The Owl of Minerva and the ICT driven change (ICT=Information and Communication Technologies) (editorial reflections on mid-2013)

Citation

Magala, S. (2013), "The Owl of Minerva and the ICT driven change (ICT=Information and Communication Technologies) (editorial reflections on mid-2013)", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 26 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2013.02326eaa.001

The Owl of Minerva and the ICT driven change (ICT=Information and Communication Technologies) (editorial reflections on mid-2013)

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 26, Issue 5

The owl of Minerva flies always at dusk – too late to reflect while and where the action is. Philosophy has long been considered a privileged province of retired or at least withdrawn lonely thinkers, endlessly reconsidering and re-evaluating the past events, ambitions and projects. However, sometimes the course of history, the flows in global space, somehow coincide with the timely reflection and at least for the time being seem to imply some hidden connection, some invisible link, some tacit bond. A philosophical reflection on the nature of democracy and the anger of masses of people rising against unmanageable, intolerable inequalities, coincide. As I am writing the present editorial, there is a very unexpected outburst of political protest, of concerned citizens’ initiative in public spaces. There is a very significant political protest movement in Turkey. It is growing and going into its second week of daily and nightly demonstrations on Taxim Square in the center of Istanbul and in more than 30 other Turkish cities, including the capital city of Ankara. The reader might as well remember about it when reading the last paper in the present issue, namely Sefer Yilmaz’s “Tailoring Model in Reforming Police Organizations towards Community Policing”, where we read that:

Policing today requires a strong partnership with communities to solve crime oriented problems. People living in that community are the real addressee who knows the problems and the underlying factors best and who is in a position to support formulating thee solution. […] The success of community policing reforms depends heavily on the support and participation of the community.

What we see on our TV screens and on our blogs, twitters, youTubes, and facebooks does not look like support of communities for the police actions, which even the prime minister, against whom the protests are directed, promises to investigate (police is beating up unarmed and peaceful protesters and some are even getting killed, while thousands are being arrested). Therefore it can be said that publishing three papers on the nature of the police work in democratic communities is a rather prescient editorial move. I have to admit at the very beginning that I had no idea that the papers in question (by Jacobs, Bayerl, van den Born et al.) will all of a sudden acquire topicality beyond any PR specialist’s wildest dreams. The first of these papers, whose first author is Gabriele Jacobs attempts to generalize the empirical findings of an interesting research project covering police forces in ten of the EU countries codenamed COMPOSITE (“Comparative Police Studies in the EU”). The countries in question are Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Republic of Macedonia, The Netherlands, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom. Gabriele Jacobs is the main coordinator of the project and she and her co-authors begin by defining their three concerns about organizational risks run by change masters. The organizations can namely damage their socially accepted identities (which might harm legitimacy and performance), they can suffer from unfavorable clusters of external and internal conditions (which can accelerate or stop change processes) and contingencies, which somehow undermine the accepted change techniques and their effectiveness. The authors quote, for instance, approvingly an observation by Punch, who notices that local interpretation of anti-corruption rules is not fully determined by formal rules and cultural traditions, that much challenging work has to be provided by police officers on the spot, surrounded by local community or by single individuals in very specific situations. Not surprisingly, they discover that:

Changes that are consistent with the organizational identity will be easier and bear less opportunity costs than changes that are in conflict with the organization’s identity.

And they quote approvingly March, who had remarked once that:

Organizations rarely do exactly what they are told to do.

If they convince us that interdisciplinary discourse and cross-cultural research networks should allow us to test and modify change theories (without going back to the old and rather silly fables of unfreeze-change-refreeze or to the infamous Maslow’s pyramid of needs), they will win. Will they?

