Ricardo AZAMBUJA | ESC RENNES SCHOOL OF BUSINESS (original) (raw)
Papers by Ricardo AZAMBUJA
Human Relations, Aug 17, 2018
The current paper examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary wo... more The current paper examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary work, characterized as the work of negotiating between multiple roles at the interstices of organizational groups. Through an ethnographic study of a Brazilian accounting firm, we explore the ambivalent experience of boundary work as characteristic of professional middle managerial workers. Our managers described themselves as proactive and reflexive agents, on the one hand, yet also as lacking autonomy and a sense of belonging, on the other. We examine this tension as a contrast between forces of emancipation (i.e. sense of mastery, autonomy, empowerment and reflexivity) and alienation (i.e. fatigue, lack of selfdetermination, and detachment from their profession and coworkers). We discuss these forces and their implications for managerial work in the light that, in our findings, managers routinely shift between being agential and reflexive mediatorsboundary subjectsand interfacing and coordination devicesboundary objects.
Journal of Management Studies, Feb 6, 2023
This paper examines how middle managers subvert organizational norms through diverse forms of dev... more This paper examines how middle managers subvert organizational norms through diverse forms of deviance. Considering deviance not only in its negative sense, but including elements of adaptability and innovation, we draw on Mertonian theorizing around structural strains to explain deviance as resulting from mismatches between organizational norms and everyday work ‘on‐the‐ground’, with deviance practices feeding back iteratively into norm formation itself. Drawing upon observations, shadowing and interviews in a Brazilian accounting firm, we explore how deviance follows from incompatible pressures and norms across organizational levels and locations, and is realized in creative practical operationalizations of, and reaction to, conflicting norms. Through thick descriptions of three exemplary cases, we examine middle‐managerial deviance at varying level of detachment from, and dialogical relation to, norms. On this basis, we advance a multifaceted conceptualization of deviance – rescoping, reconfiguring and replacing norms – accounting for its conditions of emergence, diversity of mechanisms, and repercussions on middle managers' agency and organizational functioning and norms. Our findings demonstrate that deviance paves the way for new norm formation, reconciling contradictory constraints while consolidating middle managers' power over and beyond their official mandates.
Journal of Management Studies
QMiP Bulletin
In this article we briefly explore the role of texts as artefacts. That is, texts are both a cult... more In this article we briefly explore the role of texts as artefacts. That is, texts are both a cultural tool and a record of events. They are used to construct meaning and a careful analysis of texts informs us not only about past events but also about how meaning was historically constructed and how those historic constructions are being used in the present. In order to make sense of this interleaving of meanings and objects over time we suggest that texts should be recognised as artefacts, as indeed is any object. In other words, we can study texts in the same way we can study other objects. This is, however, an introduction to our thinking on the topic and some of the constructs that can help us constrain and manage these understandings.
Journal of Management Studies
Management Decision, 2021
PurposeThe literature on Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), cultural differences between organizatio... more PurposeThe literature on Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), cultural differences between organizations have frequently been identified as one of the main challenges in the process of post-merger integration (PMI). Existing research has explored a broad variety of cultural differences in perceptions, such as those relating to expectations, norms, values and beliefs within the respective organizations, and how these affect the process and success of PMI. However, less attention has been paid to the relevance of the macro-societal context to PMI. The ambition of this article is, therefore, to advance our understanding of how macro-level societal factors define organizational cultures and affect the success of PMI.Design/methodology/approachWe draw on social systems theory as devised by Niklas Luhmann, assuming that organizations are always embedded in the macro-level societal context of distinctive realms of social reality—such as the economy, politics, religion and the arts—that make up ...
Integrating smallholders within global agricultural value chains through contract farming has reg... more Integrating smallholders within global agricultural value chains through contract farming has regained momentum in the development agenda, particularly in Africa. Governments, corporate agri-business, and global development institutions have embraced sugarcane as a suitable commodity to promote the integration of smallholders within commercial agricultural circuits so as to improve the prospects of rural development and reduce rural poverty. Influenced by the new institutional economics paradigm, win-win scenarios in which agribusiness companies and smallholders reciprocally benefit—the former by getting regular and standardized quantities of produce; the latter through secure access to the market—are advocated. However, little evidence of success in contract farming has been provided. By exploring the socio-ecological implications of contract farming within two major agro-industrial complexes (in Uganda and Tanzania), we demonstrate that the incorporation of smallholders in these s...
