Mats Alvesson
Biographic Data
| ID | 184853 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mats Alvesson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mats |
| FAMILY NAME | Alvesson |
| SIGNATURE | ALVESSON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lund University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8709-4684 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 78 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1785 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Return to Judgement: The Case for Post-Infantilized Management
The Colonization of the Lifeworld
Is it worth doing this or is it better to commit suicide?’: On ethical clearance at a university
The article examines the formal process of ‘ethical clearance’ for social science research at a large university and illuminates how it functions to undermine its stated purpose. We find that rather than promoting ethical standards, the bureaucratic process creates negative and cynical attitudes and game playing. For almost all participants, the entire procedure is counterproductive and experienced as absurd, creating a boomerang effect. The find…
Constructing Research Questions: Doing Interesting Research
Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us
Considerable progress has been made in the field of leadership in recent years. However, we argue that this is undermined by a strong residual commitment to an older set of ideas which have been repeatedly debunked but which nevertheless resolutely refuse to die. These, we term zombie leadership. Zombie leadership lives on not because it has empirical support but because it flatters and appeals to elites, to the leadership industrial complex that…
I am My Work: New Lines of Inquiry in the Study of Identity Regulation in and Around Organizations
Authentic action: A recipe for success or a minefield
Our academic field of leadership studies is plagued by an unscholarly obsession with fashions and clientelism. We have a pronounced penchant to tell our audiences what they like to hear and what makes us popular rather than what they need to know. Moreover, much of our work suffers from a chronic illusion that the study of leadership pertains to natural sciences and is governed by what to us at least appear to be highly elusive laws of causality.…
The gaslighting of authentic leadership 2.0
This article is a response to Bill Gardner and Kelly McCauley’s ‘gaslighting’ critique of our text on the perils of authentic leadership. Against gaslighting 1.0 (evilly trying to convince people to doubt their perceptions), we propose gaslighting 2.0 (enlightenment). We argue that organizations face severe problems and challenges that cannot be solved by motivating managers to engage in introspection and being overly preoccupied by their own aut…
The hegemonic ambiguity of big concepts in organization studies
The use of concepts is a vital part of the research process. Many researchers overexploit popular concepts by adding more and more vague and poorly defined meanings to them, thereby making their boundaries unclear and the concepts increasingly unwieldy. We will refer to these types of concepts as hembigs – an acronym for hegemonic, ambiguous, big concepts. The article demonstrates the problem in three domains: leadership, strategy and institution…
Dynamics of wilful ignorance in organizations
Contemporary society is obsessed with knowledge, leaving its less seductive counterpart, ignorance, in the shadows. However, as an expanding literature suggests, it is equally important to understand ignorance and consider its varieties. This study specifies the nature of wilful ignorance in organizations. It does so by (a) making a distinction between the will of an actor and the epistemic properties of ignorance, and showing how these two form …
Authentic leadership theory: The case for and against
The perils of authentic leadership theory
In this commentary, we discuss perils of authentic leadership theory (ALT) in a modest effort to help weed out one theory that has gone amiss to pave the way for new ideas. We make an argument for why ALT is not only wrong in a harmless manner, but it may be outright perilous to leadership scholars, scholarship and those who believe in it. It may undermine academic work, delegitimize university institutions, make false promises to organizations, …
Pre-understanding: An interpretation-enhancer and horizon-expander in research
Pre-understanding - our presuppositions of reality - underlies all research. Many researchers probably also draw productively on their pre-understanding in their studies. However, very few rationales and methodological resources exist for how researchers can enrich their research by mobilizing their pre-understanding more actively and systematically. We elaborate and propose a framework for how researchers more actively, systematically and visibl…
Re-imagining the Research Process: Conventional and Alternative Metaphors
Upbeat leadership: A recipe for – or against – “successful” leadership studies
Sandwiched: Exploring role and identity of middle managers in the genuine middle
