Anders Klitmøller

At a time of heightened sensitivity to the military’s role in national security and domestic politics, senior officers are more likely than ever to “play the neutral card” – i.e. to act in ways that simply emphasize their supposedly apolitical role. Two of the dominant schools of civil-military relations theory insist that this is virtually the only card officers can play, positing in effect that any political influence by officers on policy-making is inappropriate. However, a third tradition has long argued the opposite: officers do and should engage in consistent dialogue with civilian principals in the hope of producing better policy outcomes. This article adjudicates between the three perspectives, finding that while the third perspective is most persuasive, it too suffers from serious limitations. We provide a new perspective on how senior officers influence their political environments, highlighting their power and the range of options open to them.

Geopolitical and societal changes are increasingly narrated using the concept of complexity. In a range of policy contexts, from climate to finance and peacekeeping to defence and security, complexity is often prominent. This article explores the contemporary expressions of complexity in defence and security scholarship and policy. To understand the expressions of complexity, we view it as a ‘folk theory’ – what others have called a category of practice. We illustrate how this folk theory has gained prominence in NATO policy regarding the organizing of future war and warfare as one example of a policy context in which expressions of complexity are produced and promoted. Specifically, we examine NATO’s future warfighting concept – multi-domain operations – and explore how the concept offers a way and a new language to make sense of an uncertain future and make it governable from the present. We discuss some consequences of a ‘folk theory’ becoming the explanation rather than one of many explanations of the future defence and security landscape. As a representative of folk theory, complexity offers a strong performative master narrative for a variety of orientations, yet one whose practical relevance for the organization of security can be questioned.

n the shadow of various business scandals and societal crises, scholars and practitioners have developed a growing interest in authentic leadership. This approach to leadership assumes that leaders may access and leverage their “true selves” and “core values” and that the combination of these two elements forms the basis from which they act resolutely, lead ethically, and benefit others. Drawing on Heidegger’s work, we argue that a concern for authenticity can indeed instigate a leadership ethic, albeit one that acknowledges the unfounded openness of existence and its inherent relationality. On this basis, we propose an ethics-as-practice approach in which leaders respond to the situation at hand by being “attuned to attunement,” which cultivates an openness to otherness and a responsibility to others.

Anthony King’s Command: The Twenty-First-Century General claims to present a new perspective on command, in which a radical change of command from an “individualistic” to a “collective” practice has taken place since the 20th century. In this article, we critically assess two key ideas in King’s work, namely “collective command” and “complexity”. These are issues which are mirrored in contemporary collective leadership literature and complexity management discourse. We argue that this engagement with collective leadership and complexity has some unfortunate consequences for King’s assessment of military organization and how command practices have changed. The outset for our critique is what we perceive to be a “surreptitious slide” – namely a slide from analytical insights about the present and past to generalizations and prescriptions about the future of command and the organizational context in which it unfolds. The slide is reflected in a lack of specificity concerning what is and what ought to be. We suggest that scholars and practitioners attend to the diversity of actions within timeframes, specific situations, and contextual settings rather than evoke wishful thinking and legitimize specific visions of future realities. This would, among other things, shed light on how concrete issues of power, conflict, and tensions co-exist in divisional headquarters and beyond.

The understanding of culture in international management (IM) research has often been approached from two different theoretical orientations. One stream of research has proposed that culture is a set of relatively stable collective values that are transmitted to the individual in a straightforward and linear manner. In this functionalist perspective, culture is perceived to be a fixed entity firmly delimited by the nation state. Hence, the cross-national distance between comparable values has been a central scholarly focus in this tradition. An alternative and less pervasive line of research has adopted a constructivist approach. Here culture is considered a complex, dynamic interpersonal process. These two perspectives have developed relatively independently and offer scholars and students of IM different analytical insights. In this article we account for key characteristics of the two approaches and offer an alternative, integrative perspective that takes into account some central insights of both research trends, namely practice theory. In doing so, we avoid some of the inherent analytical pitfalls associated with the more radical functionalist and constructivist perspectives.

