John Sillince

Newcastle University | NCL · Newcastle University Business School

Persistent tensions arising from the exploration–exploitation paradox continuously threaten the accomplishment of organizational ambidexterity. Structural, contextual, and sequential solutions designed to alleviate these tensions dominate the ambidexterity literature. None of these adequately explains how top executives implement tension-alleviatin...

This paper draws upon archival and oral history research on organizational transition at Procter & Gamble (1950-2009), during which P&G evolved from a multinational to global enterprise. Intertextuality, the ways in which texts appropriate prior works to produce new texts, illuminates the practical workings of rhetorical history, accentuating inter...

Bearing in mind Aristotle's definition of rhetoric as the art of persuasion in a particular situation, how can rhetoric be used to construct theory about the general, rather than the particular, case? This suggests the need for a theory of rhetorical context. Burke suggested that motives provide a context framework for rhetoric in the form of five...

Organizations are often required to meet contradictory but interrelated objectives. An important response to such paradoxes is transcendence: the ability to view both poles of the paradox as necessary and complementary. Despite the centrality of transcendence to existing frameworks within the paradox literature, we still know little about its pract...

This article highlights a dynamic and productive duality in the expression of organizational identity claims between demonstrating coherence with the past and responsiveness in the present. Informed by renewed interest in the concept of institutional leadership, which is precisely concerned with the management of this temporal duality, we argue tha...

This paper contributes to the debate on the dynamics of the development of practices and their relation to the emergence of collaborative communities of practitioners. Our research is situated in a university that was seeking to promote and stimulate interdisciplinary research collaborations through a number of initiatives. We are concerned both wi...

How and why does a scholarly article make an impact through initial ‘aha’ moments and then through continued generativity that facilitates the emergence of a new scientific field? We seek to uncover reasons why readers of a scholarly article consider it to be influential. Our case study of 108 readers of one seminal article that significantly affec...

This article builds upon archival and oral history research on organizational change at Procter & Gamble (P&G) from 1930 to 2000, focusing on periods of transition. It examines historical narrative as a vehicle for ideological sensemaking by top managers. Our empirical analysis sheds light on continuities in the narratives they offer, through which...

In this paper we explain how the development of new organization theory faces several mutually reinforcing problems, which collectively suppress generative debate and the creation of new and alternative theories. We argue that to overcome these problems, researchers should adopt relationally reflexive practices. This does not lead to an alternative...

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate how sports science was institutionalised and rapidly deinstitutionalised within a Premier League football club. Institutional theory has been critiqued for its lack of responsiveness to change, but recent developments within institutional theory such as the focus on deinstitutionalisation as an explanation o...

This paper is about the rhetorical micro-foundations of transcendence and how those rhetoric strategies construct transcendence as a response to paradox. We provide additional insight into transcendence and address the dearth of empirical investigation into the micro- activities that constitute it. Drawing from a dataset of three qualitative cases...

This paper is about the rhetorical micro-foundations of transcendence and how those rhetoric strategies construct transcendence as a response to paradox. We provide additional insight into transcendence and address the dearth of empirical investigation into the micro- activities that constitute it. Drawing from a dataset of three qualitative cases...

Communities of practice scholars have neglected the question of how practices arise in nascent communities and how emergence involves a balance of collective and individual agency. We suggest that considering how individuals pursue career progression may be a way of understanding the emergence of collaborative communities of practice in terms of bo...

Missing in the organizational learning literature is an integrative framework that reflects the emotional as well as the cognitive dynamics involved. Here, we take a step in this direction by focusing in depth over time (five years) on a selected organization which manufactures electronic equipment for the office industry. Drawing on personal const...

Literature on organizational learning (OL) lacks an integrative framework that captures the emotions involved as OL proceeds. Drawing on personal construct theory, we suggest that organizations learn where their members reconstrue meaning around questions of strategic significance for the organization. In this 5-year study of an electronics company...

This paper extends existing understandings of how actors' constructions of ambiguity shape the emergent process of strategic action. We theoretically elaborate the role of rhetoric in exploiting strategic ambiguity, based on analysis of a longitudinal case study of an internationalization strategy within a business school. Our data show that actors...

