Leanne Cutcher

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Albert Mills

Saint Mary's University (Canada)

John W Mohr

University of California, Santa Barbara

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Sukru Ozen

Izmir University of Economics

Benjamin Straumann

University of Zurich, Switzerland

Olav Eikeland

OsloMet—Oslo Metropolitan University

Vítor Costa

UERJ - Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / Rio de Janeiro State University

Yael Berda

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Marijana Belaj

University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences [Filozofski fakultet]

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Papers by Leanne Cutcher

Mining the Discourse: Strategizing During BHP Billiton's Attempted Acquisition of Rio Tinto

Journal of Management Studies, Jul 15, 2013

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Authentic leadership in context: An analysis of banking CEO narratives during the global financial crisis

Human Relations, Nov 19, 2016

The concept of authentic leadership rose to prominence through its idealization as an inherently ... more The concept of authentic leadership rose to prominence through its idealization as an inherently moral and universally desirable trait. We problematize this romantic notion by exploring how the ‘authenticity’ of the CEOs of four major Australian banks was discursively constructed before and during the global financial crisis (GFC). Using multimodal discourse analysis of media texts, we show how what it meant to be an ‘authentic leader’ was co-constructed differently by the CEOs and the media. We also highlight the dynamic nature of context, where the GFC was variously framed by and for each of the CEOs. Our study challenges the acontextual notion of authentic leadership by showing how a discursively constructed context can reinforce or undermine leaders’ narratives of authenticity.

Reflections on Reflexive Theorizing: The Need for A Little More Conversation

Organization theory, Jul 1, 2020

In this paper, we investigate the nature and impact of recent reflexive theorizing that has been ... more

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A Critical Analysis of Temporal Work: Time, Space and Identity in a Global Engineering Firm

Proceedings - Academy of Management, 2015

In this paper, we critically analyze the concept of temporal work wherein individuals are said to... more

At a Critical Age: The Social and Political Organization of Age and Ageing

Organization Studies, Dec 19, 2011

Age is a culturally and politically resonant discourse in contemporary society. Whether it lies i... more Age is a culturally and politically resonant discourse in contemporary society. Whether it lies in the fetishization of youth and novelty or in the anxieties of ageing, decline and decay, age has become a reified system of classification and a pervasive organizing principle. Nor are its effects neutral: the young and the new are lauded; while old age is subjected to the ubiquitous narrative of “age as decline” (Trethewey, 2001). Thus age and ageing have a particular meaning in contemporary society, in which the old are disadvantaged, while the young and the new are extolled. This meaning emanates from diverse political, cultural, economic and social forces: at the same time as individuals, organizations and societies struggle to deal with “problems” associated with age, they help to create those very problems. Thus the issue of age is political, cultural and institutional; it cuts across diverse organizations, communities, and societies; it produces significant material effects; and it links organizations, politics and policies. While there has been considerable interest in recent years in the societal and organizational challenges of ageing populations, this work has tended to take a more reductive bio-essentialized understanding of age. However, age and ageing is constructed through knowledge systems and social practices in and by organizations, which position and advantage youth and the new over the aged and the old. The nature of these practices and the implications of these meanings are so far under-theorized and underexplored in organization studies. The objective of this special issue is to examine how and in what ways age and ageing have become an organizing principle in contemporary society; to learn more about how meanings have emerged and the different influences that have contributed to them; and to investigate more closely the political, cultural and social effects of the way in which age and ageing is organized; We welcome papers that examine how ageing is constructed, organized, policed, managed and resisted in different organizational and societal contexts, and which engage with the themes and questions below. The aim is to use age and ageing to “deepen our understanding of the complexity of organizations as social and political objects” and to investigate “the links between organizations, politics and policies” (Courpasson, Arellano-Gault, Brown & Lounsbury, 2008: 1384, 1385). We welcome both empirical and theoretical papers and are particularly interested in submissions that draw insights from other age-related disciplines such as social gerontology, social anthropology, social geography and political sociology.

Discourse and Resistance

Management Communication Quarterly, Aug 1, 2005

This article highlights the contributions that discourse analysis can make to the study of organi... more This article highlights the contributions that discourse analysis can make to the study of organizational resistance. Specifically, it demonstrates how using a discursive lens can provide insights into the targets, practices, and consequences of resistance. First, discourse analytic approaches can reveal how acts of resistance target multiple organizational audiences simultaneously, often developed through diverse texts directed to internal and external stakeholders. Second, discourse analysis enables researchers to examine the complex, dynamic, and interconnected nature of resistance practices and to avoid constructing simple dichotomies between such features as covert and overt forms of resistance or individual and collective resistance. Third, discourse analysis highlights the intended and unintended consequences of resistance by examining how organizational members engage with, adapt to, and transform organizational practices. Future directions are proposed for research on discourse analysis and organizational resistance.

