| 1. |
- Alvesson, Mats, et al.
(författare)
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Beyond Formulaic Research: In Praise of Greater Diversity in Organizational Research and Publications
- 2013
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Ingår i: Academy of Management Learning & Education. - : Academy of Management. - 1537-260X .- 1944-9585. ; 12:2, s. 245-263
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Prompted by persistent dissatisfaction with research and research publications in organization studies, we critically discuss the standardization of research and publications into formulaic patterns that constrain the imagination and creativity of scholars and restrict the social relevance of their work. Formulaic research involves extreme specialization, an incrementalist and ultra-cautious attitude toward theoretical contributions, formulaic methodologies, and a standardized article presentation targeted at very narrow and sympathetic academic communities. Formulaic research is attributed to the isomorphism that characterizes a wide range of academic practices. In the hope of galvanizing the field into transformation, we make a number of suggestions for alternative ideals and standards aimed at encouraging more diverse and imaginative ways of practicing and communicating organizational research. This is referred to as polymorphic research. We offer a number of concrete proposals to guide the practices of authors, reviewers, and editors. Polymorphic research, we argue, would reinvigorate the field of organizational studies and enhance its social relevance and impact.
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| 2. |
- Alvesson, Mats, et al.
(författare)
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Grandiosity in contemporary management and education
- 2016
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Ingår i: Management Learning. - : SAGE Publications. - 1350-5076 .- 1461-7307. ; 47:4, s. 464-473
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Contemporary practitioner and academic discourses of organizations and management have developed a tendency to discuss everyday organizational phenomena in overblown and remarkable ways. It is now commonplace to view organizations in terms of visions, missions, strategies, charisma, entrepreneurship, best practice and so on. A hyped-up language is becoming endemic to ordinary discussions of ordinary organizations doing ordinary things. This calls for some critical attention. One way of capturing this tendency to hype is through the idea of grandiosity that is taking over the ways mundane organizational phenomena are constructed and debated. In this essay, we argue that grandiosity is the product of the narcissism of our times, reinforced by contemporary consumerism; we suggest that grandiosity not only affects adversely critical reflection of organizations and management, but more importantly that it undermines organizational performance and learning.
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| 3. |
- Alvesson, Mats, et al.
(författare)
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Return to Meaning : A Social Science with Something to Say
- 2017
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Bok (refereegranskat)abstract
- This book argues that we are currently witnessing not merely a decline in the quality of social science research, but the proliferation of meaningless research, of no value to society, and modest value to its authors - apart from securing employment and promotion. The explosion of published outputs, at least in social science, creates a noisy, cluttered environment which makes meaningful research difficult, as different voices compete to capture the limelight even briefly. Older, more significant contributions are easily neglected, as the premium is to write and publish, not read and learn. The result is a widespread cynicism among academics on the value of academic research, sometimes including their own. Publishing comes to be seen as a game of hits and misses, devoid of intrinsic meaning and value, and of no wider social uses whatsoever. Academics do research in order to get published, not to say something socially meaningful. This is what we view as the rise of nonsense in academic research, which represents a serious social problem. It undermines the very point of social science.This problem is far from 'academic'. It affects many areas of social and political life entailing extensive waste of resources and inflated student fees as well as costs to tax-payers. Part two of the book offers a range of proposals aimed at restoring meaning at the heart of social research and drawing social science back address the major problems and issues that face our societies.
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| 4. |
- Arslan Waltersson, Gabriel, 1996, et al.
(författare)
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Planar Friction Modelling with LuGre Dynamics and Limit Surfaces
- 2024
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Robotics. - 1552-3098 .- 1941-0468. ; In Press
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- During planar motion, contact surfaces exhibit a coupling between tangential and rotational friction forces. This paper proposes planar friction models grounded in the LuGre model and limit surface theory. First, distributed planar extended state models are proposed and the Elasto-Plastic model is extended for multi-dimensional friction. Subsequently, we derive a reduced planar friction model coupled with a pre-calculated limit surface, that offers reduced computational cost. The limit surface approximation through an ellipsoid is discussed. The properties of the planar friction models are assessed in various simulations, demonstrating that the reduced planar friction model achieves comparable performance to the distributed model while exhibiting $\sim 80$ times lower computational cost.
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| 5. |
- Arslan Waltersson, Gabriel, 1996, et al.
(författare)
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Planning and Control for Cable-routing with Dual-arm Robot
- 2022
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Ingår i: Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. - 1050-4729. ; 2022-May, s. 1046-1052
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper, we propose a new framework for solving cable-routing problems with a dual-arm robot, where the objective is to clip a Deformable Linear Object (DLO) into several arbitrarily placed fixtures. The core of the framework is a task-space planner, which builds a roadmap from predefined tasks and employs a replanning strategy based on a genetic algorithm, if problems occur. The manipulation tasks are executed with either individual or coordinated control of the arms. Moreover, hierarchical quadratic programming is used to solve the inverse differential kinematics together with extra feasibility objectives. A vision system first identifies the desired fixture route and structure preserved registration estimates the state of the DLO in real-time. The framework is tested on real-world experiments with a YuMi robot, demonstrating a 90% success rate for 3 fixture problems.
