Appproaches to Action Research in an American setting

The following are extracts from the links shown in the Transorganisational Gameboard above, which give a comparative insight into various AR approaches employed in the USA

1. Forming Networks of Community Organizations

Saul Alinsky's Grassroots Community Organizing Model

Community Development Corporation (CDC)

Oral History Project

The Woodlawn Organization (TWO)[1]

In the 1950s, racial discrimination greatly limited opportunities for advancement among Chicago's African-American residents. The previous decade had seen a huge influx of blacks from the South who were searching for economic opportunities in the North. While Chicago's African-American population boomed, its racial boundaries remained rigid, forcing thousands of blacks to live in segregated neighborhoods. The great demand for housing in these areas allowed slum landlords to subdivide apartments into ever smaller, more crowded rental units. As neighborhoods like Woodlawn on Chicago's South Side transformed from historically white to predominantly black, they began to experience disinvestment and rapid deterioration. Absentee landlords allowed their buildings to fall into disrepair. Local businesses sold low quality goods at inflated prices. City agencies cut back on essential public services such as education and transportation, and the physical infrastructure of the neighborhood began to collapse. Because they were systematically excluded from Chicago's firmly entrenched political machine, African Americans found it very difficult to use existing political channels to demand accountability from their local elected officials.

The Power of Collective Action

In face of the alarming physical, social and economic decay of their community, the residents of Woodlawn began to organize for change. In 1960, a group of religious and block club leaders brought together a coalition of over 100 neighborhood associations, religious institutions and civic organizations to fight against the forces of disintegration. Contrary to what many believed, Woodlawn had a number of organizational resources. As one of the group's leaders, Reverend Dr. Arthur M. Brazier points out, "The idea that black communities were disorganized was really a fallacy. They were not disorganized, they were unorganized." With the assistance of Saul Alinsky, a well-known community organizer, the Temporary Woodlawn Organization (TWO; later to become The Woodlawn Organization) began to lead a unified movement for self-determination. Its founding president was Dr. Brazier.

Throughout the early 1960s, TWO mobilized Woodlawn's residents to pressure merchants, landlords, city bureaucrats and others who were responsible for the neighborhood's blighted conditions to respond to their demands for change. By picketing and threatening boycotts against local stores, residents fought back against inflated prices and inferior products. And by demonstrating in front of the suburban homes of their absentee landlords, they forced building owners to make basic repairs. These small victories were important because they proved that low-income people could gain power through collective action. The significance of this process became apparent years later when oppressed urban neighborhoods across the country erupted into violent civil disorder during the Summer of 1967. Knowing that they had an alternative means of getting attention from those in power, the residents of Woodlawn did not feel compelled to express their frustrations through urban rebellion. As Reverend Dr. Leon Finney, TWO's second executive director, observes, "We had no riots here because we had already developed a legitimate means of redressing our grievances. The people trusted that vehicle and idea of TWO."

The Campaign against Displacement

TWO launched one of its most challenging advocacy campaigns in response to the University of Chicago's plans to expand its South campus into Woodlawn. Using Urban Renewal funds, the university wanted to clear a major strip of the neighborhood to create a new park and upper-income housing. In effect, the institution was attempting to establish a buffer zone against its surrounding low-income community. Having experienced what was termed "Negro removal" as a result of other Urban Renewal projects in the city, many of Woodlawn's residents were strongly opposed to the university's plan, especially because it did not make concessions for replacement housing. Fortunately, TWO was able to make use of the Urban Renewal program's community participation requirements to mount a battle against the university's plan. They were ultimately successful in negotiating a compromise agreement whereby the university agreed to cover the costs of relocating displaced families to new low-income housing in Woodlawn. Because it had established itself as the legitimate voice of the residents of Woodlawn, and had the power of people to back it, TWO became recognized as a major political force in Chicago.

The Fight for Equal Opportunities

To ensure that blacks had access to mainstream institutions, TWO was very active in the civil rights movement during its early years. One of its priorities was to advocate for the integration of housing and education in order to eliminate the inequities produced by segregation. As Dr. Brazier explains, "Our concern about integrating public schools was to get a piece of the pie. We felt as long as our kids were segregated, they were going to get hand-me-downs."

But TWO's leaders soon began to see the need to address another critical aspect of the problem - the economic barriers that blacks faced in their struggle for self-determination. As Dr. Brazier explains, "We recognized that no matter how much access we might have, unless people had jobs, unless people earned money, no matter what doors were opened, they would not have the opportunity to walk through them." To prepare African Americans to take advantage of the gains of the civil rights movement, TWO began to focus on employment. In partnership with its former adversary, the University of Chicago, the organization secured a grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to study the racial biases of common hiring practices such as job applications and tests. By arguing that these procedures posed unnecessary obstacles to the employment of blacks, TWO was able to gain federal support for a demonstration job training and placement program in 1964.