Special Issue of: Organization Studies on At a Critical Age: The Social and Political Organization of Age and Ageing

Organization Studies, 2012

Calculative Devices as Boundary Objects in an Acquisition Discourse

Proceedings - Academy of Management, 2015

This paper explores the role of calculative devices as boundary objects. Boundary objects facilit... more

Ideas that work: mobilizing Australian workers using a discourse of rights

International Journal of Human Resource Management, Mar 22, 2012

In this paper, we focus on a potential mechanism for revitalizing unions&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;... more In this paper, we focus on a potential mechanism for revitalizing unions&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39; influence as broader political actors: their use of familiar and appealing discourses to frame political campaigns. Through a discursive analysis of campaign texts, we show how the Australian Council of Trade Unions successfully promoted a counter-discourse, which operated as a collective action frame to mobilize alternative meanings, identities

The Bundian Way: An Indigenous-Led Cross-Sector Partnership in Place Through Time

Journal of Business Ethics

Our paper explores the complex place-based relations of cross-sector partnerships between Indigen... more Our paper explores the complex place-based relations of cross-sector partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners. We draw on a longitudinal in-depth case study of the Bundian Way, an Indigenous-led cross-sector partnership of over 40 organisations. Through practices of listening to history and walking ‘on Country’, the non-Indigenous partners and our team came to appreciate the indivisibility of place and time and bear witness to the intergenerational trauma of colonially imposed divisions. By combining a 45-day place-based ethnography with a 36-month participant observation and repeated interviews with the Advisory Committee members, we explain how non-Indigenous members of the cross-sector partnership came to realise, and reverse, these place-time divisions. We contribute to an ethics of custodianship by first contrasting, and then combining, Indigenous and Western ways of knowing place through time.

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Emotion and aesthetics:organizational space, embodiment and materiality

Constructing the Customer

Leanne Cutcher makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the consumption and producti... more Leanne Cutcher makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the consumption and production nexus. Through extensive analysis of data from a range of financial institutions she shows how wider structural change and shifting organisational discourse has influenced customer and worker relations in the retail banking industry in Australia. The research focuses in particular on credit unions and community banks, two areas of retail banking that have been largely ignored to date. Her research shows that, in addition to customers having a physical presence in and influence on organisational life, management and workers also construct discursive customers as a means of influencing the meanings attached to service work. The front-line workers are not passive recipients of managerial discourse but active agents, accommodating or resisting the impact of these customers. Cutcher shows how these competing concepts of the customer influence both the customer-service provider relationship...

Volunteering: Why We Can't Survive Without It [Book Review]

Review(s) of: Volunteering: Why We Can't Survive Without It, by Melanie Oppenheimer, UNSW Pre... more

Misrepresenting Indigenous mothers

The Good Mother, 2010

Built to last: ageing, class and the masculine body in a UK hedge fund

Work, Employment and Society, 2014

This article explores the ways in which male traders negotiate ageing in the highly competitive w... more This article explores the ways in which male traders negotiate ageing in the highly competitive world of finance. It draws on a study of a UK hedge fund to show how ageing processes intersect with masculinity and class-based bodily practices to reproduce market-based ideals of the sector. Through developing the concept of body accumulation, this article provides a new framework for exploring ageing in an organizational context by demonstrating how masculinity, class and organizational values are mapped onto the traders’ bodies over time and in ways that require individuals to continually negotiate their professional value. This not only significantly advances current understanding of how one group of professionals navigate growing older at work, but also highlights the importance of understanding ageing as an accumulation process that takes into account temporal, spatial and cultural dimensions.

Call for papers for special issue of Organization Spaces and places of remembering and commemoration

