Brokering knowledge or editorial reflections on change and her images

Citation

Magala, S. (2013), "Brokering knowledge or editorial reflections on change and her images", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 26 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2013.02326aaa.001

Brokering knowledge or editorial reflections on change and her images

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 26, Issue 1

Opening the first issue in 2013, one looks up at the virtual neon sign above our heads announcing that we deal with a journal, with an organization, with a change and with management. True enough; but what does it involve? Organizations change as we sit writing this (me at the JOCM) or reading (you wherever you are). Therefore the present issue opens with a paper by Heine and Rindfleisch on organizational decline. Success, as we all know, has many fathers, while failure and decline are orphans. No wonder that theories of organizational change, which focus on growth, development, expansions, enlargement and continued high performativity – are numerous. Less researchers are willing to offer managers their insights on decline, failure and bankruptcy. The authors of the first paper in the present volume go against the grain and bring the bad news unafraid that they will miss the bonuses of consulting and coaching. They select the theoretical approaches of organizational ecology, path dependence and resource-based one. The common thread linking the three is that all three allow for a view of organizational activity as a process rather than a collection of distinct building blocks. Having selected the three approaches, the authors try to answer the question about the pattern of organizational evolution – what is being selected, by which mechanisms and what criteria of selection can be discovered. They distinguish between two types of failure, which they label with rather clumsy names: a malabsorptive incompetence and maladapted competencies. The former is simpler – organization does not have resources (primarily competencies) to tackle the forthcoming, emergent problems and challenges. They focus on the latter: organizations do have competencies and resources, but fail to notice or employ them. This is very frequently the case – and I guess universities are a case in point. This latter case, on which they choose to focus, is indeed fascinating. Quoting Teece (“bygones are rarely bygones”), they conclude, somewhat gloomily:

What once had been the spring of success is now the source of perpetuating organizational decline.

The second paper, Islam’s “Finding a space for a story” also concerns a failure, but this time not as a process of organizational decline. In his view the use of stories in organizational sense-making can often lead (and does lead as his research indicates) to what he terms “epistemic impasse”. The object of his study was a student counseling group at a university, which had been dealing mostly with disciplinary cases of student misbehavior. As Islam adds, self-consciously, his is a study based on a reflexive self-participation and thus belongs to what could be termed para-ethnography of expert communities (as Holmes and Marcus or Kaplan would have it). As He concludes:

In the current case, coexisting therapeutic, disciplinary, and professional frameworks made it difficult to formulate a coherent and unified perspective regarding student behavior. Rather than explaining different behaviors, the same student cases (e.g. unruly behavior during class) could be equally and validly described as outcome of psychosocial difficulties, a disciplinary-ethical issue, or a professional shortcoming. Further, each framing would seem dissonant with the others (epistemic impasse), but also complement and enrich a more “full” understanding of the case (epistemic spillover).

Having read about processes of evolutionary decline and communications with impasses and spillovers, the reader of the present issue finds a paper on art and architecture as instruments of corporate leadership used in order to shape the expectations of stakeholders (the shift from a proud skyscraper in the center of Chicago to the sprawling horizontal community of the new Sears headquarters in the city suburbs is a very well selected case in point).Hannay, Jaafar and Earl focused their study on teachers and educational managers in Canadian province Ontario: their observations on the possibility of employing knowledge management instruments for educational change should not leave any of us, academic teachers, unmoved. Academic institutions have been created in order to respect distinctions and divisions, specializations and research domain borders. They are professional bureaucratic hierarchies, with in-built resistance to change. Yet, change they must and they do – while knowledge hoarding and resistance to knowledge sharing outside of controlled channels are acting as a barrier to further knowledge sharing and creation. Knowledge management used to be a fad in managerial sciences, but it grew out of this first phase and perhaps it will come of age as a new way of:

[…] facilitating sustainable school improvement (…) through distributing leadership (…) and collaborative teamwork.

The problem they indicateis very acute indeed. As of the present writing I am, for instance, involved in the so called “excellence” working group, which is trying to create a path for exceptionally gifted students without sacrificing the mainstream educational qualities at a middle-sized European university. Does it work? Not yet, but some progress has been made and both our deans and our routines have accommodated some flexibility.

