Experiencing Nokia: Exploring the Narratives of the Former Employees
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EXPERIENCING NOKIA: EXPLORING THE NARRATIVES OF THE FORMER EMPLOYEES Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics Master’s Thesis 2020 Author: Antonin Routa Subject: International Business and Entrepreneurship Supervisor: Prof. Juha-Antti Lamberg 3 ABSTRACT Author Antonin Routa Title Experiencing Nokia: Exploring narratives of former employees Subject Type of work Organizational studies Master’s thesis Date Number of pages 04/2020 52+5 Abstract This case study focuses on narratives of former Nokia Corporation employees. The anal- ysis aims to describe in what way former employees recall their employment with the once largest technological company in the world. The narratives were collected from var- ious publicly available online sources such as blogs and social media posts. The targeted data were the first-person narratives. The analysis showed that there were key themes occurring among the collected narratives such as working experience, reasons for failure or layoff experience. The second stage of analysis implemented the theories of narratives attribution, which revealed the motivation behind the collected narratives. The identifica- tion of narrative attribution was based on the external and internal sources influencing the narration. The study provides the connection between past knowledge of Nokia Corporation, narra- tive and oral theories as well as cognition-emotion process of socio-psychological re- search. The discussion and conclusion part of the study offers discursive outlook on im- plication of narrative research in business and organizational studies. Moreover, the dis- cussion debates the application and value of variety of other well established entrepre- neurial study theories within the collected data set such as Tamara-story. The theories from field of failed enterprisers are applied as well. The narratives and its content offers practical insights into the working environment and overall perception of Nokia Corporation by former employees. In addition, the data set was determined as suitable base for further researches about Nokia Corporation. This re- search contributes to application of narratives within organizational studies as well as in- creasing the overall knowledge of Nokia Corporation. This study was conducted as part of as part of the large research project attempting to map the history of technology giants and reconstruct the reasons for their failures. Key words Narrative attribution, organizational studies, Nokia, Narratives Place of storage Jyväskylä University Library 4 5 CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 7 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ........................................................................ 9 2.1 Oral history ................................................................................................ 9 2.2 Causal explanation of events as social perceiver ............................... 10 2.3 Narratives as experience sharing tool .................................................. 12 2.4 Research questions.................................................................................. 15 3 RESEARCH CONTEXT ..................................................................................... 16 3.1 Nokia and its history .............................................................................. 16 3.2 Nokia - Connecting people .................................................................... 18 4 DATA AND METHODOLOGY ....................................................................... 23 4.1 Method choice ......................................................................................... 23 4.2 Data collection and analysis .................................................................. 24 5 RESULTS ............................................................................................................. 28 5.1 Themes among experiences of former employees ............................. 28 5.1.1 Layoff experience ......................................................................... 29 5.1.2 Reasons for failure ....................................................................... 30 5.1.3 Working experience .................................................................... 32 5.2 Attributes among the narratives of former employees ..................... 36 5.2.1 Personal perception ..................................................................... 37 5.2.2 Company integrity ...................................................................... 38 5.2.3 Corporate competence ................................................................ 39 5.2.4 Mechanic impacts ........................................................................ 41 6 DISCUSSION ...................................................................................................... 43 6.1 Former employees and Nokia ............................................................... 44 6.2 Tamara metaphor and narrative attributions ..................................... 45 7 CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................................. 48 Limitations and future research ....................................................................... 49 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 50 APPENDIX 1: Example of narratives of former Nokia employees in full and original transcript used as data set in this study .................................................... 53 6 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Figure 1 The cognition-emotion process (Weiner, 1986)........................................ 12 Figure 2 Nokia Corporation personnel count 2004-2013 ....................................... 19 Figure 3 Types of narratives identified by the data analysis ................................ 26 Table 1 Dispositional and Situational attribution .................................................. 11 Table 2 Key data of Nokia Corporation and Mobile Phones business unit (Lubinaite, 2015) ........................................................................................................... 17 7 1 INTRODUCTION At the time, the most famous mobile phone manufacturer Nokia, was once pearl of Finish industry. Thanks to its popularity, people around globe recognize Fin- land on the map of the World. Since the Nokia’s mobile phone unit has been dis- missed in 2013, the Nokia Corporation still raises interest among wide audiences regarding its quick depart from consumer electronics industry. In academic sphere, the main theme among the studies and researches about Nokia’s mobile phone unit are the strategic decisions that lead to its down- fall. Until this day, this topic provides opportunity for variety of different study approaches. The ultimate learning for variety of stakeholders is to avoid the sim- ilar mistakes that were conducted within the Nokia Corporation. However, the Nokia Corporation had also been frontrunner in terms of being truly international and global company. The slogan “Connecting people” did not only apply to the costumers but also to the employees inside the company. The Nokia Corporation was throughout its history applying well networked or- ganizational structure with emphasize on employees’ wellbeing and their sup- port. Such approach was common in Nordics, although very unique in other countries around the world. Many employees therefore built deep relationship with the company, fellow employees as well as with the brand in general. The dismissal of mobile phone unit and following layoffs were heart-breaking for many. This case study is aiming to shed light on employees’ experiences with business that failed. The aim is to develop idea about experiences and percep- tions the former Nokia employees’ held towards the Nokia Corporation after be- ing laid off. As Boje (1991) concluded: In organizations, storytelling is the preferred sense making currency of human relationships among internal and external stakeholders. (Boje, 1991) The narrative theory used in this research allows us to understand the feel- ings of the employees’ experienced during the collapse as well as the overall prac- tice. The discursive analysis method was selected as the most suitable to accom- pany the narrative theory. The first person oral narratives of the former employ- ees were collected through the social media platforms and evaluated with open- codes and axial-coding. The themes that were drawn from the collected data points out on three main domains of experience – working experience, layout experience and reasons for failure. In order to exploit in depth the emotion of the former employees the col- lected data set was analysed on the basis of to how the former employees per- ceive the failure and to which casual causes they are attributing the failure. Such evaluation process is based on the cognition-emotion processes as presented by 8 Weiner (1980) and used in practice evaluating narrative attributes of failed enter- prises as per Manter et al. (2012). The analysis is incorporating the internal and external perception of casual explanation of events based on the Heider (1958). Merging of these theories allowed the research to divide the emotion of former employees into four categories – personal perception, company integrity, corporate competence and mechanical impacts. Collected narratives used in this research establishes platform for future researches not only about organizational