This article explores middle managers in the professions from their position in the sandwiched middle. Based upon interviews with senior academics in management roles and their subordinates in UK business schools, we investigate this experienced middle through a metaphor that informs one particular subject position: to be an umbrella carrier. This position entails protecting subordinates from what is seen as unnecessary and/or damaging initiative…
The making and unmaking of teams
Contemporary expert organizations rely heavily on cross-border, often temporary teams typically working through virtual means of communication. While static aspects of teams are well researched, there have been considerably fewer studies on team dynamics and team processes. Existing process studies tend to take a cautious, entity-based approach, emphasizing team structure as much as (or even more than) processual aspects. This article represents …
From Science as a Vocation to Science as a Game: And the Resulting Loss of Meaning
Against a generalized loss of meaning in society, social scientists find it hard to undertake relevant research that addresses problems facing our world. Science has turned from a vocation aimed at improving the lot of humanity to a careerist game dominated by publishing hits in starred journals. Instrumental rewards replace the passion for discovery and the intrinsic quest for knowledge. Competition among academics and academic institutions, suc…
Conclusion
This chapter concludes the book by examining various possible objections that readers may raise by adopting the perspective of a sympathetic but critical reviewer, and considers how social science research may break out of its self-inflicted iron cage and renew its commitment to addressing the major issues and problems that face our world today. A number of different objections are considered and refuted. These include the charges that our argume…
Recovering Meaning by Reforming Academic Identities and Practices
Part II offers a number of proposals and suggestions for recovering meaning in social science research at the individual, institutional, and policy levels. These measures offer the prospect of many small ‘wins’ through which the system can be reformed, rather than one sweeping programme for change. This chapter addresses the identities of individual researchers and the research methodologies they use in their work, and encourages a different appr…
Institutions Encouraging Competition, Instrumentalism, and Meaningless Research
The rise of mass education has led to mass research—quantity dominates quality. A ruthless institutional competition for status, plus academics pushing to get published in the ‘right’, career-enhancing journals, has led to the fetishization of journal outputs even when they are of little meaning or value to society. This situation is now endemic within the system of academic research and publication, and is strongly driven and sustained by academ…
Reflexivity
Reflexivity can be broadly defined to mean an understanding of the knowledge‐making enterprise, including a consideration of the subjective, institutional, social, and political processes whereby research is conducted and knowledge is produced. Reflexivity is about dealing with a sense of uncertainty and crisis as increasingly complex questions are raised concerning the status, validity, basis and authority of knowledge claims
Waiting for Godot: Eight major problems in the odd field of leadership studies
This paper identifies eight significant shortcomings in leadership studies. The field is large, divergent and fragmented, making it difficult to make broad generalizations, but the majority of all research suffer from most of what may be referred to as the Hollywood, Disneyland, closed system, two kinds of people, bees and the honeypot, reification, tautology and hyperreality problems. The paper suggests ways of reducing these problems
Return to Meaning: A Social Science with Something to Say
This book argues that we are currently witnessing not merely a decline in the quality of social science research, but a proliferation of meaningless research of no value to society and modest value to its authors—apart from securing employment and promotion. The explosion of published outputs, at least in social science, creates a noisy, cluttered environment which makes meaningful research difficult, as different voices compete to capture the li…
The bumpy road to exercising leadership: Fragmentations in meaning and practice
The present study focuses on a manager’s understanding of leadership and how this guides – or does not guide practice. The paper reports an empirical in-depth study of a middle manager in an international manufacturing company. We link our discussion to both – the mainstream leadership studies, which assume that managers have a solid type of leadership behavior, and authors with a meaning-oriented, linguistic approach to leadership, in which lang…
Managing Managerial Identities: Organizational Fragmentation, Discourse and Identity Struggle
This is a case study of managerial identity work, based on an in-depth case of a senior manager and the organizational context in which she works. The article addresses the interplay between organizational discourses, role expectations, narrative self-identity and identity work. Identity is conceptualized in processual terms as identity work and struggle. The article illuminates fragmentation as well as integration in the interplay between organi…
