What You See Is What You Get? Images of Central and Eastern Europe in Managerial Discourses since 1990

Abstract

Drawing on a systematic close reading of all relevant articles published in three leading management journals since 1990, the paper analyzes the images of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) circulating in the business community at the turn of the twenty-first century. It suggests that a mere stocktaking of Western perceptions of 'the East' is not enough, arguing that CEE images in the post-Cold War managerial discourses should be analyzed in both their cultural embeddedness and their epistemological function for the construction of knowledge about CEE. The methodological approach combines a poststructuralist discourse analysis with imagological theories originating in the field of literary criticism to reconstruct the images CEE and investigate into their communicative function in processes of managerial meaning-making and knowledge construction. As such, the paper aims at an analysis of managerial meta-discourses and the very premises and assumptions that generated them.