Browsing Ph.D. theses (MPP/LPF) by Year Published

Now showing items 1-20 of 69

Jørgensen, Lydia L. (Frederiksberg, 2019)

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Abstract:

Moving Organizational Atmospheres provides a conceptual and empirical exploration of the notion of organizational atmosphere as a non-dualist concept. The atmospheric is presented as an organizational phenomenon with relevance for decision makers, organizations and managers as it concerns aesthetic, affective-emotional and spatial qualities of the work environment, but also addresses issues of profound cultural transformation and social change. As such, organizational atmospheres are considered part of an ongoing aesthetization of society that pervades the emotionalaffective climate of organizations and everyday human actions to respond to desires, creativity and the quest for constant growth. Looking at organizational atmosphere from a non-dualist perspective, shows organization as an aesthetic phenomenon manifesting itself in and stimulating the emotional-affective climate, the practices, the spaces and the ways of working in organizations. Both conceptually and analytically the thesis contributes to the discussions in the fields of organizational aesthetics as well as the affective and spatial turn in organization studies, by addressing how organizational atmospheres work when embraced as a fluid phenomenon and by providing an analytically experimental account of the experiencing and producing organizational atmosphere based on field work in two organizations. Considering organizational atmosphere as a non-dualist notion, implies embracing ambiguity by attending to subject and object as forming a coherent whole in human experience. The thesis presents a systematic and in-depth engagement with a ‘German’ non-dualist tradition of thinking the atmospheric in organization studies by tracing the philosophical roots in the German phenomenological tradition, spearheaded by the neo-phenomenology of Hermann Schmitz and Gernot Böhme’s aesthetics. Coherently, dealing empirically with organizational atmosphere raises a set of pivotal ontological and epistemological questions, which leads to arguing for a performative research approach to engage with organizational atmosphere as a relational ontological matter coming into momentary presence in the lived space through the embodied affective experience. As such the thesis reflects a move towards understanding organization as an atmospheric phenomena reflecting an aesthetic and processual apprehension, whereby not only considering organizations as part of an aesthetization of society, but proposing a rethinking of organizational categories and the ways of writing organization.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9750

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Trust and Self-Trust in Leadership Identity Constructions

A Qualitative Exploration of Narrative Ecology in the Discursive Aftermath of Heroic Discourse

Lundberg, Maria (Frederiksberg, 2019)

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The phenomenology of trust and self-trust in narrative leadership identity constructions is a field less explored within leadership studies. With a critical lens, this study approaches the construction of leadership identity, offering a broadened perspective on post-heroic leadership identity constructions. The investigation builds on an empirical inquiry based on qualitative interviews with 20 leaders. The thesis examines aspects of the narrative ecology of trust and self-trust related to leadership identity constructions in a post-heroic leadership context. The investigation concentrates on how a dyadic coexistence of trust and self-trust in leadership language can be understood to operate as an underlying potency in leadership identity constructions. The discussion focuses on four main findings related to trust and self-trust in the leaders’ stories. Based on an interpretative framework and building on a phenomenological and ethnomethodological perspective, I show how Ladkin’s idea of the leadership moment, together with Lührmann and Eberl’s identity theory as a model for leadership identity construction, correspond to the theory of narrative ecology, wherein the leaders operate as creative bricoleurs constructing their narrative identities by drawing upon resources in a narrative ecosystem. The discussion attempts to elucidate how trust and self-trust provide agency for post-heroic leadership mastery, replacing leadership agency associated with formal power and authority that links to traditional leadership ideas. As part of this, the text examines how the heroic and postheroic leadership paradigms operate as competing big “D” Discourses, occurring side by side in the little “d” discursive leadership-as-talk identity context. My main argument is that the tensionfilled contradiction between heroic and post-heroic leadership Discourse is resolved by metaphors fuelled by notions of trust and self-trust in discursive leadership practices, which function as narrative rescue remedies, providing the leader with identity resources that validate and stabilise the identity construct. In addition, a potential eclipse in the literature on trust in leadership research is examined, wherein I point to the absence of risk in the empirical material of this project, and ask how this nonappearance can be understood in a post-heroic leadership-identity context. Lastly, I look to how the leadership identity construction project materialised in this study can be understood in the light of a self-realisation, anti-establishment fashion in popular management.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9736

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Axiological Knowledge in a Knowledge Driven World

Considerations for Organizations

Prat-i-Pubill, Queralt (Frederiksberg, 2018)