Varieties of Discourse: On the Study of Organizations through Discourse Analysis
Discourse is a popular term used in a variety of ways, easily leading to confusion. This article attempts to clarify the various meanings of discourse in social studies, the term's relevance for organizational analysis and some key theoretical positions in discourse analysis. It also focuses on the methodological problem of the relationship between: a) the level of discourse produced in interviews and in everyday life observed as `social texts' (…
Identity Matters: Reflections on the Construction of Identity Scholarship in Organization Studies
Key tensions underlying much of the identity literature; we foreground identity matters as encountered by individuals, understood as social; durability of identity; identity in its various conceptualizations offers creative ways to understand a range of organizational settings and phenomena while bridging the levels from micro to macro
Critical performativity: The unfinished business of critical management studies
We argue that critical management studies (CMS) should be conceptualized as a profoundly performative project. The central task of CMS should be to actively and pragmatically intervene in specific debates about management and encourage progressive forms of management. This involves CMS becoming affirmative, caring, pragmatic, potential focused, and normative. To do this, we suggest a range of tactics including affirming ambiguity, working with my…
Taking the Linguistic Turn in Organizational Research: Challenges, Responses, Consequences
This article takes the linguistic turn, or turns, in the social sciences as its point of departure and discusses the implications for methodology, empirical research, and field practices in social and organizational studies. Various responses can be identified: grounded fictionalism, giving up the hope of making substantive, empirical claims in terms of research texts capturing social phenomena; data-constructionism, where the ambiguous and const…
Knowledge Work: Ambiguity, Image and Identity
This article takes a sceptical view of the functionalist understanding of the nature and significance of ‘knowledge’ in so-called knowledge- intensive companies. The article emphasizes the slipperiness of the concept of knowledge, the ambiguity of knowledge, its role in what is constructed as knowledge work and the evaluation of work outcomes. Given this ambiguity, the management of rhetoric, image and social processes appears crucial in organiza…
Critical leadership studies: The case for critical performativity
Existing accounts of leadership are underpinned by two dominant approaches: functionalist studies, which have tried to identify correlations between variables associated with leadership; and interpretive studies, which have tried to trace out the meaning-making process associated with leadership. Eschewing these approaches, we turn to an emerging strand of literature that develops a critical approach to leadership. This literature draws our atten…
Managers Doing Leadership: The Extra-Ordinarization of the Mundane
Based on a case study of managers in a large, international knowledge-intensive company this article suggests a rethinking of leadership, taking the mundane, almost trivial, aspects of what managers/leaders actually do seriously. In the study, the managers interviewed emphasized the importance of listening and informal chatting. Managers listening to subordinates are assumed to have various positive effects, e.g. people feel more respected, visib…
Questioning the Notion of Feminine Leadership: A Critical Perspective on the Gender Labelling of Leadership
Traditionally, leadership has been equated with masculinity. Managerial jobs, at least in business and on senior levels, have been defined as a matter of instrumentality, autonomy, result‐orientation, etc. something which is not particularly much in line with what is broadly assumed to be typical for females. Today, however, there seems to be a broad interest in leadership being more participatory, non‐hierarchical, flexible and group‐oriented. T…
Ways of constructing research questions: Gap-Spotting or Problematization
This article examines ways of constructing research questions from existing literature, which are likely to promote the development of interesting and influential theories. We review 52 articles in organization studies and develop a typology of how researchers construct their research questions from existing literature. The most common way across paradigmatic camps is to spot various 'gaps' in the literature and, based on that, to formulate speci…
Gender Relations and Identity at Work: A Case Study of Masculinities and Femininities in an Advertising Agency
The paper explores gender relations and gender identity, based upon an ethnography of a Swedish advertising agency. The organization is of special interest as it has a strong gender division of labor, where men hold all senior posts, at the same time as creative advertising work seems to have much more similarity with what gender studies describe as "femininity" rather than with forms of "masculinity." The paper discusses how gender is constructe…
