Search results

This chapter presents a case study involving a socio-economic Organizational Development (OD) project carried out in a European subsidiary of a large multinational corporation traded on the New York Stock Exchange. This research case study, one of the 1,854 socio-economic interventions undertaken by the ISEOR research center, was chosen for its good illustration of the OD engineering process. It connects the dots between OD and financial performance, between immediate results and the creation of potential. We look at some of the tools and methods, such as overhauling loss and profit accounts and balance sheets with an eye on socio-economic balance, to illustrate socioeconomic tools at work and how they help enhance compatibility between the objectives of all stakeholders, including shareholders. With this case study, we also set out to provide food for thought on the contribution of socio-economic OD to the construction of socially responsible capitalism (Savall et al., 2015).

This chapter addresses the “Taylorism–Fayolism–Weberism (TFW) virus,” a metaphor developed to highlight how organizational features recommended by each of these three management theorists produce dysfunctions that create unintended hidden costs that adversely impact organizations and their employees. The virus leads to an ideology where cost cutting is seen as the best means to improve an organization’s performance. We explore the problematic features of the TFW virus: hyperspecialization, separation of work design from work execution, and depersonalized job descriptions designed for workers who are falsely assumed to be lazy. We then address how these organizational features are related to micro dysfunctions and hidden costs (e.g., poor work organization) that accumulate into macro-level dysfunctions and costs that form the features of the risk society envisioned by Ullrich Beck (1992). These dysfunctions collectively threaten human and planetary existence. Next, we describe how the socioeconomic approach to management (SEAM) can address the TFW virus in ways that manage and remediate micro, macro, and planetary risks that emerge from a globalized enterprise. We conclude by offering a hopeful agenda for research on how to use SEAM to more effectively manage the emerging micro and macro dysfunctions and impacts of the world risk society.

The evolution of capitalism has gone through four major epochs, from the first tangible exchanges of goods and resources, to the generation of wealth by entrepreneurs held personally accountable for their actions, to cost-cutting measures for increasing efficiencies and maximizing wealth for the few, and finally to a socially irresponsible form. The fourth epoch dispatched the last remaining shards of capitalist responsibility to anyone but investors, as the basis of wealth appropriation shifted to manipulating the speculative future worth of intangible or fictitious capital. This evolution through four epochs has sadly been a process of diminishing value creation (Boje et al., 2017).

We are trapped in an era of socially irresponsible capitalism with little respect for humankind. But, it was not always this way. The earliest references to entrepreneurial behavior emerged in the east during the Han Dynasty and in the west in the eighteenth century. Somewhat like the fourth epoch of the twenty-first century, these global beginnings of early capitalism were also directed by opportunistic desires to pursue wealth generation by taking advantage of people’s needs and wants. Although capitalists have consistently been the prime directors of resources and the distributors of wealth, in the early epochs of capitalism they were different. The early epoch entrepreneurs bore personal risks of business failure, consequences that might impact them for a lifetime.

The antenarrative generative mechanisms, or spirals, help us understand the interconnectivities of “real” and “actual” domains of reality (Bhaskar, 1975; Boje, 2016). Socially irresponsible capitalism is pulling global societies into a downward spiral toward an addiction of speculative destruction and dehumanization, transforming “real” into “actual” realities. We need a force to pull us back up toward a revitalized form of socially responsible capitalism. This force is called the socio-economic approach to management (SEAM), and in the responsible entrepreneurial spirit of earlier epochs, the path to recovery can be accomplished by accountably working with one organization or entity at a time.

This chapter first investigates the historical double-spiral-helix footsteps of socially irresponsible capitalism in the making. Then through a SEAM project example, we discuss how the micro-societal perspective of an organization places it at a deeper level of reality, deeper within the double-spiral-helix meta-reality of macro-societal capitalism. Finally, we demonstrate how the socioeconomic approach can help diagnose the deeper realities with an organization, beyond the evident narratives, to reveal the third spiral of deficiencies. This third spiral disenables the organization’s ability to activate the micro forces of socially responsible capitalism.

This essay, invited by the editors, provides a retrospective overview of Robert Gephart's career using qualitative research methods to study disasters, and disseminating findings from the research in important management and organizational journals. Dr Gephart's work is associated with many methodological innovations. These include early use of grounded theory; early application of text analysis software to support analysis of extensive documentary data sets including legal proceedings and transcripts; development of ethnostatistics to explore risk assessment; explicating and elaborating abductive processes during the research experience; and using an autoethnographic approach to embed data from his own life in his research (before the term autoethnography was in common use). His contributions to the area of disasters and research methods innovations are wide ranging and provide tools for improving our understanding of risks and crises, and for managing them.