Organization
The current paper uses the concept of imaginaries to understand how permaculture provides alterna... more The current paper uses the concept of imaginaries to understand how permaculture provides alternative ways of organizing in response to the Anthropocene. We argue that imaginaries provide ways of organizing that combine ideas and concrete practices, imagining organizational alternatives by enacting new forms of collective practice. Permaculture movements, because of their combination of local, situated design practices and underlying social and political philosophies, provide an interesting case of imaginaries that make it possible to reimagine the relations between humans, non-human species and the natural environment. We identify and describe three imaginaries found in permaculture movements, conceiving of permaculture, respectively, as a technical design practice, a holistic life philosophy, and an intersectional social movement. These imaginaries open up possibilities for political and social alternatives to industrially organized agriculture, but are also at risk of various for...
Human Relations
The current article examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary ... more The current article examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary work, characterized as the work of negotiating between multiple roles in the interstices of organizational groups. Through an ethnographic study of a Brazilian accounting firm, we explore the ambivalent experience of boundary work as characteristic of professional middle managerial workers. Our managers described themselves as proactive and reflexive agents, on the one hand, yet also as lacking autonomy and a sense of belonging, on the other. We examine this tension as a contrast between forces of emancipation (i.e. sense of mastery, autonomy, empowerment and reflexivity) and alienation (i.e. fatigue, lack of self-determination, and detachment from their profession and coworkers). We discuss these forces and their implications for managerial work in the light that, in our findings, managers routinely shift between being agential and reflexive mediators (boundary subjects) and interfacing...
Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 2014
Patient Safety is a global institution in the field largely assumed to have emerged following the... more Patient Safety is a global institution in the field largely assumed to have emerged following the publication of To Err Is Human by the Institute of Medicine in 1999. In this paper we demonstrate the Patient Safety has been constructed as an institution separately in the practice of anaesthesia since 1954 and in hospitalised care since 1964. The publication of To Err was, in fact, only one of a number of later field configuring events. We use Bruner's (1991) theory of narrative to frame the institution building process which we term deliberative instauration in recognition of the historic literature on the subject. We further link the process of institution building to Vygotsky's theory of social mediation and the use of artefacts in relation to the object of intended action. We conclude that a narrative can be understood as both an artefact and a process used in the social construction of institutions by professional psychological collectives (in this case physicians).
Map discourses in the minutes (mapping work?) Use the minutes as maps of the organizational disco... more Map discourses in the minutes (mapping work?) Use the minutes as maps of the organizational discourses (uncertain of this conceptualisation) Navigate discourses somehow (using the agenda and the minutes?) Minutes are similar to maps – are they maps? Similar features – Here be Dragons
Cette these examine le travail des cadres intermediaires, leur experience subjective du travail e... more Cette these examine le travail des cadres intermediaires, leur experience subjective du travail et leur construction de realite(s) organisationnelle(s). Le materiau empirique provient d’un travail de terrain ethnographique realise sur plusieurs sites au sein d’une entreprise Bresilienne d’audit et de consulting de taille moyenne. Le cœur de cette these est constitue de trois articles independants. Le premier de ces articles conceptualise l’emergence et la nature du travail-frontiere des cadres intermediaires comme un moyen de favoriser le travail collaboratif entre des acteurs organisationnels multiples, aux perspectives et interets souvent divergents. Le travail-frontiere est a la fois un transfert de connaissances, une traduction d’interpretations et une transformation d’interets au depart incompatibles entre differents groupes organisationnels. Un cadre conceptuel – compose de huit conditions structurelles, sept types de travail-frontiere des cadres intermediaires et neuf consequ...