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| 6. |
- Foroughi, Hamid, et al.
(författare)
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Leadership in a post-truth era : A new narrative disorder?
- 2019
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Ingår i: Leadership. - : SAGE Publications. - 1742-7150 .- 1742-7169. ; 15:2, s. 135-151
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This essay, and the speical issue it introduces, seeks to explore leadership in a post-truth age, focusing in particular on the types of narratives and counter-narratives that characterize it and at times dominate it. We first examine the factors that are often held responsible for the rise of post-truth in politics, including the rise of relativist and postmodernist ideas, dishonest leaders and bullshit artists, the digital revolution and social media, the 2008 economic crisis and collapse of public trust. We develop the idea that different historical periods are characterized by specific narrative ecologies, which, by analogy to natural ecologies, can be viewed as spaces where different types of narrative and counter-narrative emerge, interact, compete, adapt, develop and die. We single out some of the dominant narrative types that characterize post-truth narrative ecologies and highlight the ability of language to ‘do things with words’ that support both the production of ‘fake news’ and a type of narcissistic leadership that thrive in these narrative ecologies. We then examine more widely leadership in post-truth politics focusing on the resurgence of populist and demagogical types along with the narratives that have made these types highly effective in our times. These include nostalgic narratives idealizing a fictional past and conspiracy theories aimed at arousing fears about a dangerous future.
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| 7. |
- Gabriel, Yiannis
(författare)
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Beyond Compassion: Replacing a Blame Culture With Proper Emotional Support and Management Comment on "Why and How Is Compassion Necessary to Provide Good Quality Healthcare?".
- 2015
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Ingår i: International Journal of Health Policy and Management. - : Maad Rayan Publishing Company. - 2322-5939. ; 4:9, s. 617-619
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The absence of compassion, argues the author, is not the cause of healthcare failures but rather a symptom of deeper systemic failures. The clinical encounter arouses strong emotions of anxiety, fear, and anger in patients which are often projected onto the clinicians. Attempts to protect clinicians through various bureaucratic devices and depersonalization of the patient, constitute as Menzies noted in her classic work, social defences, aimed at containing the anxieties of clinicians but ending up in reinforcing these anxieties. Instead of placing additional burdens on clinicians by bureaucratizing and benchmarking compassion, the author argues that proper emotional management and support is a precondition for a healthcare system that offers humane and effective treatment to patients and a humane working environment for those who work in it.
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| 8. |
- Gabriel, Yiannis
(författare)
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Case Studies as Narratives: Reflections Prompted by the Case of Victor, the Wild Child of Aveyron
- 2019
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Ingår i: Journal of Management Inquiry. - : SAGE Publications. - 1056-4926 .- 1552-6542. ; 28:4, s. 403-408
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Drawing on a celebrated case study of a feral child in France, the author argues that there are similarities between stories and case studies as types of narrative and that they are both capable of acting as insightful tools of management inquiry. Both case studies and stories call for narrative imagination to develop meaningful narratives. Serendipity, the accidental discovery of meaning or purpose in what seems random and purposeless, is an important part of narrative imagination. As meaningful narratives, both case studies and stories follow a structure of interwoven actions and events with beginnings, middles, and ends. However, where storytellers enjoy poetic license to distort facts for effect, case study researchers are more constrained by factual accuracy. The beginnings and ends of case studies are not as clearly defined as those of stories and fictional narratives.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Gabriel, Yiannis
(författare)
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Identity, choice and consumer freedom - the new opiates? A psychoanalytic interrogation
- 2015
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Ingår i: Marketing Theory. - : SAGE Publications. - 1741-301X .- 1470-5931. ; 15:1, s. 25-30
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Psychoanalysis opens a variety of windows into understanding contemporary consumption and consumerism. The psychoanalytic theory of defence and the unconscious enables us to understand why commodities, from fast cars to luxury chocolate, so readily stand in to offer substitute gratification for deeper repressed desires and why the meaning of such commodities is liable to become mobile and unstable (Baudrillard, 1988 [1970]). The psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism (Freud, 1914) and the mirror stage (Lacan, 2006) provide powerful entry points into understanding our culture's obsession with image (Cluley and Dunne, 2012), whilst the theory of neurosis offers significant insights into the addictive and deeply irrational qualities of contemporary consumption (Lasch, 1980). Object relations theory (Winnicott, 1964) enables us to understand how material objects, from early childhood attachments to teddy bears, act as bridges between our sense of self and what we come to view as an external world deeply indifferent to our desires. Several other psychoanalytic concepts and ideas have proven particularly helpful in contemporary discourses on consumption. This essay draws its inspiration from Freud's theory of religion (Freud,1927, 1930) to test the view that the consumer's freedom to choose and construct an identity is an illusion in the technical sense - a fantasy that discloses deeper desires and offers substitute gratifications for the discontents inflicted on us by contemporary consumer culture. Like earlier illusions, the illusion of freedom and the derivative illusions of choice and identity may provide some consolation, but, arguably, then deepen the discontents for which they purport to offer comfort.