Within hierarchical relationships, subordinates are expected to obey the existing order and to function well. Their deviance or organisational misbehaviour is usually regarded negatively and as a threat to the system. However, there seems to be a paradox: Subordinates' deviance and (occasional) misbehaviour does not threaten organisational hierarch...

When planned change is canceled, managers may be tempted to reverse their organization's strategy. Our longitudinal case study documents an organization's canceled merger effort and a failed attempt to return to the organization's widely accepted premerger strategy. We trace the failure to contradictions in symbolic change management. The phenomeno...

We address the co-evolution of language and material practices during institutionalization by proposing a tropological model of institutionalization that integrates linguistic and practice-oriented approaches into a four-stage sequence: Metaphor enables members to inaugurate institutional change by inspiring and energizing initial movement. Members...

This paper addresses the paradox that despite all organizational change towards flatter and postmodern organizations, hierarchical order is quite persistent. We develop a differentiated understanding of hierarchy as either formal or informal and apply this analytical framework to several types of organization. The analysis reveals that hierarchy is...

The paradigmatic separation of the strategy and identity literatures constitutes an ongoing problem for the extension of either into more global contexts. The theorization proposed in this chapter presents rhetoric as the means by which the ‘strategy work’ of reimagining future options and the ‘identity work’ of reformulating the meaning of past ac...

The literature on ambiguity reflects contradictory views on its value as a resource or a problem for organizational action. In this longitudinal empirical study of ambiguity about a strategic goal, we examined how strategic ambiguity is used as a discursive resource by different organizational constituents and how that is associated with collective...

This article analyses how multiple organizational identities are constructed through rhetoric to maintain and enhance the legitimacy claims made by organizations. Our theorizing is founded on an investigation of the 43 geographically based English and Welsh constabularies. The research contribution of our study is threefold. First, we show that off...

This special issue of Management Communication Quarterly seeks to bridge the gulf that exists between management and communication scholarship with a focus on organizational rhetoric. The articles and commentary in this special issue reflect the variety and strength of applications of rhetorical theory by a range of internationally renowned manage...

Reorganization of the UK primary health care system to create an internal market for health services depends upon local family doctors (general practitioners) taking on budgetary responsibilities and purchasing services from hospitals. These budgets will be monitored by local committees. The success of the internal market is heavily dependent upon...

Strategic intent is a useful concept in accounting for purpose and continuity of goals in an organization adapting to internal and external developmental pressures. Yet, extant literature on strategic intent does not account for heterogeneity of goals within an organization. Indeed, there is confusion over who possesses strategic intent. In this pa...

There are still few explanations of the micro detail through which top managers influence employee commitment to multiple strategic goals. This paper argues that through their language, top managers can construct a context for commitment to multiple strategic goals. We therefore propose a rhetoric-in-context approach to illuminate some of the micro...

This article recognizes a major dichotomy in the study of legitimacy construction at the organizational level. Scholars have either focused on agent-centred explanations of organizational legitimation, which favour its evaluative dimension, or on structural explanations, which highlight the isomorphic pressures imposed on individual organizations i...

Purpose To explore a musical metaphor in making organizational change a potentially pleasurable experience to participants. Design/methodology/approach The paper begins by challenging ideological assumptions behind classical change metaphors. To build an alternative, the paper employs musical semiotics to understand the core dimensions in a musica...

Organizational discourse has very little meaning outside its context. To understand any discourse's meaning, we must theorize about both the discourse's possibility and the circumstances of its constitution. Otherwise, we abstract text, sundering it from context. The present article asks what is context and what types of discourse structures and di...

The author uses resource-based view (RBV) to demonstrate how organizations use rhetoric about multiple identities to improve a firm’s competitive advantage. The author presents a model that illustrates how rhetoric can switch the audience’s attention between identities and resources to gain competitive advantage. When multiple identities exist, the...

