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21889-04-SocietyCultureandIdentity.pdf

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L E C T U R E S L I D E S A R E N O T N O T E S

Lecture slides are designed to be visual aids for the live presentation. Reading them cannot substitute for attending the lecture or listening to recordings. Sometimes concepts and ideas presented are then critiqued

and challenged during lectures.

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P R O J E C T : F U T U R E

Dr Helena Liu

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Week 4 — Society, Culture and Identity

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Last week in this subject, we examined the

origins of strategy and the history of

management. We also traced how ‘strategic

HRM’ emerged and analysed its ideological

roots in unitarism, neoliberalism and

colonialism.

REVIEW

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REVIEW STRATEGY Derives from military origin, born from an approach of force (i.e., attack

and deception). It has been used varyingly to refer to a plan as well as a

pattern of behaviour. Other forms of strategy include strategies from

above and strategies from below (Freedman, 2013).

HISTORY OF MANAGEMENT From slavery to the railroads.

STRATEGIC HRM (United States of) American ideals of business ‘excellence’ and

unitarism.

NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM Societies come to be defined through market rationalities so that

economic considerations take precedence over democratic values,

social issues are translated into private matters and citizens are treated

as customers (Giroux, 2003).

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MULTIPLE CHOICE QUIZ REVIEW

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HRM helps make societies, economies and cultures; and societies, economies and cultures help make HRM.” — Tony Watson (2004, p. 464)

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SOCIETY, CULTURE & IDENTITY

Art includes Aztec cídoce borbónico (c. 1560) and ‘Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and

Hummingbird’ by Frida Kahlo (1940)

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AGENDA Society, Culture and Identity

• What is the sociopolitical context of HRM and

why does it matter?

• What is culture and how may we better

understand it?

• What is the self and its relation to others and the

world?

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S O C I E T Y S E C T I O N

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Sociology is the study of societies. It looks for

patterns across social practices from the

micro-level behaviours of workers to

macro-level trends in a nation state.

THINKING SOCIOLOGICALLY

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THINKING SOCIOLOGICALLY In this subject, we will be developing two skills:

1. Seeing the general in the particular

2. Seeing the strange in the familiar

(Berger, 1963)

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GENERAL IN PARTICULAR The sociological imagination is a quality of mind that enables

its possessor to constantly shift between the psychological and

the political perspectives; drawing connections between the

most intimate and most abstract areas of social life.

It allows people to draw an “intricate connection between the

patterns of their own lives and the course of world history”

(Mills, 2000, p. 4).

Within a sociological imagination, our personal situations

become indivisible from social structures.

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GENERAL IN PARTICULAR

Individualised Perspective • Evaluating one’s professional strengths and weaknesses

• Develop new skills

• Seek out the advice of a mentor

Sociological Perspective • Social construction of the ‘ideal worker’ in the organisation

• The opportunities that are made available (or unavailable) due

to the organisation’s strategies

• Sociocultural ideas about who is more likely to be seen as

having leadership potential, and who is not

Take for example a case of someone failing to go up for promotion…

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STRANGE IN FAMILIAR Ability to identify and examine taken-for-granted ‘truths’.

“By examining that which is taken for granted it has the

potential to disturb the comfortable certitudes of life by asking

questions no one can remember asking and those with vested

interests resent even being asked…

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… To think sociologically can render us more sensitive and

tolerant of diversity. It can sharpen our senses and open our

eyes to new horizons beyond our immediate experiences in

order that we can explore human conditions which, hitherto,

have remained relatively invisible. Once we understand better

how the apparently natural, inevitable, immutable, eternal

aspects of our lives have been brought into being through the

exercise of human power and resources, we shall find it much

harder to accept that they are immune and impenetrable to

subsequent actions, including our own.”

(Bauman and May, 2001, pp. 10–11)

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I N T E R L O C K I N G S Y S T E M S O F P O W E R

S E C T I O N

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SYSTEMS OF POWER The concept of “interlocking systems of oppression” was introduced by

the Combahee River Collective in their pamphlet form in 1977.

Photograph above of Barbara Smith marching with her fellow members of the

Combahee River Collective (1979).

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DOMINATOR CULTURE A central theme of bell hooks’ work is her use of the term

imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to

describe the four interlocking systems of power that

characterise Euroamerican ‘dominator culture’ (hooks, 2003,

2009).

IMPERIALISM The Western colonial project historically defined exotic

‘Others’ from the epistemic gaze of the West. Under so-

called ‘objective’ Western scientific categorisation,

European worldviews have been imposed on other cultures

and peoples in order to justify and advance European

colonialism. Non-white subjects, particularly those in the

Global South, are denied self-definition (Harindranath, 2014;

Spivak, 1988).

