This book contributes to academic discussions on organizational change and how it is enacted in organizations. The founding idea of the book is that most organizational changes are made up of small‐scale adaptations rather than large‐scale transformations. Thus, Meyerson (2003) focuses on “Tempered Radicals” as a type of change agents. Their experience of ambivalence towards organizational goals, norms, and values can turn their actions into catalysts for small‐scale organizational changes. This approach promotes a concept of leadership which not only locates leadership in persons and positions with official leading functions, but also within people on different organizational levels who inspire other people and who create nurturing rooms within organizations. The book will be worth reading both for researchers dealing with questions of institutional change and for practitioners experiencing tensions between conformity and rebellion in their work.
Applying a micro perspective on organizational everyday life, the approach of the book is opposed to macro perspectives of change in which organizations are viewed as structured by repetitive patterns with occasional episodes of revolutionary change (Porras and Silvers, 1991). Typically, changes are seen as triggered by powerful people or by dramatic events. Most of the best selling books on change follow this macro perspective, thus implying the need of formal power in order to initiate substantial change. On the contrary, the micro perspective applied in the book observes organizations more closely, thus revealing minor adjustments continuously made and implying constant change. The basic assumption of this perspective is that different units of an organization are interdependent. Therefore, small continuous adjustments, created simultaneously across units, can accumulate and create substantial change (Weick and Quinn, 1999), following sequences of freeze, rebalance, and unfreeze (Lewin, 1951). The five strategies suggested in the book follow this sequence but in different ways. First a tempered radical has to freeze continuous change – showing patterns in what is happening and then challenging assumptions about what is considered normal. The second step is to rebalance – making the organization responsive to concerns about the problem rising by introducing practices that meet unaddressed needs. Finally, to unfreeze after rebalancing is to make the organization more mindful of sequences and the anomalies.
With regard to their power in the organizations, Tempered Radicals experience ambivalences which turn into a source of commitment to organizational change: ambivalences between the desire to conform to organizational norms on the one hand, and the commitment to act on personal values differing from the dominant norms on the other hand.
The book is not only a thought‐provoking contribution to academic discussions on the distributed nature of change agency. Its narrative writing style also renders Tempered Radicals: How Everyday Leaders Inspire Change at Work suitable to different kinds of practitioners who feel ambivalent about their status within the organization, and who seek empowerment for their every day struggle for more fairness in the work environment. Meyerson combines theoretical input with broad empirical material drawn from investigation into three American for‐profit companies, focusing on the cases of eight people who had identified themselves as organizational change agents. All of them were committed to very specific change agendas related to social responsibility in their companies. These illustrations make it easier for practitioners to apply the findings of the book in their own everyday life in organizations and to learn through the detailed descriptions of the eight cases. The book is encouraging for its readers in that it renders conscious different ways of inspiring organizational change by opposing dominant norms that may lead to the exclusion of members considered different, different with regard to gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation.
Following the different strategies mentioned by Meyerson, such as “Turning personal threats into opportunities”, or “Leveraging small wins” does not eliminate the ambivalences Tempered Radicals experience but rather creates new challenges like potential damage to individuals' reputation, or unsuccessfulness and frustration. Further, acting as a change agent requires awareness of power relations within organizations. Meyerson reflects upon this, e.g. by focusing on how Tempered Radicals negotiate conflicts of interests. In this, her perspective is similar to Agocs (1997) and Ledwith and Colgan (1996) who all are conscious about both the political and the power issues embedded in change agency.
The book Tempered Radicals: How Everyday Leaders Inspire Change at Work does a wonderful job in showing how ordinary people sometimes can create extraordinary changes just through small actions. However, the book could have gone further in unfolding the logics of change as an embedded and reflexive multilevel phenomenon. Focusing on Tempered Radicals as single actors may be relevant for raising awareness on organizational members' capacity to catalyze change. However, the direction and the consequences of those initiatives cannot be grasped by individualistic perspectives but have to be conceptualized as relational processes conceptualizing change as the outcome of reflexive and ongoing interaction settings.
