We have never been critical, postmodern and mainstream (editorial for the next quarter of a century)

Citation

Magala, S. (2012), "We have never been critical, postmodern and mainstream (editorial for the next quarter of a century)", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 25 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2012.02325aaa.001

We have never been critical, postmodern and mainstream (editorial for the next quarter of a century)

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 25, Issue 1

We have never been modern. We have never been postmodern. We have never been critical. Or have we? Journal of Organizational Change Management had already been going for 25 years, of which 11 years have been spent in the new, twenty-first century, and 14 years in the past, “long” twentieth century of two world wars, moon landing and the internet. It was founded by David Boje, who remains the patron saint of JOCM as the publication for mostly qualitative research of and within the processes of organizations. Having taken the editorship over from the founder, I have tried to continue his bottom line of methodological development (qualitative paradigm, sense making in organizations, narratives, ante-narratives and story-telling in the processes of organizing) and to stimulate the critical, self-reflexive approach towards the processes of organizing. Not that quantities are a taboo. They are not. But they are not dominant at the JOCM.

Why bother? Because mainstream social sciences in general and the sciences of organizing and managing in particular have been hijacked by the neopositivist quantitative research during the decisive years of the Cold War. The best and the brightest of the ARPAD years worshiped nuclear physics. They worship molecular biology and genetic researchers now. One of my colleagues at an upstanding European university did not hesitate to announce in the media that he had discovered a gene, which is necessary for an individual to become a successful salesperson. The Nobel prize committee failed to notice, but marketing of his training programs for sales personnel registered yet another boost. Humanists and critical researchers and scholars exist, survive and moderately prosper, but they do not decide about tenures, rankings and research funds. Representatives of the mainstream sciences of management are not particularly bothered by lack of relevance if methodological (paradigmatic) correctness secures funding and ranking. I do not want to sound cynical; knowledge production is growing, growth of knowledge is accelerating, education covers broader clusters of individuals, creativity sometimes soars. Even silly copyright panics of the global media giants, with their ridiculous monopolies for 70 years or more, will probably turn out to be as insignificant in the longer run as the death penalty for possessing a printed book in a post-Gutenberg Germany (no matter how many teenagers will be fined for re-mixing a tune or two). Death penalty threat in the sixteenth century did not prevent cahiers des doleances nor did it strangle the Declaration of Independence in the eigteenth. And we do not have to wait two centuries in hyper connected worldwide networks.

We do not have to wait, because we have become much more pragmatic and sociable than ever before. Had we been publishing the present editorial around 1000ad, we would have tacitly accepted the view that an individual can only have one highest target worth meeting and that it is an eternal salvation of one’s innermost immortal soul. Theology would have been our dominant form of reflection and monks the most prestigious research community. Had we been publishing the present editorial around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it would have been clear to us that the highest moral aim of a civilized man is a political struggle for the emancipation of broad masses of the wretched of the earth in order to construct a classless society, in which everybody can freely develop creative talents and skills leading a fulfilled life among free equals. Darwinism and Marxism would have been our theories of choice, and the working class a collective savior of mankind. But we do not live in those past periods. We are facing 2012, the early phase of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Our new politically correct core idea is sustainable development of ecologically correct global coordination of actions and agencies. We believe that the highest and most legitimate goal worth striving for, the most noble target of individual and collective efforts – is the balanced, sustainable growth, which increases our material welfare, promotes fairness and equality and allows for an ecological harmonization of increasingly complex projects with expected and unexpected consequences of our actions. This ideal of our times (balanced growth), this core take-away of our value-systems presented in a power-point slide show with bullet-point directness (sustainable development) is expressed in many ways, for instance in the following view on practical implications of Joseph Raelin’s “Dialogue and deliberation as expressions of democratic leadership in participatory organizational change”:

If OD and comparable participatory change processes claim at their core to be democratic processes, their exponents would endorse a leadership and communication that would preferably match their value system. There would be a shared communication by all those who are involved in the change activity, wherever they may sit within the organizational bureaucracy. The communication would become a multiple party reflective conversation that is captured in the mode called dialogue.

