Responsabilité sociétale et développement durable

In 1988, Nahavandi and Malekzadeh suggested that differences between acquired and acquiring companies' cultures did not necessarily cause members of the former to evaluate the acquirers' cultures negatively. Although their work was widely cited, the questions of how members of acquired companies form their cultural evaluations and what drives the evaluation dynamics remain unexplored. We attribute this to the lack of a theoretical language in the acquisition literature for talking about the subjectivities of the people in the acquired companies and their understanding of cultures. In this paper, we extend Nahavandi and Malekzadeh's work by introducing a conceptualization of subjectivity based on a post-structuralist perspective, as constituted by various discourses in their environment. In three cases of acquired companies, we explore the discursive frames employees use to form their cultural evaluations, and the links between these discursive frames and the employees' accounts of immediate events, in order to understand the changes in cultural evaluations over time. The findings indicate (i) a temporal aspect in people's use of different discursive frames to construct their cultural evaluations, and (ii) that the shifts in the use of discursive frames lead to changes in cultural evaluations.

The current study has tested the prediction that CEO cooperative behaviour has an impact upon organizational performance. This is a fundamental organizational issue that is in clear need of illumination through studies of practice. We pursued the issue through a study of leadership in organizations located in the Norwegian socio-cultural context in which cooperation has been, and still is, a norm of appropriateness. The study provided empirical evidence of a positive relationship between CEO cooperative behaviour and organizational performance. This relationship appeared to be stronger in organizational contexts in which CEOs are perceived to have legitimacy and managerial discretion, and it appeared to be weaker in organizations in which individual performance pay is the rule. Since some organizational characteristics have the potential to enhance the impact of CEO cooperative behaviour while other characteristics might inhibit this impact, leaders have to consider carefully how to develop and maintain individual and organizational capabilities that are needed to act appropriately.

Ford, Harding and Learmonth in their paper in the March 2010 special issue of the British Journal of Management ask ‘who is it that would make business schools more critical?’ Commenting on their paper, I argue that although they raise a very important question they do not deliver rigorous answers because their critical reflexive gaze fails to fall upon the mechanisms of hierarchy and exclusion that operate within the critical management studies (CMS) community. First the reflexivity debate in CMS and Ford, Harding and Learmonth's contribution to this debate is explored. Next institutionalized orthodoxies in CMS, such as the tendency to close ranks for those with different perspectives and the lack of demographic diversity, are problematized, and Ford, Harding and Learmonth's contribution is situated across these orthodoxies. Finally, the commentary offers some alternatives and solutions for CMS to take the step further from verbalism to critical praxis. It is suggested that the solution lies in exercising critical self-reflection which acknowledges the embeddedness of CMS in structures and relations of power and hegemony and recognizes the role of CMS scholars in sustaining and reproducing these structures in their own institutions and communities.