Editorial

Editorial

We manage (or not), study managing (or not) and some of the papers end up on a printed page (or not). Business of managing, organizing, changing goes on as usual. This is the impression one gets scanning the stream of theoretical and empirical reports. As usual? What should one do if business as usual looks very unusual indeed? What should one do it the closest analogy for a variety of different points, perspectives, aspects, views and theories is with contemporary art and politics, not science as its representatives would like themselves to be seen.

The present issue opens with the paper on “Managing the unwanted truth” and closes with the paper on the introduction of the business score cards in a single country (The Netherlands), but in different professional communities. No matter how hard we try, managing or dealing with managers we always face dissent, argument, opposition, resistance. Vickie Cox Edmnondson and George Munchus distinguish four dissent strategies, which begin as an attempt to ignore changes and end with an explosive rebellion: they speak of organizational silence, rumbling, communication and blasting. One of their findings, unsurprisingly, is that one should not kill (demonize, retaliate against) the messenger. Jack Walker, Achilles Armenakis and Jeremy Bernerth examine factors influencing organizational change efforts. They attempt to integrate the following change factors; content, context, process and individual differences. An ambitious undertaking – are the relationships between these factors always detectable early enough to help managers develop successful change implementation strategies? The next paper had been submitted by Stanley Harris and Michael Cole, who had designed a “stages of change” perspective on managers' motivation to learn and embedded it in a “leadership development context”. Somewhat mysteriously, they announce a contribution to the research on “longitudinal reactions to the development effort” but in conclusions modestly limit themselves to the expression of hope that applying their findings may guide pragmatic tailoring of pre-development “readiness/awareness efforts”. Ali Akgun, John Byrne, Gary Lynn and Halit Keskin focus on organizational unlearning as a relatively neglected aspect of learning processes. They come up with the typology of unlearning, which includes the reinventive, formative, operative and adjustive type of unlearning in organizations. David Oliver and Claus Jacobs try to tackle the theory of organizational learning through a reconstruction of the “guiding principles” which, according to them, are picked up, invented and integrated by social learning in managerial teams. The swiftness with which such guiding principles are invented depends on the dialogical processes, which include – eviva dissent! – inquiry, divergence and attempts at reconciliation (the authors illustrate their theory with empirical study of a telecommunications firm from Europe). Some of their conclusions are worth quoting:

Managers have a limited ability to manage or “impose” dialogue directly and a priori on a group or team. It is, however, possible to create the conditions for dialogue by, for example, ensuring that managers/superiors role model an open, respectful atmosphere; encouraging equality of airtime, listening and pacing conversations by deliberately suspending utterances, and ensuring shared ownership of process and content through involvement in designing the conversational arena and setting the agenda.

After such knowledge what forgiveness? Well, the authors admit that these democracy-enhancing approaches could be turned as spies sometimes are and become “hegemonic devices used to facilitate a more managerialist decision-making agenda”. How to avoid it? Piecemeal social engineering and a careful selection of self-imposed limits appear as possible precautions.

Gavin Schwartz and Arthur Shulman limit their focus to the patterning of limited structural change and argue that a bounded-rationality and bounded-“actionability” are not exceptions and deviations from a perfect ideal type of an organizational change, but perfectly “normal” demonstrations of a patterning logic of organizational change. “Prescribed change gestalts and templates” have to go – the logic of patterning and a research on “associated adjustment processes” offers a way out. Cees van Workum, Noelle Arts and Karin de Grip discuss creativity, planning and organizational change focusing on means-ends planning and alternative approaches to a planned change, trying to foster creativity in organizations. They believe that it is possible to introduce alternative ways of planning, which would be more stimulating for individual creative inputs. This is exciting stuff if you realize that managers who plan manufacturing, servicing or anything at all have to look for their inspiration (how to unleash creativity in my professional bureaucracy) to the hippie fringe, to the marginalized cultural pioneers and outcasts, the gallery owners, the bizarre curators, the blasphemous critics, the anti-establishment schools, half-mad artists, etc. Creative capital is there all right and so are successful ways of investing it in a socially acceptable and ultimately “profitable” way (though the term profit sounds fairly metaphorically here).

After flights of fancy and attempts to tether creativity, as if it was a huge dusty cloud of galloping wild horses on a corporate prairie, we finish on a sober note. Geert Bram, Jos Benders and Stefan Heusinkveld study the evolution of the managerial applications of balanced score card in The Netherlands. It turns out, somewhat surprisingly, that BSC did not become just a management fad spreading like a fashion and then giving way to the next “hot thing”. It had been used selectively, always redesigned to fit the consultants' or managers' own agenda, and always served with a different dressing, depending on what audience had been addressed (the authors analyzed printed media contents, in other words – journals and periodicals which carried articles propagating BSC). The surprising element is that the fashion had been much more influenced by the expected target audiences than by the intrinsic merits and general popularity at the time. One does not sell “because everybody does it” but because “this will be uniquely fit to increase your specific competitiveness”. Perhaps, we could learn from this study how to understand the more visible changes in clothing fashions as well? Thus, could the managers and their academic priests pay back the debt incurred when peeping into the art and market world of contemporary fringe experimental art – fashion designers and marketers could then peep into our kitchen, in which future management fads are brewing.

Slawomir Magala