Pages: 63

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 11

This chapter presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains the organizational change efforts where culture is claimed as a key theme. Culture is seen as either the key issue to be changed or something that is crucial to take seriously in order to make change possible. Many organizations work with, plan or contemplate organizational culture change as an important element in other changes. It is said that organizations must learn to adapt to changes or otherwise risk failure. The book focuses on change design issues: how management operates, and how managerial ideas inform and perhaps misinform actors in organizations. In terms of theoretical framework, one draws cultural thinking that focuses on meanings and symbolism. A sense-making theorist takes the opposite stance, and pays attention to how people reason and act based on their identity and perception of the situation. But theoretical approaches are aligned with a span of different empirical foci.

Pages: 28

This chapter gives an overview and assessment of research and recommendations for organizational change programmes. It also addresses the forces behind, and ways of classifying change. The expansion of the field of organizational change leads to a number of concepts, labels and models. There are writings on the content such as structure, culture and strategy; the process whereby change is accomplished; the various internal and external forces that presumably trigger, accelerate and obstruct change; the scope and magnitude of change; implementation problems. It is common to elaborate on two approaches to planned organizational change depending on levels of analysis. One is the group dynamics school, with its origin in the writings of Lewin and its focus on the work group level and its later development into organizational development (OD). The other is the open systems school, with its origin in organizations as open and living systems and its focus on the organizational level.

Pages: 22

The term ‘organizational culture’ was introduced more systematically in organizational analysis at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. It is understood that organizational culture can either facilitate or obstruct the possibility of implementing strategy and accomplishing change. Cultural change is part of a set of changes: in organizational structure, new ways of enforcing and monitoring behaviour, lay-offs or changes of people in key positions. Basic assumptions are seen as governing behaviour and organizational practices through more visible values and norms that are expressed in various organizational subsystems as rituals, organization structure, leadership and management control systems. One view of cultural change is everyday reframing, which is mainly an informal, ongoing, culture-shaping agenda, involving pedagogical leadership in which an actor exercises a subtle influence through the renegotiation of meaning. Local initiatives are also frequently constrained by broader organizational culture as well as by relations of power.

Pages: 47

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 7

The company Technocom (TC) was created as a separate legal entity as a result of an extensive restructuring of the parent firm, a global high-tech, Global Tech (GT). GT was founded at the beginning of the 1930s and established itself in the international markets during the 1980s. TC produces technically sophisticated and highly developed systems and applications for the high-tech industry. TC has a cultural heritage from its days as an internal unit, with a strong focus on technological advancement and sophistication. Most people are occupied with rather advanced technological development tasks which influence broader cultural orientations. They use an investigative model of management that captures the content of the cultural programme and the organizational context in which it takes place. The investigative model of management represents a useful way of addressing the challenge of analysing extensive and complex empirical material since it is constructed around the activities and tasks of the organizational change efforts.

Pages: 20

This chapter describes various steps in the cultural change dynamic in order to, at least loosely, describe the emergence and formulation of the ideas and frameworks of those managers initiating the cultural programme as a planned change. People investigate how the managers perceive the situation prior to the conception and initiatives of the cultural change programme; what management wants to achieve by initiating such work; and how they work with issues of design, implementation and interaction with the rest of the company. When employees talk about the existing culture they elevate the type of education and professional background people have by referring to them as engineers and technicians, presumably forming a technologically oriented culture. There is both a kind of positive acknowledgement of this, the opportunity of developing and using sophisticated knowledge, and a negative, focusing on the engineering and technological orientation as forming an arrogant, narrow-minded kind of thinking detached from the market and customers external to the organization.

Pages: 18

This chapter focuses on the specific practices associated with the programme and how various participants interpreted the content and practices of the culture change programme, before addressing outcomes, as indicated by responses some months after the scheduled activities. The implementation process of the culture programme began at a kick-off for the whole company, moved on to the management forum and was then located in the hands of primarily middle managers. Technocom’s management forms a management forum, where managers could meet regularly and discuss various management issues as well as the progress of the cultural change programme. This was the first meeting, for around fifty managers supposedly responsible for the implementation of the cultural workshops. The important step in the programme was the workshops by primarily junior middle managers, supposedly leading to impacts on the engineers on the floor. They analysed how they actually worked and compared that to the values and then concluded on what needed to be changed.

