Focus and myopia in research on managing and organizing

Citation

Magala, S.J. (2014), "Focus and myopia in research on managing and organizing", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 27 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-05-2014-0093

Focus and myopia in research on managing and organizing

Article Type: Section I: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 27, Issue 3

This is the third editorial in 2014, 100 years after the breakout of First World War, the most spectacular historical piece of evidence that the west does not have the right to feel morally superior to the rest just because it has dynamite and poisonous gases and produces more cigarettes. Every now and then one of my peers, usually upon stepping down as the editor in chief of a ranked journal, reflects on his (more often than not it is his rather than hers) experiences. He usually expresses both a relief and a general worry. A relief that one does not have to avoid flattery by the academic masses climbing to a very special heaven where rankings are like clouds one lives and thrives on. A general worry that in spite of one's supreme morality issuing pangs of conscience and demanding vigilance, the entire academic business is somewhat gone astray and ended up in myopic complicity with powers that be. A typical example has been provided, for instance, by Martin Parker, who was listed as the third co-author of a paper published in 2008 in Organization (Vol.15 No. 2, 2008, pp. 271-282, the other authors being Stephen Dunne and Stefano Hearney) – “The responsibilities of management intellectuals: a survey.” The authors claim that management journals “create a general state of myopia” among management scholars, who are subsequently unable to notice the vital issues in politics around them – “even making a virtue out of ignorance in this regard.” The authors use strong words:

Can anyone argue that war, environmental destruction, prejudice, health, race and migration or the gap between the rich and the poor are not important for contemporary life? (Parker et al., 2008, p. 272).

There are many ways of explaining this myopia of entire research communities. First, it is not necessarily cynical hypocrisy. Most of our colleagues, including Martin Parker, and the undersigned, understand very well that killing field of inequality are a major problem, which has to be tackled before we start thinking about solving the complex bottlenecks in morally sustainable growth of complex societies. Most of us also know that political power and ideological domination work hand in hand with economic management and thus it is easier to bail out large corporations producing cars and large banks producing sophisticated financial services than to cover millions of individuals in rich societies with health insurance or to supply clean water and universal education to all human communities and all school age children. But we can make a difference and we should want to. If there is anything one can sense in the beginning of 2014, when the present editorial for the third issue of JOCM is being written, then it is a growing awareness that the last 10 years of the twentieth and the first 10 years of the twenty-first century had been lived in a neoliberal stupor and the slow creeping conspiracy of the authoritarian dictatorships. In a sense, the twentieth century died around the state of the union speech of president Barack Obama in 2014; the speech was balanced and cautious, but even the most corrupt and partisan media and even the most biased segments of public did not dare to defend the neoliberal nonsense as a serious moral or ideological ground. If the beginning of the twentieth century was lived under the shadow of the infamous poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, in which he claimed that an individual is a zero, a nothing, while society as a collective counts, the last years of the twentieth century had been lived under the equally infamous battle cry of Margaret Thatcher. She claimed that “there is no such thing as society,” because only individuals exist, while societies are more or less imagined communities.

Imagined communities or not, they were real enough to push hundreds of thousands, even millions of Ukrainians to the streets and barricades of Kiev and other cities – this in harsh winter with temperatures down to -20°C . They did not come down to face beatings by the Ukrainian riot police, to face kidnappings, torture and death in the hands of the Russian special forces just because they were moved by a political ideology. They came to say that they disagree with their pro-Russian puppet president and that they would rather live like citizens of democratic states within the European Union than as poor and enslaved Russian citizens. Citizens of Russian Federation are deprived of civic liberties, for instance free speech, and subjected to terror and corruption of the ruling class recruited from the former functionaries of the secret police. It is not clear what the outcome of the present conflict is going to be, but democracy seems attractive enough as an ideal of an imagined community, for which millions are willing to sacrifice themselves.

This is the context, in which a special themed section on principle leadership and organizational change in schools (from a cross-cultural, comparative perspective) seems to acquire even more topicality. The section is preceded by an editorial by Kadir Beycioglu.

The regular issue opens with a paper by Anthony Hussenot's conceptual paper on “Analyzing organization through disagreements: the concept of managerial controversy.” His point of view, which had been intuitively understood by the philosophers (the “eventist” ontology of Alfred N. Whitehead is a case in point), is that researchers would learn much more about managing and organizing if they paid more attention to what appears a fleeting and artificial social construction (which can assume a form of categories, typologies, meanings, beliefs, etc.) as it emerges and becomes a “reality” for actors. Ukrainians freezing on the barricades of Kiev do think democratic vision of their country is a reality worth bringing about.

