From quasi-barracks to quasi-campuses

Citation

Magala, S.J. (2014), "From quasi-barracks to quasi-campuses", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 27 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-10-2013-0197

From quasi-barracks to quasi-campuses

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 27, Issue 1

This is the first issue of JOCM in 2014. A total of 100 years ago, the first Great War (the first world war) broke out. It brought a previous stabilization in Europe to an abrupt end. Two large autocratic regimes holding central Europe hostage – the Russian tsardom and the Austrian empire – collapsed. Russia was high-jacked by the communist sect, and political change limited to an ideological window-dressing (while Siberian penal colonies expanded beyond tsar’s wildest dreams). Vienna survived as a cultural center, but the killing of the Austrian crown prince in Sarajevo signaled the emergence of a new map of the Balkans, a post-imperial one. Henry Ford’s assembly line and Taylor’s scientific management have been implemented both in the capitalist United States and in the communist Soviet Union (where peasants drafted to industry were shot or sent to the Gulag if lacking in discipline – an interesting adaptation of an invention made in a democratic society in a totalitarian one). How does our period compare to the one of a hundred years ago?

Female protagonist of the most recent novel by Dave Eggers, "The Circle", works for one of the marvels of the hyper-connected, global, digital and individually mobile communications, namely a company, which is a collective portrait of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and the like. The company does not display any external symbols of the classical industrial bureaucracy, of a professional and a hierarchic business organization – its managers go to a great length in order to make it look as a giant ultra-modern campus of an infinitely creative paradise for artistic personalities fulfilling themselves and making tons of money for the shareholders and stakeholders alike. Everybody does his or her best all the time – while simulating relaxed and socially responsible commitment to this creative community of the best and the brightest. A win-win situation hangs upon the creative meadows of the company campus like a blessing from gods and the fact that employees become robotized slaves to a call-center-like discipline of digital and virtual espionage (openly acknowledged by the top managers) and to a ritualized emotional exhibitionism (openly broadcasted by the ever-present media) somehow fails to get enough of critical attention.

In fact, the transition from quasi-military discipline of a contemporary professional bureaucracy (already canonized in early cinema by Chaplin in his "Modern Times" and analyzed in a sociological classic by Whyte – "Organization Man" – in mid-XXth century) to an open-ended, creative and loose network of freely collaborating professionals has already been heralded many times over. A novelist from California and a close observer of the Silicon Valley’s early developments, Rob Swigart, had already hinted at it, claiming that an organization man climbing the ladder of corporate hierarchy is giving way to a spider woman, who collects projects, assignments and uses networks to propel her professional career, without pathing it only upwards and only up a single corporate ladder at that (in a book entitled Upsizing an Individual in the Downsized Organization, written with a consultant Robert Johansen, from the Palo Alto Institute for the Future). These insights have been given a very solid empirical backing by two sons of the organization men interviewed by Whyte’s researchers in General Motors of the late 1950s, namely Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker, who had decided to interview their peers – other children of the corporation’s interviewees immortalized in Whyte’s study. In 1991, some thirty years later, they have published their findings in "The New Individualists. The Generation After the Organization Man". The authors explain in the preface that they have witnessed a new social character emerging in America of individualized coaching and career pathing linked to a ruthless control of call-center like workplace:

We have not only individualized bureaucracies, we have bureaucratized individuals; our corporations have become psychic projections and our psyches corporate reflections. They – we – are all artificial persons now (Leinberger and Tucker, 1991, p.14).