Organization, 2013

Exploring the spaces and places in which we remember and commemorate the past can tell us much ab... more Exploring the spaces and places in which we remember and commemorate the past can tell us much about power, identity and material relations within organizations (Dale and Burrell 2008). With this in mind, we invite contributions to this special issue that look to embrace both the temporal and spatial organization of commemoration and remembrance, connecting to recent research that has attempted to bring space back into critical organizational theory (Beyes and Steyeart, 2012; Dale, 2005; Dale and Burrell, 2008; Zhang et al., 2008). Particular theoretical influences on this work include Lefebvre’s (1991) emphasis on space as simultaneously socially produced and producing and Soja’s (1996) concern with the trialectics of space. Theoretical ideas that might also help to inform an organizational understanding of commemoration and remembrance include phenomenological accounts emphasizing the poetic resonances and lived experiences of place (Bachelard, 1964) and Foucault’s (1986) concept of heterotopic spaces. While the latter focuses on cemeteries as ‘quasi-eternal’ and culturally ubiquitous spaces of commemoration and remembrance–and the ways in which they are transformed into places of meaning and agency–they can, of course, take many different forms. They range from spaces designed specifically to foreground the past (and its implications for the future) such as museums or memorial gardens, to those that more subtly integrate the past into the living present in order to construct particular narratives of organizational legacy or progress, such as galleries of past leaders or single monuments to organizational heroes. We therefore invite authors to explore what is perhaps a myriad of ways in which we live in and through spaces and places of recognition and recollection, thereby contributing to an understanding of these spaces as embodied and embedded, and as fundamentally organized.

At a Critical Age: The Social and Political Organization of Age and Ageing

Organization Studies, 2011

Finance capitalism's perpetually extinguished pasts: Exploring discursive shifts 2007–2011

Culture and Organization, 2012

When we published the call for papers for this special issue in early 2010, we invited authors to... more When we published the call for papers for this special issue in early 2010, we invited authors to submit work that somehow could elucidate the discursive shifts of finance capital in the broader context of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Over the period of mid-2009 to mid-2011, we witnessed a transition from ubiquitous narratives about a dystopian collapse of our socio-economic system to pervasive claims that what we had lived through was simply a temporary blip in a self-correcting free-market system and that what was needed was little more than a perfecting of what was in situ. In this new discourse, finance capital was rehabilitated and the state systems which actually rescued the financial system became the main target of critique. A combination of emergency liquidity supplies to financial institutions (which in a significant number of high profile cases involved recapitalization by the state) and a quick dose of Keynesian public spending had come at great cost to the public purse and were followed by an official strategy of deficit-cutting austerity. Moreover, this strategy was framed in terms of a ‘taking advantage of the crisis’ discourse, advocating structural reforms in social provision and pensions. Morgan et al. (2011, 148) seemed to capture a mood of exasperation among critical scholars when they exclaimed: ‘How did we get from the politics of the financial crash, from the “end of the world” rhetoric of late 2008 to this’? But, by and large, this discourse of returning to ‘business as usual’ as quickly as possible was hardly questioned despite the fact that its associated measures have yet to show any sign of working. Again, financial markets have been ‘raised to the status of omniscient and implacable forces of inevitable (and ultimately benign and productive) economic logics’ (Morgan et al. 2011, 148). At the same time, while our collective dependence upon the banks is now greater than ever (a dependency captured by the motto ‘too big to fail’) and the political influence of the financial sector seems undiminished (Willmott 2011). The period 2007–2011 thus seems to bear out the Marxist reading of Capital as a ‘machine constantly breaking down, repairing itself not by solving its local problems, but by mutation onto larger and larger scales, its past always punctually forgotten. . .’ (Jameson 2011, 7). As Prichard and Mir (2010, 508) have pointed out, it is precisely this forgetfulness, a ‘collective absent mindedness’ that lies at the very core of the economic regime that creates the conditions for ever more frequent and intensive crises. Fredric Jameson’s (2011, 106) description of our current historical moment as ‘the eternal virginity of capitalism and its perpetually extinguished pasts’ seems particularly apposite in this context. Given the significance of what has taken place in the finance capital arena over the last few years, it is somewhat surprising that our field has devoted so little attention to the GFC and its aftermath. For example, Prichard and Mir (2010, 509) documented how ‘key gatherings of the critically-inclined management and organization studies community’ failed to pay much attention to ‘the major economic events of the day and the

The Shifting Meaning of Mutuality and Co-Operativeness in the Credit Union Movement from 1959 to 1989

Labour History, 2006

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Spaces and places of remembering and commemoration

Organization, Dec 22, 2015

Organisations engage in remembering and commemorative practices, often to produce effects of stab... more Organisations engage in remembering and commemorative practices, often to produce effects of stability and continuity and to create shared meanings and culture, yet commemoration has been a relatively neglected theme in the study of organisations. The articles in this Special Issue range across diverse examples to provide a rich understanding of the dynamic and complex processes involved in the organisation of commemoration. In particular, they illustrate the importance of paying attention to materialities, spatiality and embodiment in the lived experience of practices of remembering.

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Mining the Discourse: Strategizing During BHP Billiton's Attempted Acquisition of Rio Tinto

Journal of Management Studies, Jul 15, 2013

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Authentic leadership in context: An analysis of banking CEO narratives during the global financial crisis

Human Relations, Nov 19, 2016