Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 22, Issue 5

Business as unusual? Perhaps, this would be the best label for a “normal science” research in sciences of organizing and managing Anno Domini 2009. The basic problems remain the same. Why does bureaucracy persist and why its transparent, rational rules do not apply to its masters (CEOs with too large bonuses, politicians with too large egos, superstars with too little show and too much business)? Why are professionals becoming domesticated in velvet or virtual cages and yet cling to their liberal identities of autonomous creative and free members of privileged communities? Where are the masses to be turned into audiences and followers, clients and fellow citizens? Let us begin with the study of language in managers’, consultants’ and employees’ talk about change – this time, the organizations involved are two merged hospitals. The above-mentioned actors demonstrated “conflicting sensemaking processes, organizational rules and identities within the organization” (Amy Thurlow and Jean Helms Mills, “Change talk and sensemaking”). An interesting and well-established field of research, with slight tendency to turn into a study of linguistic communications rather than more “material” interactions behind them. Once we begin to find our way in the analyses of power and rhetoric in organizational communications in times of an imposed change, we might as well turn to Peter Dobers’ and Anders Soderholm’s “Translation and inscription in development projects”. The authors go beyond a purely linguistic analysis and try to supplement it with actor-network theory (thus Latour is quoted along with Czarniawska) paying attention to the beginning of the project (“translation”of the idea into action plan within a context and with actors) and to the final stages of a change project, namely “inscription” (formalization and finalization – “materialized ideas are inscribed into reports,actions, or action nets and passed on as temporarily stabilized entities”).

“Understanding perceived organizational identity during crisis and change: a threat/opportunity framework” by Sarah Kovoor-Misra leads us to the “perceived organizational identity” issues. The author tries to answer the question when they become issues at all, in other words, when they become “salient”, relevant and urgent for individuals involved. She offers two concepts of “identity cost” and “identity gap”to guide us through the processes of “identification with organization,resistance to change and identity related learning.” Neil Paulsen, Diana Maldonado, Victor J. Callan, and Oluremi Ayoko focus on an analysis of organizational change through charismatic leadership manifested by team leaders in R&D companies. Their statistical analyses of 34 teams with 178 participants allows them to rank charisma of a leader as a relevant and significant factor influencing the creativity levels and innovation rates through direct impacts on team identity, cooperation and innovativeness. The concept of charisma, stolen from religion and auctioned in politics, seems to be digestible for regular quantitative research communities in social sciences.

Two closing papers sum up two strategies for solving the inter-paradigmatic differences. Mike Young’s “A meta model of change” offers a suggestion that a meta-model of change allows us to successfully integrate viewpoints from methodology of studying organizational learning, from personal,social, situational and emergent change theories, from systems thinking and leadership concepts. The author hopes for a strong support of the action plan for change consultants who want to design a viable system for “the monitoring and evaluation of the process and outcomes of interventions in terms of their total systemic effects”. His systematic overview of relevant literature does, indeed, offer a handy inventory for a field practitioner and for a data-mining researcher as well. Maxim Voronov’s “From marginalization to phronetic science: toward a new role for critical management studies” suggests that we should, indeed, be as close to the real life,hands on, consulting, changing and managing (in which he aggress with his predecessor), but not by meta-inclusion of many points of theoretical view, only by a focused, selective embedding of critical insights in “living practice”. He wants to avoid the marginalization of critical management studies due to“nearly exclusive focus on research for theory’s sake, a lack of interest or discomfort with practical applications, and devaluing of nonacademic pursuits”. His point merits attention:

In essence, CMS has succumbed to symbolic violence, for despite defences of CMS as different from, or even in opposition to, “mainstream”management and organizational research, the field-prescribed habitus (i.e. disposition) does not differ meaningfully from that prescribed by any other field of basic research. Thus, Bourdieu’s accusation that sociologists fail to use their own theories to reflect critically on themselves is equally applicable to CMS, in that CMS has largely become indistinguishable from the so-called mainstream of organization studies.

He is probably right. Czarniawska, who certainly belonged to the critical tradition, has already skillfully interwoven an analysis of a narrative of organizational change and institutional continuity so that reading her mainstream analysis of the institutional history of London School of Economics we are not quite certain if we can still distinguish between critical assessment of political power struggles, clashes of stakeholders’ interests and other major manifestations of “class struggles” and a relatively “safe”literary analysis of a narrative genre as a liberal contribution to the ongoing debate of properly socialized professionals:

There can be no doubt that “institutional entrepreneurs” are characters in a narrative of emergence of institutions. They are attributes of the genre, and are required to achieve narrative coherence. If Sidney Webb had not existed, he would have to be invented, as the romance of entrepreneurship requires such a Figure (Czarniawska, 2009).

If scientific research on organizational change did not exist, it would have to be reinvented on a regular basis. Luckily, it does (exist).

Slawomir Magala