Can we have equally sweeping generalization on the basis of what is currently being researched in the domain of organizational change? It would be hard to say because of the lower level of abstraction and less bold conjectures or generalizations, but the issue opens on an unexpectedly topical and political note, namely with the paper reporting an empirical investigation of readiness in business companies in Syria (Mohamed Haffar, Wafi Al-Kharaghouli, Ahmad Ghoneim – "An empirical investigation of the influence of organizational culture upon individual readiness for change in Syrian manufacturing organizations"), written by authors who are all based in London. Two Portuguese researchers, Maria Rita Silva and Antonio Caetano from Business Research Unit of the university of Lisbon come up with the paper on "Organizational justice: what changes, what remains the same?" They claim that a triangulation of data obtained by comparing distributive and interactive organizational justice dimensions with the procedural one, which they did not account for, might yield interesting results in future. The next paper takes us to South Korea, whose three representatives, Jeonghwan Lee, Namgoyo K. Park and Hyojung Kim, write about "The Effect of change in organizational identity on knowledge creation by mobile R&D workers in M&As". Here we come close to Johanson and Swigart (1994) and to the changes in contemporary workplace: first, we see what high tech professionals do when they have to change their organizational colors, and secondly, the authors try to see what happens to their tacit and sticky knowledge has to be shared (or withheld from sharing) in new arrangements after, for instance, mergers and acquisitions.

The next paper takes us even further into the qualitative domain of organizational research. Isabel Faro Albuquerque, Rita Campos Cuhna, Luis Dias Martins and Armando Brito Sa (all of them from Lisbon’s academic institutions (Albuquerque and Cunha from New School of Business and Economics, Martins from managerial faculty of the Lisbon university and Sa from the medical university) wrote on "Primary health care services: workplace spirituality and organizational performance". They studied an innovation in health care from the point of employee’s inner life, experience of meaningful work and a feeling of community. In their conclusions they point out that we should pay attention to the spirituality in medical workplaces, especially in view of the aging of the European population and increasing work pressure on medical services employees. The next paper comes from the north of China, namely from Dalian university of technology, whose two employees, Haifen Lin and Jingquin Su wrote "A case study on adoptive management innovation in China". Theirs is an empirical study carried out in Jiangxi Mobile plants (one of the core companies of the leading state-owned mobile services provider, namely China Mobile Group with branches in 11 cities and 85 county centers) with the help of semi-structured interviews, archival data and (participant) observation. Their conclusion, not surprisingly, is that the adaptation of managerial solutions from elsewhere is not a simple process and involves a very complex adjustment and trial-and-error fitting trajectory. In a sense, their simple empirical generalizations echo the reflections of the late Max Boisot on social learning curve – although the authors do not quote Boisot’s I-space and they limit themselves to the observation that every implementation of adopted managerial technique requires a logical transformation (i.e. refitting and readjustment on site). They also note, quite explicitly, that a top-down style of state-owned corporate bureaucracies shuts employees up and makes it more difficult to understand how important a job they do in adopting and implementing. Interesting, coming from Dalian, a successful company and yet not so successfully pacified and standardized researchers. From China we return to Europe, to Belgium – two authors from Vlerick Business School, namely Ralf Wetzel from Leuven and Lore van Gorp from Gent write about "Eighteen shades of grey? An explorative literature review into the theoretical flavors of organizational change research", which allows us to see how much is still to be done if less mainstream approaches are to be given a fair chance in structuring the research domain of organizational change processes. Finally, the issue closes with a paper by two US researchers, Joseph C. Ofori-Dankwa from Saginaw Valley State University, a management university center in Michigan and Julian Scott from the school of business administration of Wayne State university in Detroit. They try to develop a heuristic model for explaining diversity’s paradox and wonder why the same diversity may either help or damage the organizational performance. Let me evoke once again the late Max Boisot, who tried to solve this problem by implying that an organization has to be only as diverse as the complexity of its environment calls for – well, but how do we know what it calls for before our organization stumbles and fails?

Which brings me back to the analogy between 2014 and 1914: we all think that we are witnessing a major shift from pyramids, hierarchies, army barracks and industrial prisons for collectivized individuals. We all hope to be creative, permanently studying and learning employees of benevolent campus-like corporations. Free, open, networked and inspired, informal but focussed firms – ethical and self-managing organizational forms of uncertain futures. Sounds nice, like the phrase about departure of organization man and arrival of spider woman.

Slawomir Jan Magala

References

Johanson, R. and Swigart, R. (1994), Upsizing the Individual in the Downsized Organization: Managing in the Wake of Reengineering, Globalization and the Overwhelming Technological Change, Perseus Books, New York, NY

Leinberger, P. and Tucker, B. (1991), The New Individualists. The Generation After the Organization Man, Harper Collins, New York, NY