Business Sweden

Privileging the discursive expression of micro-resistance while exploiting spatial metaphors such as cynical distancing and escape, recent work in Critical Management Studies (CMS) has tended to find resistance everywhere without actually examining its spatial whereabouts. Utilizing a spatial approach, this article therefore investigates how homeless people in Stockholm not only resisted but also coped otherwise with two urban planning projects that intended to drive them away from two public places. Whereas some of the homeless subverted the planners’ intentions by returning, others confirmed their intentions by leaving. The article further discusses the nomadic nature of these movements and how they were related to homeless discourses of apathy, cynicism and contentment. Finally, it discusses what implications this may have for homeless people and urban planning organizations, and for the understanding of resistance in CMS.

Globalization is reshaping our modes of thinking and ways of behaving and foster-ing cultural change in societies. While some scholars (cf. Harrison, 2006; Harrison and Huntington, 2000) may argue over a ‘clash of cultures’, it seems just as relevant to focus on the ways in which cultures may learn from each other, even inspire each other where the beauty of cultural differences and cultur-al collisions is applauded (Fang, in press; Soderberg and Holden, 2002). At the same time, some scholars argue that a world cul-ture (Lechner and Boli, 2005) or global cul-ture (Arnett, 2002; Bird and Stevens, 2003) is emerging and that it threatens the existence of national cultures.This special section on ‘Cross Cultural Management in the Age of Globalization’ aims at providing a forum to examine what globalization means for cross cultural man-agement with a special focus on the evolution of our understanding of national culture and cultural change. We attempt to avoid a sim-plistic and sweeping ‘either-or’ debate over convergence vs. divergence. Instead, we give importance to understanding the paradoxi-cal and evolving conceptualizations of cul-tures and their implications for cross cultural management theory and practice.To put the discussion into perspective, it is useful to consider the changing trends in the cultural research pantheon. In the 19th cen-tury, Sir Francis Galton first introduced the problem of cultural group independence in his work on correlation. He noted that cultural groups could not be considered truly independ-ent from one another because the processes of cultural transfusion created relationships that cannot be easily disentangled (Lindridge, 2005). Consequently, research came to focus on cultures

Discursive accounts of time tend to focus on a deconstruction of taken-for-granted notions of clock time, restricted to linear measurable units. By contrast the present article examines some of the discourses and practices deployed by managers in their attempts to control time; in the final instance, it shows how time can be a mystery that escapes such managerial pursuits and preoccupations. More specifically, we draw on Levinas’s ideas on time and the ‘Other’, and use two managerial discourses to illustrate how reification (through the use of technological and institutional artefacts) as attempts to control time tend to result in a proliferation of participation but, equally, an insistence on participation may invoke an intensification of control through reification. Reified relationships invariably result in a perpetual return to the Other, or what we have called participation. However, to varying degrees, our participatory mode is not possible without reification. Yet ‘relationships’ cannot be completely delegated to rationally calculating devices, formal institutions, or markets. Cooperation has its source not in reified forms of rationality (nor of irrationality), but in the human encounter with the Other. The organizational, social order is based on personal relations and personal responsibilities.