Few studies have dealt with inclusive language use in multicultural organizations. This is unfortunate because it has been hypothesized that such organizations will be more creative and will perform better than mono-cultural organizations if communication issues are dealt with correctly by managers. In this study, we test the general hypothesis that inclusive language use by managers and employees in formal and informal situations will increase the creativity and performance in multicultural organizations. By use of responses from 676 individuals employed in privately owned multicultural companies, we found that management common language communication was strongly associated with performance but not with creativity. Openness to language diversity among employees, however, had strong relations with both creativity and performance. This indicates that management communication may provide information and a shared identity that can increase the performance of an organization. Yet in order to increase creativity, there is a need to also facilitate inclusive group processes. The findings provide new insights into the theoretical idea that diversity leads to creativity and performance if communication is managed correctly.

This article advances a theory of practice approach to the study of conflictual practice sharing in the multinational corporation (MNC). The article demonstrates distinct opportunities offered by practice theory in researching the multiple lines of conflict and cooperation over local organizational practices, policies and strategies that emerge in the face of global HQ demands. Extant literature concentrates on how transfer outcomes are shaped by institutional or cultural distance at the national level and inter-unit relationships, often taking the subsidiary as a unit of analysis. Therefore, intra-unit conflicts over global practice sharing are under-researched, particularly how such conflicts are shaped by actors’ differential situatedness in the immediate societal context of the subsidiary. In explicating a practice theory agenda for the study of MNCs, we contribute to an understanding of how actors’ social positioning within and outside the firm, combined with their career opportunities, shape both the character and dynamics of intra-unit conflicts over the local configuration of organizational practices mandated by HQ. Building on an extended case study of an MNC in a Mexican special economic zone (SEZ), we thus examine how subsidiary actors accommodate, actively support and resist various parts of an HQ-mandated management control system.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore the interrelation between language differences, media choice and social categorization in global virtual teams (GVTs).Design/methodology/approach– An ethnographic field work was conducted in a Finnish multinational corporation (MNC). The study included interviews, observations, and language proficiency assessment of 27 GVT members located in five European countries.Findings– In GVTs, the combination of language proficiency differences and verbal media (e.g. telephone) tends to lead to social categorization, while a similar effect was not found when GVT members chose written media (e.g. e-mail).Research limitations/implications– The qualitative study only consisted of GVTs from one MNC, and thus the empirical findings might not be generalizable to other MNCs. Therefore, quantitative studies that can add to the robustness of the exploratory findings could be a worthwhile endeavour.Practical implications– Language training should be provided to GVT members, and virtual policies should be implemented to ensure the use of written media in GVTs characterized by language proficiency differences.Originality/value– Although it is well established in the literature that language differences are detrimental to co-located team effectiveness no study has explored how the relationship between variation in language proficiency and media choice affects social categorization in GVTs

Virtual work has become an increasingly important part of the international business environment. In particular, two components of virtual work; workplace mobility and distributed work, depicting physical and psychological distance to the workplace, have gained substantial scholarly attention. However, while the main stream of the international business literature, studying global virtual teams, has used mobility and distribution as predictors for negative work outcomes, there are indications that virtual work can have positive implications for the organization. In this study, we explore how workplace mobility and distributed work can affect employees’ perceptions of their colleagues and of managerial activities. More specifically, we focus on inclusive language use by managers and employees since this is a theme of growing interest in international business research. Relying on responses from 676 individuals from five Danish multicultural business organizations, we demonstrate a positive association between workplace mobility and perceptions of employees’ openness to language diversity as well as between distributed work and perceptions of consistent common corporate language at management level. This is consistent with construal level theory predicting that distance between employees and the organization will lead to more objective and goal-oriented perceptions whereas individuals that are more emerged in organizational social life will view issues more in relation to goal irrelevant factors.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are highly dependent on a corporate language to control and coordinate their distributed operations. However, research on the impact of language differences on intra- and inter-unit communication is still underdeveloped. In this study, we focus on corporate language-based communication avoidance (CLBCA) which has received little systematic attention in international business (IB) literature despite the negative impact it may have on MNC effectiveness. Applying a research methodology labeled multi-sited ethnography, we traced CLBCA across three Danish owned MNCs and identified five contextual factors that affect avoidance behavior in second language encounters: formality level, media leanness, group size, power difference, and relation strength. Thereby, this study provides novel insights into context dependent language barriers in MNCs. A central argument in this article is that communication avoidance in MNCs should not be perceived only as an individual level variable as has been the practice in most studies so far.