The Transition into Service Provision

The creation of TWO's job training and placement program marked an important transition for the organization. Some of its members did not believe that TWO should begin to provide services because this new direction might compromise the organization's ability to continue conducting advocacy and organizing. But as Dr. Brazier reasoned, "just to continue advocacy and not think about the other social ills that affected the community seemed to be short sighted."

In the 1970s, TWO began to make use of federal funds to offer a range of social services, including prenatal and infant health care, Head Start early childhood development, and mental health care. Today, TWO operates a $4.2 million social service network that reaches 7,500 people daily. One of TWO's primary concerns is helping people at an early point in the life cycle in order to prevent substance abuse, teen-age pregnancy, and infant mortality. The organization offers comprehensive health care, infant day care, substance abuse treatment and rehabilitation, AIDS awareness and outreach, job counseling and placement, and black adoption services. Through its Family Life Program, TWO addresses the psycho-social problems that result from poor health in low-income neighborhoods.

In 1969, under the leadership of Dr. Finney, the organization decided that its broadened programmatic direction required a change in structure. From its inception, TWO had operated as a federation of civic and neighborhood associations. The members of this federation comprised the organization's community base, and were represented on delegate committees that made policy recommendations on housing, crime, education and other neighborhood issues. As TWO entered the 1970s, the challenge was to create a new structure that would continue to hold the organization accountable to its community-based constituency, but would also address the concerns of its funders, who believed that advocacy needed to be kept distinct from other program areas such as social service delivery and development. TWO's solution was to create a separate entity, the Woodlawn Community Development Corporation (WCDC), for its physical and economic development activities. This development corporation would have its own board of directors, but was to remain accountable to The Woodlawn Organization's community base.

Development as a Means of Creating Viable Communities

TWO was faced with a great challenge when the development corporation was formed in 1972. Woodlawn had lost nearly half of its population between 1960 and 1970. One of the ironies of the civil rights movement was that as the barriers to integration were removed, the social and economic infrastructure of African-American urban neighborhoods began to erode. Out of necessity, black communities had once been home to people with a broad range of social and economic backgrounds. Doctors and lawyers lived next door to housekeepers and welfare recipients. But once moderate and middle-income residents gained opportunities to escape the deteriorated conditions of inner city neighborhoods, many of them moved out. Increasingly, communities like Woodlawn became ghettos of the poor. Because of its great concern about these demographic trends, TWO/WCDC's leadership decided that its redevelopment strategy needed to focus on attracting middle class families back into the neighborhood. To achieve this goal, the organization began to search for ways to improve Woodlawn's physical and socioeconomic conditions. TWO/WCDC's ultimate aim was to make Woodlawn a viable, mixed-income community.

This redevelopment strategy proved controversial at times. By concentrating on bringing moderate and middle-income families into the neighborhood, TWO/WCDC could not always ensure that its programs had a direct benefit to Woodlawn's poorest and most desperate residents. In fact, some of its programs required the displacement of existing residents. Nevertheless, quite a few neighborhood residents felt that the drawbacks of this development approach were outweighed by its benefits.

Since 1968, TWO/WCDC has rehabilitated or constructed over 1,500 apartment units and homes for low and moderate-income families and individuals, senior citizens and physically and mentally disabled residents of Woodlawn. It pioneered the first mixed-income homeownership project in the country, proving that it was possible to create communities in which middle, moderate and low-income families choose to live next door to each other. Moreover, the CDC has helped dispel the myth that whites are unwilling to live in predominantly black neighborhoods. Over the years, TWO/WCDC has built a strong reputation for being an efficient and effective manager of low-income housing. Recently, it was hired by the Chicago Housing Authority to manage and provide social services to two of the city's most troubled public housing projects.

Another aspect of TWO's redevelopment strategy has focused on economic revitalization. One of WCDC's first efforts was a small-business support program that provided technical assistance and access to outside financing for local enterprises. By the mid-1970s, however, the limits of this economic development approach in Woodlawn compelled WCDC to begin large-scale commercial real estate development, including a shopping plaza, movie theater and supermarket to spur economic growth and create jobs for neighborhood residents.

A Commitment to Quality of Life Issues

Over the years, TWO has continued to serve as an advocate for quality of life issues in Woodlawn. In the 1970s, it conducted a series of studies on the Board of Education's budget, revealing vast inequities in the distribution of resources throughout Chicago's school districts. Drawing upon the organizing capabilities it developed in its early advocacy campaigns, TWO was able to create a partnership of teachers, students, parents and the Board of Education to improve public schools in Woodlawn. In 1976, it launched a major effort to revamp Woodlawn's Hyde Park High School, which had become a battle ground for local street gangs. Renamed the Hyde Park Career Academy, the school was transformed from one of the lowest-performing to one of the top eight in the city in just over a decade.