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The purpose of this thesis is to focus in understanding axiological knowledge in knowledge driven societies which survive thanks to the creation of science and technology and new products and services. The considerations of this thesis are critical to organizations and society at large, because as I will show axiological knowledge is key to ensure the survival of human beings in specific survival conditions. Living in a knowledge driven world means the creation of knowledge in organizations is key. Thus axiological knowledge would need to be created to accommodate this need in organizations. Contrary to established beliefs, and although we experience most our behavior as intentional and volitional pertaining to our particular nature, we are constituted, in the form of automatic, evident, “true” interpretations and understandings of the world, through minimal constituent cultural configurations. This axiological knowledge is shaped by collective motivations through the communication of a constituent speech in the form of narratives, stories, myths, rituals and symbols created to ensure survival in specific material conditions. This axiological knowledge provides us with the adequate knowledge to interpret and value the world according to the existing survival conditions. Currently, many approaches aiming to change the axiological conditions, among others, to promote creativity, responsibility, sustainability and ethics in organizations appeal to personal responsibility and goodwill, without consideration of the affect system and the axiological knowledge currently in place. I argue these proposals are unsuccessful because they disregard the latest social sciences research and also because their key assumptions are outdated. These approaches either assume an anthropology of matter and spirit or an anthropology of matter and reason, as well as a mythical epistemology. This thesis is organized as a compendium of four articles structured in two parts dealing with the complexity of the axiological. The first part comprises two articles describing, argumenting and analysing our current axiological world. The second part, introduces and deals with the diverse discursive approaches to managing motivations in management studies, those of narratology, storytelling and rhetorics, and develops linguistic theory to intervene in collectivities by creating axiological knowledge. I argue, that focusing on the axiological knowledge is a pending need that will not be undetected for long in organization studies. The most difficult issue is to avoid current approaches to the axiological and thus to allow for new research to take place. This thesis is a step towards creating the theoretical basis for this research to develop.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9672

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Queralt Prat-i-Pubill.pdf (2.618Mb)

Crowds and Speculation

A study of crowd phenomena in the U.S. financial markets 1890 to 1940

Hansen, Kristian Bondo (Frederiksberg, 2017)

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This dissertation undertakes an explorative historical analysis of problems associated with crowd phenomena in the U.S. financial markets between 1890 and 1940. While a study of crowd-related problems in the financial markets invariably involves examinations of panics and crises, the dissertation shows that crowds were not exclusively seen as crisis phenomena, but were considered by many financial writers to be of much broader significance to the organisation and functioning of markets. The dissertation claims that it is necessary to explore the close connections between financial markets and crowd phenomena in order to fully understand how markets were perceived and conceptualised in the given historical period. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s reflections on the analysis of problematisations, the dissertation explores how practical, academic and popular accounts of financial markets problematised (i.e. reflected upon, contested and responded to) various crowd phenomena as they occurred in the markets. As part of the historical exposition, the dissertation examines how financial writers employed tropes and terminology from late nineteenth century crowd theories when describing and seeking to explain the processes and practices of the markets. The dissertation argues that the way in which crowd phenomena were problematised as well as the attempts to address these alleged crowd problems influenced perceptions of financial markets and transformed approaches to market analysis and speculation. Drawing on an archive of handbooks on how to become a successful investor or speculator, scholarly work on financial markets (from the academic fields of economics, sociology and psychology) as well as a range of popular (fictional and non-fictional) textual accounts of trading in financial markets, the dissertation offers a broad, yet rigorously focused, historical perspective on crowd phenomena in financial markets. Furthermore, it explores how ideas about crowd action, imitation, herding and contagion were introduced to and became integral parts of the discourses on financial markets. Reiterations of such historically formed ideas about crowd phenomena in financial markets are still prominent in current discussions and the dissertation thus offers a historical contextualisation of a pertinent feature of contemporary debates on financial markets.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9496

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Kristian Bonco Hansen.pdf (2.088Mb)

The Significance of Normativity

Studies in Post-Kantian Philosophy and Social Theory

Presskorn-Thygesen, Thomas (Frederiksberg, 2017)

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This dissertation examines the concept of normativity through a series of studies in post- Kantian philosophy and social theory. The overall aim is to analyse the historical as well as systematic relevance of the concept of normativity to modern philosophy and to the methodological challenges of social theory. In pursuing this overall research agenda, the dissertation contributes to a number of specific research literatures. Following two introductory and methodological chapters, Chapter 3 thus critically examines the analysis of normativity suggested in the recent attempts at transforming the methods of neo-classical economics into a broader form of social theory. The chapter thereby contributes to the critical discourses, particularly in philosophy of science, that challenge the validity of neo-classical economics and its underlying conception of practical rationality. In examining the practical philosophies of Kant and Hegel, Chapter 4 substantiates and collects the numerous, specific insights on normativity, practical rationality and autonomy that have been generated by the so-called ‘post- Sellarsian’ reading of German Idealism. The chapter thereby contributes not only to this particular branch of philosophical exegesis, but also to the social theoretical concern with the conceptions of autonomy and agency that have influenced European modernity. Chapter 5 examines the social theoretical transfiguration of the problems of German Idealism that occurred in the works of Durkheim and Weber. It does so by situating Durkheim and Weber in the context of Neo-Kantian philosophy, which prevailed among their contemporaries, and the chapter thereby reveals a series of under-thematised similarities not only with regard to their methodological positions, but also in their conception of social norms. Chapter 6 employs the late Wittgenstein’s much-debated rule-following considerations to recapitulate the significance of normativity to philosophy and social theory; in this way the chapter shows a wider import of the rule-following considerations that go beyond the strict mathematical and epistemological perspectives most often analysed in the Wittgenstein scholarship related to this topic.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9473