Flexibility is one of the terms, which made a career in the organizational change studies, since more often than not a change is preceded by a tacit or implicit question: are you flexible enough to evolve or are you rigid enough to go the way of the dinosaurs? Things do not look that simple from the research ground floor: it is ok to expect that a police force in a city evolves in order to follow creative organizational changes in criminal underworld, but what about devoted and loyal police officers, for whom flexibility means loss of patiently built solidarities and cooperation patterns with their colleagues, teams, organizational units? Dunford, Cuganesan, Grant, Palmer, Beaumont and Steele asks this question and tries to answer it from the discursive perspective, by analyzing meanings attached to it by various stakeholders. Considering the fact that flexibility is often quoted as a rationale for programs of managed organizational change and development, their reflections and analyses might turn out to be useful (in spite of the fact that Foucault or Derrida are not exactly the first associations when one starts conceptualizing research in police organizations).

Dutkiewicz and Duxbury decided to check the flexibility of three successive change leaders and prepared a case study of a major organizational change in the Canadian printed media industry (as they correctly, somewhat surprisingly, note – there are not too many studies of the back office changes in media industry, as if the media, so keen on exposing everybody else to public scrutiny, were shy when their own intimate working world was concerned). Dutkiewicz and Duxbury trace the change process and the role of three leaders involved, selecting the publisher, the editor-in-chief and an executive from the parent company pressing for change. One of the rather interesting conclusions is that successful leaders do get away with rather undemocratic measures:

It would appear that change leaders can behave antithetically to what is considered best practice in the change management literature (i.e. mandating down major change) if the change is urgent and stakeholders see visible signs of success.

Yilmaz, Ozgen and Akyel takes us to another part of the world to trace the change process in security management (involving the police, or, to be exact, Turkish gendarmerie) and using questionnaires and quantitative analysis of responses concludes that informing employees well about forthcoming change, consulting them and maintaining participation, will certainly improve chances of a change project to succeed. Tuan, in turn, takes us to Vietnam, where he chose a sample of 127 shipping companies in order to see what are the underlying factors, which determine organizational health and robust knowledge sharing. Not very surprisingly, but with the help of quantitative data analysis, Tuan concludes that corporate social responsibility, if taken seriously as an ethical guideline does increase identification and knowledge based trust, reinforcing desirable and punishing undesirable behavior. Canada, Turkey, Vietnam. India is the next stop, and inside India, one of the most solid professional bureaucracies in all countries – the Indian railroads. Kumar wrote his essay on action research and the actionable knowledge plus unplanned consequences generated by such research while studying the Indian railroads. His advice sounds like Amartya Sen’s “The argumentative Indian” rewritten as practical guide for an action researcher in the Indian context. He observes that a key to success is in aligning the proposed direction of change with the expected “latent need” of organizational members (he suggests that insider action researchers should be perceived as articulators of what everybody thinks rather than messengers from above. Two final remarks are worth quoting:

“Understand that Hindu method is experiential” and “Do not seek confrontative reflection”.

Finally, we are back in Europe, in the economic heart of our continent, namely in Germany, but described and analyzed by a Greek researcher. Mihail, Links and Sarvanidis look at the high performance work systems in a corporate turn-around. They come up with the conclusion that a surgical instruments company, facing a complex challenge of change, managed to create a win-win situation by encouraging and sustaining:

[…] a corporate culture nurtured by a stakeholder approach. Indeed, a culture of institutionalized open dialogue between the social partners based on trust led to a crucial development; a corporate agreement that cemented high performance work practices in the new workplace. Thus, management’s open communication, pay and training incentives and job security were balanced by employees’ drive to higher quality and greater output.

I would like to close on this optimistic accent, somewhat balancing out the corporate decline theme of the first, German-authored, paper, with the success story described in the last one. I would like to wish all our readers and contributors, and especially our faithful and tireless reviewers, a very happy 2013!

Slawek Magala