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| 11. |
- Gabriel, Yiannis
(författare)
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Kafka and the COVID-19 epidemic : Why the Sirens’ silence is more deadly than their song
- 2020
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Ingår i: Leadership. - : SAGE Publications. - 1742-7150 .- 1742-7169. ; 16:3, s. 320-330
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Seeking to examine the implications of social distancing, isolation and the silencing of public spaces brought about by the COVID-19 epidemic, I offer an interpretation of Kafka’s short story ‘The Silence of the Sirens’ contrasting it to the Homeric original. In Homer’s story, Odysseus resists the temptation of the Sirens’ deadly song by having himself tied to the mast of his ship, while his oarsmen, ears blocked with beeswax, sail quickly by. By contrast, in Kafka’s telling of the story, the Sirens fall silent. A solitary Odysseus, indifferent to them, sails by peacefully, his ears blocked, his ‘great eyes’ staring in the distance. Homer’s story has long been seen as a warning against the seductions of Siren voices like those of opportunist demagogues. Throughout the Odyssey, Odysseus himself offers a complex archetype of heroic leadership, navigating adroitly and prudently the dangers of stormy seas. Kafka’s character, by contrast, proposes a different archetype, one akin to the Stoics’ homo viator, the individual who sails through life’s adversities by accepting them and turning them into a source of inner strength and wisdom. In this way, Kafka offers two things: first, an insightful explanation of why silence and isolation can be deadly when they leaving us alone with our darkest fears and fantasies, and second, an archetype of hope that is attuned to our times on how to cope with pain and anxiety.
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| 12. |
- Gabriel, Yiannis
(författare)
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Leadership in opera : Romance, betrayal, strife and sacrifice
- 2017
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Ingår i: Leadership. - : SAGE Publications. - 1742-7150 .- 1742-7169. ; 13:1, s. 5-19
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- What, if anything, does opera tell us about leadership, leaders and followers, that social research or indeed other art forms do not tell us? This is the question I address here. I argue that opera is a highly political genre, able to depict political events involving leaders and followers in sharply illuminating ways. In particular, through the device of the chorus it is able to represent the political actions and sentiments of large multitudes of people in their complexity and ambiguity. It is also capable of portraying many of the contradictions of leadership in a critical light. In particular, I argue that opera offers powerful insights into the psychology of leaders confronted by crisis and strife. It highlights the sacrifices they make, the distance and isolation that frequently afflicts them, the different ways in which they wield power and handle conflicts and the tensions between their private and public lives. In showing them meting out favours and punishments, opera warns of rulers’ perennial temptation to abuse their power and highlights some of the dark sides of leadership.
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| 13. |
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| 14. |
- Gabriel, Yiannis, et al.
(författare)
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Organizations and their consumers: Bridging work and consumption
- 2015
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Ingår i: Organization. - : SAGE Publications. - 1350-5084 .- 1461-7323. ; 22:5, s. 629-643
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The last 20 years or so have seen a far-reaching reconfiguration of the characters that dominate the world of organizations. For much of its life, the study of organizations was dominated by two central characters, the manager and the worker, whose relationship with all its tensions, conflicts and accommodations unfolded with within a broader environment of markets, governments, shareholders, social institutions, technological forces and so forth. In recent years, however, there has been a substantial movement to change the two-actor show into a three-actor show, the organizational dyad into a triad. The newcomer to the stage has been the consumer, a character whose whims, habits, desires and practices are no longer seen as impacting on' the activities of managers and workers from the outside, but increasingly as defining them. This introduction to the Special Issue on Organizations and their Consumers' examines the ramifications of the rise of the consumer and the hegemony of global markets for (1) the nature of organizations and their management, (2) the employees and the labour process and (3) the consumers themselves as they increasingly find themselves doing work, usually unpaid, on behalf of organizations.