We provide an empirical study of the reframing of accounts of responsibility for strategy. We found that top management ambivalence about strategy provided a middle management team with wide scope for interpretation of responsibility for developing and implementing a strategic initiative. In the early stage, responsibility as well as expectations a...

ABSTRACT Implementation often occupies a problematic,position in accounts,of strategy. Itis often seen as a separate and low level activity. The assumption of separateness contradicts empirical evidence, while the assumption of low level activity portrays implementation,as simple ,and automatic despite evidence that implementation ,often fails. We...

I argue that attempts to adapt structure to contingencies will be unsuccessful unless there is also rhetorical congruence, which has two parts. First, rhetorical congruence exists if rhetoric is appropriate to contingencies. For example, decentralization aimed at increasing local initiative will lead to more requests by headquarters for advice from...

This paper claims that organizational cognitions are manifested as argumentation. Such argumentation can be represented as organizational construct systems (systems of constructs shared by important organization members). Such organizational construct systems enable us to detect structural features of an organization's cognition which indicate its...

Operable knowledge features are discovered which present a structure of knowledge which is independent of the specific meaning or use of knowledge. This discovery presents a completely new mathematically based concept of knowledge for different disciplines like economy, sociology, communication science, physics or biology. We explain how this arise...

This article is concerned with the introduction of the agenda of New Public Management (NPM) within the board of a UK Hospital Trust: West London Hospital (WLH). We discuss the literature on New Public Management, including its limitations for analysing the organizational reality of implementing NPM. But we will also be drawing on discourse theory...

This article is concerned with the introduction of the agenda of New Public Management (NPM) within the board of a UK Hospital Trust: West London Hospital (WLH). We discuss the literature on New Public Management, including its limitations for analysing the organizational reality of implementing NPM. But we will also be drawing on discourse theory...

Argumentation within organizations depends for its effectiveness upon the context. The model presented seeks to identify the three ways in which an arguer can become more persuasive. The first way uses the fact that many of the dimensions of argument strength (familiarity, evidence, simplicity, etc.) are not appropriate in particular organizational...

This is a case study of a US$ 30 million project to establish a new form of rapid healthcare service delivery within the context of a highly politicised National Health Service Hospital (NHS) Trust in the United Kingdom (UK). This project involved large-scale redesign of long-established healthcare procedures and the development of sophisticated ne...

This book is a result of the Tenth International Conference on Information Systems Development (ISD2001) held at Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom, during September 5-7, 2001. ISD 2001 carries on the fine tradition established by the first Polish-Scandinavian Seminar on Current Trends in Information Systems Development Methodolog...

This is a case study of a US$ 30 million project to establish a new form of rapid healthcare service delivery within the context of a highly politicised National Health Service Hospital (NHS) Trust in the United Kingdom (UK). This project involved large-scale redesign of long-established healthcare procedures and the development of sophisticated ne...

A prototype system is described that simulates a transcript of a business meeting based on a computational model of argumentation using the distinction between premises, conclusions, and warrants. The argumentation in the dialogue is represented as a directional weighted graph. An algorithm for calculating the strength of each conclusion is describ...

This article considers data from a hospital that was introducing an experimental new facility onto an existing site, including the process of institutionalization of the argument ‘The new facility requires radically new working practices.’ The data are used to test a proposed integration of Barley and Tolbert’s (1997) model of the psychological mec...

The paper considers several issues. (1) The feasibility of a premise to claim model of dialogue: the results show that a rule-based system can generate claims in the same sequence as they appear in a real discussion. (2) The relationship between the increased knowledge created in the leap from premise to claim on the perceived coherence and compreh...

1 ‘Organisation ’ as a linguistic construct. “As the idea of an ultimate foundation for moral and political beliefs has become increasingly implausible, theorists have turned to ‘discourse ’ to provide a basis on which to defend the legitimacy of social and political practices. The turn to discourse, which includes but is not limited to communicati...

The problem considered in this chapter is how does an individual keep in touch with what everybody else is doing, in order to proactively participate, while ensuring they do not spend too much time on passively watching and listening? The chapter aims to consider several means of supporting the grounding process in computer mediated communication....