Pages: 36

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 10

This chapter discusses the cultural work at Technocom and key idea in the change programme to provide an occasion for people to discuss vital issues and encourage flow of clarification and change work across the organization. The cultural change work is characterized by a certain ritualistic, rather than engaged and focused, instrumentalism. According to top and senior middle managers it was the junior middle managers and their subordinates who were supposed to be culture carriers and engage in and implement the new culture, based on ideals that were widely shared: the idea is to transfer a new way of thinking down the organization and to encourage suggestions. There was a significant shortage of strong intellectual and emotional/affective engagement from several of those centrally involved in designing and implementing the programme. The shortage is also from other actors, unable to use the occasion to introduce and work with ideas, beliefs and values that could be seen as vital for improving the workplace.

Pages: 12

This chapter investigates how the change programme is unfolded among the various participants on its trajectory. Considering the amount of preparation work and the seemingly well-engineered design previously discussed, one could perhaps expect the various participants to have been sufficiently well oriented about the trajectory and its aims. The chapter discusses the problems of non-connections, reconnections and disconnections between primarily the consultant, the HR people, the middle managers and the originators in top management. The broader, and more theoretical, objective of this chapter is to illuminate the collaboration and interaction between actors, managers, consultants, HR professionals, in change projects, in particular problems with division of labour and a partitioning of culture work. The apparent problems confirm many normative authors’ convictions that top or senior managers must be involved and actively encourage or even demand middle managers to lead change in their units rather than to drive change through corporate staff-led programmes and consultant-led programmes.

Pages: 12

This chapter investigates the ideas and expressions of the cultural change programme, discussing it as a hyperculture, a carved-out set of positive-sounding statements about values, often decoupled from everyday life thinking and practices. Some occupational groups, communicators, consultants, marketing people, branding experts, educators, staff, managers, politicians, government officials and pop-management writers may to a large degree have less of a reality contact and mostly be engaged in plans, policies, PowerPoint presentations, media reports and idealized talk about activities and organizations. The chapter also discusses the cultural work focusing on hyperculture in terms of: post office activities, manufacturing, imitation and conformism, ceremonial talk and ideal fantasy creations. Hyperculture is inspired by certain postmodernists using the term ‘hyperreality’. It is about specific acts and activities in which culture is focused. It is typically composed of a set of positive-sounding stated values circulating in the business press, in consultants’ standard vocabularies and in many companies’ mission and value statements.

Pages: 54

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 15

This chapter discusses the general production of cultural meaning in the change programme. As many interviewees expressed the opinion that the culture change programme was a paper product remote from their everyday life and the real organizational practices, one could say that the cultural change programme tells people little about organizational culture. The change process exhibits various indications of managers being invisible or distanced from lower-level employees. Still, the overall organizational form, in particular as it came through in the cultural change work, bore the imprint of professional bureaucracy. Contrary to what is commonly suggested in the business press, pop-management books and even in many social science texts, bureaucracy is still a common, perhaps the dominant, organizational form in one version or another. A key motive of the change effort is to encourage the employees to move away from a narrow technological focus in favour of considering wider concerns associated with the market and ways of working.

Pages: 17

This chapter discusses change work by addressing sense making, work activities and identities of those involved. After some initial comments on the value of in-depth studies, it looks at the problems of a technocratic approach to change. Another key feature is how non-recognized organizational culture working behind the backs of people plays a key role in the change efforts. A key point concerns the overall images of organizational change work. The chapter explains a kind of ‘root metaphor’ (not explicitly expressed) of change work as a passing on of the baton. Organizational culture works to a high degree non-consciously, behind the backs of people’s identities, informing them in terms of thinking and acting. Change work needs not only to address the substance (ideals, values, practices) of what is supposed to be changed, but also to include the management of meaning and understanding of the roles and identities of those to be mobilized in the work.

Pages: 20

This chapter focuses on the issues of practical relevance for practitioners interested in change management: top and middle managers, management consultants, HR staff, etc. A consultant from a leading management firm is used, a task force is organized and a number of workshops with managers at various levels are launched. A change programme makes all employees aware of the new corporate situation and engages them in realizing values crucial for success and survival is started. The chapter first discusses the hyperculture, symbolic anorexia, and an over-focus on values and a denial of ignorance. The second discusses the various images of change projects and the need for and possibility of developing a shared view and a common language around the specific change project. The third part more directly tries to offer fifteen lessons, through indicating not just traps to escape but also themes worthy of more positive attention in working with change.