Intellectual trends and research communications

Citation

Magala, S. (2013), "Intellectual trends and research communications", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 26 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2013.02326baa.002

Intellectual trends and research communications

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 26, Issue 2

Perhaps it is not so good to look back when the journal is already second issue into the second quarter of a century since Dave Boje had founded it. Perhaps it is better to look forward and to ask oneself why is the entire research field in organization theory still so slavishly uptight about the issues of power and inequality? After all, no academic career of a full tenured professor would come to an abrupt end if he or she noticed the persuasion, translation and interpretation of power issues into less exciting and potentially less politically relevant misnomers? Let us look back, however, in order to leap forward (no great leaps, but some hop and hope anyway).

The first paper in the present issue, second one in 2013, offers an opportunity, which deserves attention. The title could hardly have been less inviting: “Uncovering the intellectual development of the Journal of Organizational Change Management: a knowledge stock and bibliometric study 1995-2011” does not exactly sound as inviting as “In Search of Excellence” or “Structures in Fives”, “Change Masters” or even “Images of Organization”. And yet, I hope that our creative readers will not drop us as quickly as they dropped the excellence book (though bureaucrats picked it up – I am teaching currently a course for the topmost section of our students from all faculties designed specifically to foster excellence in teaching and producing future elites). I hope our authors will not come to regret having used our articles in their research and teaching (though Mintzberg publicly declared MBA schools to be a blasphemy in face of Pure Love of Truth). I hope, finally, that images of organizing we had conveyed will stick to their research memories after they have forgot everything they have read about in books (although Karl Weick seems to think that writing on management is like theorizing about poetry and thinks that this is especially true with respect to “the poetics of process” – see “The Poetics of Process: Theorizing the Ineffable in Organization Studies”, in Hernes, Tony, Maitlis, Sally, eds., Process, Sensemaking and Organizing, Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 102-111).

The authors (Laurent Giraud and David Autissier) claim to have described the contents of JOCM in the abovementioned period, to have identified the most influential, most often quoted and accessed articles and thus to have traced a certain evolution of the journal’s contents over time. Needless to say, when they announced their study, I have felt a little bit like an individual, who had just been approached by a famous photographer or painter with a kind request for a permission to shoot or paint a portrait in order to put it on a public display. General features are pleasant enough: quotes at 740, impact factor at 0,744, five-year impact factor 0,959, cited half-life 8,9. One might add that 740 citations is only one third of what a journal like Technological Forecasting and Social Change scores, but the latter also publishes three times more articles per year.

Some general statistics raise no eyebrows: in the period 1995-2000 there were on the average 32 papers per year, in 2001-2006 – almost 39 and in the last period taken into consideration – 2007 – 2011, there were more than 42. Less than half of them were and remained single-authored, and most of the authors came from North America (both USA and Canada), northern Europe (The Netherlands and Scandinavia) and what the authors term Oceania (mostly Australia, occasionally New Zealand). Equally unsurprising are the conclusions that articles about change process and change content dominate and that the share of empirical articles at the expense of theoretical ones went up (from 47 to 69 percent), while theoretical articles’share dropped from 53 to 31 percent. Our most quoted authors are Senge and Weick, who can be considered classics of change management (Weick a theoretical pioneer, Senge the first respectable implementer). Morgan peaked before 2000, Schein, Boje, Eisenhardt, van de Ven and Poole, Czarniawska, Nonaka and Takeouchi and Hamel and Pralad – all made their significant and often quoted apperances. What strikes me as a reflection of a broader development in the field is that while between 2001-2006 books made for 77 percent of the sources quoted in articles published by the JOCM, they went down to 59 percent by 2011 (as if authors felt that to show how au courant they are with the fast growing research field, they must quote the latest articles in other periodicals, and not books – a technique once used by nuclear physicists to stimulate public funding of large accelerators). I think that some conclusions about changes in influence merit attention. For instance, among authors, whose influence grew throughout the entire 25 years of JOCM, there are Weick, Eisenhardt and Czarniawska. The authors who peaked before 2006 and whose influence declined afterwards include Boje, and Miles and Huberman, while a modest growth in influence in the last period is attributed to Kunda, Willmott, Geertz, Kotter, Nonaka and Takeouchi and van de Ven and Poole. Plotting a diagram of the intellectual structure of JOCM articles, the authors point out a “hard core”of our research galaxy, made up of the authors like Senge, Argyris and Schon, Weick, Schein, Glaser and Strauss, followed by Burrell, Morgan, Pettigrew and Smircich. Over time only Weick and Senge remained at the core, but they were approached by Czarniawska and Boje moving towards the status of classics. Let us close with the authors’ conclusion: constructivist research and language based approaches (rhetoric, narratives, story-telling) were clearly preferred, methodological awareness increased, and empirical and practice-oriented papers increased their share of the journal’s space.

