Journal of Management Inquiry

This article compares sensemaking processes in multinational corporations (MNCs) situated in the same industrial sector. Our comparative analysis of three MNCs and their subsidiaries in Germany and the United Kingdom aims to shed light on the contextual dimension (institutions, culture, and politics) of the sensemaking process. First, I discuss ideologies related to the discourse about global restructuring of manufacturing. Second, I compare similarities and differences in vocabularies of the (multinational) organizations. Third, I compare cross-national vocabularies of work in German and U.K. subsidiaries. Finally I suggest a political approach of sensemaking referring to stories used to legitimize or delegitimize dominant ideologies about global manufacturing, established decision-premises within the MNC, and specific nationally entrenched work paradigms.

Drawing on a 28-item survey, this article reports the editorial experiences of 173 lead authors of articles published in theAcademy of Management Journal andAcademy of Management Review, over the period 1999 to 2001, to explore some relatively new dynamics that have changed the character of the manuscript review process and given rise to a mounting debate over the proper roles of authors, referees, and editors. Among the survey’s more disturbing findings, more than one third of the responding authors reported that recommended revisions in their manuscripts were based on an editor’s or referee’s personal preferences, and almost 25% indicated that in revising their manuscripts they had actually made changes they felt were incorrect.

Authors need to view reviewers’ comments not as judgments about the value of their work, but as good data about potential readers of their articles. The editorial review process does have deficiencies, the most serious being that reviewers should decide what articles warrant publication. “Peer review” should mean that reviewers and authors are indeed peers. However, editors typically act as if reviewers have more competence and more valid opinions than authors, and as if they themselves have the wisdom and knowledge to impose constraints on manuscripts. Empirical evidence indicates that editorial decisions incorporate bias and randomness. However, authors need to persuade potential readers to read their articles and that authors’ ideas and theories are plausible and useful. Authors must adapt their manuscripts to readers’ perceptual frameworks. Nevertheless, authors should remember that editors and reviewers are not superior and that the ultimate decisions about what is right must come from inside themselves.

Given the disquieting changes in higher education worldwide, universities need new directions and ways of thinking about how to operate.In this article, we propose the notion of academic entrepreneurship, in which each employee pursues or supports those who pursue opportunities to build and improve their units, colleges, or universities.W e present ways that individual faculty members, program managers, department chairs, deans, and provosts can support academic entrepreneurship through helping to create opportunities, nurturing people who recognize and act on them, garnering resources to support opportunities, and creating a culture that supports the entrepreneurial activities of universities.

In this article, the authors explore media coverage of a recent acquisition across national borders. Their starting point is that the media represent a key arena of “discursive strategizing” for actors such as corporate managers. They illustrate and specify how global capitalism, as discourse relying on economic and financial rationale and exemplified here by the acquiring firm’s attempts to expand, meets national spirit, exemplified here by the complexity in selling the acquisition target to foreigners. The main contribution of this study lies in identifying how key actors draw on and mobilize rationalistic and nationalistic discourses in public discussion. The analysis illustrates that the same actors can draw on different—even contradictory—discourses at different points in time. Furthermore, different actors—even with opposing objectives—may draw on the same discourse in legitimizing their positions and pursuing specific ends.

Strategy is a pervasive and consequential practice in mostWestern societies. We respond to strategy’s importance by drawing an initial map of strategy as an organizational field that embraces not just firms, but consultancies, business schools, the state and financial institutions. Using the example of Enron, we show how the strategy field is prone to manipulations in which other actors in the field can easily become entrapped, with grave consequences. Given these consequences, we argue that it is time to take strategy seriously in three senses: undertaking systematic research on the field itself; developing appropriate responses to recent failures in the field; and building more heedful interrelationships between actors within the field, particularly between business schools and practitioners.

Recent spectacular failures of many companies that had previously been held up as icons to emulate have called into question the use of best practice exemplars in strategic management. In this commentary on Whittington et al.'s “Taking Strategy Seriously,” I suggest that we can reject naïve concepts of excellence without jettisoning case studies. Company cases are essentially stories, and stories are ways of conveying understanding, creating meaning, and justifying action. We can still use these company narratives as part of a process of reflection and dialogue. Stories should be used for their power to provoke learning and change without being turned into rote templates to be followed blindly. An appreciation of the power, productive and seductive, of stories of best practice, may provide some “heedfulness” to work in the strategy field.