Organization

An activity theoretical analysis is presented of an organization that is operating in a rapidly changing sector and whose competitiveness depends significantly upon the design skills of its engineers. The company designs high-technology make-to-order products. Like other organizations that compete through knowledge and innovation, the prosperity of this company depends upon its organizational learning, that is, upon the effectiveness with which it can mobilize, apply and develop its distinctive knowledge base as circumstances change. In the difficult context that the company faces, the speed with which projects can move from the initial concept phase through design to production has to become especially important. The paper outlines a general strategy that was developed as the company sought to control this process and traces the consequences for design practices. An activity theoretical approach is used to model the changes that were attempted and the outcomes which emerged and to introduce a discussion of possible future options. The approach (i) emphasizes the relevance of a historical perspective on organizational change, (ii) features the changing nature of expertise in contemporary manufacturing and (iii) discusses the potential significance for collective learning of tensions and incoherencies within a work system.

This paper inspects our understanding of recent organizational innovations taking place at the margins of radical theory and practice. Its central argument is that political science, in its reaction to such innovations, evinces a hierarchical organizational paradigm that both distorts evidence and hampers further research. The paper then explores the nature of this perceptual failure, tries a variety of conceptual resources which might overcome it and concludes with a re-assessment of the organizational innovations themselves.

We conceptualize bitching as an ambivalent communicative practice that takes place in and contributes to the construction of gendered organizational identities. Through interpretive analyses of in situ bitching among corporate secretaries, we show how the ambivalent dynamics of their collective bitching both maintained stereotypical gender attributes and destabilized the properly professional secretarial identity. By elaborating the ambivalent dynamics of bitching, we offer a more nuanced understanding of the interplay of control and resistance in the communicative construction of gendered workplace identities.

The change management discourse has appropriated central ideas of action research, group dynamics, and the management of attitude change from the political left. This has been concealed by the way that that discourse has written its own history, that is, its historiography. Managerialist accounts of the lives of Kurt Lewin and John Collier (in relation to group dynamics and action research), and of the work of Edgar Schein (in relation to the management of attitude change), are compared with those found in non-managerialist sources. The latter alone reveal Lewin's left activism, his working relationship with the radical John Collier, and the likelihood that Collier invented action research before Lewin. They also show how Schein's theory of attitude change was derived from the Chinese Communist Party. Change management's very construction has been a political process which has written the left out, and shaped an understanding of the field as technocratic and ideologically neutral. However, it is not only managerialist historiographies, but also supposedly more critical approaches to organizational theory which have a historiographical shaping effect.

In recent years, organizational and political debates have accorded a privileged position to enterprise as holding the promise for both corporate and individual development. In several publications, Paul du Gay has articulated a persuasive analysis and critique of the enterprise discourse; he and a number of collaborators have analysed the various managerial discourses and techniques through which employees are reimagined as entrepreneurs, and organizations are to move from dysfunctional bureaucracies to models of excellence. Whilst we share du Gay's critical position towards enterprise and the Foucauldian tradition upon which he draws, we feel that his analysis suffers from several flaws which we articulate around three themes. Firstly, we argue that du Gay's analysis claims too much for enterprise, and relies on a flawed dualism between enterprise and bureaucracy; secondly, we feel that his analysis is over-deterministic and makes too little space for resistance and alternative discourses to enterprise; finally, we suggest that du Gay has presented the same arguments too often and that his work is implicated in the constitution of the enterprise discourse as an accomplished fact within the academic community.

This paper seeks to draw out commonalities between the organizational/practitioners' and academic agenda and to explore the idea that academe may not only reflect the times but also help to create them. In so doing, it examines the extent to which In Search of Excellence, a significant and timely exemplar of the organizational agenda, in effect operationalized The Social Psychology of Organizing. If, it concludes, sensemaking is retrospective, then how can it help us to think about current issues that require action and shape our conversations and sensemaking about time future? To this end, much of academic management treats much of management practice as beyond the pale and, for that reason, what matters in this paper is not just a consideration of how to break out of Hambrick's closed loop, but also how others can be encouraged to break in. We see this as part of an ongoing conversation that matters.