Change and continuity in writing about change and continuity

Citation

Gleadle, P., Cornelius, N., Pezet, E. and Salaman, G. (2007), "Change and continuity in writing about change and continuity", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 20 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2007.02320daa.001

Change and continuity in writing about change and continuity

Introduction to special issue on “Change, identity and employment: the role of knowledge”

We have six papers in this special issue on “Change, identity and employment: the role of knowledge”. The first four papers explore identity and change with respect to different kinds of knowledge worker ranging from business school academics and software engineers to various types of contract worker and microbiologists. The last two papers address knowledge management in two quite different organizations, a New Zealand tree farming company and the UK Mortgage Code Compliance Board (MCCB). All six papers are crucially concerned with the role of knowledge, specifically with issues around change, identity and employment.

Todd Bridgman's paper on business school academics puts us under the microscope just as we ourselves do later in this editorial. Todd argues that at the level of government policy, enterprise is narrowly defined in commercial terms. However, people can be enterprising in different ways, some of which openly challenge the narrow definition of enterprise put forward by government and affirm the role of the autonomous and critical academic. The “enterprise” literature (du Gay, Nik Rose, Barbara Townley and others) notes that enterprise operates at three different but inter-related levels – polity, organisational structures and relationships, employee identity an subjectivity, and that the relationships between these levels represent important focii of analysis and research. Organisations structured in terms of the prescriptions of the enterprise literature may not be enterprising and employees may or may not be enterprising. Bridgman's article not only raises questions about the prevalence and implications of enterprising behaviour within academic contexts; it also raises more fundamental questions about the highly problematical nature of the links between organisational and individual levels of enterprise and about the nature, origins and implications of pervasive and dominant conceptions of the enterprising employee.

The next paper by Dariusz Jemielniak on “Lazy, stupid careerists” stands in the long tradition of ethnographic writing going back to Donald Roy and Egon Bitner and others – and more recently Julian Orr. The paper concerns the existence of a work group, software engineers, with distinctive attitudes at odds with management. However, despite this apparent stand-off between groups with different even opposed value systems and priorities, an accommodation has been found between the two groups as illustrated in two cameos. In the first, the HR manager is talking to the new recruits on their first day at the firm and she makes it clear that while company rules and procedures exist, management does not expect software engineers to spend much time worrying about these. In the second cameo, a group of very formal Japanese clients shows itself to be delighted by the contrariness displayed by the software engineers in the study. The software engineers perhaps engage in posturing as despite their apparent contempt for management, there is little evidence in the paper that they choose to leave their organisations. So, while they insist on their own autonomy, there exists a negotiated order characterised in fact by a lack of change.

Tara Fenwick's paper is concerned with the aftermath of the massive organizational restructuring in the 1990s in North America and the consequent shuffling and even dissolution of jobs in the professional/middle managerial ranks. As a result of these changes, many knowledge workers left organizations to become self-employed, with Arthur and Rousseau (1996) maintaining that such workers are revolutionising employment relations in bringing about the phenomenon of the boundaryless career.

Julie Summerlund and Sami Boutaiba also address the existence or otherwise of the boundaryless career. According to Arthur and Rousseau, newer thinking on careers emphasizes their unfolding through individuals' choices in time. However, Summerlund and Boutaiba uncover continuity as well as change, finding that the old ways of understanding the career continue to be useful.

Alan Lowe and Andrea McIntosh in their study of a New Zealand tree farming company contribute to an understanding of knowledge management (KM) issues at the organizational and work group levels. Specifically, they explore the interaction of organizational control processes and the nature of resistance in the complex environments typical of knowledge work settings. Finally, the last paper by Shaw, Hall, Edwards and Baker contributes in that KM and learning in times of organizational crisis has attracted little comment to date. In the case study they provide of the MCCB, KM is used to manage an impending crisis, the planned dissolution of the organization.

