Different types of mental frames of reference among employees in a producers' cooperative are described. Characterizing the employee this way produces a pic ture of the way in which each employee processes information that, in a given situation, enables him or her to identify probiems and solutions. These different frames of reference are assumed to have an impact on the actions taken by these individuals. Furthermore, such actions are assumed to be connected with actions in the organization. Some of the employees occasionally display unexpected beha viour that cannot be explained by the way they have previously interpreted their situation. They experience a paradoxical situation in the organization, during which previous frames of references (or parts of them) are 'deframed' and devoid of meaning, because they hecome involved in discussions on a different, unknown level. Some of these employees discover that the new categories are socially constructed, enabling them to pursue new ways of understanding the environ ment, and to act accordingly. This paper describes situations in which this process is likely to take place and how it may or may not facilitate organizational change.

Management and the Future of Open Collaboration-Special issue call for papers from Journal of Organizational Change Management TITLE: Dilemmas within Commercial involvement in Open Source Software.

The aim of this article is to analyse the construction of time as perceived by a group of IT workers. It is argued that two stories about working time have been socially constructed during the 19th and 20th centuries, not as an epochal phenomenon but as a multi-times phenomenon: a clock time story and a task-time story. A quantitative method is used in analysing the IT workers, which breaks with the traditional conception within research that a social constructivist approach requires qualitative data and methods. The analysis reveals that these IT workers do not represent an homogenous group. Rather, four distinct groups are identifiable: Blurred Timers, Invaded Clock Timers, Clock Timers, and Task Timers – with Blurred Timers being the largest group and Task Timers the smallest. Employment status and union membership have a direct and significant impact on these time identities whereas gender, age, educational level, and challenge of the work do not have any direct or significant correlation with these time identities. Finally, the time identities are put into perspective and compared to recent research on gender and industrial relations

This article addresses the methodological question of how the researcher tackles the problem of only having access to empirical data through social interpretation processes (a second order social constructivism). It is argued that researchers can learn new aspects about an organization by replacing a logic perspective, predominant within western research, with a paradox perspective on the analysis of the organization. A paradox perspective rests on the assumption that mutually exclusive phenomena exist in the organization. This article describes the four phases of analysis which were developed when a paradox perspective was applied to analyse development at an employee-owned Danish newspaper.

In this article, the authors try to develop a theoretical frame of reference to help us understand the social construction of employees as strategic company actors on boards of directors. In 1973, the Danish Parliament passed an act granting employees the right to elect two members to sit on a company's board of directors. The authors attempt to understand the processes by which employee representatives infused this institutional form with meaning through a process of identity construction. This construction process draws on general cultural forms in the Danish society, primarily the institution of democracy. However, the authors' focus is on the board level. They observe that employee representatives come to share with their board colleagues, the representatives of capital, a market or company strategic perspective on board decision making, simultaneously maintaining the perspective of employee interests. This article is based on a series of in-depth analyses of company boards and interviews with a number of directors.