Telling stories, making sense

Citation

Magala, S. (2008), "Telling stories, making sense", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 21 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2008.02321faa.001

Telling stories, making sense

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 21, Issue 6

The sixth issue of JOCM closes 2008 publications on a narrative note with a clear homage to Bakhtin as a resuscitated theoretician of dialogue. Mind you, Bakhtin’s admiration for Rabelais and Dostoyevski had been born in the blackest of black (actually redest of red, if we stick to ideological hues) periods in contemporary history of Russia. He had barely survived Stalin’s terror, when orders to ship him to a polar Siberian concentration camp had been changed in the last moment and he had been banned to a relatively “milder” Kazakhstan, where he outlived the bloodiest butcher of the past century (and a great hero of the Sartres and H.G. Wellses who saw the future and noticed that it had worked). Jabri, Adrian and Boje correctly point out that for Bakhtin, dreaming of a free society of sovereign individuals, the very participation in polyphonic communications matters most. This parrticipation is more important from the point of view of a dialogic approach to social communications than a message (the authors also quote Umberto Eco with The Role of the Reader and Wolfgang Iser – enlisting both in their struggle to “accommodate otherness” by ongoing interpretation and sensemaking). They hope that management of change could some day switch from rigid model of communication as a code to a “communication as a surplus of seeing” and that “rather than seeing change as a prefabricated product that needs to be communicated, change management would focus on facilitating dialogues about issues.” Let us hope their hopes are justified and that something more interesting than a liberal interpretation of Habermasian “coercion-free dialogue” in structurally evolving public sphere of a civil society will emerge.

Two pairs of authors, Randall and Procter, and Landau and Drori, test these highly theoretical assumptions about dialogic presence of others in our sensemaking in their empirical studies. Randall and Procter investigate ambiguities and ambivalences in “senior managers” accounts of organizational change in a restructured government department and quote the usual suspects from critical management studies, for instance Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott. Dana Landau and Israel Drori quote Kunda, Latour, Sewell and Weick, and investigate personal narratives of a research lab undergoing a major transformation (but at the same time offering employed professionals enough buffers to make them less afraid to share their sensemaking reports with the researchers).

Sabine Hotho shifts our attention towards the issues of an identity of a profession and of the frames of reference such identity furnishes. According to her, frameworks have to be furnished for individuals who are working out their professional identities, their identities as active professionals, usually within a broader context of an organizational change. Do they repeat and copy-paste or do they rewrite “scripts of their profession”? Structuration theory and social identity theory (SIT – what an acronym!) are discussed and a sample of NHS professionals are examined. Willmott, Hassard and Parker make their brief appearance in a footnote, which softens a slightly more middle-of-the-road, establishment-friendly look of bibliography. Jane Bryson follows with an interesting distinction between dominant, emergent and residual subcultures of an organizational culture within the context of organizational change. Alvesson, Linstead and Sally Riad appear in the literature list, and so does Raymond Williams, a welcome re-activation of an interesting, though slightly forgotten leftist theoretician of culture.

The issue closes with an analysis of the language of self-presentation of consulting professionals by Backlund and Werr and an empirical study of the evolution of high-tech biotechnological companies in “hostile financing environments”. Backlund and Werr point out that “managerial regimes” of “bureaucracy” and “post-bureaucracy” “resonate well with the rationalizing and normalizing discursive practices of constructing a legitimate client”. It is a welcome broadening of a field of analysis; consultants are not perceived as virtuoso professionals “enchanting” single managers in a psychological “seduction” of a client, but as members of communities of practice moving in a socially determined field of overall societal cultures, subcultures, modes of organizing and managerial regimes. Last not least, Holger Patzelt and David Audretsch examine the results of a crisis in financing caused by the burst of a “high-tech’ bubble – they suggest that population ecology of organizations may still have something to say in explaining how companies adopt to “hostile environments” (they propose to study industry and firm level adaptiation in parallel).

Food for thought? Certainly. Contribution to a dialogic perception of the presence of other, sensemaking fellow-professionals, moving around us? I think so. Let us hope 2009, which promises us a glimpse of history in theory of organizational change and a Lacan-dyed discussion of “corporate Robespierres” (to mention just two special issues), will offer as much or more.

Slawomir Magala