Traditional structural-functional approaches to organizational change, as well as critics of those approaches, often offer overly structured and rationalised views of how change occurs. This paper attempts to build upon processual studies of change and critiques of overly hegemonic views of managerial control by seeking to capture the complex, emotive and fluid character of organisational 'changing'. In pursuit of this aim, the paper documents these characteristics of change through a personalised ethnography of a micro-incident -- a critical change meeting -- in an Australian steel making plant undergoing cultural change. In conclusion, it is argued that even the more sophisticated studies of the emergent process-like character of organisational change fail to fully capture the ambiguous, ironic, emotional, and uncertain character of events in the 'blender' of change.

Traditionally, strategic messages were communicated through the power of text and financial measures. Over the years, with an increased use and evident impact of aesthetics, such as art, corporations began to incorporate imagery in strategic messages to strengthen their persuasive power. The addition of this creative use of art has also brought interest in strategy analysis to help uncover those hidden messages and identify marginal but living voices, in other words, antenarratives. In the role of a strategy spectator, understanding the signals for corporate strategic inflection prior to its occurrence is essential when calculating a company‘s future performance. These signals are never handed to you. They are hidden and cannot be identified by accepting the face-value of the dominant and apparent organizational voices, delivered through corporate documents. When a spectator is swooped into the organizational dominant storyline, he/she becomes part of the grand narrative and loses his/her critical perspective. Instead, strategic inflection signals should be identified through organizational antenarratives, uncovered in the deconstruction of an organization‘s strategy storytelling. Deconstruction of imagery, as a new complementary method to text and financial reporting embedded throughout corporate documents, helps strategy spectators understand a more abstract and less obvious side of strategy authors‘ strategic intentions. In the case of Motorola, this paper will demonstrate how imagery has been incorporated into organizational storytelling and how deconstruction could help strategy spectators make sense of and potentially anticipate strategic inflections.

The claim of the present article is that human mortality makes a case for the discovery of the immortal nature of the person. Based on a clear distinction of the concepts of the human being and the person, human beings and persons are considered immortal insofar as both entities evidently do not qualify for a definition as living systems. On the one hand, human beings are presented as neither lifeless nor living systems. On the other hand, persons are introduced as lifeless systems and, as a result, immortal system. This claim is extended by the statement that, even if supposed to be living systems, persons could be considered at least potentially immortal, which is illustrated by a brief and proxy case of the person of Karl Marx.

This article presents the idea of mapping organizational learning as a way of doing organizational ethnography. It suggests that organizational learning is a (re)assemblage of human and non-human and material and immaterial forces that reverberate in networks of lived stories. Mapping is suggested as a process of collecting and writing about lived stories as they emerge in different historical, geographical and material conditions. It is seen as a way of capturing a dynamic, changing and unfolding network of stories that are tied together, but are still disparate from one another. The article ties the idea of mapping to regional development projects concerned with the actualization of the bio-economy.

Contemporary organizations feature absence of boundaries and are increasingly defined by loose couplings, pluri-vocality and network configurations. What Foucault (1995) addressed as a former society of discipline is transformed and replaced into what Deleuze (1995) refines as a society of control that incorporates its subjects into new and ever changing lines of subjectification. This transformation of dispositifs (Deleuze, 1992; Foucault, 1980) and authoritative discourses (Bakhtin, 1982) that compose (and is composed of) a contemporary way of living induces in other words new types of embodied organizational knowledge and ways of organizing, which have consequences for how subject positions are (re)configured in everyday corporate lives. Such identity work is rarely studied in local discursive practices of today’s modern and emergent corporations. The aspiration in the present article is to scrutinize local practices in a dialogue based leadership development forum in university settings. This provides insights into the lived lives and identity work in Aalborg University representing a temporary, polyphonic and cross-disciplinary research project in a modern corporation. The project was an example of a loose-coupled and temporary arrangement/organization that invited a diverse group of participants to engage in the co-production of knowledge in/on leadership communicative practices. The participants were professional leaders from diverse organizations in the North of Jutland together with researchers and candidate students from the study programs of communication and philosophy at Aalborg University.

This paper explores the concept of dominance in traditional rural and remote island communities in the Zadar island archipelago in Croatia. Like their EU counterparts, these communities struggle with geographical remoteness; island depopulation, irregular ferry connections, lack of entrepreneurship, unemployment and poverty. A previous study captured a complex web of communal relationships that play a part in minimising these negative effects on the island communities’ lives. This study focuses on studying one such behaviour - dominance and, thus, is concerned with two questions: How does dominance reveals itself, and what is its significance in practice? A conceptual and methodological approach consisting of living acts in Roman Ingarden’s spirit, ethnography, deconstruction and storytelling becomes a tool for observing the rural island communities’ experiences. In the process, the approach undergoes a qualitative metamorphosis – it co-exists and co evolves so to help us to better understand how island life unfolds. Findings show that dominance reveals itself as rada, signifying the approach of bonding the members into theisland community. Rada in this sense symbolizes Deleuze’s weapon against the governmental economisation. To engage and support the needs of the island communities, it is vital to understand how they make informal decisions, and studying local communal practices in this sense, has practical implications for the policy makers with the responsibility for small island development.