Catalyzing Reinvestment

TWO has always believed that an integral aspect of its mission is to increase confidence in the economic and social viability of its community. It has long been concerned about the consequences of disinvestment, which were evidenced when Woodlawn's only remaining financial institution, the Southeast National Bank, left the neighborhood in 1971. TWO has therefore made a conscious effort to transform the psychological perceptions of Woodlawn. The CDC's idea is to create enough positive change to instil confidence in the community by major institutions. As Dr. Finney explains, "At best TWO is a catalytic agent. If we catalyze reinvestment in the community, we don't have to do it all. The point is let others take it up after we've been on the point. And we're beginning to see that."

The success of TWO's revitalization strategy was illustrated by the building of a regional YMCA in Woodlawn in 1990. Despite intense competition from other, more affluent neighborhoods, TWO was able to convince the Metropolitan Y that Woodlawn was a viable site for its new facility. The Woodlawn Y greatly exceeded membership projections within the first few years of its operation. TWO also recently assisted a massive effort to overhaul Woodlawn's decaying public transit system. Through a partnership with the city, it helped create a $56 million investment in transportation and related infrastructure in the neighborhood. Over the years, TWO has catalyzed a total of over $113 million in public and private investments in Woodlawn.

The Road to Renewal

As TWO/WCDC looks to the future, it has reason to be optimistic about Woodlawn's economic, social and physical viability. Though it continues to face challenges inherent to low-income urban communities, the neighborhood has realized some breakthroughs in renewed growth and investment. After twenty years without a neighborhood bank, Woodlawn proudly observed a significant milestone on the road to renewal - the opening of the Cole Taylor Bank in 1993. Under the direction of Carole Millison, TWO's current executive director, TWO continues to build partnerships with the public and private sectors to improve the quality of life in Woodlawn.

The Woodlawn Organization (TWO)
6040 South Harper Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
(312) 288-5840
(312) 288-5796 Fax
Carole Millison, Executive Director

2. Participative Design for Participative Democracy

PDPD Example: "Engines of Democracy" by Charles Fishman -- This is a surprisingly well done article on participative democracy in a US workplace (yes, a US workplace!) in the October 1999 issue of FAST COMPANY (issue 28, p.174) that Joel Diemer alerted me to:

“The General Electric plant in Durham, North Carolina builds some of the world's most powerful jet engines. But the plant's real power lies in the lessons that it teaches about the future of work and about workplace democracy.”

This plant has no time clock. Workers leave to go to their kids' band concerts and Little League games. Every technician has an email address and Internet access, voice mail, business cards, and a desk shared with one teammate. The plant manager -- the boss -- sits in an open cubicle that's located right on the factory floor: Engines float by, just 20 feet away.

The Emerys and colleagues describe themselves as contextualists and use abduction as opposed to deduction/induction (See M. Emery, 1994: 2; 1997: 11). Deduction/induction both begin with a priori hypothesis.

·        Abduction - For Peirce - Abduction "makes its start from the facts, without, at the outset, having any particular theory in view… abduction seeks a theory. Induction seeks for facts… (Cited in Sebeok & Umiker-Sebeok "You Know My Method, (pp. 24-25). Recall that logical deduction seeks to verify a priori formal theory, while induction or grounded theory focuses on generating theory from in situ observations. Examples of formal theory from which deductive hypotheses are tested are Weber's ideal types of authority (bureaucratic, charismatic and feudalistic), Marx's labor process and surplus value theories, and Durkheim's typology of mechanistic and organic social solidarity (Source Boje, 1999 Sage Book on Narrative Analysis, Chapter 3 - in process). Peirce (1955: 155-6) writing between 1896 and 1908 explained it this way.

At each stage of his long investigation, Kepler has a theory which is approximately true, since it approximately satisfies the observations … and he proceeds to modify this theory, after the most careful and judicious reflection in such a way as to render it more rational or closer to the observed fact… Kepler shows his keen logical sense in detailing the whole process by which he finally arrived at the true orbit. This is the greatest piece of Retroductive [abductive] reasoning ever performed.

(Source Boje, 1999 Sage Book on Narrative Analysis, Chapter 3 - in process).

·        Contextualism - For Pepper, contextualism is the historic event in the present. Events are to be explained within the context of their occurrence. Organizational life is complex, with interconnected events and continuously changing patterns. Source: "Narratology and the Death of Stories" - David M. Boje. Paper for presentation to the Ohio Discourse Conference. May, 1999; "A Postmodern Perspective on Narrative Research of Organization Life" - John T. Luhman & D. Boje - paper under review.

