Veranstaltungsprogramm der VHB Jahrestagung

This paper examines how self-managing modes of organizing (SMOs) can be sustained within hierarchical organizational settings. Such embedded SMOs are inherently precarious due to the paradoxical tensions between principles of self-management versus the hierarchies in which they are embedded. We conceptualize the question of how to sustain embedded SMOs as a matter of paradoxical boundary work. We draw on this perspective in our qualitative case study of a self-managing team within an international medical technology company. Our findings reveal how this team was able to perpetuate its SMOs through the dialectical interplay of three main and recursively combined communicative practices of day-to-day nurturing and two forms of strategic intra-organizational positioning: exposing and blending in. Our study makes two main theoretical contributions. First, we contribute to research on embedded SMOs by highlighting how a team can navigate between the risks of either a too rigid or too permeable boundary, both of which are likely to have discontinued the embedded SMOs. Second, we add to research on paradoxes in organizational boundary work. While prior works have focused on more established boundaries between job roles or professions, we explore the role of paradoxes in maintaining precarious boundaries between distinct modes of organizing. By adopting a constitutive view, our study highlights that paradoxes are not merely a side-effect of boundary work but rather that the ongoing communicative negotiation of such paradoxes creates and sustains these boundaries over time – and that way allowed the team to uphold their SMOs in an otherwise hierarchical setting.

It is undisputed that universities have undergone the transformation from being loosely coupled systems into being more tightly coupled organizations since competition in the higher education system has increased at multiple levels. There is no single modus operandi of governance for universities to respond. In this paper, we provide a configurational perspective to analyse the congruence between external contingencies and internal organisational arrangements. Relying on a comprehensive qualitative meta-study based on 36 case studies, we mixed theoretical reasoning with data analysis and synthesized four archetypal configurations: The Diffuser, the Cascader, the Absorber, and the Modifier. They reflect robust strategy-structure patterns and provide an understanding of universities’ transformation into an organizational actor responding to competition.

Middle managers have a central, usually powerful and agentive position in the hierarchy. However especially in situations of changing governance structures their position of ‘being in the middle’ can be tensional. This paper seeks to better understand the complexity of agency of middle managers’ identity work against the backdrop of changing power relations, and the paradoxical tensions this creates for them. We take a critical lens on middle managers’ identity discourse constituted within relations of power. By doing so we aim to get at the bottom of the micro-dynamics of paradoxes and their development, that are considered important and yet still not well understood. The results of our linguistic analysis including an extended pronoun analysis (Harding et al., 2014) reveal two different discourses: (1) The discourse of agency where the middle managers can agentively position themselves as subjects and objects when talking about situations within the hierarchical space, (2) and the discourse of paralysis where our results show how the same managers are stuck in their own discourse and thus actively constitute their own inability to act. They discursively struggle over leadership meaning and power relations when they find themselves in positions that are outside the scope of hierarchical space.