Evolution for the hell of it

Citation

Magala, S.J. (2016), "Evolution for the hell of it", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 29 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-02-2016-0024

Evolution for the hell of it

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 29, Issue 2.

(Second JOCM editorial in 2016: migrations continue, real, virtual and imaginary).

The second issue of JOCM in 2016 opens up without the fresh smell of paint on paper – in fact we have gone virtual a year ago and intend to remain firmly committed to the cause of politically correct ecological purity. Green is the new red on virtual barricades. Scanning the papers published in the present volume we cannot fail to notice that academic scrutiny is increasingly connected to the self-policing needs of our expanding research networks. Hence Bindu Singh and M.K. Rao devote their attention to “Effect of intellectual capital on dynamic capabilities,” Chi-Han Ai and Hung-Che Wu focus on a question asked among Shanghai ICT companies – “Where Does the Source of External Knowledge Come From? A case of the Shanghai ICT chip industrial cluster in China,” while Yolanda Ramirez, Angel Tejada and Montserrat Manzaneque consider “The Value of Disclosing Intellectual Capital in Spanish Universities: a new challenge of our days.” Clearly, the question of managing knowledge production, distribution, maintenance and employment, is on our managerial, organizational and research minds. Knowledge – let us add, considered as an instrumental knowledge about getting there, not knowledge, which would allow us to answer the question why do we want to get there, anywhere, in the first place. Where should we look for matching questions about values, goals, aims, perspectives, preferences and desires?

It looks like we are better off asking our artists than scientists if we want to know what we really want and what future has in store for us either in order to facilitate or to hamper our progress toward possible goals. Creative producers of computer games had invented visual representations of weird planets with different stars, moons and temporary flows. Once they had put their game online, real researchers came running and asking for a simulation of their own wildest guesses. The analogy holds even better with respect to the novelists. As far back as 1973 an American writer, Thomas Pynchon, had published a bulky novel loosely spun around the tale of the V-1 and V-2 rockets and around the Second World War “Manhattan” project entitled Gravity's Rainbow, which had spelled out the worst nightmares caused by the nuclear weapons looming large over human populations and controlled by not very trustworthy gatherings of politicians. Pynchon has never become an idol of the masses, although he had attracted a very ardent following on the margins of the counterculture and his cult among academics sustains quite a traffic inside the world wide web. He had gone on to write a sequel to Gravity's Rainbow entitled Against the Day, which begins aboard something like a Zeppelin during the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1894 and ends in the nearest future aboard something like “Battleship Galactica.” TV SF series inspire a serious novelist, a serious novelist inspires researchers, and mankind gains new insights into the complex networks of power and money under our urban skyscrapers. Pynchon commented further upon the Information and Communication Technology in his last novel The Bleeding Edge but it is in Gravity's Rainbow where we find the most crucial sociological observation about all the world's military-industrial complexes happily married to Goggles, Microsofts, Verizons and fearing nothing apart from Wikileaks:

It means this war was never political at all, politics was all theatre, all just to keep people distracted […] secretly it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology […] by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques […] We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid […] we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function […] zeroing in on what incalculable plot? (Pynchon, 1973, accessed 2016).

Our academic community is not entirely blind to these signals of technological and secretive undermining of democracy by an ongoing multi-media show entitled “Democracy, Inc.” – to quote the title of the last political treatise by Sheldon Wolin, published shortly before his death, namely in 2008. Wolin notes the lack of proportion between something I would call an imbalance between overpraised humanist freedom and underestimated humanitarian solidarity:

Democratization is not about being “left alone,” but about becoming a self that sees the values of common involvements and endeavors and finds in them a source of self-fulfillment (Wolin, 2008, p. 289).

Corporate democracy and citizenship are thus also duly recognized and studied by researchers in organizational and managerial sciences. Hence, the following bunch of papers, which opens with a paper by Gloria Cuevas-Rodriguez, Jaime Guerrero-Villegas and Ramón Valle-Cabrera – “Corporate Governance Changes, Firm Strategy and Compensation Mechanisms in a Privatization Context.” The corporate democracy and corporate citizenship focus continues with a paper by Muhammad Shahnawaz Adil – “Impact of Change Readiness on Commitment to technological change, focal, and discretionary behaviors: evidence from the manufacturing sector of Karachi” and with a paper on “How Does Leader Communication Style Promote Employee's Commitment at times of Change?” by Wenhao Luo, Lynda Jiwen Song, Diether R Gebert, Kai Zhang and Yunxia Feng.

The third sub-group of articles in the present issue deals with the interpersonal and personal issues of organizational life. Sjoerd Van den Heuvel, René Schalk, Charissa Freese and Volken Timmerman ask simply “What's In It For Me? A managerial perspective on the influence of the psychological contract on attitude towards change” studying psychological contracts, while Anna Pluta and Aleksandra Rudawska deal with “Holistic Approach to HR and Organizational Acceleration.” Moving in a slightly different research area – change as a negotiable but not an inevitable preference – Safal Batra asks “Do new ventures benefit from strategic change or persistence? A behavioral perspective.”

This last question merits more attention than we usually devote it. Two answers are possible immediately. One – that change is good in itself, because we should give evolution our helping hand instead of trying to slow it down and to prevent the inevitable progress form occurring. Two – that a change should be resisted because it may be dictated by a new technology, which does not necessarily fit our human needs better than the previous one. Instead of slavishly following the dictatorship of the digitalized super-minds of profiling computers, we should slow their imperial invasion down and see what we could domesticate for our good use and what we should reject and resist. Slow food, slow sex and slow armaments movements are already here, though speed dating and technological dictatorship are still going strong. Which brings me back to the artists. In an essay written in the 1980s, entitled “Is it OK to be a Luddite?” Thomas Pynchon reflected on the up and coming computers, asking himself if we could, perhaps, smash some of them down in order to slow down their rapid advances and the grand theft of our labor. Some mainframes may have been smashed, had we mobilized then, but with the PC's and smart phones so widespread as they are at present – no luddite stands a chance. We are already rounded up, profiled and filed away. All we can do is fight for the last scraps of privacy uninvaded by a “selfie” or a “strangie” (selfie made by a stranger). Are strangers in the night, exchanging glances, being replaced by strangers in the cloud, exchanging selfies?

Slawomir Jan Magala

References

Pynchon, T. (1973), Gravity's Rainbow, available at: www.goodreads.com/quotes/829397-it-means-this-war-was-never-political-at-allthe (accessed 2016)

Wolin, S. (2008), Democracy Incorporated. Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and London