·        Luhman and I (1999) argue that each of these world hypotheses have been a way to narrate organizations with metaphoric “images of organizations” since the mechanical apparatus of Hobbes’ Leviathan and Newton’s mechanistic science in the 17th century.

·        Machine metaphors have been popular in OT since the industrial revolution. Each technology becomes a discourse to read and fashion organizations, from Frederick Taylor’s scientific management to more recent machine models of TQM, and reengineering. Formist (ideal type typologies centered on bureaucracy) images of organization have been the icons of formal Weberian readings of organization theory. Henri Fayol (1916: 70) based his fourteen commandment-principles of management and his five basic managerial functions on an organic metaphor of the firm (the living tree). Contingency theory sought to appropriate mechanistic and organic into yet another formalism.

·        I need to stress that using an organic metaphor does not read life into story. Work by Best and Kellner (1999: 17) agrees with my position that OT continues to endorse biological fallacy, when now complexity, chaos and cybercapitalism theorists “wrongly dissolve the boundaries between natural and social systems.” The new metaphors applied from the new information technologies blur distinctions between body and machine and are quite trendy.

·        Contextualism may be less familiar to you. The root-metaphor for contextualism is “historic event … alive in the present” (Pepper, 1942: 232). Pragmatist philosophers, in particular James, Dewy, and Peirce focus upon the lived experience, in which change and novelty are a given (Pepper, 1942: 234-5). We are caught up in intrinsic complexity, interconnected networks of events with “continuously changing patterns” (p. 233). Each event has a structural (or semiotic) order to be explored and a network of diffuse strands to be traced. Contextualism models are represented in the systems theory approach of organization theory. Fred and Merrelyn Emery (1993), for example, adopt contextualism metaphors as fundamental to any knowledge of organizations and its interactions with an environment that is everywhere turbulent since the 1960s. Contextualism is viewed by Fred and Marilyn Emery, as foundational to open systems and ecological adaptation theories (M. Emery, 1994: 2; 1997: 11).

I elaborate because there is a strand of connection between the Microstoria (Italian) work I am doing in postmodern storytelling and the Emerys' since both rely on Peirce for abduction and a related theory of contextualism (from William James)- Boje in press.

·        Between macro logical-deduction and grounded theory-induction is the abduction method of microstoria analysis (Boje, 1999b).

·        One of the things I want to do is make rhizomatic connections across the TD gameboard areas.

Critiques of STS

1.                  STS says J.C. Spender "is unsuitable as the basis for a theory of the firm because it adopt[s] too naive a view of social systems and ignor[es] economic interactions" (p.55). Reference: Spender, J.C., "Making Knowledge the Basis of a Dynamic Theory of the Firm," Strategic Management Journal 17, Winter (1996): 45-62.

2.                  David Collins (1998) Book - see Deprogramming below: "Systems think as one of the dominant models in organizational analysis represents a unitary modeling of organizations"

3.                  Czarniawska (1997) System becomes a gross metaphor.

4.                  Other Critiques:

·        Assumes it is systems, not people who do things and are purposive

·        System becomes a conflict-exclusion ideology (with harmony and coherence)

·        Environment is rather disembodied and benign (abstract rather than live)

·        System is abstract analytic construct, a metaphor that displaces/simulates "real."

·        Gross simplification of multiplicity of incoherencies, fragmentations, and pluralities.

·        People programmed/scripted by their assumed system role in fictive system.

·        Lou Davis has a structural functionalist theory of social in STS; Emerys have a set of harmony values that norm social.

·        REIFICATION- treating human subjective creation ("system") as abstract object.

New Directions

·        Knowledge Work and STS - Michael W. Stebbins and A. B. (Rami) Shani, The Journal of Systemic Knowledge Management, February, 1998 Explores non-routine systems design from STS perspective. Includes a brief discussion of non-routine systems and an examination of alternative methods for diagnosing and redesigning organizations composed of knowledge workers.

·        Role of Information Technology in Managing Organizational Change and Organizational Interdependence 1993, Yogesh Malhotra. Ties to Emery & Trist. Note he mixes Katz & Kahn open system theory in which would not be regarded as appropriate by Emery disciples.

References

David M. Boje
1999a Narratology and the Death of Stories - Paper for presentation to the Ohio Discourse Conference May, 1999
1999b Chapter 3 'Microstoria Analysis" Narrative Analysis. New book for Sage.

Boje, David M. and Luhman, John
1999 “Narrativism: A fifth world hypothesis.” Under review.

Emery, Merrelyn
1993 Participative Design for Participative Democracy. Center for Continuing Education, Australian National University.