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DOMINATOR CULTURE WHITE SUPREMACY Contrary to lay uses of ‘white supremacy’ to refer to deviant acts

of racial violence, white supremacy in the tradition of race studies

refers to the centuries-old racialised social system comprising

the “totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce

white privilege” (Bonilla-Silva, 2006, p. 9). White supremacy is

systemic and operates in and through everyday racism to

maintain a strong positive orientation to white superiority.

CAPITALISM The class hierarchy, for hooks, is fundamentally exploitative and

dehumanising. Especially in Business Schools, capitalism can

become an all-consuming way of life.

PATRIARCHY A sociopolitical and cultural system that values men and

masculinity over women and femininity.

see Week 8’s lecture

more in Week 6’s lecture

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Riach and Kelly (2015) attempt to

understand the systematic denigration of

ageing workers through a sociological lens.

By studying cultural texts of vampires, they

show how we marginalise those seen as

older workers while inscribing impossible

measures that expect all workers to be

fresh, flexible and unrelentingly productive

in the face of work intensification and job

insecurity.

AGEISM

‘Love and Pain’ by Edvard Munch (1895).

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Prasad (2012, p. 65) critically examines how

racist misogyny towards Muslim women is

grounded in European colonial and neo-

colonial fantasies of ‘the veil’ as “a sinister

symbol of secrecy and violence”.

MUSLIM WOMEN AND THE VEIL

‘Shéhérazade’ by Édouard Frédéric Wilhelm Richter (date unknown).

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C U L T U R E S E C T I O N

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CULTURE CULTURE “Despite a century of efforts to define culture adequately, there was … no

agreement among anthropologists regarding its nature” (Apte, 1994, p.

2001).

UNDERSTANDING CULTURE Culture cannot be ‘solved’ via a formula or model. Cultural

interpretation calls for reflection and critique of how one’s own cultural

ideas reveal as well as obscure (Alvesson, 2002).

COMPLEX, INACCESSIBLE, FUZZY, HOLISTIC “Deep-level, partly non-conscious sets of meanings, ideas and

symbolism that may be contradictory and run across different social

groupings” (Alvesson, 2002, p. 14).

COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS • Cultures as things (as opposed to sets of processes)

• They are customs

• They are homogenous and uniformly distributed

• They are timeless

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ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE

Artefacts

Espoused Values

Basic Assumptions

• Sensorial features, behaviour patterns, architecture and workplace layout, symbols, etc.

• Strategies, goals, justifications, etc.

• Taken-for-granted beliefs, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, etc.

(Schein, 1984)

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ORG. CULTURE The appeal of organisational culture is often constructed

through the idea that organisational culture has a strong

impact on performance.

Three Positions: 1. Culture is assumed to be built by management. Strong cultures have a

positive effect on organisational performance.

2. Culture is mediated in social practices that affect beliefs and

understandings.

3. Understanding culture is important for managers’ possibilities

navigating through the organisation.

(see in particular Chapter 3 of Alvesson, 2002)

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T H E S E L F S E C T I O N

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Identities are individuals’ subjective

interpretations of who they are, based on

their socio‐demographic characteristics,

political identifications, roles, and group

memberships (Caza et al., 2018).

IDENTITY

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IDENTITY Identity “can be linked to nearly everything: from

mergers, motivation and meaning‐making to ethnicity,

entrepreneurship and emotions to politics,

participation and project teams” (Alvesson, Ashcraft and

Thomas, 2008, p. 5).

Our meanings of self are not fixed and static, but rather,

multidimensional and dynamic (Ashforth, Harrison and

Corley, 2008; Brown, 2015; Caza et al., 2018).

Types of Identities • Collective (e.g., organisational, occupational, etc.)

• Role (e.g., ‘entrepreneur’, ‘leader’, etc.)

• Personal (e.g., gender, racial, notion of ‘good worker’,

etc.)

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IDENTITY WORK The ongoing range of activities individuals engage in for “forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising” their self‐meanings (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002, p. 626).

Identity work should be seen as an ongoing process. It is not the same thing as identity. (Please note that the reference cited on this slide is an excellent resource for this week’s pre-tutorial activity.)

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IDENTITY WORK Because identity work is “intimately connected with discourse”

(Carroll and Levy, 2010, p. 84), people often use narratives as a

conduit for identity work.

Storytelling Identity work is continual storytelling in order to piece together the

disjointed fragments of one’s live into a coherent narrative (Beech et al.,

2008; Boje, 1991).

Material Expressions People also construct and project their identities materially by either

using their physical bodies (e.g., Humphreys and Brown, 2002) or through

artefacts in their organisational environments (e.g., Shortt, 2012).

