Editorial

Citation

Magala, S. (2009), "Editorial", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 22 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2009.02322caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 22, Issue 3

Whenever one opens a book about change management, one is bound to encounter a stern warning that without peripheral vision leaders and their followers will be unable to adjust their inter-organizational dynamics and personal sights to the broader rhythms of social life flowing outside of the factory or office gates. This warning is accompanied by a suggestion that one should find a way of stepping aside from busy roles and ongoing interactions in order to “reflect” (“we recommend coaching or action learning if you are serious about developing yourself as a reader”, Cameron and Green, 2007, p. 268) or make sense of what we are busy with. Ranks of professionals who are ready to offer their consulting, training and coaching services to managers and managed, underemployed and burning out, under-challenged and overstressed – are swelling and so are the ranks of the academic researchers producing legitimate knowledge for consultants, practitioners and the rest of mankind.

How do we go about meeting the increasingly difficult requirements of various professionals for specialist and applicable, relevant and legitimate knowledge? No royal roads, to be sure. In the present issue of Journal of Organizational Change Management, we begin with 508 hospitals in Taiwan, which were studied from the point of adopting e-learning systems in order to upgrade knowledge and skills of hospital staff (the alternative being measurable in intolerable levels of medical errors causing death of patients). “Moving hospitals toward e-learning adoption: an empirical investigation” by Shin-Yuan Hung, Charlie C. Chen and Wan-Ju Lee does not limit itself to the issue at hand. The authors are sensitive to the complexities of a hospital as a professional organization with dual authority: senior executives and managers on the one hand, and top practitioners on the other, and they are open to broader comparisons with the USA, Singaporean, Canadian or German hospitals as well. Are hospitals the pioneers in a move towards standard-based, web-enabled, open learning architecture of future organizational learning systems? Is there a drift towards them?

The paper by Victor Dos Santos Paulino from Toulouse brings us closer to another high-tech industry, namely space and aircraft producing plants. The author adopts population ecology approach, duly quoting Hannan and Freeman and pointing out that a change, however desirable, always carries with it dangers and risks – increasing the risk of organizational mortality, for instance, or to view it from another perspective, constraining change processes which are considered admissible in an organizational environment defined as highly volatile and risky. High-reliability organizations (certainly legitimate requirement with respect to aircraft producers) – according to the author – are thus faced with a paradox. In order to conduct very innovative programs (designing and constructing spacecraft can be classified as innovative activity), they have to wallow in “fat” of protective inertia in order to avoid potentially lethal changes. This works when risks are indeed high – but then, when it decreases, one should get lean and ready to change again. What can we do to increase managers’ ability to tell the difference? To notice when risks go down? To either overcome resistance to change or to the acceptance of inertia?

Resistance to change has been studied by Leanne Cutcher who focused on a case of an Australian credit union trying to explain why front-desk employees within one of the branch offices resisted change much more than in other locations. Change was perceived as a hostile decision imposed by indifferent “powers that be” from above and threatening the work- and personality-based (including gender-linked) identities “of good friends, mothers, and caring members of local communities.” In other words, resources for successful design and implementation of resistance had been found by employees in the past “stories” of organizations embedding among members-not-just-customers and a sense of belonging to a local community. Cutcher concludes that tradition and place offer powerful resources for resisting managerial strategies which fail to recognize local complexities and “a complex grid of employee life experiences” (needless to say, she quotes Alvesson and Willmott) and her final words merit more than passing attention:

The fact that the women continued to resist the changes being introduced, despite the increasing managerial denigration, reduced earnings, and continuing negative health effects, tells us much about the continuous process of identity construction that we all engage in, as we seek to find dignity and meaning through our work.

Alfons H. van Marrewijk went further in studying spatial aspects of organizational change and investigated corporate headquarters as physical embodiments of organizational change. He points out to us that the changing styles of corporate headquarters’ architectural designs reflect cultural changes, which organizations underwent and are still undergoing – under our very eyes (for those of us who happen to traverse the Amsterdam ring passing the “southern axis” this architectural fair of corporate vanities is a visdual reality). He claims to have found traces of the privatization campaigns of the late twentieth century in the subsequent “waves” or “generations” of corporate headquarters of KPN from 1989 through 1996-2007 which are “powerful representations of organizational ambitions and corporate value orientations.” Socio-spatial consultants – beware!

From outer space of corporate headquarters to the inner spaces of individual employees. R. Michael Bokeno takes us to the world of organizational learning viewed as an emancipatory project and suggests that we rethink Senge’s concept of “personal mastery” in the light of Marcuse’s idea of radical subjectivity (not on its own merits but because it carries a Freudian psychoanalytical message). Freudian inspiration hovers above the remaining contributions to the issue. The issue closes with Yi-Chia Chiu and Yi-Ching Liaw’s paper on “organizational slack.” With the paper on organizational slack we have made a full circle and returned to Taiwan – this time not to hospitals but to 529 high-tech Taiwanese companies studied over the period 1997-2005. The authors distinguish between available, recoverable and potential types of “slack” and basically agree that it should never be eliminated for fear that the forthcoming challenge is easier to meet if slack offers hidden inner reserves. Although the authors follow a quantitative methodology, they appreciate the necessity to include qualitative inquiry in the knowledge build-up leading to salient managerial decisions about a “just measure of slack”. Ex oriente lux?

Slawek Magala