1994 “The search conference: state of the art.” Unpublished paper, Center for Continuing Education. Australian National University.

1997 “Open systems is alive and well.” Paper presented to the ODC division of the Academy of Management Meetings, Boston (August).

Peirce, Charles Sanders
1955 Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Edited by Justus Buchler. First published in 1940. NY: Dover Publications, Inc. See in particular Chapter 2, "Abduction and Induction" with writing of Pierce on the topic between 1896 and 1908.

Pepper, Stephen C.
1942 World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

3. All other non-Emery Search Conference and STS Models

·        Lou Davis STS and Quality of Work Life Movement

·        Book: Performance By Design: Sociotechnical Systems In North America, 1/e - James C. Taylor & David F. Felten Published November, 1992 by Prentice Hall Business Publishing. Taylor worked closely with Lou Davis at UCLA and after.

·        Marvin R. Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, Future Search: An Action Guide to Finding Common Ground Organizations and Communities, San Francisco ( Berrett-Koehler) 1995 (this book assists you in designing your own Future Search conference)

·        Future Search : An Action Guide to Finding Common Ground in Organizations and Communities by Sandra Janoff (Contributor), Marvin Ross Weisbord Future Search is one of the most powerful means of developing a facilitated consensus on the future, regardless of scale. More structured than Open Space, Future Search is an exceptional technique which Weisbord & Janoff have described exceptionally well. Facilitators, change agents and leaders would do well to read this book.

·        Open Systems Planning

·        Future Search Conference

·        PAPER - The construction of routine surveillance practice in the electronic marketplace - Socio-technical Negotiations around Digital Cash Systems by David J. Phillips. The paper applies a Foucauldian paradigm to STS and Power. Includes relations to Structuration theory (Giddens). Works through the public dissemination of interpretations of systems. Concludes STS negotiations occur in an ideological landscape in which one concept is uncontested, certain, and pervasive: "the inevitability and naturalness of the internet as a sit of market activity" (p. 12). Phillips asks some good critical theory and postmodern theory questions:

·        What communities are created in the discourses of STS? Who is spoken of and who may speak in the discourses? How are the discourses positioned with respect to each other?

·        Which institutions are attacked and which are supported in the discourses? Conversely, which institutions control or partake in the discourses?

We could spend days deconstructing the narratives and these images. But it will give you some easy points of intersect between non-Emery approaches and the Spectacle approach below. If the typology was resituated, it could be useful. E.g. the dimensions of Fragmentation/Coherence and Individual/Community map some of the tensions of late postindustrial capitalism and the spectacle of postmodern culture.

4. SEAM - Socio Economic Analysis of Management

What is SEAM[2]? The Socio Economic Analysis of Management. This is the basic intervention model of Henri Savall and his team of associations (professors and doctoral students learning OD). SEAM was created by Henri Savall to link economics, accounting and a special Socio Technical Systems approach to large system change. It is a long term commitment. No firm enters into a SEAM contract without an up front three to five year commitment. SEAM bridges a qualitative interview and observation method with an accounting (hidden cost) and economic analysis of the firm's strategy. SEAM is the major operation of ISEOR. SEAM has been "validated by thorough experimentation of long duration in 1000 companies since more than 26 years, in 30 countries on 4 continents. The data base grows with the passing of years by multiplying and diversifying cases of experimentation in new companies and organizations in new countries" (Translated from French). SEAM is both micro and macro, connection internal and external strategic planning to the enactment of local working conditions as well as policy changes, including changing the rules of the game between workers, unions, management, suppliers, and communities.

What is ISEOR? The ISEOR research center -Socio-Economic Institute of Firms and Organizations - is a research center in the field of management. It was created in 1976 by Henri Savall, a professor at the University of Lyon 2. The institute's vocation is to experiment new management methods allowing improvement in compatibility between economic and social objectives of companies. Interventions are carried out by the ISEOR research center in many companies around the world. They consist in active participation and experimentation within chosen organizations, resulting in a body of knowledge which can be used as a scientific data base. SEAM is the name given to the consulting approach. ISEOR is a collaboration with people of the university, large schools, companies and administration encouraging search for SEAM.

What is the Purpose of SEAM? SEAM is about balancing on the one hand the smooth running of the organization and the social attributes, and on the other hand the economic performance in the short and long term and lasting competitiveness.

CLICK for interactive model http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/sbc/pages/seampage.html

Copyright 1999 ISEOR

In Figure 1, you see a four leaf clover model with the stem rooted in the "Performance of the Company." In the top leaf, there are six areas of social performance (Working Conditions, Work Organization, Communication-Coordination-Cooperation, Time-Sharing, In-House Training, & Strategic Implementation), that when led astray result in six areas of hidden cost in the bottom leaf (Absenteeism, Industrial Injuries, Personnel Rotation/Turnover, Product quality problems, Direct productivity problems). The left leaf is the structural elements of the firm (physical, technological, organizational, demographic and mental). These interact with the Social Performance (upper leaf) and the right leaf aggregates (individual, sectional, and collective).

