Renate E. Meyer's research while affiliated with University of Vienna and other places
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Publications (94)
To the surprise of many in the West, the fall of the USSR in 1991 did not lead to the adoption of liberal democratic government around the world and the much anticipated “end of history.” In fact, authoritarianism has made a comeback, and liberal democracy has been on the retreat for at least the last 15 years culminating in the unthinkable: the in...
In this paper, we aim to help researchers think, design, and execute their empirical journey by mapping the terrain of choices common in qualitative research. We offer a matrix that relates to various dimensions—the level at which to study the phenomenon (level of analysis), types of field materials, time orientation of research and data, the analy...
Institutions are collective responses to collective concerns, with the underlying link between concern and response being the purpose of the institution. With this conceptual lens, we analyze the history of the Aktiengesellschaft (AG), which emerged in Austria and Germany around 1800. While any analysis of the organizational features of the form wo...
For more than a century, the corporation has shaped our thinking of organizations. This deeply institutionalized form is still regarded as both the iconic business organization and the core structural unit of our economic order. Today, however, it stands at a crossroads. Economic, social, and environmental failures of the recent past as well as mis...
Office space modifications are often implemented as a catalyst for broader organizational change with the intention to break with deeply institutionalized cultural practices in the workplace. Whereas a number of studies provide evidence on effects of office redesign on work practices, the relationship between office space and work practices is stil...
Strategy has become an important concern and practical tool in urban management and governance, with the literature highlighting implementation as a hallmark of effective strategy. Whilst such a strategy–action link (which we label here as ‘implementation nexus’) has been well established, other long-term effects have been documented in less detail...
Im Zentrum des Buches stehen die Kritik und Weiterentwicklung eines der einflussreichsten Ansätze der Sozialwissenschaften: des soziologischen Neo-Institutionalismus. Insbesondere diejenigen, die an wichtigen Forschungsfeldern der Soziologie, der Managementforschung und der Politikwissenschaft interessiert sind, können von den kritischen Auseinande...
The Covid‐19 crisis makes the study of languages in management even more relevant and timely than before the crisis. This “black and brown epidemic,” as Joseph Betancourt from Massachusetts General Hospital called it, brings to the fore social divisions and hardship, accelerating and magnifying processes and practices of linguistic inequality with...
Under far-reaching reforms, many cities have delegated core tasks previously delivered by their administrations to independent organizations that they formally own, e.g. municipal companies, or supervise, e.g. municipal trust funds. The coordination of these (as we call them) ‘domestic’ city organizations has proven challenging. Extant literature a...
We argue that in order to overcome the reductionism and essentialism in institutional theory there is a need to acknowledge that institutions and social actors are co‐constitutive and co‐constructed in processes of communication. We elaborate this argument by drawing on the phenomenological foundation of institutional theory and point to promising...
Recent developments around the sharing economy bring to the fore questions of governability and broader societal benefit—and subsequently the need to explore effective means of public governance, from nurturing, on the one hand, to restriction, on the other. As sharing is a predominately urban phenomenon in modern societies, cities around the globe...
Looking at accounting reforms in central government, the paper investigates how key actors (senior managers responsible for developing and/or implementing change) account for the related change outcomes subsequent to implementation. Using aggregated data from three countries (the UK, Italy, and Austria), and a mixed‐methods approach, the study inve...
This article develops the idea of ‘interlinking theorization’ in the context of management knowledge. We explain how management concepts are theorized through their direct co-occurrence with other management concepts, on the one hand, and their embeddedness in general business vocabulary, on the other. Conceptually, we extend a semantic network app...
Scent permeates all organizations and multiple dimensions of organizational life - yet it has been largely neglected in organization studies. This is unfortunate as scent is both a constitutive component of social reality and a distinct semiotic mode of constructing and conveying cultural meaning. It impacts, among many other things, the identity a...
The mass migration of refugees in the fall of 2015 in Europe posed an immense humanitarian and logistical challenge: exhausted from their week-long journeys, refugees arrived in Vienna in need of care, shelter, food, medical aid, and onward transport. The refugee crisis was managed by an emerging polycentric and intersectoral collective of organiza...
This chapter explores the multiplicity, formation, and porosity of organizational boundaries in new, fluid forms of production. Conceptualizing them as “partial organizations,” we argue that both the intentional design of organizational elements (such as membership, hierarchy, rules, monitoring, and sanctioning) as well as unintended adjustments of...