The insights into organisational change generated by the papers will be readily apparent but it may be useful to point out one interesting feature of this set of papers. This is that by focusing on change they inevitably and necessarily also focus on non-change – on continuity. Managers involved in advocating or “championing” change frequently focus so emphatically and positively on the necessity for and virtues of the change in question (sometimes defined as “reform” so as to rule out the legitimacy or possibility of the rational or moral basis of any questioning or “resistance”) that they in effect disregard or reject what came before the change. By focusing on change they overlook continuity. The authors in this collection, however, avoid this trap. For these papers, in studying when and how organisations change and the implications and origins of these changes also necessarily and properly focus on non-change – continuity. It is as important to know why change does not happen as to understand when it does. The paper by Julie Summerlund and Sami Boutaiba for example argues that although researchers have argued that a certain change is occurring in the nature of careers, in fact within their sample, conventional historic forms of career persist. Here the significant finding is that things remain the same, that change has not occurred: the dog did not bark.

Another variant of this phenomenon is displayed in Dariusz Jemielniak's paper. Not only does this paper follow a long and valuable tradition of work-place ethnographies, it also explores the nature and implications of work-place processes of accommodation whereby disparate and even apparently opposing groups and cultures maintain their differences but find subtle ways of indicating and achieving a negotiated order. Like the management and staff in the gypsum mine studied by Gouldner (1954) in Patterns of Bureaucracy or the prisoners and wardens described in Sykes' (1958) Society of Captives, the two groups in Dariusz Jemielniak's study, despite their widely different rhetorics and values and the almost abusive ways these cultures relate to each other, nevertheless, find ways to ensure that the basic relationship between the two groups remains in a state of equilibrium. A form of symbiosis is achieved – a modus vivendi – not despite the differences but arguably because of them. One might argue that the function of the differences and the apparent hostility between the groups is not to generate any momentum for change but actually to enable things to persist whilst allowing a display (but no more than this) of conflict and difference. Antipathy is a way of avoiding real change. In “Contested practice: multiple inclusion in double-knit organizations” Irma Bogenrieder and Peter van Baalen are concerned with another aspect of change and continuity, namely with the multiple-inclusion of single individuals in many communities of practice at once. Is our membership in those communities a separate chapter in our professional lives or is it but another link of a smooth continuum? Is this multiple inclusion a blessing in disguise, which allows us to share tacit knowledge and facilitates situated learning or is it asking for trouble (when norms set buy different communities clash)? Be it as it may, the authors tend to confirm Contu and Willmott's intuition that communities of practice do not fit into a “technocratic tool of organizational engineering”.

However, as well as addressing the nature, sources and implications of different types of change – and continuity – within organisations the papers also allow us a glimpse into how research into organisations (here, into organisational change/continuity) is itself characterised by change (or continuity). This is not something we expected to find or sought to find. But we think it is a feature of this set of papers and possibly of the field of research into organisational change as a whole.

The papers are interesting and insightful in what they reveal about processes of organisational change. That's why they have been included. But they are not only about change, they are also in intriguing ways, themselves manifestations of change. They are revealing about how the analysis of change and research into organisational change, have themselves changed – and also how they have retained an element of continuity.

The papers are revealing both about the subject matter: change in organisations – and about the conceptual and theoretical tools and assumptions used by researchers in researching this subject matter.

One feature of these papers that struck us was that extent to which the papers did not draw on or deploy to any noticeable degree concepts, frameworks and models from something that could be called the change literature. We began to wonder if there was such a literature. If there is it isn't used by these authors. Although in their various ways these papers are about change they approach the understanding of change/continuity via a range of concepts (identity, enterprise, career, role, culture, etc.) which are not specifically tied to a discrete and identifiable change literature. For these authors apparently change is normal feature of organisational life and therefore needs to be addressed via the concepts currently in play in analyses of organisational dynamics and not by the use of specialist change concepts or models. These authors seem to have accepted the frequently rehearsed assertion that change is normal and that it must be addressed as such. In other words for these students of change it is not necessary to change analytical concepts frameworks and models when addressing change in organisations: change can be analysed and understood via the concepts which would be used to explore organisational structures, dynamics and functioning.