How managers facilitate cross-functional collaboration across intraorganizational symbolic bounda... more How managers facilitate cross-functional collaboration across intraorganizational symbolic boundaries separating actors has been a seminal and persistent academic puzzle. Whereas these boundaries m...
in this article, the use of Parisian urban furniture as a medium for communicating advertising is... more in this article, the use of Parisian urban furniture as a medium for communicating advertising is analyzed drawing from the perspectives of the audrillardian consumerism and the concept of Junkspace introduced by Rem Koolhaas. Three examples of advertising integrated into the city are presented and analyzed via-a-vis these theoretical frameworks. Three extensions of the Baudrillardian concept of seduction are proposed: i) the seduction through the sign of the familial, offered by the Grands Magasins’ shop-windows, ii) the seduction by integration, reached by the Morris column, and iii) the seduction by the ambition of belonging to a reference-group, incited by a panel-siding. The characterization of the embodiments of Junkspace into contemporary Paris, as well as a reflection on the subtle and spectacular seduction of consumption through the inevitability of everyday in this city, are then advocated.
Narrative is typically conflated with story with an attendant lack of consideration for what migh... more Narrative is typically conflated with story with an attendant lack of consideration for what might be important distinctions between the two. Similarly, narrative is typically considered as an object but the recognition of the object as an artefact - a cultural tool - is disregarded. Rarely is narrative considered as a process and even less so as both a process and an artefact. In this paper we draw on the work of scholars from both Psychology and Humanities in an attempt to demonstrate that narrative is both a process and an artefact and consider some of the implications for this understanding. In particular, we present an understanding of the role of motif. Motif, we suggest, is a powerful tool used to both build and represent shared meanings and to recognise recurring patterns. Of course, the former understanding is widely acknowledged in literary studies, but less so in other disciplinary studies of narrative. Our current work demonstrates how a linguistic motif is both used to ...
Agrarian South: a Journal of Political Economy, 2018
Integrating smallholders within global agricultural value chains through contract farming has reg... more Integrating smallholders within global agricultural value chains through contract farming has regained momentum in the development agenda, particularly in Africa. Governments, corporate agri-business, and global development institutions have embraced sugarcane as a suitable commodity to promote the integration of smallholders within commercial agricultural circuits so as to improve the prospects of rural development and reduce rural poverty. Influenced by the new institutional economics paradigm, win-win scenarios in which agribusiness companies and smallholders reciprocally benefit-the former by getting regular and standardized quantities of produce; the latter through secure access to the market-are advocated. However, little evidence of success in contract farming has been provided. By exploring the socio-ecological
Human Relations, Aug 17, 2018
The current paper examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary wo... more The current paper examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary work, characterized as the work of negotiating between multiple roles at the interstices of organizational groups. Through an ethnographic study of a Brazilian accounting firm, we explore the ambivalent experience of boundary work as characteristic of professional middle managerial workers. Our managers described themselves as proactive and reflexive agents, on the one hand, yet also as lacking autonomy and a sense of belonging, on the other. We examine this tension as a contrast between forces of emancipation (i.e. sense of mastery, autonomy, empowerment and reflexivity) and alienation (i.e. fatigue, lack of selfdetermination, and detachment from their profession and coworkers). We discuss these forces and their implications for managerial work in the light that, in our findings, managers routinely shift between being agential and reflexive mediatorsboundary subjectsand interfacing and coordination devicesboundary objects.
Journal of Management Studies, Feb 6, 2023
This paper examines how middle managers subvert organizational norms through diverse forms of dev... more This paper examines how middle managers subvert organizational norms through diverse forms of deviance. Considering deviance not only in its negative sense, but including elements of adaptability and innovation, we draw on Mertonian theorizing around structural strains to explain deviance as resulting from mismatches between organizational norms and everyday work ‘on‐the‐ground’, with deviance practices feeding back iteratively into norm formation itself. Drawing upon observations, shadowing and interviews in a Brazilian accounting firm, we explore how deviance follows from incompatible pressures and norms across organizational levels and locations, and is realized in creative practical operationalizations of, and reaction to, conflicting norms. Through thick descriptions of three exemplary cases, we examine middle‐managerial deviance at varying level of detachment from, and dialogical relation to, norms. On this basis, we advance a multifaceted conceptualization of deviance – rescoping, reconfiguring and replacing norms – accounting for its conditions of emergence, diversity of mechanisms, and repercussions on middle managers' agency and organizational functioning and norms. Our findings demonstrate that deviance paves the way for new norm formation, reconciling contradictory constraints while consolidating middle managers' power over and beyond their official mandates.