The paper co-authored by many researchers, of whom Saskia Bayerl is the first one, deals with “The role of macro context for the link between technological and organizational change”, clearly a very topical issue in times of rapid dissemination of evolving ICTs (information and communication technologies). Bayerl et al. are using the PESTL analytical framework (which allows to trace the political, economic, social, technological and legal levels of environmental influences upon organizational change) and collect their data within the aforementioned COMPOSITE project. They identify social media and mobile computing as the most important technological trends influencing police work and notice extremely large disparities between adoption of, say, social media, by national police forces in various countries (high in the UK, low in Italy, high in the Netherlands, low France and Germany). Decentralization and allowing some discretion in experimenting by police officers seem to have a fairly significant influence upon the speed of adaptation and domestication of new technologies.

Finally, the paper authored by van den Born et al., also originating from the COMPOSITE team, deals with “Policing opportunities and threats in Europe” and is based on interviews of police officers at different hierarchical levels and representatives of external stakeholders. PESTL framework has been adopted, and SWOT-like questions asked. Not very surprisingly, they discover that political influences are fairly insignificant, no matter whether changes in police organization are considered positive (Romania) or negative (Germany and the UK) and that economic changes, usually equated with austerity and reduction of public expenditures – very significant. Social changes (mobility of new migrants) are more ambiguous, but most interviewees stress the tensions between migrant and non-migrant communities as a negative influence upon their work. Increasing inequality is also noticed and marked with a minus.

Since one of the above papers dealt with the influence of technological (mainly ICT) change upon police activities, the paper by Rachel Nirit on “Computerizing class management software – teachers’ view and assessment” offers an interesting chance of comparing the responses of another professional community to the technological transformation of their work. Class management software in question has been designed to help school principal, teachers and parents to trace student’s progress in terms of discipline, achievements, academic orientation and attendance. When reading this paper I was thinking about an interesting possibility of asking students what they thought of it – my first response if I were one, would be to repeat after Thomas Pynchon – “Is it OK to be a Luddite?”

The author limited herself to 120 teachers (75 women and 45 men, as the feminization of a teaching profession is obvious) from three Israeli high schools, which implemented the software systems under the comprehensive project of the ministry of education. The findings are that a convincing majority of teachers think that their work has become more efficient and comfortable (113 out of 120), though some mention the investment of time and effort to master the new software. Only 12 teachers expressed the opinion that the new technology is harming student-teacher relations. Things become more ambiguous when communication between parents, teachers and students is concerned. 67 report improvement, but 71 claim noticing negative aspects with the disappearance of a personal touch. As far as fears of increased parental control go, they were reduced since it turned out that most parents do not bother to learn about the available software or to use it. Let me add that the author does notice a need for including students in further development of similar softwares. We certainly should.

Hussan Chowdhurry writes about “Impact of group dynamics on eService implementation (a qualitative analysis of Australian public sector organizational change) investigates the attempt undertaken by the Australian government to facilitate electronic access for all citizens who should be able to acquire these services online. The research was carried out in fifty local councils in the Melbourne metropolitan area and interviewees included 23 directors, managers, team leaders and employees of City Councils. The author found that the pace of implementation of ICT driven changes is below the national average because of the confusion of roles and responsibilities between functional departments, business units and ICT staff.

Last not least, Lu Co-Rong writes on “How top management team diversity fosters organizational ambidexterity: the role of social capital among top executives”. The concept of organizational ambidexterity is an interesting one, and studying it by collecting responses from a sample of 113 companies out of 1,500, which had been approached (Shenzhen area manufacturing companies) allows to draw some cautious conclusions about significance of social capital for making a company agile (or ambidextrous). In a nutshell: t pays to have more diversity, but only if trust and social capital are also high, so that exploration and exploitation (exploratory and exploitative innovations) balance each other out.

The owl of Minerva flies out at dusk. We are all trying to accelerate her departure. Sometimes by conducting qualitative or quantitative research, sometimes by writing manifestoes – for instance Jaron Lanier wrote about Siren Servers in “Who Owns the Future” and Mats Alvesson about pompous artifice of educational industries in “Triumph of Emptiness”. We close the fifth issue of JOCM in 2013 and try to think about organizational change in the shadow of servers, social media, online computing and mobile individualized killer apps.

Slawek MagalaRotterdam, June 7, 2013