The “multiparty relfexive conversation” comes close to the “coercion-free dialogue” – an ideal codified in the liberal left academic establishment by Jurgen Habermas, as the author of The Theory of Communicative Action (although Habermas needed the Polish “solidarity” and the Polish Pope to start recognizing the emotional and political potential of human spirituality and the limitations of a middle class’s institutional politics in “postmodern” societies). This is our new civic religion and this is where the hope for a breakout from managed democracy and the specter of totalitarianism, which Sheldon S. Wolin warns us against in Democracy, Inc and Raghuram Rajan in Fault Lines (the undertitle of the latter (How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy) comes as no surprise.

Religion is only one of the ways in which traditionally a regulation and institutionalization of human spirituality was patterned and routinized in social processes. One of the reasons that religion was a particularly successful mode of patterning spirituality can be found in the emotional appeal. Hence the studies of Michal Izak (“Spiritual episteme: sensemaking in the framework of organizational spirituality”) and Timo Vuori’s and Jouni Virtaharju’s “On the role of emotional arousal in sensegiving”. Here’s the quote from the latter authors:

We recognize two elements in sensegiving, which are (1) increasing sense-receivers’ level of emotional arousal and (2) cognitively associating that arousal with desired definitions of organizational reality. While the cognitive component determines the beliefs individuals come to hold, the emotional component influences how intensively they will hold these beliefs. Emotional arousal can be amplified in ways that are loosely coupled with the cognitive dimension of sensegiving.

Some more empirical studies of sense making and story-telling follow. Elisabeth Briody, together with Tracy Meerwarth Pester and Robert Trotter, investigates “A story’s impact on organizational-culture change” (they have been conducting their research for eight years in General Motors). Joeri Mol, Ming Chiu and Nachoem Wijnberg try to assess chances of newcomers in cultural contents industry, for instance, in the music business (“Love Me Tender: new entry in popular music”).

Last but not least, two papers cater to a very respectable interface between qualitative and quantititative, or quantitative and behavioral approaches. S. Heusinkveld and J. Benders study the “sedimentation” of management fashions (the current fashion, for instance, is about servant leadership and coaching of spontaneous knowledge sharing) – which lets us notice that theoretical models of management and pragmatic instructions for practitioners do not always follow the invisible hand of scientific rationality in organizational and institutional formalizations and routines. Sometimes they follow a fashion … J. Kuntz and J. Gomes focus on “Transformational change in organizations: a self-regulation approach”, which does account for sensemaking and individual interpretation of organizational ideologies (“corporate cultures”), although at the same time they would like to come up with empirical generalization allowing for some semblance of a covering law.

The first issue in 2012 gives a fairly good review of the domain of organizational change management; hot items are linked to cultural communications and individual hyperlinked mobility, to critical thrust of qualitative approaches and to the increasing importance of pragmatically institutionalized interfaces between knowledge communities, business companies, public authorities, NGOs and entrepreneurial, creative women and men who refuse to give up and reproduce manageable inequalities. The future may have arrived – but will we notice it if we failed to do so before an ARPAD turned into an internet? Not necessarily – and that is why it still makes sense to read JOCM, on-line off-line and off-off line as well.

Fernando Fuentes-Henríquez and Patricio Del Sol offer an interesting example of the sustainability of the Bojean inspiration in managerial studies. They claim, quite rightly, that:

The storytelling theory argues that people in the organization engage in a dynamic process of refinement of their stories and events that take place among internal and external stakeholders (Boje, 1991). These stories are the antecedent to explain individual assumptions, decisions, and actions of the firm’s people.

It is interesting to note that the storytelling in organizations is being perceived by those two researchers as a platform, an interface, a meeting point, in which the managerial decision-making (the top down structuring of organizational life) and the employee communications patterning the taste and thrust of daily organizing (the bottom up construction of organizational realities) meet one another and not fully able to clash or ignore resort to analogies in order to accommodate each other. An analogy as a signal of possible democratization of organizational processes?

On with the story. On with the JOCM. Please continue to give us as much support as you have given so far – and more.

Slawek Magala