view, IOL is understood as part of an organizational learning continuum and is analyzed within the framework of practical rationality in an approach that is less cognitive and more social-behavioral

The sensorium at work: the sensory phenomenology of the working body

The sociology of the body and the sociology of work and occupations have both neglected to some extent the study of the ‘working body’ in paid employment, particularly with regard to empirical research into the sensory aspects of working practices. This gap is perhaps surprising given how strongly the sensory dimension features in much of working life. This article is very much a first step in calling for a more phenomenological, embodied and ‘fleshy’ perspective on the body in employment, and examines some of the theoretical and conceptual resources available to researchers wishing to focus on the lived working-body experiences of the sensorium. We also consider some possible representational forms for a more evocative, phenomenologically-inspired portrayal of sensory, lived-working-body experiences, and offer suggestions for future avenues of research

Towards an articulation of the material and visual turn in organization studies

International audienceContemporary organizations increasingly rely on images, logos, videos, building materials, graphic andproduct design, and a range of other material and visual artifacts to compete, communicate, form identityand organize their activities. This Special Issue focuses on materiality and visuality in the course of objectifyingand reacting to novel ideas, and, more broadly, contributes to organizational theory by articulating theemergent contours of a material and visual turn in the study of organizations. In this Introduction, weprovide an overview of research on materiality and visuality. Drawing on the articles in the special issue, wefurther explore the affordances and limits of the material and visual dimensions of organizing in relation tonovelty. We conclude by pointing out theoretical avenues for advancing multimodal research, and discusssome of the ethical, pragmatic and identity-related challenges that a material and visual turn could pose fororganizational research

Collaborating for Innovation: the socialised management of knowledge

Although the importance of diverse knowledge is widely recognised for open innovation, there may be a gap in our understanding of the social processes that shape how collaborators engage in knowledge exchange. This social gap may be significant because of the powerful, but largely unexplained, role attributed to trust as a social artefact. Moreover, we see trust as a process and that different types of trust are involved in the collaborative process. Thus, this paper uses a qualitative methodology to capture the experiences of innovation collaborators. As explanation of the dynamic interplays of knowledge and trust, we offer a description of phases in the process. Our analysis finds that the relationship moves from transactional to social. The early phases are characterised by technical knowledge, but the later and mature phases are identified with knowledge of the person and by personal trust. The success of innovation is a result of relationships with augmented trust. We found that a fabric of trust is woven from the weft of professional knowledge and the warp of personal knowledge to support innovation. We propose that this developing of relationships might be conceived as becoming more open in the sense of sharing with one another. If so, we seem to have described and offered a social dimension of open innovation

Nursing, bedside care, and the organization of expert knowledge: Professional work as agencement

Professional work such as nursing has traditionally been examined as being localized in the individual's body where professional know-how and skills are residing in the cognitive faculties and in embodied action. Contrary to such a view, the concept of agencement, recently used in the social study of finance, underlines that agency is in the contemporary technoscientifically determined times of necessity distributed and includes a variety of tempospatially distributed resources. Reporting a study nursing work in a leukemia ward in a Swedish regional hospital, it is demonstrated that the conventional view of nursing as primarily being bedside care is only accommodating a subset of the totality of the nurses' work. In addition to face-to-face care and patient interaction, nursing work is the mobilization of a great number of actors with different domains of expertise to safeguard the health care status of the patient. Speaking of nursing work as agencement is opening up for alternative and more accurate understandings of nursing work in an increasingly technologically determined health care system

Pastoral power in leadership work: the relational leadership idiom in the construction industry

Purpose Drawing on the literature on pastoral power, a term introduced by Foucault that denotes a specific form of authority based on the subordinate\u27s open communication regarding aspirations, interests and personal concerns, having the full faith in the leader\u27s care of the subordinate\u27s welfare, this article report empirical material from a study of Swedish construction industry. Design/methodology/approach Leadership practices are contingent on context and situation, and over time, authoritative leadership practices have been complemented by relational leadership that increasingly emphasizes the bilateral communication between manager and subordinate. The more communicative and "soft" leadership idiom may have both benefits and incur unanticipated consequences and conditions that need to be studied on basis of empirical materials. Findings Managers in the construction industry emphasize how subordinates increasingly turn to their closest managers to address a variety of concerns. Even though managers recognizes the value of providing personalized support, there is a risk that such a leadership idiom distract both managers and subordinates, i.e. counseling activities consume too much resources, making agents less prone to fully attend to proper project goals. Originality/value To consider contemporary leadership practices as partially premised on pastoral power provides new analytical possibilities that shed light on how leadership practice needs to correspond with new demands in the corporate setting

A managerial revolution in reverse: finance market control of the corporation and the triumph of the agency theory model

Corporate governance denotes different practices and procedures in economic sociology and in the economic theory literature; while economic sociologists are concerned about understanding the institutional features of corporate law and other corporate governance vehicles, economists are primarily interested in theorizing how capital owners can reduce agency costs. In pursuing the latter objective, agency theory has been remarkably successful in advancing shareholder value creation as the only legitimate objective of firms. This accomplishment is deeply entangled with a series of political, macroeconomic and institutional changes in (primarily) the US economy and political life, including the financialization of the world economy. The article examines these changes and stresses the capital funding of free-market advocates in academic communities as a decisive factor that contributes to the popularity of shareholder value creation. The study thus calls for a broader institutional view of the political economy of corporate governance and in the study of the ‘managerial revolution in reverse’ taking place as managerial capitalism is displaced by investor capitalism. \ua9 2015, Taylor & Francis