“Trust But Verify”: How middle managers in a multinational use proverbs to translate an imported management concept

In this paper we report on how middle managers in a Russian subsidiary translate empowerment, a ‘western’ management concept imposed by the Finnish headquarters. The analysis shows that in their discursive struggles these middle managers mobilised proverbs to address competing discourses that reflected imported and local ideals of good management. We advance organisational translation research by highlighting the value of proverbs as an understudied discursive resource in translation activities on the ground. The paper also examines the dual role of middle managers as both translators and implementers of an imported and imposed concept in a multinational corporation. Translation work carried out by middle managers in multinationals has received limited attention in previous research. Finally, by bringing together the discursive and the interlingual, we join recent efforts to broaden the definition of translation to encompass translation work undertaken in multilingual organisations.

Laughter in times of uncertainty: Negotiating gender and social distance in Bahraini women’s humorous talk

This paper explores three interrelated aspects of young Bahraini women’s laughter: the subjects and genres of their humor, the social relationships between the women involved with a particular focus on homo-social friendships, and their humor’s potential as an instrument of resistance or social control. After discussing local ideals of femininity, the paper analyzes three distinct genres of humorous conversation: self-mockery, mutual teasing, and joking about absent third parties. The data show that the ambiguity of humour allowed for great freedom regarding women’s play with gendered identities and the expression of critical views on Bahrain’s gender hierarchy. Simultaneously, different kinds of humor were employed to negotiate closeness or distance in social relations. Among women friends, humor was often drastic, intimate, aggressive, and revelled in the taboo subjects of Bahraini society. Through humor, women questioned existing gender ideals and played with alternative identities. Their laughter, however, also served to maintain conventional ideas about “proper” women and confirmed existing social hierarchies. Thus, Bahraini women’s humor captured the contradictions and ambiguities of their fragmented and hybrid social environment replete with the uncertainties accompanying rapid social change.

Joint Mean Oscillation and Local Ideals in the Toeplitz Algebra II: Local Commutivity and Essential Commutant

A well-known theorem of Sarason [11] asserts that if [Tf, Th] is compact for every h ∈ H∞, then f ∈ H∞ + C(T). Using local analysis in the full Toeplitz algebra τ = τ(L∞), we show that the membership f ∈ H∞ + C(T) can be inferred from the compactness of a much smaller collection of commutators [Tf, Th]. Using this strengthened result and a theorem of Davidson [2], we construct a proper C*-subalgebra τ(L)) of τ which has the same essential commutant as that of τ. Thus the image of τ(ℒ) in the Calkin algebra does not satisfy the double commutant relation [12], [1]. We will also show that no separable subalgebra Ѕ of τ is capable of conferring the membership f ∈ H∞ + C(T) through the compactness of the commutators {[Tf, S] : S ∈ Ѕ}.