Cages in Tandem: Management Control, Social Identity, and Identification in a Knowledge-Intensive Firm
Developments in organization studies downplay the role of bureaucracy in favour of more flexible arrangements and forms of organizational control, including socio-ideological control. Corporate culture and regulated social identities are assumed to provide means for the integration and orchestration of work. Knowledge-intensive firms, which typically draw heavily upon socio-ideological modes of control, are often singled out as organizational for…
Decolonializing discourse: Critical reflections on organizational discourse analysis
Organizational discourse has emerged as a large research field and references to discourse are numerous. As with all dominating approaches problematizations of assumptions are important. This article, partly a follow up of the authors' frequently cited 2000 Human Relations article, provides a critical and perhaps provocative overview of some of the more recent work and tendencies within the field. It is argued that discourse continues to be used …
Self-doubters, strugglers, storytellers, surfers and others: Images of self-identities in organization studies
This article provides an overview of the key images of identity in organizations found in the research literature. Image refers to the overall idea or conceptualization, capturing how researchers relate to — and shape — a phenomenon. Seven images are suggested: self-doubters, strugglers, surfers, storytellers, strategists, stencils and soldiers. These refer to how the individual is metaphorically understood in terms of identity, that is, how the …
Resisting resistance: Counter-resistance, consent and compliance in a consultancy firm
Consent, obedience and resistance can be seen as key concerns in management and organization. Why people comply is a crucial issue in the field. We address the theme within a specific area: management consultants in a big firm that places quite a lot of pressure on its personnel to be hardworking and predictable and to subordinate themselves to hierarchy, standards and tight production schedules. By studying how the discourses of Ambition and Aut…
Return to Meaning: A Social Science with Something to Say
This book argues that we are currently witnessing not merely a decline in the quality of social science research, but a proliferation of meaningless research of no value to society and modest value to its authors—apart from securing employment and promotion. The explosion of published outputs, at least in social science, creates a noisy, cluttered environment which makes meaningful research difficult, as different voices compete to capture the li…
Sandwiched: Exploring role and identity of middle managers in the genuine middle
This article explores middle managers in the professions from their position in the sandwiched middle. Based upon interviews with senior academics in management roles and their subordinates in UK business schools, we investigate this experienced middle through a metaphor that informs one particular subject position: to be an umbrella carrier. This position entails protecting subordinates from what is seen as unnecessary and/or damaging initiative…
Extending critical performativity
In this article we extend the debate about critical performativity. We begin by outlining the basic tenets of critical performativity and how this has been applied in the study of management and organization. We then address recent critiques of critical performance. We note these arguments suffer from an undue focus on intra-academic debates; engage in author-itarian theoretical policing; feign relevance through symbolic radicalism; and repackage…
Pre-understanding: An interpretation-enhancer and horizon-expander in research
Pre-understanding - our presuppositions of reality - underlies all research. Many researchers probably also draw productively on their pre-understanding in their studies. However, very few rationales and methodological resources exist for how researchers can enrich their research by mobilizing their pre-understanding more actively and systematically. We elaborate and propose a framework for how researchers more actively, systematically and visibl…
Cultural Perspectives on Organizations
The hegemonic ambiguity of big concepts in organization studies
The use of concepts is a vital part of the research process. Many researchers overexploit popular concepts by adding more and more vague and poorly defined meanings to them, thereby making their boundaries unclear and the concepts increasingly unwieldy. We will refer to these types of concepts as hembigs – an acronym for hegemonic, ambiguous, big concepts. The article demonstrates the problem in three domains: leadership, strategy and institution…
The bumpy road to exercising leadership: Fragmentations in meaning and practice
The present study focuses on a manager’s understanding of leadership and how this guides – or does not guide practice. The paper reports an empirical in-depth study of a middle manager in an international manufacturing company. We link our discussion to both – the mainstream leadership studies, which assume that managers have a solid type of leadership behavior, and authors with a meaning-oriented, linguistic approach to leadership, in which lang…
On the Popularity of Organizational Culture
