Rebecca Gill

In this paper, we articulate how nonprofit legitimacy is generated through the rhetorical construction of symbolic capital by nonprofit organizations. Our analysis demonstrates how symbolic capital responds to and reflects the local values of a donor/volunteer base, thus allowing nonprofits to assuage the potential for dissonance between image and behavior in humanitarian aid. To make this claim, we engage in a rhetorical analysis of one international nonprofit organization headquartered in the United States that conducts most of its humanitarian work in and around Africa. Implications of this study underscore how nonprofits capitalize on organizational identification and point to the value of understanding nonprofit legitimacy as the rhetorical construction of a “donor gaze” and a nonprofit “space of freedom.”

ABSTRACT Inspectors of nuclear power plants manage information to make plants safer and to monitor and evaluate adherence to regulatory requirements. Integrating grounded practical theory and communication as design (CAD), we investigated the collective design of and practice of status meetings—a pair of daily meetings meant to manage information about the day-to-day safety oversight of nuclear power plants. Our analysis focused on (1) the problems these status meetings were meant to address, (2) the techniques participants used or proposed to address them, and (3) the situated ideals reflected in the designs for and practice of these meetings. Clustering the techniques illuminated designable features of status meetings (e.g., what, how much, and how to communicate, turn-taking, timing, pacing, and audience). We extend work on CAD by conceptualizing and investigating collective design work, focusing on the fit, function, and fragmentation of approaches to status meetings. We also contribute to the theory and practice of organizing for safety and reliability by making recommendations for coping when communication processes informed by best practices nonetheless produce persistent, irresolvable tensions that complicate the enactment of safety.

Communication is key to hospital emergency department (ED) caregiving. Interventions in ED processes (and health care organizing in general) have struggled when they have ignored the professional role expectations that enable and constrain providers with patients and each other. Informed by a communication as design (CAD) approach, this study explored the intersections of professional roles, physical space, and communication at EmergiCare—an academic medical center and level-1 trauma center hospital. Based on an ethnographic analysis of field notes from 70 hours of shadowing at the EmergiCare ED, this study identified two specific communication patterns, “case talk” and “comfort talk,” that reflect different logics for communication in health care organizing. The findings indicate (a) that case and comfort talk have different status and therefore different influence in EmergiCare ED interprofessional communication and (b) that the arrangement of physical space at EmergiCare ED reflects the requirements of case talk more so than comfort talk. These findings have important implications for theory and practice, including the importance of considering the macro-discursive construction of professional roles reified in the arrangement of work space.

Purpose – To provide practical recommendations for shadowing as a method of organizational study with a focus on the situated processes and practices of shadowing fieldwork.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper reflects on the shadowing experiences of three researchers – in a hospital emergency department, nuclear power plants, and entrepreneur workspaces – to generate recommendations by identifying and synthesizing solutions that emerged during our encounters with the challenges and opportunities in shadowing.

Findings – Considering shadowing as an ongoing and emergent research process can be helpful to prepare for particular aspects of shadowing fieldwork. Shadowing presents research challenges that may emerge in the practice of fieldwork, including how to negotiate awkward conversations with participants, what to bring and wear, and how to take notes.

Practical implications – Though our recommendations for shadowing are based on particular experiences and may not generalize to all shadowing engagements, they offer concrete, practical recommendations useful across experience levels. The recommendations should sensitize researchers to the intimate and situational character of shadowing, and offer strategies for coping with the distinctive requirements of shadowing.

Originality/value – By looking across diverse experiences of shadowing, we generated guidelines that help to make sense of shadowing processes, manage uncertainty in the field, and build on the emerging work on shadowing. Our ten recommendations provide insight into shadowing that are of particular value to graduate students, junior researchers, and those new to shadowing. Moreover, the experienced shadower may find value in the camaraderie of shared experience, the concrete ideas about another’s experience of shadowing, and insight in recommendations that capture aspects of fieldwork that they are also exploring.

Keywords – Shadowing, organizational ethnography, recommendations, fieldwork, ethnographic notetaking

Entrepreneurship is commonly talked about in the West as a freely chosen, optimistic occupational choice. Yet, as an ideological construct, entrepreneurship is ultimately shaped in ways that legitimize some entrepreneurs while marginalizing others. Taking cues from scholarship that has unpacked the gendered and raced dimensions of entrepreneurial discourse, this article examines the classed dimensions of such discourse. Illuminating the ideological contradiction between American dream promises of class mobility and enterprise initiatives, I argue that the hegemonic allure of entrepreneurial discourse stems in large part from the (re)production of class hierarchies around notions of exceptional capitalist ownership, action and innovation and opportunity recognition.