The second regular paper has been written by Marianne Stang Våland and Susse Georg on “The socio-materiality of designing organizational change.” Creativity and intimate link between a working space and knowledge production are becoming the key issues in our complex societies, primarily because the question prompts revision of our ideas about social planning, urban spaces, architecture for a civil society, and son. These questions are being asked from very different quarters. They are being asked by some inhabitants of the Silicon Valleys (“Who owns the future?” is a recent case in point), but also by organizational sciences and sciences of management. Awareness of material design of our working spaces becomes very relevant for the ability of our organizations to accommodate bottom-up initiatives and inventions. This is what the protesting Ukrainians have also discovered: that if they let their Russian puppet rule the country, only the Putin-like dictators will have the right to be creative (and creatively waste resources on Potyomkin villages disguised as Olympic centers), while the rest will have to admire and applaud. Stang Våland pleads for a conscious analysis of managerial implications of adopting a design attitude to organizational change. Våland's analysis is an ethnographic study of the interplay between spaces constructed by architectural design and a real life movement and interacting in these spaces after a physical relocation to a new office building. Organization of a social space within the organizational routines, a space both physical and virtual, which facilitates emergent change, which coaches toward creative inputs and makes it easier and more attractive to share knowledge rather than to use it as a weapon in a competitive struggle against everybody else in an organization – all this, according to Våland, can relieve managers from their traditional role constraints – they do not have to be the keepers of a designer's top-down solution. They can allow different organizational actors to contribute to the ongoing re-designing and renegotiation of design. It is indeed surprising how little we followed the lead of Elton Mayo, who had observed as early as the Hawthorne experiments, that even a relatively minor manipulation of a light arrangement in the working spaces can have significant effects measured in performance and sociability or esprit de corps.

The third paper tackles a core problem and the main differentiating factor between democratic and authoritarian organizing and managing, namely the problem of control. Tiago Costa, Henrique Duarte and Ofelia Anna Palermo have written a paper on “Control mechanisms and perceived organizational support: exploring the relationship between new and traditional forms of control.” The authors have developed and tested a scale (which they code-named SIOCS – as in Socio-Ideological Organizational Controls) which they compare to a Human Resource Management Controls scale by Snell and Youndt and to a Perceived Organizational Support scale by Eisenberger et al. They invited participants to take part in their study by using the e-mails and the so-called social networks (like a more professional LinkedIn and a more gossipy Facebook). Generally speaking their findings confirm the results of Gabriel's psychoanalytical study of organizations with respect to the significance of values, beliefs, and their promotion. While they think that this promotion belongs to the subjective aspects of human resources, they are prepared to go beyond a behaviorist approach and tackle an inter-subjective problem of specific discourses which, in turn, favor the construction of meanings among employees. It is almost moving to read the last sentence of this fairly quantitative study: “[…] more attention should be paid to exchange processes and possible effects generated on employees reciprocity behaviors and trust. Studies in this direction would complement the existing theoretical reflections by showing the material effects that culture and subjective approaches to individuals’ identities can have over organizations.” Yes, indeed.

The next paper, by Jay Joseph, is about “Managing change after the merger” and is based on an application of a social identity theory to the M&A integration studies. The author found that the in-group cohesion achieved prior to merger did facilitate identification with the new organizational structure after the merger and did reduce hostility or rivalry among employee groups involved. He pointed out that a creation of a low threat environment in which both emerging partners have a comparable legitimacy was important, as was the reduction of status differences and their employment in local power struggles. Who we are as communities, imagined or not, does matter, indeed.

Finally, Syed Zamberi Ahmad wrote on “Examining entrepreneurial intention through cognitive approach using Malaysia GEM data.” Ever since the GLOBE studies of perceived desirable leadership characteristics have been conducted in clusters of countries, researchers have been interested in investigating the willingness to take entrepreneurial risks and the patterns of national recognition granted to those who take them. Ahmad studied three kinds of perceptions and beliefs, which are present in thinking about entrepreneurship in Malaysia. First, what individuals think about entrepreneurs, second, what do they think about their chances to succeed (with or without corruption), and finally, what is their status and cultural legitimacy when they decide to become entrepreneurs. In a sense, the Malaysian author had spontaneously made a tacit equation sign between social climbers and entrepreneurs. After all, entrepreneurial risk is a risk taken by upwardly mobile individuals, who hope to move up in material welfare, but also in social recognition and ranking respect. It is interesting to note that in school education in Malaysia the figure of Abdul Rahman Bin Auf, who is said to have been the prophet Muhammad's companion, is used to stimulate children's interest in business entrepreneurship.

The third issue of JOCM is thus closing in Asia, in a country, which has once expelled Singapore from its political bonds for too overt Marxist and communist leanings of organized labor, only to see this expelled city-state grow into an entrepreneurial center with political differences neutralized in a deep freeze. It is very well off, with Chinese majority dominating economics and politics, Malay language as formally the main language of the realm and the mix of Indians, Malaysians, and Chinese as a testing ground for the intercultural entrepreneurial initiatives. And yet, the Singaporeans are fairly remote country cousins of democratic countries. Will they, like Ukrainians, claim their civic rights one day?

Slawomir Jan Magala