Who does the media love? A qualitative content analysis of the narratives of founders and nonfounders in IPO firms

PurposeResearchers have investigated the distinctions between founder and nonfounder chief executive officers (CEOs) for different performance variables. Researchers have also investigated the use of media as supplemental information that investors review to make decisions about initial public offering (IPO) firms. Research that investigates founders and nonfounder CEOs of IPO firms in the media is limited but growing. This paper aims to explore how founder and nonfounder CEOs' narratives are portrayed differently in business media following an IPO.Design/methodology/approachUsing insights from the narrative paradigm, 1,057 news paragraphs about CEOs from 19 matched pairs (38 firms) were content analyzed using a contrasting coding strategy.FindingsFounders and nonfounders' narratives differ in three ways. Specifically, founder CEOs are more likely to (1) have their personal background detailed in the media, (2) translate technical business information to easy-to-understand general language and (3) be quoted talking about positive information than nonfounder CEOs.Research limitations/implicationsThe results of this study show the media's role in creating narratives about management and how the experiences of founders and nonfounders are represented differently in the media. The study is limited by only investigating media articles about CEOs and not investigating the entire organizational narrative.Originality/valueThis study adds to the growing literature that investigates the role the media plays in portraying management in the media at time of IPO.

Project Narratives That Potentially Perform and Change the Future

This article develops a framework for applying organizational narrative theory to understand project narratives that potentially perform and change the future. Project narratives are temporal but often get repeated throughout the project life cycle to stabilize meaning, and could be about project mission, vision, identity, value creation, and so forth. Project narratives have important implications for organizational identity and image crafting. This article differentiates among different types of project narratives in relation to a project life cycle, providing case studies of project narratives on three major UK rail projects. We then set out the future research agenda into project narrative work.

Through The Lens of Modernity

This article is a contribution to the conversation on what lies at the crux of the contradiction of South Africa’s progressive constitution and legal framework with reference to sexuality and limited access of the rights these convey for a vast number of people in same-sex relationships. This article locates what lies at the heart of this contradiction as rooted in the (colonial) cultural archive of gender and sexuality that has historically privileged heterosexuality. We continue to see this through neoliberal universalist rights approaches, in which the nongovernmental organizational narrative is deeply imbricated. Organizations like Dutch international human rights funder Hivos that have funded the championing of sexual rights often fail to fully engage with and interrogate this (colonial) cultural archive. This is the customary in its hegemonic form. By deploying an intersectional decolonial approach, this article sheds light on the locus of colonial difference and offers three nuanced infrapolitical narratives of African same-sex intimacies operating at this locus—queering the customary—and this way reimagining African sexuality, thereby offering an epistemic reconstitution.

Jihadist visual communication strategy: ISIL’s hostage executions video production

Based on a visual, verbal and aural quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the 62 execution videos produced by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) during its first year of existence (2014–2015), the aim of this research is to further the understanding of the inherent nature of the narratives spread by ISIL execution videos and to which audience(s) they are targeted. The authors adopt a bottom-up systematic approach of coding based on grounded theory to process visual and aural communication data as well as verbal communication of more than seven hours of ISIL hostage execution videos. In so doing, this research contributes to the understanding of multimodal communication interactions and the role of their discrepancies in framing fundamentalist ideologies. Moreover, the study adds perspective to previous research on Jihadist visual communication and audience studies. The results demonstrate how hostage execution videos discourse relies on ‘framing packages’ linked to values, norms and archetypes to create a recurrent and coherent organizational narrative aimed at segmenting ISIL’s audiences.

Understanding Organizational Narrative-Counter-narratives Dynamics:

There is a rich tradition of studying narratives in the fields of communication and language at work. Our purpose is to review two approaches to narrative-counter-narrative dynamics. The first is ‘storytelling organization theory’ (SOT), which interplays western retrospective-narrative ways of knowing with more indigenous ways of knowing called ‘living stories’, ‘pre-narrative’ and ‘pre-story’, and the prospective-‘antenarrative’ practices. The second is the communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) approach to narrative-counter-narrative. Both SOT and CCO deconstruct dominant narratives about communication and language at work. Both theories revisit, challenge, and to some extent cultivate counter-narratives. SOT seeks to go beyond and beneath the narrative-counter-narrative ‘dialectic’ in an antenarrative approach. CCO pursues counter-narratives as a useful tool to make tensions within and between organizations and society, salient as they may contest or negotiate dominant narratives, which hinder the organization from benefitting from less powerful counter-narratives.

