Citation
Magala, S.(S). (2013), "Organizing change in an age of post-consumerist expectations", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 26 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM.02326faa.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Organizing change in an age of post-consumerist expectations
Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 26, Issue 6
One does not think about change in terms of an abstract willingness to imitate blind Darwinian evolution of the species. Change is what happens when we try to reach some goals and use some means, usually achieving other goals and selecting other means the next time round. We wanted – to quote but one example – to create both a knowledge economy liberating individuals from daily toil and a political democracy based on fairness, equality and competitive merits. Our knowledge economy works well for the yuppies in London or New York, but not so well for the employees of Nike in Vietnam or Zara in Bangladesh. What the physical workers in the manufacturing plants in Shenzen or Miramar or their relatives baby-sitting or house-cleaning in Stockholm or Riad clearly experience is that the knowledge economy does not abolish class distinctions, nor class struggles.
Class is back, and so is a serious re-examination of the tacit class bias of the socially organized decision-making with respect to investment policies. Higher education is not neutral, not are academic professionals. Ritzer had started the trend with a critique of rationalization a la Weber symbolized by the macdonalidzation, lasvegasification, malling and credit-card express-ing of America. Then critical voices about our own profession became more audible – “How Professors Think? by Michelle Lamont was based on a study of tenure committee meetings, during which formal democracy freely mixes with less democratic criteria and procedures. We had also learned about the decline of our ethical standards and the slippery road from higher aims to hired hands, etc. More recently, Mats Alvesson and Andre Spicer came up with a “stupidity based theory of organization, a nice hatchet job on mainstream managerial practices and their academic justifications. According even to quite moderate representatives of the Critical Management Studies, what we got is the rankophilia-infested higher education. Displaying rankings, expensive universities ask students to take loans, in order to study with the best and the brightest. Once the desired diplomas are meted out, however, salaries, which would allow poor students to pay credits and loans back do not seem to be forthcoming. Time for the new Cassandric voices? One of the founding fathers of Critical Management Studies, Mats Alvesson, certainly thinks so and publishes the English version of his earlier Swedish pamphlet entitled “The triumph of emptiness. consumption, higher education and work organization (Oxford University Press, 2013). He thinks – echoing earlier analyses of Sennett from the heart of downtown Chicago – that education does not offer the way out of the lower class inferno to the purgatory of the lower middle class and to the paradise of the upper echelons of the middle class. From the point-of-view of upward social mobility – this is the core of his critique – our curricula became irrelevant. The reason we do not see it as a reason enough to start a Taxim – Tahrir – like social movement is the indoctrination in a consumerist ideology. We have succumbed, id, ego, superego and the rest, to the temptation of a very successful consumerist ideology, which promises happiness, defined as an ever rising standard of living, with ever more ever more expensive logos to mark our superiority above the others. A bit too simple, I guess.
Be it as it may, one conclusion is clear: we have certainly witnessed the re-enchantment of the world with the possibilities of solidarity and collective action against the established order. The return of spirituality and values, even virtues, should not come as a surprise. These brave men and women who stand to the authorities on Tahrir or Taxim squares, can, perhaps, initiate the learning process among even the most affluent, and ideologically dominant of the Western academic professionals. Hence, the first paper to open our last issue in 2013 has been written by Yusuf Sidani and Sammy Showail, who discuss the role of “Religious discourse and organizational change: legitimizing the stakeholder perspective at a Saudi conglomerate. What they have to say should be interesting to the teachers of business ethics:
Islam is argued to embrace the stakeholder approach (Beekun and Badawi, 2005) which puts the Saudi manager in conflict between commitment to Islamic values emphasizing justice and fairness, and tribal values emphasizing primal kindness to family and tribal members. In such a context, organizational decision makers find themselves reconciling two sets of obligations, an obligation to family and clan, and another conflicting obligation to universal concepts of justice and fairness. This tension is relevant to our current discussion as a stakeholder perspective of conducting business is alien to a narrow tribal understanding. A stakeholder perspective emphasizes the need to consider various parties, and accords each one of them a given level of recognition. Such a perspective may not be welcomed by a strict tribal standing, where tribal affiliation is paramount.
