Editorial

Citation

Jan Magala, S. (2016), "Editorial", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 29 No. 7, pp. 1042-1043. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-10-2016-0190

Seventh editorial: spatiotemporal consequences of digital commons

The present editorial opens the seventh issue of JOCM in 2016, which would not be strange, were it not for the fact that a bi-monthly publication is not supposed to exceed six issues per year. How come we have seven? Well, one way of putting it is that we cope with the changing reality of knowledge production. Since we all agree that recent discoveries in physics and astrophysics (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, is the double case in point) slowly confirm the basic soundness of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, let us see what it means. It may mean, for instance, that this time, our time, your, dear readers, time – is ripe. The time is ripe to claim that at least some conventions of keeping track of the passage of time can be subverted. And the time is ripe to claim that the confines of a traditional (uncurved) and three-dimensional space as experienced by an observer moving in a spatiotemporal 4D should be lifted. Or at least re-examined and re-negotiated. Issuing seven Journals of Organizational Change Management per year we contribute to this epochal shift, and it is with this message that we offer our readers the best wishes of a Merry Christmas! For our potential authors this also means that we offer more space in less time – also a testimony to the general relativity of our spatiotemporal ebbs and flows.

Two of the papers opening our seventh issue belong to a special themed section devoted to management and media. Ursula Plesner and Elena Raviola write on “Digital technologies and a changing profession: new management devices, practices and power relations in news work” and what they study will change your view of the screens, pages and waves through which your knowledge of the external world builds up inside your head. The second paper from this section has been written by Josef Pallas et al. on “Organizations, prizes and media” and it might raise your doubts about the way in which the news subtly frame your attention and suggest some value hierarchies, which – if offered straight and pure and simple – might not be as acceptable as you think. The mediated communications exist in time and they certainly curve social space around us by throwing light and praise on some events and downplaying others. Next time you indulge in admiring the quality and promptness of “The New York Review of Books” or “Fox News,” keep those analytical voices in mind. They open up an issue devoted in fact to knowledge management at various stages of creating, formatting, presenting, disseminating and evaluating knowledge, which is channeled through digital networks.

The cultural turn in self-reflective contemplation of organizational realities does not touch only media and their organizing processes. It is already gaining ground in the humanities and in some social sciences, certainly in organizational and managerial research domains. Let us see how this shift manifests itself in daily production of researchers. Arthur Sementelli writes on “OD, change management and the a priori: introducing parrhesia” in order to ask a simple question – what would happen if we took liberties with breaking organizational taboos and stopped bowing to His Master’s Voice – creating a sustainable truth-telling framework for organizational communications? Mohammad Imran (with his co-authors: Chaudry Rehman, Usman Aslam and Ahmad Bilal) presents a paper entitled “What’s organization knowledge management strategy for successful change implementation?” Both truth-telling frame and a knowledge management strategy which offers the best chances of a manageable and sustainable change require a certain consensus, a negotiating procedure for agreeing on what we perceive, experience, go through. In fact, we are in dire need of a quasi-judicial reform of the publishing system.

Concepción Garcés-Averbe (together with her co-authors Sabina Scarpellini, Jesus Valero-Gil and Pilar Rivera-Torres) wrote on “Proactive environmental strategy development: from laggard to eco-innovative firms,” and their concerns are echoed by Bryan Rill, the author of “Resonant co-creation as an approach to strategic innovation.” Innovations, especially eco-innovative creativities are becoming important in investment guidance – sustainability may not be a new religion yet, but there is enough momentum to inspire and attract, so that eco-innovative firms may have an evolutionary “gene,” which will produce a vast majority of the future organizational populations.

Finally, the issue closes with the last four papers of the ten included in issue 7/2016. Kelly Ann Schmidtke, Ivo Vlaev and Karen Baber write on “Using behavioral economics to increase organizational learning in an NHS hospital” while Fu-Sheng Tsai devotes his paper to “Knowing what we know differently: knowledge heterogeneity and dynamically ambidextrous innovation” a complex title, but it basically means that some kinds of knowledge we are actually using in our interactions with others in organizational processes, especially those which may lead to a creative innovation, are as unpredictable as a fencing partner who keeps switching his sword from left hand to right hand all the time.

Last not least, Marta Gancarczyk wants to integrate two methods of analyzing an entrepreneur’s progress through firm building and Chen Yu et al. want to use a mixed-method analysis to compare mergers and acquisitions performed by the Chinese in Europe and the Europeans in China. Marta Gancarczyk writes on “The integrated resource-based and transaction cost approach to the growth process of firms.” She suggests integrating the analysis of an entrepreneurial progress both through the assessment of available resources and by analysis of the negotiating and transaction costs involved. Gancarczyk believes that the integration in question may allow us to design a robust theory, with some predictive power, or at least with some diagnostic power to generate empirically testable hypotheses. Chen Yu and his colleagues (Herbert Werle and Roger Moser) write about “Comparing critical success factors between European M&As in China and Chinese M&As in Europe: a mixed-method analysis.” Will they also be able to come up with a method, which allows for drawing comparative conclusions and predicting future success of cross-cultural M&As? Will this be the case? In curved spatiotemporal processes of our knowledge production it is hard to say no – a priori.