Public sector reforms of recent decades in Europe have promoted managerialism and aimed at introducing private sector thinking and practices. However, with regard to public sector executives’ self-understanding, managerial role identities have not replaced bureaucratic ones; rather, components from both paradigms were combined. In this chapter, we...
Human-driven changes on this planet have been giving rise to global warming, social instability, civil wars, and acts of terrorism. The existing system of global governance is not equipped to effectively address these enormous challenges. It is slow where one must move quickly, favors bureaucracy and politics over authentic deliberations and effect...
This is an appendix to the article "United People: designing a new model of global governance", available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324983643_United_People_Designing_a_New_Model_of_Global_Governance
This appendix provides background information on the principles informing the UP model, creating councils within this model, get...
Contemporary organizations increasingly rely on images, logos, videos, building materials, graphic and product design, and a range of other material and visual artifacts to compete, communicate, form identity and organize their activities. This Special Issue focuses on materiality and visuality in the course of objectifying and reacting to novel id...
Scent permeates all organizations and multiple dimensions of organizational life—yet it has been largely neglected in organization studies. This is unfortunate as scent is both a constitutive component of social reality and a distinct semiotic mode of constructing and conveying cultural meaning. It impacts, among many other things, the identity and...
In this article, we develop a structural model for studying how constellations of multiple institutional logics are instantiated at the organizational level. Conceptually, we complement an institutional logics perspective with structural interactionism and network theory and model a constellation as a nexus of organizational role identities and cou...
In this article, we develop and advance an understanding of institutions as multimodal accomplishments. We draw on social semiotics and the linguistic concept of metafunctions to establish the visual as a specific mode of meaning construction. In addition, we make semiotic modes conducive to institutional inquiry by introducing the notion of distin...
This paper explores the deployment of rhetorical legitimation strategies during public-sector accounting reforms by investigating how organizational actors justify related changes in the central governments of the United Kingdom (UK), Italy and Austria. The study shows that changes are largely legitimated (and rarely delegitimated) by key actors, w...
In this article we develop novel theory on the differentiated impact of verbal and visual text on the emergence, rise, establishment, and consolidation of institutions. Integrating key insights from social semiotics into a discursive model of institutionalization, we identify distinct affordances of verbal and visual text based on the constitutive...
Open Government is en vogue, yet vague: while practitioners, policy-makers, and others praise its virtues, little is known about how Open Government relates to bureaucratic organization. This paper presents insights from a qualitative investigation into the City of Vienna, Austria. It demonstrates how the encounter between the city administration a...
Materiality and visuality are crucial to institutions and institutional processes. They constitute ‘embodied’ aspects of all experiences, including the creation and interpretation of signs and institutions, which are bound to material properties of the sensory apparatus, such as vocal chords, retinas, the brain, etc. Materiality and visuality are a...
Despite an abundance of studies on hybridization and hybrid forms of organizing, scholarly work has failed to distinguish consistently between specific types of hybridity. As a consequence, the analytical category has become blurred and lacks conceptual clarity. Our paper discusses hybridity as the simultaneous appearance of institutional logics in...
Our research contributes to knowledge on strategic organizational responses by addressing a specific type of institutional complexity that has, to date, been rather neglected in scholarly inquiry: conflicting institutional demands that arise within the same institutional order. We suggest referring to such type of complexity as “intra-institutional...
Over the past two decades, research has emphasised a shift from city government to urban governance. Such a shift brings about its very own challenges, namely governance gaps, uncertain configurations in governance and a limited capacity to act. In this paper, we argue that the concurrent rise of strategy documents in city administration addresses...
New public management-inspired reforms created numerous autonomous units with many different faces and labels. This variety of organizations and organizational forms precludes a straightforward definition of what constitutes a public sector organization and blurs the boundaries between the public and private sectors as well as the boundaries of sin...
While the de-politicization of public sector management was a core objective of past reform initiatives, more recent debates urge the state to act as a strong principal when it comes to public sector unity and policy coherence, and consequently make a case for reinvigorating links between the political and managerial sphere. Using data from Austria...
Through long stretches of its history, Austria’s administration was deeply embedded in an imperial-royal tradition which is an essential element of the sociocultural and administrative landscape even today. In the eighteenth century, it was the concern for the welfare of her subjects that motivated Empress Maria Theresa to form a centrally administ...
In this article, we aim at a more nuanced understanding of the structuring dynamics of novel forms of organizing. We propose combining conceptual insights from several perspectives on social structuration and organizational design. Given the relative scarcity of work that uses such perspectives to examine the ‘fluidity’ of new forms of organizing,...
