Browsing by Subject "Legitimation"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Open Access
Cross-national reconstruction of managerial practices: TQM in Turkey
(Sage Publications, 2007) Özen, Ş.; Berkman, Ü.
Drawing on the discursive and translative perspectives, we examine the discourse produced by an elite group of corporate executives to legitimate TQM (total quality management) at the national level in Turkey. The findings indicate that the legitimating agencies largely used ethos justifications exploiting the macro-cultural discourses prevalent in the Turkish context. As such, they reconstructed TQM as a blueprint embracing solutions to the problems at societal, organizational, and individual levels. Based on the findings, we propose that reconstruction of imported practices in recipient contexts is more likely to involve ethos justification when compared to the construction of the original rhetoric because of the nature of cross-national translation. The strategy of ethos justification is even more likely when legitimating actors also strive to legitimate themselves as a social group, and/or to promote the practice to the public. Furthermore, the recipient discourse will be less coherent if legitimating actors have less formal authority and loose structure, and the target audiences have diverse values and expectations. We suggest that, under these circumstances, the reconstruction of the imported practices is more likely to produce fashions than institutions, a limited diffusion of the practice in contrast to the intentions of legitimating actors.
Open Access
Eristic legitimation of controversial managerial decisions
(Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2023-10-12) Kurdoğlu, Rasim Serdar; Islam, G.
This paper investigates the eristic legitimation of managerial decisions – managerial interactions to win without reasoned persuasion of the counterparty – in the context of career-advancement disputes. This mode of legitimation can be ethically questionable, particularly when powerful managers have the licence for it, while less powerful subordinates may have ‘no other choice’ than reasoned persuasion to address their concerns. The present study involves two sets of interviews to explore eristic legitimations and associated moral and political processes. The first involves former employees who had career advancement disputes with their former managers, and the second, HR professionals with expertise in dealing with employee complaints. Our analysis suggests that managing unfairness concerns can be destructive when managerial authorities argue eristically by exploiting ambiguities around performance, tasks, goals and moral principles. The novelty of this study is that it explores how ambiguities shape managerial handling of employees’ justice concerns and how eristic legitimations during ethical decision-making can have deleterious consequences for organizations and individual careers. While this study contributes to research on the rhetorical strategies of managers, it has important implications for interactional justice and ethical decision-making research.