What is different about SEAM and the Sociotechnical Systems approaches of Emery, Davis, Weisbord, etc? First, the SEAM approach demonstrating the existence of hidden costs and performance that aren't assessed in the usual information systems of the companies such as budgets, accounting tools and indicators. Second, SEAM embeds large system change within an economic and strategic analysis of the firm. Third, SEAM uses qualitative data gathering techniques that including profiling the focal firm with 1,000 prior qualitative studies in thirty countries. Fourth, the approach is postmodern in ways described below.

What are Hidden Costs? (Bottom Leaf ) "The financial cost of these abnormal operations is not identified in the information systems of management, and, less still, in the countable plan, general or analytical" - Savall. The untapped potential linked with hidden costs and performance is due to the informal power of all those who take part in the organization and ho contribute more or less to the objectives of the many shapes and sizes of retributions received in exchange for their effort. Hidden costs are also linked with low quality management due to both a lack of executive role development and a lack of support in the face of a constantly changing world. For a more accounting orientation, see various types of Hidden Costs can be found at http://web.nmsu.edu/~dboje/TDgreenconcepts.html.

What are the Process Issues? Consulting is about process. The process here is based upon carefully collecting and coding qualitative interviews into a text-retrieval computer system. This means that Ph.D. candidates are trained at ISEOR in the use of qualitative analysis as well as process consultation. Ph.D. students spend a minimum of three years in the filed under supervised apprenticeship learning all the ins and outs of the model presented in Figure 1. They do semi-structured and unstructured interviews and observation studies as part of their training. They learn an immense typology with 2,000 codes that extends four and five levels of sub-categories below what I am summarizing here. There is a long term commitment contract negotiated between ISEOR and clients that extends beyond three years. This is not a week-end workshop. This is a careful and methodical diagnosis followed by measured experiments to effect changes in the relationship between Social and Economic. The firm goes through an extensive external and internal strategic planning and action planning initiative in the early phase. Policies and the allocations of training resources as well as areas of participation are re-negotiated among the stakeholders of the firm. There is the kind of careful process variance analysis one finds in TQM, but an broader strategic focus on the firm and its industry as well as marketing. In the implemented demonstration experiments clients learn how to explore and understand hidden cost accounting as well as more macro economic issues that are affected by the mismanagement of social performance. The process of diagnosis begins with employees, managers, and customers to explore areas of common and divergent ground. As in survey research (and this is not that), there is a reporting back of finding. But these are findings which compare the narratives (ad coded utterances) of managers, employees, and customers, pointing out disparities. A key area is exploring taboo topics, what people are not saying or refuse to go on the record saying. The approach is therefore both critical and confrontive. As in action research initiatives, there are cooperatively designed and executed interventions. The approach is much more inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary than most others on the TD Gameboard. The implementation changes accounting, strategy, HR, and quality practices. From a postmodern point of view, more hegemonic aspects of socialization and control that are increasing hidden costs as well as keeping them hidden get deconstructed as part of the approach. With a postmodernist on board the SEAM team the know the postmodern consulting language. but they translate this language into management terms, such as taboo topics, scapegoat practices, and hidden costs.

What is a Taboo Topic? Part of the consulting contract is that any statement will be written down by the consultants unless they are explicitly told not to record it. No names are used in the qualitative and narrative reports that are rendered. But, there is a time set aside for stakeholders to confront the 'taboo" areas people are refusing to go on record about. This makes it more and more OK to challenge the political status quo and get at the sub-layers of socialization.

Copyright 1999 ISEOR

What are the Six areas of SEAM Social Performance? (Top Leaf of Four Leaf Clover) There are the five listed in Figure Two (Work Organization was mistakenly omitted - we seek a new drawing) . The interaction of the structures and the behaviors within the company (See Figure One) creates six families of abnormal operations (figure Two). These six families constitute at the same time explanatory variables of operation and levers of action on the abnormal operations listed in the diagnosis of the company.

1.      Working Conditions

2.      Communication, Coordination & Cooperation

3.      Work Organization (Bureaucratic, Complexity, Postmodern)

4.      Time Sharing ( More accurate would be "time management" of cycle time, time use as in studies of how people spend their time, etc.).

5.      Training (What are people not trained in, where is training be spent?).

6.      Strategic Implementation (What is firm's situation in its environment? What kinds of strategic change quests has the firm been caught up in?).

