Refine
Document Type
- Book (9)
- Conference Proceeding/Conference Report (7)
- Article (6)
- Part of a Book (6)
- Lecture/Speech (1)
Language
- English (16)
- German (12)
- Multiple languages (1)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (29)
Keywords
- Gamification (4)
- Personalwirtschaft (3)
- Urban Planning (3)
- Konsumentenverhalten (2)
- Kulturunterschiede (2)
- Markenkommunikation (2)
- Organizational Change (2)
- Unternehmensbeispiele (2)
- Brand Management (1)
- Brandmanagement (1)
What processes must have taken place so that HR managers or operations managers somehow ‘know’ that they have to do things differently from the way they did things five or fifteen years ago? How do they learn what the latest management trends are? The creation and diffusion of management theories and practice is generally viewed as a three stage process: business schools and consulting firms produce the knowledge, the business press disseminates it, and then there is a process of legitimization as these theories become part of ‘common sense’ and form the standard managerial discourse through their representation in non-business media. An ever increasing amount of attention has been paid to the first two of these stages, but relatively little has been paid to how management knowledge might be diffused through other methods. This paper is an attempt to address this gap.
The process of change is difficult to manage. In this paper the authors investigate a planned organisational change involving a marketing department that did not reach its objectives and had several unwanted outcomes. The authors show how a multi-level model is helpful understanding change processes, and suggest how change can be managed more successfully.
When planned organisational change happens, the members of the organisation experience it in different ways at different times. Their “change journeys” begin with the original response to the change initiative and they pass through a sequence of steps from the initial realisation that there is a discrepancy or inconsistency with pre-existing schemas (i.e. when the individual learns of a change, or perceives that there has been a change) to an actual change in their own schemas (George and Jones, 2001), which is the point where the change journey has (temporarily) ended and the destination been reached.
Such a journey becomes possible when individuals start to question their own position(s) in regard to the change, when they start taking into account their own reactions to it together with developments and responses to the change initiative at the meso and macro-level over time. As individuals reach different understandings about themselves during the change process, their change journey itself changes: they may set out for a new destination, or continue to the original destination but follow a different route.
Much of the literature on reactions to change ignores the tendency of individuals to pay attention to their own reasons for how they react and tends to view responses to change–especially resistance– almost as an involuntary reflex rather than as part of a complex process of interpretation and action carried out by self-aware individuals. This paper reports on how reflexivity is a vital aspect of the change journey. We carried out a longitudinal, multi-level qualitative study of a planned change initiative at PCo, the Canadian subsidiary of a European pharmaceutical company, which involved the introduction of a new organisational structure– the creation of a matrix structure. Grounded theory was used to guide the research. More than sixty in-depth interviews were carried out over a period of eighteen months. The data from these interviews were supplemented by quantitative data.
We describe how members of the organisation thought through what the change was “really” about and what it meant for them. They told stories and passed on anecdotes, which provided a way of demonstrating their own analysis of the change and their role in it, and of then building on this in order to achieve particular goals, like simply securing their own position or moving up the career ladder. We show that there was an element of playfulness in these processes. The employees analysed their own position and changed this according to developments in their groups and in the organisation. For some, it was like playing a game where they had to react to what was going on and change their tactics and strategy. This could then meant replanning their own change journeys.
In analysing this process, we pay particular attention to the role of language. Language is not simply a mechanism of communication, but rather a fundamental aspect of organisation and organising (eg Westwood and Linstead, 2001). One view is that organisation exists only through language, leading to views of organisation as text, or as narrative, or as constituted in discourse (e.g. Mumby and Clair, 1997). So there is great value at investigating discourse during change processes because language, in the form of conversations, stories and rumours, is a significant factor in the way change is conceptualised (Balogun and Johnson, 2005). Conversation – “language-based interactions of individuals within organisations” (Woodilla, 1998: 33)– is one of the most common forms of communication in the workplace. Studies of managerial activities (e.g. Mintzberg, 1973) have shown that managers spend a large part of their time in carrying out oral communications. The act of conversation and the content of conversation produce action (Hardy et al., 2000), which indicates why conversations can play an important part in a change process. The way in which organisational members negotiate meaning in the change process is through discursive practices and textual objects (Anderson, 2005). Indeed, coherent language use can play a significant role in the outcome of change initiatives (Sillince, 1999) and there are fragmented and competing discourses within an organisation during a change process.
Stories play a significant role in the creation and maintenance of meaning in organisations. Stories are passed from one person to another through conversation, and storytelling is “something done around the water cooler” (Boje at al., 2001: 166). The informal nature of storytelling does not mean that it is not important. Boje (1991) shows how the use of stories enabled change to take place, as when an executive's storytelling enabled him to convince colleagues to move in new direction. Indeed, Tsoukas (2005) argues that organisational change is the process of constructing and sharing new meanings and interpretations of organisational activities.
Discourse, then, is a mechanism through which change happens and through which change journeys are planned and re-planned and made. The members of an organisation use discourse in all its various forms to reflect on and change (or not) their own position and to influence the change journeys of others.
We discussed the realisation of corporate social responsibility and responsible living in general with employers and employees in different companies and organisations. We found out, that most of the participants think, that they know too little about the corporate social responsibility activities of their company, evaluate the atmosphere as not really good and don’t see their own responsibility. Also they mentioned, that the employees mostly talk with each other about emotions and stories, less about facts and information. In the discussion all agreed, that it would be much more effective, if information about social responsibility is delivered by stories—by storytelling.
We prove this by a questionnaire, where we give the participants the same information about employees social and corporate social activities in a short news with numbers and also in the form of storytelling. We ask them, which text they would tell their friends, neighbours or colleagues and which text would attract them at most to motivate themselves for acting more responsible. We also ask the employees how they think this could be realised.
With the result we can show, how you can sensitize and activate people for bringing more attention, awareness and activity to a more responsible living inside and outside companies.
Germany has an enviable reputation. Around the world, the country is famous for writers like JW Goethe, Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, for composers like the Bach family, Beethoven and Brahms, for artists like Albrecht Dürer, Paul Klee and Gerhard Richter, for philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant. Germany is also renowned for its achievements in science, technology and engineering. Where was the car invented? Where were the first aspirin tablets produced? In which country were the first X-rays made? The first modern football boots? The answer to all these questions, of course, is Germany, a country that is famous for inventions and patents that have changed the world.
But which country is not performing very well in start-ups – an area where success is essential for a thriving economy? Again, the answer is Germany. Compared to the United States, Germany is lagging behind in all the key metrics. When we contrast Germany to the United States, taking population size into account, Germany has fewer successful start-ups. This book provides a great deal of evidence that shows that a healthy start-up scene is becoming ever more critical in assuring the long-term performance of a country’s economy. This fact has been recognised by governments, but not all of them are dealing with this issue with well thought out plans and policies, or if they have such plans, they are not being well implemented...