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| 15. |
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| 16. |
- Gabriel, Yiannis
(författare)
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Placing emotion and fantasy at the heart of the researcher-researched relationship : The contribution of psychosocial studies
- 2020
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Ingår i: Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal. - 1746-5648. ; 15:2, s. 192-196
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce psychosocial research methodology as a method that makes use of the emotions of researcher and researched and goes well-beyond empathetic understanding. Design/methodology/approach: This short piece critically introduces the recently published book Further Researching Beneath the Surface (Volume 2): Psycho-social Research Methods in Practice, Eds Cummins, A.-M., and Williams, N., and analyses the psychosocial approach to qualitative research that emphasizes research as an emotional activity and makes use of the researcher’s and the researched’s emotional responses to each other in drawing interpretations about organizational phenomena. Findings: By analysing transference and counter-transference, researchers can draw valuable insights into organizational phenomena that remain unseen by more conventional research methodologies. Originality/value: Emotions, far from being the enemy of the researcher, can, if recognized properly, be valuable resources in social research.
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| 17. |
- Gabriel, Yiannis
(författare)
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Reflexivity and beyond – a plea for imagination in qualitative research methodology
- 2015
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Ingår i: Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal. - 1746-5648. ; 10:4, s. 332-336
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, important as reflexivity is, it does not constitute the gold standard of qualitative research. Instead the author makes a plea for the use of sociological imagination. Design/methodology/approach – The paper makes use of data from the ISI Web of Science database to demonstrate the increasing popularity of the concept of reflexivity. Findings – All researchers exercise reflexivity in as much as carrying out research alters both the subject and the object of the research. Conscious reflexivity enables researchers to question their assumptions and consequences of their work but does not guarantee high quality research. For this, creative imagination in recognizing the creative possibilities afforded by the data, are essential. Originality/value – Arguing against the emerging orthodoxy of qualitative research methodology, the original proposal of this paper lies in its plea to relax methodological strictures and judge the quality of research pragmatically in terms of its scientific value and social usefulness.
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| 18. |
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| 19. |
- Laezza, Rita, 1995, et al.
(författare)
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Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning for Shape Control of Deformable Linear Objects
- 2024
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Deformable objects present several challenges to the field of robotic manipulation. One of the tasks that best encapsulates the difficulties arising due to non-rigid behavior is shape control, which requires driving an object to a desired shape. While shape-servoing methods have been shown successful in contexts with approximately linear behavior, they can fail in tasks with more complex dynamics. We investigate an alternative approach, using offline RL to solve a planar shape control problem of a Deformable Linear Object (DLO). To evaluate the effect of material properties, two DLOs are tested namely a soft rope and an elastic cord. We frame this task as a goal-conditioned offline RL problem, and aim to learn to generalize to unseen goal shapes. Data collection and augmentation procedures are proposed to limit the amount of experimental data which needs to be collected with the real robot. We evaluate the amount of augmentation needed to achieve the best results, and test the effect of regularization through behavior cloning on the TD3+BC algorithm. Finally, we show that the proposed approach is able to outperform a shape-servoing baseline in a curvature inversion experiment.
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| 20. |
- Lindebaum, Dirk, et al.
(författare)
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Anger and Organization Studies : From Social Disorder to Moral Order
- 2016
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Ingår i: Organization Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 0170-8406 .- 1741-3044. ; 37:7, s. 903-918
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this essay, we oppose current conceptualizations of anger as, at least, a temporary individual psychological disorder and as the cause of a social disorder. We develop the view that anger can be a profoundly moral emotion aimed at maintaining moral order and restoring social order when this has been ruptured. Moral anger is distinguished from other types of anger, like the ones arising from routine frustration, break-downs of communication and ego violations. Through a close reading of the jury drama Twelve Angry Men, we demonstrate that moral anger has an information dimension, signaling a rupture of a moral code, as well as an energic dimension, as a source of energy aimed at putting right a wrong. We conclude that a world without anger would be, possibly, a compliant and quiescent world but not a just world.
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| 21. |
- Ulus, Eda, et al.
(författare)
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Bridging the contradictions of social constructionism and psychoanalysis in a study of workplace emotions in India
- 2018
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Ingår i: Culture and Organization. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1475-9551 .- 1477-2760. ; 24:3, s. 221-243
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper makes a contribution to the study of emotions in organizations by offering a systematic juxtaposition and cross-fertilization of psychoanalytic and social constructionist approaches. These two traditions have found it hard to communicate in the past when addressing organizational emotions. Points of similarity and tension between them are discussed in connection with two critical case studies of female Indian managers discussing their emotions at the workplace. These were obtained during field work in which emotions were studied through narratives generated by a free-association interview approach. Both the emotions described in the narratives themselves and the emotions of the interview encounter were analysed, as resources for a rapprochement of contrasting perspectives on emotion. This rapprochement acknowledges the psychoanalytic emphasis on unconscious dynamics shaping the emotional lives of individuals and groups, while also honouring the social constructionist emphasis on how emotions are influenced by social, cultural and discursive practices.
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| 22. |
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