The article starts with the observation that dunng the 1980s organizational culture has become a very popular topic within organization theory. The rapid expansion of this perspective, which received almost no attention until the end of the 1970s, is explained It is argued that although there are good theoretical, i e intra-scientific, reasons for the mterest in organizational cultures, these only explain to a limited degree the development of th…
The making and unmaking of teams
Contemporary expert organizations rely heavily on cross-border, often temporary teams typically working through virtual means of communication. While static aspects of teams are well researched, there have been considerably fewer studies on team dynamics and team processes. Existing process studies tend to take a cautious, entity-based approach, emphasizing team structure as much as (or even more than) processual aspects. This article represents …
Dynamics of wilful ignorance in organizations
Contemporary society is obsessed with knowledge, leaving its less seductive counterpart, ignorance, in the shadows. However, as an expanding literature suggests, it is equally important to understand ignorance and consider its varieties. This study specifies the nature of wilful ignorance in organizations. It does so by (a) making a distinction between the will of an actor and the epistemic properties of ignorance, and showing how these two form …
The Limits and Shortcomings of Humanistic Organization Theory
This article is concerned with the weak influence of humamstic organization principles on working lite in highly-industrialized societies. Three aspects contributing to this weak impact are discussed. the control interest of management, the contingency view, and the influence of the formal and qualificational hierarchy in organizations on the practice of humanistic prin ciples The latter aspect is emphasized The article discusses and rejects stud…
On the Popularity of Organizational Culture
The article starts with the observation that dunng the 1980s organizational culture has become a very popular topic within organization theory. The rapid expansion of this perspective, which received almost no attention until the end of the 1970s, is explained It is argued that although there are good theoretical, i e intra-scientific, reasons for the mterest in organizational cultures, these only explain to a limited degree the development of th…
On the Idea of Emancipation in Management and Organization Studies
Cultural perspectives on organizations
Cultural-Ideological Modes of Management Control: A Theory and a Case Study of a Professional Service Company
This chapter argues that traditional conceptualizations of organizational and management control should be complemented by an elaborated theory of cultural control. Current efforts addressing the topic of control have operated with a single, overall concept (such as ideology, clan, or culture) that either covers too broad a territory or focuses only on restricted elements of cultural control forms, thus leading to a risk of neglecting important a…
Approaching Organizational Culture versus Cultural Approaches to Organizations: Let's Close the Gap
Gender, Managers, and Organizations
Att synliggöra organisation eller ”Arne Weise har fan inte sålt nånting”. Löpsedelsmöte på Aftonpressen
This article aims to illuminate certain cultural aspects of the work of an evening newspaper (working style, ways of thinking, assumptions about the business, its objectives, perceptions of the readership) as well as how communication in group situations contributes to the social construction of organizations in terms of objectives, meaning and style. The paper will also address the issues of play, emotions and pleasure on work. It is argued that…
Cultural Perspectives on Organizations
Communication, Power and Organization
Gender Relations and Identity at Work: A Case Study of Masculinities and Femininities in an Advertising Agency
The paper explores gender relations and gender identity, based upon an ethnography of a Swedish advertising agency. The organization is of special interest as it has a strong gender division of labor, where men hold all senior posts, at the same time as creative advertising work seems to have much more similarity with what gender studies describe as "femininity" rather than with forms of "masculinity." The paper discusses how gender is constructe…
Doing Critical Management Research
An Introduction to Critical Research Alternative Social Science Research Perspectives Critical Overview of Quantitative and Conventional Qualitative Methodology The Critical Tradition Critical Theory and Postmodernism New Rules for Research A Framework for Critical Research Developing Critical Sensitivity in Management Research On the Practice of Critical Management Research
Questioning the Notion of Feminine Leadership: A Critical Perspective on the Gender Labelling of Leadership
Traditionally, leadership has been equated with masculinity. Managerial jobs, at least in business and on senior levels, have been defined as a matter of instrumentality, autonomy, result‐orientation, etc. something which is not particularly much in line with what is broadly assumed to be typical for females. Today, however, there seems to be a broad interest in leadership being more participatory, non‐hierarchical, flexible and group‐oriented. T…