The general aim of the paper is to shift interest in group communication in organizations in general and in committees in particular away from a prescriptive and rationalistic view detached from the organizational context towards a more analytical approach which takes account of important organizational issues of conflict, power and accountability....

The paper discusses the verbal and nonverbal communication during a video-recorded meeting between two physically separate teams as part of a 9 month multi-site construction project. In the extract analysed here, the team which was video-recorded contained three members and the project coordinator, whereas the remote team contained a single individ...

Although the association between management and argumentation has been a long-standing one, very little research has been undertaken into the organizational setting, institutionalization and use of argumentation. Argumentation is still considered to be undertaken between isolated individuals or within political communities. This paper aims to provi...

Argumentation support systems have both advantages and disadvantages. For the individual, there is an increased power to express herself and to gain recognition and reward for the extra effort and frankness required, but at the cost of slowing down work, making the user constantly explain herself, and putting her statements at risk of being taken o...

Although the association between management and argumentation has been a longstanding one, very little research has been undertaken in formal modeling and simulation of the organizational setting and use of argumentation. Argumentation is still considered by most researchers to be undertaken between isolated individuals or within political communit...

The article introduces argumentation theory, some examples of computational models of argumentation, some application examples, considers the significance and problems of argumentation systems, and outlines the significance and difficulties of the field. Also, the article describes a system which used rhetorical reasoning rules such as fairness, re...

This paper views organizational change from a linguistic perspective. Concepts are taken from the theory of speech acts, the theory of political language forms, and the theory of language coherence and applied to two case studies of companies undergoing major organizational change. Two criteria for coherent language use during organizational change...

Discourse analysis can take understanding about information systems planning and development further than is possible with current approaches. The two added value items in this paper are those of ‘talk-as-action’ and social constructionism. Both are used to elaborate a structurationist view that values and ideas (those of the actor or agent) which...

This paper suggests a political model of information systems development and business process reengineering (BPR). This political character means that the evaluation of the process is given different interpretations depending on the stakeholder. BPR and IS react to different political factors and therefore do not flow along in a synchronised, paral...

A survey of 360 small firms of between 10 and 250 employees revealed that 274 (76.1%) had not adopted, and 86 (23.9%) had adopted email. Of firms with less than 100 employees, non-adopters were four times as numerous as adopters, whereas companies with 100–250 employees had a slight majority of adopters. Of the adopters, three-quarters adopted emai...

This paper explores the political character of business process re-engineering (BPR) and its associated information systems (IS) change. This political character means that the scope of business processes and their associated IS, the scale and type of change and the evaluation of BPR success are subject to different interpretations depending on the...

We identify several difficulties which exist in current electronic market systems and suggest that a knowledge-based system enabling argumentation would solve these problems. We put forward some ideas for how such a system would be designed and operated for the task allocation problem.

An important question in the design of a computer-based argumentation support tool is how such a system would interface with the decision environment within which it operates. One aspect of this interaction is the effect of decision environment on the selection of each warrant. The purpose of the present article is to suggest a grammar of types of...

This study uses a longitudinal research design with multiple data collection methods on a systems development project. Five theoretical perspectives about power have been used to evaluate the case: zero sum, proeessual, organizational, structurally constrained, and social shaping/social construction. Our working assumption is that power is multidim...

We contend that the 2-way relation between information technology and communication media (chosen according to media attributes) on the one hand and organizational structure and behavior (which involves making design Choices) on the other is made more visible at the level of media attributes, because such an analysis reveals a number of organizatio...

The advantages of electronic argumentation as it exists in current technology emphasise argumentation as a rational process of concept development and communication which needs to be systematically managed. These are important advantages which will push such technology forward into an increasing number of future applications. However, people like t...

One problem in studying quality circles (QCs) is the shortage of objective measures of success. Another is the fact that many previous studies have been longitudinal but based on only one site. Presents results of a large sample of over 5,000 QCs which capture some longitudinal aspects of quality circle development and relate them to several object...