Entrepreneurship research has begun to examine the construction of an occupational identity for entrepreneurs, arguing that this identity is intersected by a variety of discourses, including gender, class and race/ethnicity. Yet, these studies only partially account for the myriad ways that entrepreneurial identity, and occupational identity more broadly, may manifest across the US or globally. In this article, we discuss how high-tech entrepreneurial identities are constructed in conjunction with place-based ‘transcendent’ and ‘locale-specific’ discourses. Empirical results from two studies of high- tech entrepreneurs in the western US demonstrate that place both shapes and constrains the possibilities for constructing an ‘ideal entrepreneurial self’. The implications of our research suggest: (i) the importance of ‘relocating place’ to understand the regional shaping of entrepreneurial identity and occupational identity; (ii) the significance of place serving as a rich organizing discourse for studies of intersectionality; and (iii) the complex ways in which entrepreneurial and occupational identities are shaped by place while simultaneously engaged in ‘place-making’.

In this paper, we articulate how nonprofit legitimacy is generated through the rhetorical construction of symbolic capital by nonprofit organizations. Our analysis demonstrates how symbolic capital responds to and reflects the local values of a donor/volunteer base, thus allowing nonprofits to assuage the potential for dissonance between image and behavior in humanitarian aid. To make this claim, we engage in a rhetorical analysis of one international nonprofit organization headquartered in the United States that conducts most of its humanitarian work in and around Africa. Implications of this study underscore how nonprofits capitalize on organizational identification and point to the value of understanding nonprofit legitimacy as the rhetorical construction of a “donor gaze” and a nonprofit “space of freedom.”

Inspectors of nuclear power plants manage information to make plants safer and to monitor and evaluate adherence to regulatory requirements. Integrating grounded practical theory and communication as design (CAD), we investigated the collective design of and practice of status meetings—a pair of daily meetings meant to manage information about the day-to-day safety oversight of nuclear power plants. Our analysis focused on (1) the problems these status meetings were meant to address, (2) the techniques participants used or proposed to address them, and (3) the situated ideals reflected in the designs for and practice of these meetings. Clustering the techniques illuminated designable features of status meetings (e.g., what, how much, and how to communicate, turn-taking, timing, pacing, and audience). We extend work on CAD by conceptualizing and investigating collective design work, focusing on the fit, function, and fragmentation of approaches to status meetings. We also contribute to the theory and practice of organizing for safety and reliability by making recommendations for coping when communication processes informed by best practices nonetheless produce persistent, irresolvable tensions that complicate the enactment of safety.

Throughout much of the 20th century, the image of the organization man dominated the cultural imagination and undergirded capitalist organizing. Yet, in the last 20 years, there has been a signal shift away from the organization man and toward the entrepreneur as an ideal. Although scholars have suggested that entrepreneurship in the new economy is rooted in neoliberal ideology, I argue that neoliberalism alone does not account for the ease with which entrepreneurialism has become a dominant discourse. By critically examining entrepreneurial discourse as communicated through US business periodicals from 2000-2009, I present a case for the “entrepreneurial man” as formed at the partial inclusion and/or rejection of aspects of the self made man, organization man, and neoliberalism. Ultimately, this analysis critiques the entrepreneurial man archetype as a rejection of the social contract and the embracing of a privatized, entrepreneurial American dream.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the methodological practice of shadowing and its implications for ethnographic fieldwork. Furthermore, the paper challenges the label of “shadowing” and suggests a new label of “spect-acting.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based in a feminist and interpretive-qualitative approach to methods, and uses the author's experience with shadowing as a case study. The author argues that fieldwork is always intersubjective and as such, the research site emerges out of the co-construction of the relationship between researcher and participant.

Findings – The author argues that reflexivity is a required but neglected aspect of shadowing, and that spect-acting as a new term would require the researcher to take reflexivity more seriously, thereby opening up emancipatory possibilities in the field.

Research limitations/implications – Findings are based on a limited time span of shadowing.

Originality/value – The paper is original in that it imports “spect-acting” from performance studies into the organizational methods lexicon. The value of the paper is that it provides reflection and discussion of one-on-one ethnography, which is a relatively underutilized method in research on organizations and management (but beginning to grow in popularity)."

Entrepreneurship in United States culture has been idealized as offering a flexible organizational identity, but has also been critiqued as subjecting individuals to organizationally preferred identities. An examination of work and life experiences for women entrepreneurs offers insight into the work-life relationship for people who ostensibly have more freedom and flexibility to make choices as to how to shape their material work-life as well as their work-life identity. In this empirical study, I apply Tracy and Trethewey’s (2005) theoretical concept of the crystallized self to explore the viability of entrepreneurship as a “solution” to work-life tensions and to draw out how women entrepreneurs discursively frame and manage their work-life relationship. I conclude that the crystallized self is evident in some women entrepreneurs’ conceptualizations of self, though they do not yet have a language to adequately express this. In addition, women entrepreneurs who over-identified with their businesses moved beyond the crystallized identity to experience a dis/integrated identity.