This chapter relates quantum storytelling consulting (QSC) to ensemble leadership theory (ELT) by Rosile, Boje, & Claw (2016). What kinds of leadership does it take to attend to the forecaring in advance of the future and how does this relate to quantum storytelling? In a music ensemble, no one musician is the star: they are equal, all are the stars of the show, emerging as stars and then taking a supporting role in cyclic rotation. ELT is important to the world ecology because it is a together-we-are-all-leaders approach. Rather than restricting leadership to one or a few people, the ensemble of many networks of leadership is important. I will contrast ELT with more familiar models of leadership: dispersed, distributed, and relational that restrict leadership to a few. One primary difference is that ELT includes both community and ecology and it is rooted in Indigenous Ways of Knowing (IWOK) that extend from the ancient Southwest US and Mexico. My contribution here is to recognize that ELT is rooted in the rhizomatic fractal, whereas the other models of leadership discussed here (dispersed, distributed, and relational) have been linear-, cyclic-, or spiral-fractal waves. A fractal is defined as recurring self-sameness patterns across scalabilities. I will look to Deleuzian rhizomatic-fractals, which ELT purports to be and make an observation: ELT revived and reinvented in late modern capitalism, must be a correlate with the dominant hierarchic kinds of leadership of here and now, which is this world situation we are now in. Does not each revolution (steam, diesel/gas combustion, cyber-information, and liquid modernity) actually create anew the enslavement of human beings in hierarchic forms of leadership? At the end of this chapter, ensemble leadership will be related to whole-world ecological health.

We live in organizations addicted to problematic narratives. My purpose is to develop intelligent action understandings of how to care for organizations addicted to problematic elevator pitch narratives and one-sided stories by mapping quantum storytelling “Tamara-Land” forces ignored beneath and between them both (Boje, 1995). Tamara-land is the everyday activity of people in organizations chasing stories spatially distributed in different rooms, hallways, buildings that are temporally simultaneous, with materialities that are agential to the telling. For example, in this conference, the immersive theater into Tamara-Land is done in Steel Case open office spaces, as audience decides which actors to follow as they exit each scene. You cannot chase them all, and cannot be everywhere at once in this spacetimemattering. Quantum storytelling does not search for simple word or text messaging tag lines to explain open offices. Quantum storytelling uncovers deep behavior patterns of the spacetimemattering. “Quantum storytelling includes nondiscursive and behavioral aspects embodied in the storyteller’s life, in their living story behavioral-performative agentiality” (Boje, 1995, p. 114) and in nonhuman’s materialism featured in Karen Barad’s (2007) and Anete Strand’s material storytelling work. Quantum storytelling of Tamara-Land mapping at macro scale traces the interplay of people, planet, and profit (aka Triple Bottom Line, 3BL) but does not reduce it to imagined profitability metrics. I will critique 3BL for not proposing any method to measure people and planet first and by default reducing all dimensions to just bottom line profit measures. The consequence is that a runaway, maximizing fractal, known in socioeconomic work as the Taylor–Fayol–Weber rationality or “TFW virus” (Worley, Zardet, Bonnet, & Savall, 2015, pp. 23–24; Savall& Peron, 2015), attains functional structuralism (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012). In quantum storytelling fractal work, it’s “TFW fractal” profiteering that is destroying both planet and people, at an ever-accelerating rate (Boje & Henderson, 2014; Boje, 2015; Henderson & Boje, 2015). My contribution is to propose a different fractal pattern, the Mandelbrot fractal that actually sets limits on runaway fractal appetite. Both the 3BL and the VA techno-digital fractal narrative spiral more and more materials, energy, and people into the risk of an addictive TFW virus pattern, without limit.

The purpose of the research is to develop methodological approach to evaluation of effectiveness of development of “conflict-free” socio-economic system.

The fundamental platform of the research is the classic approach to evaluation of effectiveness of managerial practice in socio-economic system.

A methodological approach to evaluation of effectiveness of development of “conflict-free” socio-economic system is developed; it envisages calculating the ratio of aggregate results (including advantages) from “conflict-free” development of systems to aggregate expenditures for management of conflicts. Successful approbation of this approach by the example of modern “conflict-free” socio-economic systems – Turkey and Japan – showed its readiness for practical application. The obtained results show that in Turkey in 2018 the effectiveness of development of “conflict-free” socio-economic system is acceptable (normal), as the value of the calculated Erbs index is in the interval (1,5;2), that is the results of managing the conflicts exceed the expenditures. In Japan in 2018, effectiveness of development of “conflict-free” socio-economic system is very high, as the value of the calculated Erbs index is in the interval (2;3) – that is, expenditures for management of conflicts are minimum, and results are very high.

Advantages of the developed methodological approach to evaluation of effectiveness of development of “conflict-free” socio-economic system, which emphasize perspectives of its practical application, are the detailed structure, variability, and universal character.