Toru Kiyomiya

Communication has become one of the most important approaches to innovative management control and organizational practices. In particular, the contribution of Weick (1979, 1995) has led organization and management scholars to emphasize ‘organizing’, instead of ‘organization’, and to focus

Post-disaster tourism is an important reconstruction strategy for communities affected by natural disasters. In shrinking rural communities that also experience depopulation and aging as general trends, the need to develop proactive resilient practices for disaster management and sustainable development is a pressing requirement. Our longitudinal, multi-method study carried out in a Japanese rural coastal town affected by the 2011 Tsunami sheds light on the attributes and mechanisms by which a post-disaster education tourism initiative which was led and co-delivered by the community in collaboration with a variety of stakeholders enhanced community resilience and led to sustainable practices of post-disaster reconstruction. We provide empirical insights into how community resilience and sustainable tourism development were achieved through the careful development and balancing of economic, social and environmental capital. Our study contributes to existing debates regarding the rela...

Japanese methods, such as TQM, TPS and lean, and Japanese organizational characteristics, such as loyalty to the company and long-term incentive systems, have received great attention from researchers who study organizational development and change. Some studies suggest that Japan's unique modes of communication can lead to effective and unique forms of organizational development and change. However, only a few studies examine the role of language and discourse in organizational development and change in Japanese organizations. The situation is similar in other non-English speaking countries. Most of the studies that draw on organizational discourse theory use cases of Western organizations in which English is used as the official language. This symposium is an attempt to break through such a situation. The main aim of this symposium is to bring a perspective on the diversity of language and various modes of language use in the studies of organizational discourse as well as organizational development and ...

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This article explores how tacit knowledge used in organizational communication is related to unethical behavior through negative aspects of collaborative practices in Japanese organizations. While collaborative practices are conventionally recognized as a strength in Japanese organizations, this article explores the "dark side" of the application of tacit knowledge and collaborative organizational communication (kyocho-kodo). A content analysis is conducted to examine how organization members make sense of ethical dilemmas in business. A major finding is that interpretation of equivocal context and creation of equivocal messages are the key aspects of collaborative organizational communication in unethical situations and other circumstances in which customers, other stakeholders, and society can be harmed by the group cohesion of members of an organization. Although this article looks only at Japanese organizations, the collaborative practices are likely to be used in other situations where corporate governance and corporate social responsibility challenges are faced by groups with strong cohesion.

Corruption and unethical business practices are yet to disappear from industrial countries. Particularly, organizational misconduct has been proliferating in Japan over the past decades. The traditional approaches of business ethics and risk management obviously show limitations in this respect. The problems of business scandals seem not to stem from erroneous management of an individual company but to be embedded in a communication process that constitutes risks in the capitalist organizations of contemporary society. The goal of this paper is to explicate organizational discourse of risks and compliance that are related with ideology and hegemony in communication process. This article particularly focuses on social construction of risks: how organizational members use equivocal communication struggling with fuzzy legitimacy. This articulation inquires descriptive data that are collected from the open-ended questions about three different unethical settings. The paper suggests that...