Editorial

Citation

Magala, S.J. (2015), "Editorial", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 28 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-01-2015-0017

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 28, Issue 2.

Howard Becker, who has recently praised reasoning from cases as the most creative aspect of sociological research practice (see his “What About Mozart? What About Murder?”) quotes John Cage as reputedly saying “music is the moral evaluation of noise.” He is trying to present cases as black boxes from past or contemporary events waiting for a sociologist to decode their contents. Decode means here to explain why in this particular case a given input had produced this unique output. We may consider organizational theory and organizational change patterns, methods and both desired and unexpected outcomes also in terms of such black boxes. Some of his comments, for instance about persistence of a musical practice of giving concerts with orchestras composed of musicians playing the same classics for the past 100 years, or about inertia’s other name being hegemony, clearly are meant to resuscitate sociology from its academic existence as a supplier of experts for professional bureaucracies, especially the public ones.

Serina Al-Haddad and Timothy Kotnour, both from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, are trying to present a synthetic overview of the existing research literature on organizational change. They strongly suggest that change managers and agents might profit from knowing what inputs are likely to generate desirable outcomes. They might, if they pay close attention to possible answers to a question under what circumstances and in which organizational settings their desirable state of organizational affairs might be best accomplished. “Integrating the organizational change literature; a model for successful change” is a promising title, though what emerges is, I guess, rather different than a model in a traditional, say, econometric sense.

Peter Steane (from Sydney’s Australian Catholic University), Yvon Dufour (from the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec) and Donald Gates (also from ACU in Sydney) are trying to investigate what goes on inside the black box of a case of a public organization’ s change. They discuss “Assessing impediments to NPM change” and Becker might be amused to see his metaphor of a black box put to a managerial use (though sociologists in general and Howard Becker in particular, are not read very often by researchers in organizational theory). A similar investigation of the black box of organizational changes under the label of New Public Management has been conducted by a team of Australian investigators led by the first author, Fiona Buick (University of Canberra) accompanied by Deborah Blackman (from University of New South Wales in Canberra), Michael O’Donnell (also from UNSW in Canberra), Janine O’Flynn (University of Melbourne) and Damian West from the Australian Public Service Commission in Canberra. In the title of their paper they ask simply: “Can enhanced performance management support public sector change?”. A similar question is posed by three Dutch researchers, Joris van der Voet from ESADE in Barcelona and his two colleagues from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Ben Kuipers and Sandra Groeneveld – the title of their paper is “Held back and pushed forward: Leading change in a complex public sector environment.”

Roy Smollan from New Zealand writes on “Causes of stress before, during and after organizational change” on the basis of his interviews with managers subjected to a major organizational change. He notices that employees of a company, which implements a change program are stressed not only by their own fears but also by clearly perceived stress of their fellow employees. He suggests that this is recognized and accounted for (for instance with a design of counter-stress and compensating activities by change agents).

Last not least the metaphor of a black box comes back in Ann Dadich’ s paper on “Reacting to and managing change within Juvenile Justice.” The author clearly suggests that no black box is like another black box and thus organizational settings for juvenile justice in which a change is implemented offer a variety of cases, each of which differs from one another to the point that a general covering law of a successful change implementation is hard to imagine. What a way to go into 2015!

Slawomir J. Magala