This paper examines how management concepts acquire meaning through discursive distinction and embedding. Drawing on Austrian public sector reform, we reconstruct a classification of vocabularies according to their internal integrative capacity and external connectivity in order to study how distinct bundles of management concepts are embedded in b...
Since the late 1980s, there has been a significant and progressive movement away from the traditional Public Administration (PA) systems, in favour of NPM-type accounting tools and ideas inspired by the private sector. More recently, a new focus on governance systems, under the banner Public Governance (PG), has emerged. In this paper it is argued...
Greenwood, Hinings and Whetten (2014) present two major criticisms of current institutional scholarship, and see need for a broad redirection: Institutional organization theory, they argue, has lost sight of the claim to study organizations and, with its overwhelming focus on isomorphism and similarity, has fallen short on adequately theorizing dif...
Institutions are the formal and informal rules that operate in society which shape and give meaning to human interaction (North, 1990). They are underpinned by coercive structures, normative systems, and cognitive understandings (Scott, 2008). Given this definition of institutions, it is fair to say that capitalism is one of the most dominant insti...
In a rapidly changing and increasingly complex environment, the importance of reflection for public managers has been acknowledged almost unanimously by academics as well as practitioners. In this article we highlight the necessity to look at reflection in a more nuanced way. Reflection is a broad and multifaceted concept and public sector work env...
With the unprecedented rise in the use of visuals, and its undeniable omnipresence in organizational contexts, as well as in the individual's everyday life, organization and management science has recently started to pay closer attention to the to date under-theorized “visual mode” of discourse and meaning construction. Building primarily on insigh...
Over recent decades, a number of managerial reform initiatives in continental Europe have aimed at moving away from the traditional Weberian model of public administration. Such shifting bases of legitimacy are brought about by changes in the institutional logics in place, which not only provide frames of reference but also social identities and vo...
In this paper, we explore how corporations use visual artifacts to translate and re-contextualize a globally theorized managerial concept (CSR) into a local setting (Austria). In our analysis of the field-level visual discourse, we analyze over 1,600 images in stand-alone CSR reports of publicly traded corporations. We borrow from framing analysis...
This paper examines the framings and identity work associated with professionals' discursive construction of climate change science, their legitimation of themselves as experts on 'the truth', and their attitudes towards regulatory measures. Drawing from survey responses of 1077 professional engineers and geoscientists, we reconstruct their framing...
When organizational concepts spread beyond national and cultural boundaries, they must pass through powerful filters of local cultural and structural opportunities and constraints in order to mobilize legitimacy. Struggles over their meaning are intensified if they challenge the prevailing order. Drawing on the case of shareholder value in Austria,...
We take the 30th birthday of Organization Studies, the publication outlet of the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS), as an opportunity to reflect on what Europeanness in organization research means at times of globalization where territory and geographic boundaries increasingly lose their relevance for scholarly identity. In particular,...
This article reports a comparative study of human resource management (HRM) practices in Europe. We focus on the extent to which decision-making authority is decentralized, that is, passed down to management, and individualized in the sense of being in the discretion of a single decision maker. Using these two dimensions, this paper gives a picture...
Das Konzept der Public Service Motivation (PSM) fokussiert auf die spezifischen Beweggründe und Motivationen, die für öffentlich Bedienstete charakteristisch sind und untersucht, welche Implikationen dies für zentrale Fragestellungen des Public Management wie etwa Arbeitszufriedenheit, Organizational Commitment, Anreizsysteme oder generell die Perf...
The motivation of public servants in general (Behn 1995), and public service
motivation (PSM) in particular (Perry and Hondeghem 2008b), have always been important
issues in public administration and public management research. In recent years, research on
public service motivation has made significant progress, finally living up to the status it h...
In this brief review, we do not attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of how the concept of ideology has developed in the different perspectives; this has been done in several publications that classify and discuss ideology in great detail (see Chiapello, 2003; Thompson, 1996; Eagleton, 1991; Lenk, 1984; Therborn, 1980; Larrain, 1979, among m...
Few papers achieve the success of DiMaggio and Powell's 1983 “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” The impact of the paper, as indicated by its citation count and its influence on a wide range of disciplines, has been extraordinary. Furthermore, the paper's influence continues to i...
This chapter argues that organizational actors and interests need to be regarded as cultural constructions. It considers organizational institutionalism and Giddens's structuration theory to relate strategic action with the process of institutional innovation. This allows for a reconsideration of social practices through which organizational actors...