Journal of Management Studies
QMiP Bulletin
In this article we briefly explore the role of texts as artefacts. That is, texts are both a cult... more In this article we briefly explore the role of texts as artefacts. That is, texts are both a cultural tool and a record of events. They are used to construct meaning and a careful analysis of texts informs us not only about past events but also about how meaning was historically constructed and how those historic constructions are being used in the present. In order to make sense of this interleaving of meanings and objects over time we suggest that texts should be recognised as artefacts, as indeed is any object. In other words, we can study texts in the same way we can study other objects. This is, however, an introduction to our thinking on the topic and some of the constructs that can help us constrain and manage these understandings.
Journal of Management Studies
Management Decision, 2021
PurposeThe literature on Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), cultural differences between organizatio... more PurposeThe literature on Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), cultural differences between organizations have frequently been identified as one of the main challenges in the process of post-merger integration (PMI). Existing research has explored a broad variety of cultural differences in perceptions, such as those relating to expectations, norms, values and beliefs within the respective organizations, and how these affect the process and success of PMI. However, less attention has been paid to the relevance of the macro-societal context to PMI. The ambition of this article is, therefore, to advance our understanding of how macro-level societal factors define organizational cultures and affect the success of PMI.Design/methodology/approachWe draw on social systems theory as devised by Niklas Luhmann, assuming that organizations are always embedded in the macro-level societal context of distinctive realms of social reality—such as the economy, politics, religion and the arts—that make up ...
Integrating smallholders within global agricultural value chains through contract farming has reg... more Integrating smallholders within global agricultural value chains through contract farming has regained momentum in the development agenda, particularly in Africa. Governments, corporate agri-business, and global development institutions have embraced sugarcane as a suitable commodity to promote the integration of smallholders within commercial agricultural circuits so as to improve the prospects of rural development and reduce rural poverty. Influenced by the new institutional economics paradigm, win-win scenarios in which agribusiness companies and smallholders reciprocally benefit—the former by getting regular and standardized quantities of produce; the latter through secure access to the market—are advocated. However, little evidence of success in contract farming has been provided. By exploring the socio-ecological implications of contract farming within two major agro-industrial complexes (in Uganda and Tanzania), we demonstrate that the incorporation of smallholders in these s...
Organization
The current paper uses the concept of imaginaries to understand how permaculture provides alterna... more The current paper uses the concept of imaginaries to understand how permaculture provides alternative ways of organizing in response to the Anthropocene. We argue that imaginaries provide ways of organizing that combine ideas and concrete practices, imagining organizational alternatives by enacting new forms of collective practice. Permaculture movements, because of their combination of local, situated design practices and underlying social and political philosophies, provide an interesting case of imaginaries that make it possible to reimagine the relations between humans, non-human species and the natural environment. We identify and describe three imaginaries found in permaculture movements, conceiving of permaculture, respectively, as a technical design practice, a holistic life philosophy, and an intersectional social movement. These imaginaries open up possibilities for political and social alternatives to industrially organized agriculture, but are also at risk of various for...
Human Relations
The current article examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary ... more The current article examines the experience of middle management through the concept of boundary work, characterized as the work of negotiating between multiple roles in the interstices of organizational groups. Through an ethnographic study of a Brazilian accounting firm, we explore the ambivalent experience of boundary work as characteristic of professional middle managerial workers. Our managers described themselves as proactive and reflexive agents, on the one hand, yet also as lacking autonomy and a sense of belonging, on the other. We examine this tension as a contrast between forces of emancipation (i.e. sense of mastery, autonomy, empowerment and reflexivity) and alienation (i.e. fatigue, lack of self-determination, and detachment from their profession and coworkers). We discuss these forces and their implications for managerial work in the light that, in our findings, managers routinely shift between being agential and reflexive mediators (boundary subjects) and interfacing...
Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 2014
Patient Safety is a global institution in the field largely assumed to have emerged following the... more Patient Safety is a global institution in the field largely assumed to have emerged following the publication of To Err Is Human by the Institute of Medicine in 1999. In this paper we demonstrate the Patient Safety has been constructed as an institution separately in the practice of anaesthesia since 1954 and in hospitalised care since 1964. The publication of To Err was, in fact, only one of a number of later field configuring events. We use Bruner's (1991) theory of narrative to frame the institution building process which we term deliberative instauration in recognition of the historic literature on the subject. We further link the process of institution building to Vygotsky's theory of social mediation and the use of artefacts in relation to the object of intended action. We conclude that a narrative can be understood as both an artefact and a process used in the social construction of institutions by professional psychological collectives (in this case physicians).