The analysis of change also displays another continuity – not only with other current analytical approaches but with traditions of analysis – that is, it displayscontinuity over time. Although many of the concepts used here are modern and reflect current discourses of organisational analysis – enterprise, theories of identity for example – we were also struck how these papers also displayed in ways which may not be always apparent to the authors, contemporary manifestations of phenomena which have interested students of organisations for many years: relationships between differentiated groups within organisations, issues of control and commitment, the notion of career and the meaning of work, work group structures and cultures, the nature and role of reference groups, work-based communities, attempts by management to generate legitimacy and impose cultures, and so on.

The paper by Dariusz Jemielniak for example can be seen as part of a tradition of sociological and ethnographic analysis of workplace relations stretching back to the 1940s with the Chicago school. But this is by no means the only paper in this collection which reveals – to those who can take an historic overview – more continuities with classic concepts in work and organisational analysis than the authors themselves may realise. In this respect too then, the papers reveal continuities. All six sets of authors are exploring issues of change and continuity using tools of modern theory. However, the issues explored themselves are perhaps older, illuminating an enduring paradox about academic analysis of organisations (or the pressures surrounding the achievement of success within academic careers) that the analysis of organisations centres on a set of continuing issues and tensions within work structures and organisations but that this element of continuity must be addressed through the deployment of concepts which at least appear to be distinctive and different. So while analysis must demonstrate and embrace change and difference it also displays significant continuity.

Finally, this collection of seven papers, all addressing issues of change (one of which focuses on change within the academy) reveal another and deeper possibility of change. Organisations, professions, work structures and processes, all demonstrate change and continuity. This applies no less to academic work and organisations than to any other, as Todd Bridgman, in this collection illustrates. It may be possible to argue that these papers about change reflect a long term change in the nature of academic work itself – not in the choice subject matter, or the tools and debates employed to address the subject matter, but in the way in which these papers reflect tacit assumptions about the nature of the standards which apply to high quality academic work, about how academic virtuosity can be displayed about what counts as high status academic work in 2007 – and specifically about the perceived relative importance and value of displaying mastery of theoretical and conceptual materials (often of a somewhat arcane and esoteric nature) compared to achieving empirical illumination and understanding.

In the this selection of papers most of the authors with the exception of Dariusz Jemielniak concentrate considerable intellectual resource on impressive theoretical exegesis but devote relatively less attention to achieving empirical illumination. Furthermore, the links between exegesis and empirical analysis are often not strongly evident (although in our view this does not weaken the value of the empirical analyses). This suggests that the exegetical sections (which are, as noted often markedly accomplished) are seen as valuable in their own right – that they indicate achievement of academic values. The balance between conceptual exegesis and empirical illumination tilts strongly towards the former. An academic Rip Van Winkle awaking after 20 or 30 years might be struck that during that time an interesting and significant change had occurred in the criteria that academics use to evaluate quality academic work in the study of work and organisations, might even be surprised that at a time when notions of enterprise were apparently being imposed on the academy and academics – not least within Business Schools where many of these authors are employed, academic achievement was apparently defined in terms of the accomplishment of a somewhat introverted form of conceptual exegesis. Is it possible that the nature of these articles reflects a change in our own world of work and employment, a change that has been so subtle that we have hardly noticed it? Although we had no Rip Van Winkles on the editorial board we thought that compared to the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, when there was more emphasis on empirical work including longitudinal studies, this sample of papers could well reflect a long term change and that the articles in this special issue could be regarded not only as valuable in what they contribute but also as phenomena worthy of comment in their own right. If this is the case then of course our authors can themselves be seen as enterprising in recognising and meeting these trends. But since our role as academics interested in organisational change includes a concern with understanding the changes which impact on us as well as on others this could well be an issue that deserves further analysis and discussion.

Pauline Gleadle, Nelarine Cornelius, Eric Pezet and Graeme Salaman