In this article, the authors analyze whether and to what extent an “old” administrative orientation is being replaced by a new managerial logic in the Austrian public sector. They illustrate that shifts in institutional logics can be analyzed by the extent to which actors draw on the social identities derived from the competing logics and show that...
Purpose
– Sets out to present current dynamics of public management reform in Austria, a country that is characterized by institutional governance features (federal structure, legalistic Rechtsstaat tradition) often described as an obstacle to management‐oriented reforms. The paper's focus lies in the reception of management ideas and concepts by p...
This article tracks public sector reform in Austria with a focus on the influence of New Public Management (NPM) both as label and as specific set of reform ideas. We analyse to what degree current reforms have been influenced and shaped by this widely acclaimed international trend. In this empirical study we combine the different data sources of m...
Public management literature is mostly dominated by Anglo-Saxon or northern European experiences (Christensen and Lagreid 2001, Farnham et al. 1996, Horton and Farnham 2000, Olsen and Peters 1996, Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000) only peripherally covering Continental European countries with a strong Rechtsstaat tradition and, in terms of staff particip...
Whereas in many countries and contexts questions of public service motivation and ethos have increasingly been topic of empirical studies a noticeable lack of such research in G erman speaking countries with their specific legalistic Rechtsstaattradition can be observed. Although there exists a research tradition on civil service motivation and a s...
Citations
... 4 These are just some of the worrisome growing warnings about the deteriorating health of democracy, which is not a single-country phenomenon but rather a global event (Diamond, 2015(Diamond, , 2020Lührmann et al., 2019;Plattner, 2015). There is a growing recognition that the logic of democracy can be eroded in small steps, notably in the most established democratic societies (Adler et al., 2023). ...
Reference: Does democracy foster entrepreneurship?
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... As a second step, the iterative inductive coding process on the material then allowed the changes through COVID-19-specific aspects in the approval process to be explored in detail. Here, the process-oriented approach (Zilber and Meyer 2022) is used to consider the temporal dynamics (categories: framework/environment and which regulatory margins remain; see Sect. 5.1) in regulations for events and the impact on event management from the organizer's perspective. ...
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... Prussia was the most powerful militarily and economically, so it dominated policy decisions. German states supported economic development by investing in mines and factories, assisting private firms financially, funding infrastructure like roads and canals, and responding to calls for integration, first economic and then political (Leixnering, Meyer, & Doralt, 2022). ...
... Brorstr€ om 2020). Kornberger, Meyer, and H€ ollerer (2021) argued that a strategy might eventually change the "thought style" of an organization, and that this might be an important development when addressing grand challenges. The common good can be considered a mission driver, a source of inspiration for action (Pesci, Costa, and Andreaus 2020), and close to the aim of the strategic work studied here. ...
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... This paper aims to introduce the constructs of intended meaning, intentionality, and collective intentionality into institutional organization theory. Meaning is conceptualized differently in various theoretical traditions: Symbolic interactionism focuses on meaning negotiated between actors in interactions, while macro phenomenology addresses meaning as internally coherent yet distinct and inter-related clusters of shared interpretations that inform differentiated social structures (R. E. Meyer, Jancsary, and Höllerer 2021). This paper adopts a different definition of meaning. ...
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... While methodological realists might desire triangulation, calling for additional data to prove our findings, we sought to study how the discursive localisation was represented, not to capture the process conclusively. This discursive focus (Meyer et al, 2020) does not consider questions about non-discursive impacts, though there is literature that does have this aim, namely, to establish whether there 9 Table 1: Sources included in the study and coding frequency is only a change in organisations' stories to fit an SDG-aligned narrative or there are clear strategic changes too (Ansari et al, 2017;van den Broek, 2020). Second, documents should be understood in the context within which they are produced and consumed (Dalglish et al, 2021), and (re)constructing a document's significance from its literal meaning is an interpretive process in which background familiarity with context is indispensable (Scott, 1990). ...
... At the same time, boundaries in the office environment are being removed to foster interaction and collaboration (Bernstein and Turban 2018). Although the theory on how removing boundaries affects human behavior is divided (Ward et al. 2017). Although the social facilitation hypothesis, represented by sociologists, suggests that removing boundaries may foster collaboration and collective intelligence (Geen and Gange 1977), organizational scholars, mainly social and environmental psychologists (Taylor 1975), draw an opposite conclusion. ...
... during the pandemic (Piekkari et al., 2021). HCL proficiency includes the ability to listen, speak, read, write, and comprehend the HCL, as well as familiarity with local nonverbal communication (Selmer & Lauring, 2015). ...