The second paper in JOCM 26.6 of 2013 has been written by George Gotsis and Zoe Kortezi and is entitled “Ethical paradigms as potential foundations of diversity management initiatives in business organizations. Two Greek authors, both of them from the University of Athens, do not refer to the religious tradition, as the former authors did, but they rely on a philosophical argument. Nevertheless, they arrive at similar conclusions about the necessity to pursue a less than complete devotion to the mainstream view that a business is there to make profit, and profits matter more than values, which need not be discussed and subjected to the scrutiny of a free community:
Fostering organizational change. Lawrence and Maitlis (2012) examine an ethic of care as both a practice and a value, located in concrete, enduring and emotional relationships, and enacted in discursive practices. They then identify three domains of narrative practices in work teams informed by the value of caring: the way people construct their experiences, contextualize their concomitant struggles and shape their respective future oriented stories is epitomized in belief systems that increase a teams potency as well as resiliency, collective agency and transcendent hope. Such an ontology of possibility, Lawrence and Maitlis (2012, p. 656) argue, is more likely to emerge “in organizations with structures that foster integration, with cultures that nurture trust and respect the emotional lives of members, and where members have the opportunity to become competent carers.
The paper written by the researcher from Finland, Noora Jansson, and entitled “Organizational change as practice: a critical analysis is devoted to the analysis of organizational change as much less subjected to universal abstract laws and regularities and thus much more comprehensible in practice-related, then dominant theory-related explanatory and actionable contexts:
If universal change practices are not applicable, even adjusted, to what extent practices ought to be generalized? To understand this dilemma further, more research is needed to explore the relationship between particularities and universalities in organizational change (Flybjerg, 1998). What are the appropriate research methodologies to study change as social practices? One direction worth further examination might be the narrative methodologies, as they can contribute in many ways to understand organizational practices (Fenton and Langley, 2011). If organizational change resistance is mostly about power struggles and not so much about the change itself, what does it mean to organizational research, research questions and methodologies that focus on resistance? One interesting avenue for future research is to approach organizational change resistance as sets of power struggles.
The next paper has been presented by a team of researchers from Taiwan, namely Hao Cheng Huang, Mei-Chi Lai, Li-Hsuan Lin, and Chien-Tsai Chen, who wrote a study entitled “Overcoming organizational inertia to strengthen business model innovation: an open innovation perspective in which they try to draw conclusions about open innovation in 141 small and middle-sized Taiwanese companies. The most important discoveries related not only to the inertia as an obstacle, but more significantly to the awareness that:
As the environment changes and the concepts of competition change, innovation is no longer confined to only the R&D team within the organization.
One does not have to believe in “wisdom of the crowds nor does one have to be a believer in a Silicon Valley model of a future innovative bliss in order to understand that we are, indeed, redefining and re-engineering all traditional functional areas of organizing, managing and coordinating – and that no single individual or group, no single organizational element and part has or have a monopoly on innovative inputs.
The last regular issue of JOCM in 2013 closes with three papers: the one on change and learning strategies in a health promotion programs in Sweden, another on the institutional change during the adoption of local agenda 21 in Spain and the third one on the role of a psychological contract in the process of organizational change. The Swedish authors, Monica Nystrom, Elisabeth Hoog, Ricard Garvare, Lars Weinhall and Anelli Ivarsson write about “Change and learning strategies in large scale change programs: describing the variation of strategies used in a health promotion program. They make ample use of the Dutch change consultants (de Caluwe) and they describe a strategic mix as a remedy against an imprisonment in a single top-down strategy during the change process. Rocio Llamas-Sanchez, Victor Garcia Morales and Inmaculada Martin-Tapia write about “Factors affecting institutional change: a study of the adoption of local agenda 21 in Spain and conclude that organizations should pay attention to the institutional context when implementing organizational change (theirs is an empirical study of an agenda designed to improve the functioning of local councils in Spain). Finally, Sjoerd van der Smissen, Rene Schalk and Clarissa Freese pay attention to “Organizational change and the psychological contract: how change influences the perceived fulfillment of obligations. Theirs is also an empirical study and they discover, perhaps not surprisingly, that less quantitative, more longitudinal studies are needed, if we are to understand the impact of transformational changes upon individuals in organizations.
Thus we finish 2013 and go on to 2014. I would like to thank all our faithful readers and even more faithful reviewers, and – last not least – all the authors who find time to offer us their reflections. Thank you, good bye in 2013 and good luck in 2014!
Slawomir (Slawek) Magala