Barbara Czarniawska

Heather Hopfl

Casting the Other: Maintaining Gender Inequalities in the Workplace focuses on the production and maintenance of gender inequalities in organizations. By emphasizing 'difference' as something to be managed many organizations institute the 'problem of difference', and while orgainzations pay lip-service to ideas of equality, their day-to-day practices may be unchanged and unchallenged. Discrimination of various groups such as women, immigrants and older people continues and its dynamics remain unclear, largely because of the difficulties of studying it in the field. Additionally, various programs aimed at removing inequality, such as gender equality of managing diversity programs, may actually promote it by making differences visible and stabilizing them. Management, under these circumstances, comes to refer to the management of appearances which take the place of more radical acts to change the 'status quo'.

The Production and Maintenance of Inequalities in Work Organizations

Casting the Other

'Editing collective works is demanding but can be equally or more rewarding than writing an entire book alone. Czarniawska, in this case, had no choice: she alone could not have written the agenda of the whole field. Thus she played the role of the editor, and did so in an exemplary way, carefully choosing the contributors, conceiving the right structure and managing to draw from each author pieces or tiles, which resulted in an extraordinary mosaic: a complete and bright vista of what the field of management and organization studies is today and will become in the future.'- Pasquale Gagliardi, Catholic University of Milan and Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, Italy

A Research Agenda for Management and Organization Studies

Managing and organizing are now central phenomena in contemporary societies. It is essential they are studied from a variety of perspectives, and with equal attention paid to their past, their present, and their future. This book collects opinions of the trailblazing scholars concerning the most important research topics, essential for study in the next 15–20 years. The opinions concern both traditional functions, such as accounting and marketing, personnel management and strategy, technology and communication, but also new challenges, such as diversity, equality, waste and cultural encounters. The collection is intended to be inspiration for young scholars and an invitation to a dialogue with practitioners.

Shadowing offers an array of techniques to study people on the move, and the book is addressed to all social scientists interested in fieldwork as a way of grasping phenomena typical of late modernity. The book's starting point is that present times require different metaphors than static "cultures," "organizations," or even "societies." It is time to start constructing a mobile ethnology that is knowledge about people, objects, and ideas that circulate globally. The present text offers suggestions concerning the ways such construction may take.

And Other Techniques for Doing Fieldwork in Modern Societies

Shadowing

Organizing in Action Nets (projekt)

Gothenburg Research Institute

Pyramids Or Anthills?

Emerging Institutions

Skandia Professor of Management Studies Barbara Czarniawska

Cities are complex, sprawling, diverse places. They are organized, but disorganized; managed, but unmanaged; orderly, but disorderly. Modern metropolitan cities reproduce themselves and we are familiar with the common icons that are replicated in every part of the globe, but how should we understand cities? For the past five years, Professor Czarniawska has been leading a research project on globalization and the management of cities. Rather than seeing the city as a conurbation, or a location of economic activity, or in terms of governance and administration, Czarniawska explores the city as an action net. An action net of this sort includes various organizations-municipal, state, private, and voluntary-and non-organized individuals. Such an approach was designed to avoid the fallacy of viewing the big city as one big organization. The city is thus conceived as a particularly complex and disorderly action net; a seamless web of interorganizational networks, where the city administration proper constitutes just one point of entry and by no means provides a map of the entire terrain. The research focuses on three European capitals: Warsaw, Stockholm, and Rome. At the outset, leading politicians and officials in each city listed the major problems and projects that the city was engaged in, for example environmental reforms, improvement of public utilities, privatization, financial targets, etc. The author selected a number of these for more detailed study, reporting upon interesting similarities and differences between the approaches taken. The book aims to explore organizing processes in their local context while following the connections between such contexts.

Or the Glocalization of City Management

A Tale of Three Cities

Bernward Joerges

In this timely book, Barbara Czarniawska and Bernward Joerges examine the hopes and fears around work and job security inspired by automation, from the original coining of the term ‘robot’ to the present day media fascination. Have these hopes and fears changed or do they remain the same? This discerning book investigates whether these changes in perception correlate to actual changes taking place in the field of robotics.

Answers from Popular Culture, Media and Social Sciences

Robotization of Work?

This clear, straightforward textbook embraces the practical reality of actually doing fieldwork. It tackles the common problems faced by new researchers head on, offering sensible advice and instructive case studies from the author’s own experience. Barbara Czarniawska takes us on a master class through the research process, encouraging us to revisit the various facets of the fieldwork research and helping us to reframe our own experiences. Combining a conversational style of writing with an impressive range of empirical examples she takes the reader from planning and designing research to collecting and analyzing data all the way to writing up and disseminating findings. This is a sophisticated introduction to a broad range of research methods and methodologies; it will be of great interest to anyone keen to revisit social research in the company of an expert guide.

From Field to Desk

Social Science Research

Orvar Löfgren

What does a stockbroker in Istanbul navigating the rush of incoming trading figures have in common with a mother in Stockholm trying to organize a growing pile of baby clothes? They are both coping with excess or overflow.

Barbara Czarniawska

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