Ahead of the curve in the MBA bubble: Institutional narcissism and the narrative reconstruction of moral agency

Academic criticism of institutional narcissism in business schools is well established. But little scholarly attention has been devoted to insider critics of business schools. Filling this research gap – from an interdisciplinary narrative perspective – is the aim of this article. It draws attention to one of the many autobiographical narratives that have recently been published by MBA graduates. Narcissism here appears as an important theme, both on an institutional and a personal level. What role does narration play for coping with narcissism? To explore this question, this paper offers a close reading of Ahead of the curve: Two years at Harvard Business School (2008) by Philip Delves Broughton. After a brief introduction to institutional narcissism and organizational narrative studies, the article illustrates how narrative functions as a sense-making tool for understanding institutional narcissism and as a means to reconstruct individual moral agency. The study pushes the frontiers of narrative studies by providing an innovative blend of empirical organizational research and literary studies, while also touching upon genre, interdisciplinarity, and the ethical responsibility of business in society.

Exclusion and inclusion in the Danish Military

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine why and how past stories of women’s insufficiency for military work survive and how they come to form a gendered organizational narrative dominant in constructing current opinions on women in the military. Design/methodology/approach The analysis is based mainly on archival data, but supported by interview material as well as participant observation data. The authors do this from the assumption that the culturally constructed notion of the ideal soldier is based on a historically constructed professional narrative. Findings The authors show how a historically produced gender narrative – based on (fictional) stories on what women can and cannot do – is perceived as true and thereby casts women as less suitable for a military career. Thus, despite the current equal legal rights of men and women in the military, the power of the narrative limits female soldiers’ career possibilities. Originality/value The paper is unique as it, in drawing on archival data, is able to trace how an organizational narrative comes to be and due to its ethnographic data how this creates limitations for women’s careers. This narrative is stronger and much more powerful than management is aware of. The paper therefore adds crucial knowledge about the ideological influence a historically produced organizational narrative can have on current change initiatives.

#RIPINSTAGRAM: Examining user’s counter-narratives opposing the introduction of algorithmic personalization on Instagram

When Instagram announced the implementation of algorithmic personalization on their platform a heated debate arose. Several users expressed instantly their strong discontent under the hashtag #RIPINSTAGRAM. In this paper, we examine how users commented on the announcement of Instagram implementing algorithmic personalization. Drawing on the conceptual starting point of framing user comments as “counter-narratives” (Andrews, 2004), which oppose Instagram’s organizational narrative of improving the user experience, the study explores the main concerns users bring forth in greater detail. The two-step analysis draws on altogether 8,645 comments collected from Twitter and Instagram. The collected Twitter data were used to develop preliminary inductive categories describing users’ counter-narratives. Thereafter, we coded all Instagram data extracted from Instagram systematically in order to enhance, adjust and revise the preliminary categories. This inductive coding approach (Mayring, 2000) combined with an in-depth qualitative analysis resulted in the identification of the following four counter-narratives brought forth by users: 1) algorithmic hegemony; 2) violation of user autonomy; 3) prevalence of commercial interests; and 4) deification of mainstream. All of these counter-narratives are related to ongoing public debates regarding the social implications of algorithmic personalization. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the identified counter-narratives tell a story of resistance. While technological advancement is generally welcomed and celebrated, the findings of this study point towards a growing user resistance to algorithmic personalization.

Talking objects: Towards a post-social research framework for exploring object narratives

In this article, we examine how to give objects a voice in organizational narrative. We track our encounter with a 914 Xerox copier, a redundant technological object that was scripted into a desired historical narrative within a corporate exhibit. Despite the 914’s apparent mnemonic and institutional efficacy, we questioned whether it might constitute more than a narrative repository. Might material objects in organizations also participate in narrative production? In this article, we advocate a post-social approach to narrative methodology that recognizes objects—such as the 914—as non-human actors in organizational sense-making. After reviewing post-sociality’s central premises, we propose three domains through which an object narrative can be elicited: object materiality, object practices and object biography. First, we suggest that object materiality can highlight the significant, networks of forces, materials and people—and therefore episodes and actors—that engage with and through objects. Second, we argue that people and objects are enmeshed in sequenced, workplace activities, and therefore through object practice humans define what stories objects can tell while objects reciprocally influence the latitude of human performance. Third, we propose that object biography provides a strategy to map the connections and transitions that occur over the life-course of an object, which can, in turn, unravel a changing web of organizational relations. Our aim is to provide methodological guidance to narrative researchers seeking to augment their organizational analyses by scrutinizing human–object enmeshment.