The second paper by Staffan Furusten deals with the commercialzed profesionalizm of management consultants – a very urgent problem, since over the past 30 years, roughly coinciding with the 25 years of JOCM, the ranks of fee-earning organizational advisers, coaches and consultants increased 1600 percent In The Netherlands alone one counts 15,000 individuals making a living by advising the others how to run their businesses. He suggests that the authorization of these new itinerant experts does not follow the old patterns of apprenticeship in academically sanctioned bureaucratic institutions, but neither does it imitate the patterns of emergent entrepreneurial profession. The surprising conclusion is that the market – firms willing to pay for a particular kind of assistance – emerges as the major form of authorization. Furusten names rites de passage to which the market forces presumably subject candidates for the role of a professional consultant: versatility, availability, relevance and a moderate twist – “differentiation not deviation”. This seems to me to be an interesting contribution to the social theory of an expertise and the social construction of a new form of professionalism.

Anna A. Łupina-Wegener writes on a human resource integration in subsidiary mergers and acquisitions with empirical illustrations from Poland trying to provide a practical instrument for post M&A company HR managers in a ”brownfield” or “greenfield” context. Deniz Kantur and Arzu eri-Say analyze dependencies and influences between organizational context and firm-level entrepreneurship (they call their analysis a multiple case one) contributing to the growing literature on corporate entrepreneurship within the Turkish business environment (one of the most dynamic ones in the present day world). Angela Risquez and Sarah Moore move towards “Exploring feelings about technology integration in higher education: individuation and congruence” – the last two terms clearly reveal their theoretical background in psychoanalysis as a starting point for considering the psychoanalytical dynamics of organizing processes. They analyzed 146 responses to an open ended survey in which they had asked questions about attitudes towards an introduction of a new learning technology at a university level institution. Feelings matter, particularly when they are closely related to identity – and individuation is one of the basic ways of building one, organizational rules or no rules. Pekka Aula and Saku Mantere continue in a “soft” vein writing on “Making and breaking sense: an inquiry into the reputation change”. Their conclusions are that an “arena” model of stakeholders as “rhetors” who are engaged in a continuous debate about what organization is, is the most promising theoretical construct allowing for the reconstruction of both creation and destruction of “sense” made out of organizing processes. Their overall conclusion: reputation is always negotiation and not something fixed an organization can simply inform others about. Weifeng Chen, Adrian Woods and Satwinder Singh examine some of the most fascinating and least understood processes of change in recent Chinese history, namely Organizational Change and Development of Reformed Chinese Township and Village Enterprises” – a study had been conducted in the Guotai International Group based in Zhangjiagang, near Suzhou (province of Jiangsu) and covers changes which had occurred in the past 40 years. The most interesting findings tell us that the “hybrid” organizational constructs for internally top-down managed and externally market-oriented but politically government-obedient resemble those of their Korean or Japanese counterparts much more than those of the Northern American or European partners, even if the formal shape is that of a joint venture. Finally, the issue closes with Jorge Humberto Mejia-Morelos, François Grima and Georges Trepo’s study of “Change and Stability Interaction Processes in SMEs; a Comparative Case Study” and one of their conclusions closes the second issue in 2013:

“Rethinking the relationship between change and stability is therefore critical for new theory building and for deriving implications for guiding modern organizations’ practices. Our research findings show that stability variables can influence successful results of a specific change initiative (certified cases). The three theoretical models represent one of the first proposals that integrate both perspectives (change and stability) into a pragmatic frame for entrepreneurs, owners, consultants and managers of small businesses.”

So perhaps this is an indication that even the authors of the most empirical studies feel the urgent need for the next step – theoretical salvation and the flight towards pragmatically relevant abstraction, a theoretical beacon, a worthy pursuit of truth in a pluralist intercommunity of interdisciplinary academic and inter-institutional businesses and public undertakings. The road to theoretical salvation is not very easy – and the trench warfare of qualitative and quantitative clans of methodologies does not appear to be nearing its end. This is one more reason to pay close attention to the paper closing our issue, namely to Dominie Garcia’s and Julia C. Guesing’s “Qualitative Research Methods in International Organizational Change Research”. Not only do the authors present an overview of qualitative methods for doing research on organizational change in an international context – they also discuss software tools for qualitative analysis and global teams research projects and pay attention to the “narrowing the divide between academic scholarship and management practice”. Their Table 1 provides a final bracket for the entire issue – if the authors of the first paper analyze JOCM alone, Garcia and Gluesing compare JOCM to Journal of Change Management and Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. From this comparison we emerge as champions of qualitative methods. We also seem to be very much the best allies of narrative approaches, the only ones who notice ethnography and we also seem to like case method more than the others. Not bad for identity building. So be it.

S. Magala