Editorial

Citation

Magala, S. (2010), "Editorial", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 23 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2010.02323eaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 23, Issue 5

The present issue of Journal of Organizational Change Management (JOCM) is a creative compromise, which often signals an attempt to eat the cake of having a special guest issue with a specific focus and topic, but also to continue having it, too, by devoting only part of the current issue to the guest stuff and reserving the rest for business as usual. Compromise or a rotten compromise?

This is exactly the case with the fifth issue of JOCM in 2010. Almost exactly half of the space is taken by the Christopher J. Rees and John Hassard international comparative research in China, India, Indonesia and Malaysia. Another half is business as usual, or a selection of successive successful papers, which survived the long and hostile process of negative selection, extremely high-rejection rate and the rounds of revise and resubmit maneuvers. What do their authors, the “regulars”, have to say marching along with the “specials”?

They want to tell us that what the managers do when they manage – does not resemble rational choice models of strategic management gurus in the least. Good, but heard before. But they go a bit further. They claim more. Real life of managers is not a dreamland of behavioral ethics, economics, finance and leadership either. This is already more interesting. The emergent surplus of psychologists churned out by the academic mills begins to throw a dark shadow on over-psychologized and under-socialized research projects. Psychologists are trying currently to convince the credulous and gullible consumers of multi-mediated mass communications (that is us, dear readers, ourselves, our frères) that they can always predict tipping points, black swans, wise crowds, outliers and other secret signals of hidden realities. Well, perhaps they can. Meanwhile, back at the real research […]

Monika Kostera (Sweden and Poland, and a bit of UK too) and Krzysztof Obłój stress the fact that managers of, say, commercial radio stations, do not need to perform a 360-degree scan of all possible competitors. They make quick intuitive choices and they scan whom they see as relevant, salient and to the point. Which is much less work than theory would have us expect. Which is many less rivals looked up than academic consultants would have us trace, shadow and analyze. Moreover, managers do not make those scans in a sterile lab frock and with natural sciences idiom on their lips. They are not afraid of parading around with their humanist education and identify with Athena, Apollo, or Hermes. Ah! Yes, the role of the humanities in the making of the European elites, including the managerial ones (if there are managerial elites at all, which is somehow doubtful if we forget about the price classes of the cars in the reserved parking lot):

Each manager had their preferred archetype which they had remained faithful to throughout the interviews. The archetypes provided them with a narrative template, without impoverishing the narrative or making it simplistic (Kostera and Obłój, 2010, p. 573).

Symbolic resources? Indeed, our cultural background belongs to our cultural resources, and the more we dig into them, the better for the depth and accuracy of our research results. If you think that the choice of managers – from among radio station heads, who by definition have to deal with mythmaking and highly concentrated mythological contents – is biased and that “regular” managers in normal non-creative industries do less crazy things, well, have a look at what Deanna Kemp, Julia Keenan and Jane Gronow discover when they turn their research attention to gender policies and to the issues of corporate social responsibilities in a global mining company (mind you – mining, not really a creative industry). What do they find out? Well, to put it in a nutshell, they find that “shared meanings can be generated through discoursive exchange”, or, in other words, that we can negotiate what we mean through saying it aloud and thinking about the answers we get to our communications:

Findings confirm predictions made by scholars of this journal that “the future preoccupation of organizational change is likely to be management of meaning as opposed to management of change” (Oswick, et al., 2005, p. 387) as shared meaning enabled continuation of the change process in the case of the gender guide (Kemp et al., 2010, p. 590).

With the next paper, the one by Sharon Purchase, Sid Lowe and Nick Ellis on the network pictures in industrial marketing research, we are back into the twilight zone between creative industries (making “network pictures”) and the down-to-earth brick-and-mortar commercial activities (can there be something more mundane and real than marketing?). Except that Purchase, Lowe and Ellis make it with a twist – they try to see what happens if we watch organizational processes as if they were a feature movie unfolding in front of our very eyes. They claim that we should forget about reified and static view of organizational life as an album of frozen snapshots – photographs of an organizational reality as it never was (it never stood still for one thing). We should not treat images as butterflies which have to be netted, killed, dried and then pinned down to a background panel of a glass case. We should switch to the late Wittgenstein and post-Cartesian language gaming – using the films and streaming media as our weapon of choice. And yes, they do not shy away from being critical to the point of risking loss of consulting assignments from the CEO headquarters:

Postmodern visual culture is the one where social relations are dominated by commodified images. The images that prevail, from this critical viewpoint, are social opiates masquerading as progress that control actors through addictive consumption and acquisition by spectator-consumers. In this context, business-to-business relationships are about how these image-based addictions are maintained within business cultures (Purchase et al., 2010, p. 595, abstract).

I have to admit that my jaw fell open with pleasant surprise and philosophical satisfaction when I have found the authors quoting the Mexican movie director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu – the author of Amores Perros and Babel, or 21 Grams, easily three films which leave the entire Hollywood production light years behind on a waste dump of history, three films which manifest truly humane awareness and compassion, three films, which show us how far we could go employing social humanist awareness of what is important and what is the most damaging in the shaping powers of global inequalities. How come that third-rate entertainers feed their mediocre products to the media while the best and the noblest remain a niche attraction? This seems to me a much more important question than the one I had asked in my own Cross Cultural Management (from which the authors quote me as being on the side of a cinematographic approach and using Manovich’s The Language of the New Media as the case in point, i.e. as the recognition of the fact that the “visual culture in the computer age is cinematographic”). Not that I would take back what I had written then and what the authors quote, namely, that, as they sum me up:

Cinema is a global visual culture targeting non-hierarchical, individualized mobile post-modern “cyber” identities.

No, I would not. And I am glad the authors did not either. Which brings me to the last of the four “regulars” in the present issue. Mari Kira, Frans M. van Eijnatten and David B. Balkin (from Finland, The Netherlands and the USA, respectively) write on “Creating sustainable work: development of personal resources”. They are certainly right to try to break out of the human resources management stereotypes – we all know that this is the “canon fodder” approach to the employees, which makes less and less sense unless we want to deepen the crises to come. What they basically suggest is that all organizations which have some sense left should focus on a continuous negotiation and renegotiation – via direct communication between managers and employees – of what kinds of changes into jobs could and should be introduced. In other words – the employees would be introducing direct democracy by the back door of job description and its inadequacy rather than by class gates of income and status differences. Collaboration, then – yes, but with a democratic and humanist twist:

Where traditional job design focuses on the psychological health of employees and high organizational performance, the process of crafting sustainable work is aimed at attaining the development and translation of various personal resources that underlie an individual’s ability to work, i.e. the ability to keep on working, to experience work as a positive factor in life, and to keep on making positive contributions in the lives of colleagues, customers and other stakeholders (Kira et al., 2010, conclusions).

If this is business as usual, at least 50 percent of it, so be it.

Slawomir Magala