Varieties of Discourse: On the Study of Organizations through Discourse Analysis
Discourse is a popular term used in a variety of ways, easily leading to confusion. This article attempts to clarify the various meanings of discourse in social studies, the term's relevance for organizational analysis and some key theoretical positions in discourse analysis. It also focuses on the methodological problem of the relationship between: a) the level of discourse produced in interviews and in everyday life observed as `social texts' (…
Taking the Linguistic Turn in Organizational Research: Challenges, Responses, Consequences
This article takes the linguistic turn, or turns, in the social sciences as its point of departure and discusses the implications for methodology, empirical research, and field practices in social and organizational studies. Various responses can be identified: grounded fictionalism, giving up the hope of making substantive, empirical claims in terms of research texts capturing social phenomena; data-constructionism, where the ambiguous and const…
Knowledge Work: Ambiguity, Image and Identity
This article takes a sceptical view of the functionalist understanding of the nature and significance of ‘knowledge’ in so-called knowledge- intensive companies. The article emphasizes the slipperiness of the concept of knowledge, the ambiguity of knowledge, its role in what is constructed as knowledge work and the evaluation of work outcomes. Given this ambiguity, the management of rhetoric, image and social processes appears crucial in organiza…
Understanding Organizational Culture
The Concept of Organizational Culture Organizational Culture as Metaphor and Metaphors for Culture Organizational Culture and Identity Organizational Culture and Performance Organizational Culture, Strategy and Marketing Organizational Culture and Leadership Work and Multiple Levels of Culture Ambiguity of Culture Culture as Constraint: An Emancipatory Approach Cultural Change Conclusions
Identity Regulation as Organizational Control: Producing the Appropriate Individual
This paper takes the regulation of identity as a focus for examining organizational control. It considers how employees are enjoined to develop self‐images and work orientations that are deemed congruent with managerially defined objectives. This focus on identity extends and deepens themes developed within other analyses of normative control. Empirical materials are deployed to illustrate how managerial intervention operates, more or less intent…
Reflexivity and the Politics of Qualitative Research
Methodology for close up studies – struggling with closeness and closure
Good Visions, Bad Micro-management and Ugly Ambiguity: Contradictions of (Non-)Leadership in a Knowledge-Intensive Organization
This article investigates how managers position themselves and their work in terms of leadership in a large knowledge-intensive company. The significance of contemporary discourse on leadership, practical aspects of managerial work, and ambiguity as a central dimension of organization and leadership (particularly in knowledge-intensive settings) are highlighted. We examine the presumed leadership in a company with respect to the three `moral' and…
Beyond Neopositivists, Romantics, and Localists: A Reflexive Approach to Interviews in Organizational Research
In this article I develop a framework for thinking about the research interview, and I critique dominating neopositivist and romantic views on the interview. I suggest eight metaphors that offer reconceptualizations of the interview, drawing upon recent theoretical trends on language, the subject, and discourse, and develop a reflexive theoretical framework. The article provides new ways of dealing with interviews, along with implications for fie…
Studying Management Critically
Managers Doing Leadership: The Extra-Ordinarization of the Mundane
Based on a case study of managers in a large, international knowledge-intensive company this article suggests a rethinking of leadership, taking the mundane, almost trivial, aspects of what managers/leaders actually do seriously. In the study, the managers interviewed emphasized the importance of listening and informal chatting. Managers listening to subordinates are assumed to have various positive effects, e.g. people feel more respected, visib…
Managing Managerial Identities: Organizational Fragmentation, Discourse and Identity Struggle
This is a case study of managerial identity work, based on an in-depth case of a senior manager and the organizational context in which she works. The article addresses the interplay between organizational discourses, role expectations, narrative self-identity and identity work. Identity is conceptualized in processual terms as identity work and struggle. The article illuminates fragmentation as well as integration in the interplay between organi…
Sociology (52 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (49 works) · Political science (42 works) · Epistemology (36 works) · Psychology (31 works) · Public relations (27 works) · Computer Science (25 works) · Social science (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Social Psychology (21 works)