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WEEK 5 Organisational Violence

Are humans resources?

Read the required readings, attend the

lecture and tutorial.

NEXT WEEK

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REFERENCES * Prasad, P. (2012), ‘Unveiling Europe’s civilized face: Gender relations, new immigrants and the discourse of the veil

in the Scandinavian workplace’ in A. Prasad (ed), Against the Grain: Advances in Postcolonial Organization Studies, Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 54–72.

* Riach, K., and Kelly, S. (2015), ‘The need for fresh blood: Understanding organizational age inequality through a vampiric lens’, Organization, 22(3), pp. 287–305.

SOCIOLOGY

Bauman, Z. and May, T. (2001), Thinking Sociologically, Malden: Blackwell Publishing.

Berger, P.L. (1963), Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, New York: Doubleday.

Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006), Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Collins, P.H. (2000), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd ed), Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.

Crenshaw, K. (1991), ‘Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’, Stanford Law Review, 43(6), pp. 1241–1299.

hooks, b. (1984), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Boston, MA: South End.

This week’s readings show the

interrelation between society, culture and

identity.

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REFERENCES SOCIOLOGY

hooks, b. (2000), Feminism Is For Everybody: Passionate Politics, London: Pluto Press.

hooks, b. (2003), We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.

hooks, b. (2009), Belonging: A Culture of Place, New York: Routledge.

Mills, C.W. (2000[1959]), The Sociological Imagination, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

The Combahee River Collective (1977), ‘A Black feminist statement’ in T. P. McCarthy and J. McMillian (eds), Protest Nation: Words that Inspired A Century of American Radicalism, New York: The New Press, pp. 212–216.

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Greenwood, M. and Van Buren , H.J. (2017), ‘Ideology in HRM scholarship: Interrogating the ideological performativity of ‘new unitarism’, Journal of Business Ethics, 142(4), pp. 663–678.

Legge, K. (2005), Human Resource Management: Rhetorics and Realities, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Watson, T.J. (2004), ‘HRM and critical social science analysis’, Journal of Management Studies, 41(3), pp. 447–467.

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REFERENCES IDENTITIES

Alvesson, M., Ashcraft, K.L. and Thomas, R. (2008), ‘Identity matters: Reflections on the construction of identity scholarship in organization studies’, Organization, 15(1), pp. 5–28.

Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H. (2002), ‘Identity regulation as organizational control: Producing the appropriate individual’, Journal of Management Studies, 39(5), pp. 619–644.

Ashforth, B.E., Harrison, S.H. and Corley, K.G. (2008), ‘Identification in organizations: An examination of four fundamental questions’, Journal of Management, 34(3), pp. 325–374.

Beech, N., MacIntosh, R., and McInnes, P. (2008), ‘Identity work: Processes and dynamics of identity formations’, International Journal of Public Administration, 31(9), pp. 957–970.

Boje, D.M. (1991), ‘The storytelling organization: A study of story performance in an office‐supply firm’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 36(1), pp. 106–126.

Brown, A.D. (2015), ‘Identities and identity work in organizations’, International Journal of Management Reviews, 17(1), pp. 20–40.

Caza, B.B., Vough, H., and Puranik, H. (2018), ‘Identity work in organizations and occupations: Definitions, theories, and pathways forward’, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(7), pp. 889–910.

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REFERENCES IDENTITIES

Heizmann, H. and Liu, H. (2018), ‘Becoming green, becoming leaders: Identity narratives in sustainability leadership development’, Management Learning, 49(1), pp. 40–58.

Humphreys, M. and Brown, A.D. (2002), ‘Dress and identity: A Turkish case study’, Journal of Management Studies, 39(7), pp. 927–952.

Shortt, H. (2012), ‘Identityscapes of a hair salon: Work identities and the value of visual methods’, Sociological Research Online, 17(2), pp. 1–14.

CULTURE

Alvesson, M. (2002), Understanding Organizational Culture, London: Sage.

Apte, M. (1994), ‘Language in sociocultural context’, in R. E. Asher (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Schein, E. (1984), ‘Coming to a new awareness of organizational culture’, Sloan Management Review, 25(2), pp. 3–16.

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REFERENCES POSTCOLONIALISM

Cooke, B. (2003), ‘The denial of slavery in management studies’, Journal of Management Studies, 40(8), pp. 1895– 1918.

Harindranath, R. (2014), ‘The view from the Global South: An introduction’, Postcolonial Studies, 17(2), pp. 109–114.

Prasad, A. (2003), ‘The gaze of the Other: Postcolonial theory and organizational analysis’, in Prasad, A. (ed.) Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis: A Critical Engagement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3– 43.

Spivak, G.C. (1988), ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Basingstoke: Macmillian Education, pp. 271–313.

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