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Session 12: Human Resource Management in a Global Context - Coggle Diagram
Session 12: Human Resource Management in a Global Context
Stakeholders and Globalisation
"Intervening in the inevitable: Contesting globalization in a public sector organization"
(Spicer and Fleming, 2007)
Article
Key Concepts and Theory
Globalisation discourse
Discourse as a political tool for organisational shaping.
Discursive resistance
Public sector ethos
Focus
: How globalisation discourse was used to justify restructuring at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and how organised resistance groups challenged it through discursive strategies,
Discursive strategies
are deliberate, organised language techniques used in communication to shape public perception, influence opinions and legitimise specific viewpoints or actions.
Case study was Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) facing funding cuts, pressure to commercialise and integration into global media markets. All pushed by globalisation discourse.
Resistance Groups (stakeholders):
not rejecting globalisation but reworked its meaning.
FABC - Friends of the ABC (citizens/consumers)
MEAA - Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (union)
CSPU - Community and Public Sector Union
Tactics of Resistance
Appropriating Dominant Discourses:
using managements own words against them. Makes their critique harder to be dismissed as ideological, nostalgic or irrational.
Example:
Reframed managements "best practice" as damaging creativity.
Result
: by exposing contradictions in market-based claims made by management regarding efficiency, innovation and inevitability.
Works because it accepts the rules of the debate and then uses those rules to expose contradictions in managerial logic.
Surfacing Shared Discourses
: activated values stakeholders (management, government, workers and public) officially agreed on, then showed how reform violated them.
Example:
National Culture. ABC has a role in nurturing Australian content. But if they changed there is fear of American imports and loss of local music, arts and voices.
Result:
reframing market reforms as violations of the ABC's own institutional identity, having discursive, political and organisational effects.
Reviving Traditional Discourses
: resurrecting older, marginalised values that once defined ABC's identity. Function as moral counter-histories, reminding audiences that the current trajectory was not natural or inevitable. Argue that what was being lost mattered.
Example:
Reviving value of non-commercialism. Depicted commercialism as dangerous and corrupting. If management had their reforms then this is what would happen to ABC.
Result :
groups mobilised institutional memory to morally delegitimise commercialisation, disrupt narratives of progress and reassert public broadcasting as an essential public good.
Outcomes
Public protests of "save our ABC"
Reforms were softened or reversed: reduced job cuts and rolling back ABC Online commercialisation.
ABC was reasserted as a national public service.
Management were forced to justify reforms publicly and incorporate public service language into globalisation narratives.
Management could no longer say that the reforms came because of globalisation and that is was purely market-driven and detached from public service values. Globalisation had to be framed as serving democratic and cultural goals.
Key Argument
: globalisation discourse is not singular or fixed. It challenges the idea that public sector is obsolete as a site of resistance and shows hat public institutions can be powerful symbolic and political resources,