Defence Firm Research Articles

Attitudes towards face-to-face meetings in virtual engineering teams: perceptions from a survey of defence projects

Modes of communication used in virtual defence projects have changed dramatically over the years with tools such as e-mail and video-conferencing dominating face-to-face (FTF) meetings. We conducted a survey at a defence firm with an aim to test current attitudes towards FTF meetings - with respect to significant problems faced, project success, transfer of technical requirements, preference for FTF vis-à-vis virtual meetings, differences between virtual and co-located environments, criticality of various forms of communication, and whether FTF meetings were scheduled as often as desired. Our survey participants, about one hundred in number, were experienced engineers, technicians, and program managers - working in a virtual product development team at a defence firm. The results suggest that despite significant advances in virtual communication technologies, FTF meetings remain critical and cannot be eliminated from defence firms. Further, it is also clear that FTF meetings can play a significant role in reducing chances of miscommunication.

Attitudes towards face-to-face meetings in virtual engineering teams: perceptions from a survey of defence projects

Modes of communication used in virtual defence projects have changed dramatically over the years with tools such as e-mail and video-conferencing dominating face-to-face (FTF) meetings. We conducted a survey at a defence firm with an aim to test current attitudes towards FTF meetings - with respect to significant problems faced, project success, transfer of technical requirements, preference for FTF vis-a-vis virtual meetings, differences between virtual and co-located environments, criticality of various forms of communication, and whether FTF meetings were scheduled as often as desired. Our survey participants, about one hundred in number, were experienced engineers, technicians, and program managers - working in a virtual product development team at a defence firm. The results suggest that despite significant advances in virtual communication technologies, FTF meetings remain critical and cannot be eliminated from defence firms. Further, it is also clear that FTF meetings can play a significant role in reducing chances of miscommunication.

‘Metaphoring’ People out of this World: A Critical Discourse Analysis of a Chairman’s Statement of a UK Defense Firm

We introduce Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), an interdisciplinary approach to analysing written and spoken texts, which provides accounting researchers with a range of resources to analyze corporate narrative documents more systematically and in more detail from a linguistic perspective. CDA addresses how the content and the linguistic features of texts influence, and are in turn influenced, by the contexts of text production, distribution, reception and adaptation, and by the wider socio-economic context in which texts are embedded. We apply Fairclough’s (2003, 2006) Dialectic-Relational approach to the analysis of a chairman’s statement of a UK defence firm. The focus of analysis is on the grammatical devices used to represent organisational activities and outcomes in ways which obfuscate social agency (impersonalisation), and to evaluate social actors, entities, and social events (evaluation). We find that impersonalisation and evaluation are used strategically to guide organisational audiences’ interpretations of financial performance and to legitimise and normalise violence and destruction by depicting it in an abstract and sanitised manner.

The Future of the Defence Firm

SummaryThis paper focuses on the future of the defence firm. It forecasts that the defence firm of 2050 will be radically different, reflecting a combination of technology, economic and political factors. To provide insights into the future, the paper starts by outlining recent changes in the size, structure and organization of defence firms and industries. It concludes by suggesting that the defence firm has a future and that it will focus on systems integration with new and different forms of industrial organization and will include new entrants.