In the diagnostic phase, these six areas of social performance are explored using qualitative interviews and observations. Socio-economic analyses are done to ascertain the hidden costs of sustaining current patterns of Social Performance. The diagnostic narratives generated in the field work are entered into a data base, and then ordered by the six main themes (and sometimes 5 layers of sub-theme categories). Narrative examples are presented from various stakeholder positions in the firm. Frequencies and basic statistics are used to tabulate themes and sub-themes.

What are Indicators of Hidden Costs? There are five that SEAM focuses upon. The assumption is that when Social Performance areas are out of whack, the company will experience hidden costs (some not so hidden) in each area. But the reporting system of managerial accounting most times does not track these costs of make them available for decision making. The lack of understanding of these costs leads to short-term perspective on the part of management. In this phase, the six Social Performance areas (in the qualitative report) are translated into demonstrations of accounting for costs. For example, where there is poor quality, the processes underlying that quality performance are analyzed. Audits of the Social Performance areas are conducted, and cost information is collected to show where poor quality is coming from (lack of training, poor time management, ineffective work design or organization design). Then for each accounting reports are generated to show to management, as well as to staff and workers, what it the impact of the Social on Hidden Costs. "'The hidden costs indicate the costs not located by the traditional information systems available to the company (budgets, general ledger or analytical, financial management reports...) in opposition to visible costs ... such as distributions of personnel or purchases of raw materials" (Translated from French).

1.      Absenteeism

2.      Injuries

3.      Turnover

4.      Poor Quality

5.      Low Productivity

As the hidden costs accumulate and the Social Performance system gets more out of whack, there are bottom line issues of a financial consideration. This gets us to the more strategic and policy levels of the firm (See Figure Four). In other words, to really do something significant about hidden costs it is necessary to change strategies, policies and the very rules of the game.

There are Six Financial Consequences of problematic Social Performance:

1.      Over-wages (Extra wages)

2.      Time wasted

3.      Over consumption (waste)

4.      Non-production (time)

5.      Non-creation of potential gains (opportunity costs)

6.      Risks

Figure Three integrates these three micro and macro areas into one drawing.

Figure Three: " Relationship between Social Performance, Hidden Cost and Financial Consequences.

Copyright 1999 ISEOR
For case example see http://www.iseor.com/presentation_en_anglais.htm

How does SEAM work? Figures 1, 2, and 3 are a part of the Large System Change approach of SEAM. They help with the diagnosis. The results come in implementing processes of improvement, political and strategic decision changes, and a number of key management tools. As the diagnosis is enacted, a number of demonstration experiments are negotiated between consultants and the stakeholders of the company. The experiments are designed to track hidden costs while changing the Socio-Economic areas of the company. This happens slowly by proving the relation between Social and Economic, then moving out in the three directions below. For example developing an internal and external planning tool, but also changing the rules of game and strategy in the political realm, while continue to develop project implementations that result in improvements. The assumption is that you can not affect change with out tools and without dealing with the political dynamics that mire strategy. Over time there are changes in policy, more tools such as time sharing (which translates to time management), and evaluations of results. One thing I like about the SEAM approach is that the intervention program measures its performance costs and gains as it proceeds. It is therefore unusual if not unique in this regard.

Figure Four: "Three Dimensions of SEAM"

Copyright 1999 ISEOR



Figure Five "MAGESE"

Copyright 1999 ISEOR
Figure Five is a star image that connects, strategy, information systems, marketing, operations, production, organization, compensation, human resources, and accounting. The assumption here is that since professors and consultants train in specialized and bounded disciplines, they lack an overall and integrated, interdisciplinary understanding of the firm and its environment. The purpose of SEAM is to build precisely this integration over time.

What are the Postmodern Aspects of SEAM? It is inter-disciplinary, more a rhizomatic understanding of the interplay of disciplines that have been kept separate. For example, looking at hidden costs, the discipline of accounting is used to show that screwing up Social Performance messes up the bottom line. See Green Accounting Gameboard for concepts and examples of relating accounting hidden cost analysis to environmental life cycle audits. Specific types of Hidden Costs can be found at http://web.nmsu.edu/~dboje/TDgreenconcepts.html. And for postmodern accounting overview see http://web.nmsu.edu/~dboje/TDgreenlinks.html. SEAM therefore moves from a functionalist operating corporation (or NGO) to a more socio-economic and I think ecocentric (as opposed to anthropocentric) understanding of the firm and its environment. And SEAM moves us to a more critical postmodern position. Accounting numbers in accounting charts and tables and in financial reports and audits create instead of reflect or mirror reality. Behind the illusion of the mirrored-representation is the politics of accounting and the social construction of the hyperreal. Lehman and Tinker (1996) argue that in order to democratize accounting and develop a more emancipatory and progressive accounting agenda it is necessary to reformulate "environmental accounting as part of its instrumental modus vivendi perpetuating the terrible slide into subjectivism and anthropocentricism where humanity is seen as capable of controlling and measuring nature" (p. 2) [see http://web.nmsu.edu/~dboje/TDgreenlinks.html.].

