Micro-political processes in a multinational corporation subsidiary: A postcolonial reading of restructuring in a sales department
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What shapes micro-political contest in the subsidiary of a multinational corporation? We use observational and interview data from a Pakistani subsidiary of a global company to address this question. We trace debate surrounding the entry of modern (self-service) retail through multiple voices. Following postcolonial theory, we show how top management create a narrative that combines the progressiveness of modern retail with the locally salient discourse of izzat/honour. This hybrid narrative defines the terrain and terms of micro-political contest for all others in the subsidiary. Our analysis shows how some workers adapt this hybrid story to support their interests, whilst the attachment of izzat to the modern restricts the possibility of resistance for others. We examine how the narrative enables the establishment of an elite and a dominated group. The postcolonial approach allows us to argue that the subsidiary is a specific site of micro-political struggle where both geo-political factors and relationships with other parts of the multinational corporation shape micro-political processes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".