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Institutions and Legitimations in Finance for the Arts

Lunde Jørgensen, Ida (Frederiksberg, 2016)

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The thesis contributes to a more nuanced understanding of art support by investigating the underlying legitimations and institutional logics of two of the most significant foundations supporting visual art, in Denmark, the private New Carlsberg Foundation and public Danish Arts Foundation. Drawing on insights from neo-institutional and French convention theory, the thesis makes its central contributions within the fields of neo-institutional theory, cultural policy and philanthropy studies. The first paper shows the suitability of neo-institutional theory, particularly the theories of isomorphism, cultural and institutional entrepreneurship, institutional logics, and rhetorical work to address a number of key debates in cultural policy pertaining to the evaluation of aesthetic performance, the justification of investment in the arts and how ideas and meanings become taken for granted in the cultural policy field. In addition, the first paper theorizes the wider field of cultural policy, suggesting twelve institutional arenas where cultural policy is unfolded, of which the thesis focuses on public and private foundations. In the second paper, the thesis focuses on uncovering the key legitimations of art support in the New Carlsberg Foundation and the Danish Arts Foundation at critical points in time, drawing on and contributing to the literature on institutional logics and convention theory. Specifically, the thesis shows the importance of nine particular logics of legitimation underlying art support; the industrial, market, inspired, family, renown, civic, projective, emotional and temporal. Most central to the foundations’ operation are the professional (industrial), artistic (inspired) and civic logics. The thesis shows that the invocations of these logics are highly reflective upon wider societal institutions, prevailing institutional logics, the nature of the critical moment and the organisations’ practices and purpose. In the third paper the thesis hones in on the temporal logic, and draws attention to the micro-level use of this logic, which suggests that logics are invoked in characteristic ways. The third paper illuminates five distinctive uses of the past in the New Carlsberg Foundation, pertaining to the charter, the founding family, place, the moment and anecdotes and importantly shows that while some of these uses are reflected and instrumental, others are institutionalised and show propensity towards institutional reification.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9337

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In Search of Entrepreneurial Learning

Towards a Relational Perspective on Incubating Practices

Henriques, Christine Thalsgård (Frederiksberg, 2016)

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Abstract:

The world wants more entrepreneurs so badly, that it has become a major priority of governments all over the world trying to produce them. Based on Industrial PhD collaboration between the Danish Science Park, Symbion A/S and Copenhagen Business School, this dissertation presents a unique opportunity to study how the interactions between technology-based entrepreneurs and an Accelerator programme may lead to increased entrepreneurial capacity, learning and growth. The Industrial PhD setting offers privileged access to entrepreneurs, advisors, incubator management and investors, and we get to listen to stories seldom told in this field. As follows, the write-up of the ethnographic fieldwork is a narrative multi-voiced analysis in search of entrepreneurial learning in an incubator context. The phenomenon of business incubation – in this dissertation referred to as incubating activities - is originally intended as a forum that is shielded off from the everydayness of things, with the purpose of adding resources and removing barriers to venture creation. The idea is that entrepreneuring actors will be offered complementary resources and forced to spend time on planning and strategies in a helicopter perspective, which in the end will benefit the process and make venture success more likely. Policy makers together with researchers of entrepreneurship policy and incubation, to a large degree assume that entrepreneurial actors somehow lack skills and resources and cannot easily acquire these themselves, and furthermore that it is possible to affect the resources, behaviour and skills of entrepreneurs. It has nevertheless been shown that enhancing entrepreneurial growth from support activities is not as easy, even if the intentions are good and the resources invested considerable (Blackburn and Schaper 2012, Bruneel et al. 2012, Mason and Brown 2013). It is also taken for granted that entrepreneurs are open to learning and foreign intervention (help and support). This study shows that this is not always the case. Hence, the dissertation explores a highly political and delicate matter touching upon the legitimacy of business incubation.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9305

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