Map discourses in the minutes (mapping work?) Use the minutes as maps of the organizational disco... more Map discourses in the minutes (mapping work?) Use the minutes as maps of the organizational discourses (uncertain of this conceptualisation) Navigate discourses somehow (using the agenda and the minutes?) Minutes are similar to maps – are they maps? Similar features – Here be Dragons
Cette these examine le travail des cadres intermediaires, leur experience subjective du travail e... more Cette these examine le travail des cadres intermediaires, leur experience subjective du travail et leur construction de realite(s) organisationnelle(s). Le materiau empirique provient d’un travail de terrain ethnographique realise sur plusieurs sites au sein d’une entreprise Bresilienne d’audit et de consulting de taille moyenne. Le cœur de cette these est constitue de trois articles independants. Le premier de ces articles conceptualise l’emergence et la nature du travail-frontiere des cadres intermediaires comme un moyen de favoriser le travail collaboratif entre des acteurs organisationnels multiples, aux perspectives et interets souvent divergents. Le travail-frontiere est a la fois un transfert de connaissances, une traduction d’interpretations et une transformation d’interets au depart incompatibles entre differents groupes organisationnels. Un cadre conceptuel – compose de huit conditions structurelles, sept types de travail-frontiere des cadres intermediaires et neuf consequ...
How managers facilitate cross-functional collaboration across intraorganizational symbolic bounda... more How managers facilitate cross-functional collaboration across intraorganizational symbolic boundaries separating actors has been a seminal and persistent academic puzzle. Whereas these boundaries m...
in this article, the use of Parisian urban furniture as a medium for communicating advertising is... more in this article, the use of Parisian urban furniture as a medium for communicating advertising is analyzed drawing from the perspectives of the audrillardian consumerism and the concept of Junkspace introduced by Rem Koolhaas. Three examples of advertising integrated into the city are presented and analyzed via-a-vis these theoretical frameworks. Three extensions of the Baudrillardian concept of seduction are proposed: i) the seduction through the sign of the familial, offered by the Grands Magasins’ shop-windows, ii) the seduction by integration, reached by the Morris column, and iii) the seduction by the ambition of belonging to a reference-group, incited by a panel-siding. The characterization of the embodiments of Junkspace into contemporary Paris, as well as a reflection on the subtle and spectacular seduction of consumption through the inevitability of everyday in this city, are then advocated.
Narrative is typically conflated with story with an attendant lack of consideration for what migh... more Narrative is typically conflated with story with an attendant lack of consideration for what might be important distinctions between the two. Similarly, narrative is typically considered as an object but the recognition of the object as an artefact - a cultural tool - is disregarded. Rarely is narrative considered as a process and even less so as both a process and an artefact. In this paper we draw on the work of scholars from both Psychology and Humanities in an attempt to demonstrate that narrative is both a process and an artefact and consider some of the implications for this understanding. In particular, we present an understanding of the role of motif. Motif, we suggest, is a powerful tool used to both build and represent shared meanings and to recognise recurring patterns. Of course, the former understanding is widely acknowledged in literary studies, but less so in other disciplinary studies of narrative. Our current work demonstrates how a linguistic motif is both used to ...
Agrarian South: a Journal of Political Economy, 2018
Integrating smallholders within global agricultural value chains through contract farming has reg... more Integrating smallholders within global agricultural value chains through contract farming has regained momentum in the development agenda, particularly in Africa. Governments, corporate agri-business, and global development institutions have embraced sugarcane as a suitable commodity to promote the integration of smallholders within commercial agricultural circuits so as to improve the prospects of rural development and reduce rural poverty. Influenced by the new institutional economics paradigm, win-win scenarios in which agribusiness companies and smallholders reciprocally benefit-the former by getting regular and standardized quantities of produce; the latter through secure access to the market-are advocated. However, little evidence of success in contract farming has been provided. By exploring the socio-ecological