Strategic organizational support systems enable and support unstructured reasoning and communication within organizations. Such argumentation-based unstructured transactions can be used to continuously maintain a cognitive model of the organization. The model can be subjected to a prescriptive theory, in order to diagnose good and bad patterns in o...

The paper considers how argumentation retains its coherence and suggests that each subconclusion references other subconclusions in several ways. These references can be analysed for distance and canonicality to discover relevance and hence coherence. An argument focus is a small number of subconclusions including the current one, which have small...

Faced with a potentially vast amount of information, how is one to decide what is worth searching and when a piece of information is valuable? With small quantities of information semantic concepts are useful—the relevance and significance of a piece of information can be assessed easily. But with large quantities non-semantic clues are needed, and...

The case study investigates the relationship between the development of material requirements planning/just-in-time (MRP/JIT) operations management methods and an accounting system within a manufacturing company. The study identifies the improvements that have already been made and those yet to be made and investigates the role the accounting funct...

Little work has as yet been undertaken into the modelling and formalizing of group, collaborative and cooperative work using computers. This paper sets out to describe and model the social, emotional, and symbolic aspects of computer-based communication within an organization. A descriptive model is developed which relates elements together and an...

This paper seeks to demonstrate the lack of any integrated European information policy. This lack of integra tion is shown to be due to intrinsic properties of information itself, as well as due to the political characteristics of the European Union (EU). The paper shows how any EU information policy has to take account of multiple strands of relev...

This paper introduces and reviews intelligent argumentation systems. It seeks to define what such systems are, and to emphasize the crucial distinction between argument represenation and argument generation programs. Such a review includes both working programs and design ideas. The paper also explores some domain applications, suggesting the wide-...

In the system described in the paper, agents attempt to make claims using tactical rules (such as fairness and commitment), and agents also say what other claims these claims support or attack. Claims can be set of claims connected by attacking and supporting links. As debate continues, a shared argument map is created. This map is controlled by st...

This article discusses European Community policy as it relates to information technology and the information industry. With the advent of a common market within Europe there is an increase in competition and the removal of national barriers. This process is slow and difficult to accomplish and is not yet complete. Markets have traditionally been fr...

Systems requirements change, which necessitates expensive and error-prone maintenance. Such change is unavoidable, because requirements are intellectually and politically fluid. A five-stage method is suggested for developing systems which adapt to their host organization. Business rules are established during a negotiation stage, which consists ei...

Industrial innovation often involves human rather than technical problems. Such problems can be particularly acute when embedded within organizational structures and when allied to mechanisms, such as control systems, which reinforce the status quo. Management accountancy systems often play this role, being crucially involved in the process of eval...

Most research interest in the requirements determination part of software development has been in suggesting methodologies. Such an approach has been successful in software design. But requirements is concerned with questions of 'what' and 'why' - which do not fit easily into a structured or formalised recipe. The first objective for any research t...

Describes both MRPII and JIT, reviews their strengths and weaknesses, and investigates their potential complementary nature. Suggests a step-by-step implementation of MRPII/JIT integration. Shows that several technical problems are solvable, and that MRPII and JIT are suitable in many similar environments. Analyses justification of change using cur...

This paper investigates the requirements of an information system for protein structure and biological activity (structure-function) studies in molecular biology. With large amounts of sequence data, boosted by the Human Genome Project, currently flooding into the main sequence databases, the time is opportune for an exploration of the needs of mol...

The current conflict theory of emotion states that emotions arise at junctures of plans in which circumstances show the likely attainment or nonattainment of a goal and in which those circumstances include other plans and other goals. But emotions often arise from side goals rather than from the goal being aimed at. This article raises the question...

The UK primary health care system is being reorganized to create an internal market for health services. This will only succeed if local family doctors (general practitioners) take on responsibilities for budgets and as purchasers of specialist services. According to auditing mechanisms the visible discharge of these responsibilities can only be do...

Governments play a major role in molecular database development. They are deeply committed to science infrastructure and research funding, and can influence international agreements crucial to successful collaboration. The driving force, however, comes from private companies, particularly but not solely pharmaceutical companies. Recent developments...