Editorial

Citation

Magala, S. (2006), "Editorial", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 19 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2006.02319caa.001

Editorial

Organizational change becomes ubiquitous, and both theoretical reflection and empirical investigation on change processes accumulate at accelerated pace. Changes emerge as focal points of multiparadigmatic and interdisciplinary studies mercilessly cutting through the academic turfs, rejuvenating institutions and redefining specializations. An uneasy dialogue between two main classes of paradigms – qualitative and quantitative ones develops in order to bridge the gaps and claim “no man’s (or rather no paradigm’s) land” in between. New gaps in our knowledge become visible and wipe off previous “blank spots” left on the map after all our findings have been plotted, data crunched, interpretations compared and explanations evaluated. I hope we have managed to render some facets of this fascinating dynamic process visible with the papers in the present issue, and that some important issues – relatively neglected so far – will be perceived as meriting attention. I hope so in spite of the fact that class and status divisions within academic communities remain very deep and erect barriers against communication flows between research communities. On the other hand, perhaps a certain level of conflict is needed for hidden (and not so hidden) injuries of “class inequalities” to resurface often enough to spark off creative commons, knowledge cafes and other anti-bureaucratic initiatives of radical, mostly younger researchers.

Our potpourri issue opens with an empirical study by an academic researcher and a practicing consultant, who tackles transformations of urban jungle with ethnographic codebook. She presents an attempt to outline and plot an “integral metamap” of social reality woven with four value-threads – subjective, intersubjective, objective and interobjective. Her theoretical dream can be tested against the background of the second paper, in which Carol Langer and her co-authors (Deb Anderson, Rich Furman, James Blue) record a child welfare agency’s attempts to deconstruct and reconstruct its image in order to fit ideological and political landscape of “privatized” and reformed public services. We are all aware of the fact that long-standing providers of social services are suddenly facing a necessity to streamline their communications and to use marketing techniques to modify perceptions of their stakeholders and thus to survive in a new environment, although it is still fairly awkward to find, let us say, Salvation Army’s commercials on TV. Awkward or not, perhaps new standards of accountability and environmental scans of confidence (which the agency in Nebraska they are describing have introduced) are a lasting advantage of the neoliberal era?

Ed Vosselman and Jeltje van der Meer-Kooistra study shifting boundaries of contemporary business companies in the context of flexible, variable networks of outsourcing and cooperative networks based on transactional relationships and calling for new forms of managerial control. They begin at the control side and try to understand how a transition to a trust-based pattern of inter-firm cooperation emerges (or could and should emerge) on the ruins of the strict bureaucratic control model with its accompanying rational-choice ideologies. While their overall approach is still linked to neoclassical economics with theory of bounded rationality looming large on theoretical horizon, they cautiously speak of situated agency and balance institutional features against situational aspects of transactional relationships. The same issue of flexibility is approached by Linda Twiname, Maria Humphries and Kate Kearins from a methodologically “softer” and more “interpretative” point of view. Three researchers from New Zealand analyze a case of a manufacturing company, which implements the latest fashionable managerial ideas on making a firm “lean and mean” flexible, agile, etc. They describe the reduction of permanent personnel and contingent employment of temporary workers. By carefully tracking, collecting and interpreting the “microstorias” of the remaining core workers they are able to reconstruct flexible work arrangements as a source of conflict. First, they try to explain how the situation of those core workers who had been left with fixed salaries but increased and flexible work tasks and arrangements has actually deteriorated (quality of working life giving way to the requirements of flexibility on managers’ terms), second, they consider hidden human costs of using temporary labor. Critical theory and attempts to link their action research to the criteria of the quality of working life (workers’ well-being) and democracy at the shop-floor and firm level make their paper an interesting and alternative counterpart to the above paper by their Dutch colleagues. Even more telling comment on the ideal of flexibility are offered by Kim Buch and Ann Tolentino in their study of the employee perceptions of the rewards established in a company, which accepted the six sigma approach towards organizational change. Perhaps not surprisingly, their findings link the positive perception of change-oriented rewards to the level of employees’ participation in the program.

Bas Koene’s paper on situated human agency, institutional entrepreneurship and institutional change returns to the questions of flexibility and temporary work force issues first raised by Vosselman and van der Meer-Kooistra. He studies the very temporary work agencies, which deliver “temps” required by firms striving for flexibility and competitive edge. Koene observes the emergence of the new species of business organizations, namely how companies offering their services to companies looking for temporary employees at all levels of corporate hierarchies gave rise to the evolutionary emergence of new service industry. His conclusions – industry developments can be autonomous or constrained and we should be able to investigate consequences of each for organizational forms and processes. Moreover, legitimacy of emergent branch of service industry depends on “societalization” of the emergent temp-providing organizations and their practices, which play a decisive role in organizational change – and in changing the way other organizations change and evolve. Intelligent design (flexibility through temporary workforce) meets organizational Darwinism (regulatory legitimacy paves the way for institutional adaptation and establishes the framework for “societal confidence”).

Cheng, Millar and Choi’s paper deals with evolutionary questions as well – they study dynamic identity of contemporary companies and their institutional certification – both from the point of stakeholders and “indices” they will use in monitoring organizational evolution (especially those indices, which have a clearly ethical background, important in the post-Enron era). “Organizations change and compete in the market against other organizations” – as they say in their conclusions – “however, they also maintain long-term relations with these institutional certification mechanisms, which provide a system of indirect measurement of performance”. Awareness of the latter means that realities of social structure should not be neglected and stakeholder approach should not be limited to the analysis of purely commercial value involved in a company’s operations. The last paper, by Jacqueline Reed and Maria Vakola, deals with organizational change from yet another point of view, namely from the point of training needs involved. Two authors have studied a large and complex health system, subjected to a change similar to the American “managed health care” transformations of the past two decades. They have concluded that development, articulation and recording (“piloting”) of the needs analysis process forms a very important part of organizational change projects (which moreover is often neglected) and that it allows for a flexible and creative mix of standardization and customization procedures, which can then benefit from different organizational subcultures and increase the overall level of involvement and readiness for change in organization at large.

Slawek Magala