A second postmodern area is the restorying of the relationship between Social and Economic conditions. Instead of a trade off, the assumption inter-penetrating. It is telling, for example that Savall and Bonnet were vehemently opposed to the reengineering craze of the 1990s. They pointed out in their careful measurement of Socio-Economic relationships under SEAM, that there were significant hidden costs to reengineering that were note being accounting for. They did not get sucked into the reengineering fad; they remained sceptical of an intervention that was premised on destroying to Social capacity of the firm in order to reap what they saw as temporary and short-term gains.

Third, in looking at What is Postmodern organization, there are several points to be made.

The postmodern organization may be defined as that comprising a networked set of diverse, self-managed, self-controlled teams with poly-centers [many centers] of coordination that fold and unfold according to the requirements of the tasks. Likewise, these teams are organized in flat design, employees are highly empowered and involved in the job, information is fluid and continuous improvement is emphasized throughout (after Boje and Dennehy, 2000).

This is the type of flexible and de-centered working organization that can be implemented over team with SEAM. "If, as many now argue, the structural defenses against task anxieties and the insulated cultures provided by the dependency hierarchies of more traditional organizations no longer serve in the current environment, the question must then be posed-what new defenses do we have available?" (Long, 1999). In SEAM, there is a relationship between to social anxieties of a problematic work organization and working condition that gets plaid out on hidden cost areas and ultimately strategic implementation.

There are limits to the postmodern implementation in SEAM. For example, SEAM is not about fragmentation. A more postmodern organization would be a combination or collage of many types and forms (modern as well as postmodern), partly bureaucratic, partly chaotic, partly a quest to reform it all, and partly postmodern unknowability. The postmodern organization acts out fragmented and contrary scripts (script here is the story acted out in action). Yet, the value, I see in SEAM, is that with the historical, comparative and deep investment in qualitative data collection, it should be possible to track just such fragmented patterns of organizing.

Finally, there is a postmodern linguistic aspect to SEAM that Professor Jacques Henri Coste, the postmodernist of the team speaks to. That is, there are changes in the language games, in the signs and symbols that socially construct the relationship between social and economic. SEAM is built on collecting and reshaping utterances. Utterances are coded by the clients and consultants, and entered into a computerized text-retrieval program with some 2,000 codes. The first level of codes are as portrayed in Figures 1 to 4. But what you have to understand is that there are sub-categories for each of these down to five levels. The work of 30 years has gone into refining and evolving the coding schema to track the classes of information collected for qualitative analysis.

What are the Transorganizational aspects of SEAM? As I see it, SEAM is a long term collaboration between university (doctoral education and scholarship), corporate experimentation, and community. As the SEAM experiments get enacted relationships between the firm and its suppliers, customers, and communities become part of the intervention.

References to EGOS Proposal

Savall, Henri (2000) ISEOR Institut de Socio-Economie des Entreprises et des Organisations. Web site explaining the SEAM approach in French and English.

Boje, D. M. (1979) "The Change Agent as Revolutionary: Activist Interventions into Inter organizational Networks," Transorganizational Development Session of the Academy of Management Meetings, Atlanta, Georgia, August 1979. This became the piece with Wolfe and the basis for See Tom Cummings' (1984)-review piece.

Boje, D. M. (2000a) SEAM and Transorganizational Development. Web Site http://web.nmsu.edu/~dboje/TDseam.html

Boje, D. M. (2000b) SEAM and Small Business Action Research. Interactive web site. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/sbc/pages/seampage.html

Boje, D. M. (2000c) Transorganizational Development Gameboard. Web site comparing multiple perspectives on action research and large system change, including SEAM analysis. http://web.nmsu.edu/~dboje/TDgameboard.html

Boje, D. M. and Wolfe, T. (1989) "Transorganizational Development: Contributions to Theory and Practice," 733-753 In Leavitt, H., Pondy, L. R., and Boje, D. M., Readings in Managerial Psychology, Chicago Press, Third Edition.

Culbert, Samuel A., James Max Elden, Will McWhinney, Warren Schmidt & bob Tannenbaum (1972) "Trans-organizational praxis: A search beyond organizational development," International Associations, XXIV (10, October). 1972. Still an excellent piece. This was the first piece I read that got me started in TD.

Cummings, Thomas G. (1984) "Transorganizational development," In B. M. Staw and L. L. Cummings (Eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol. 6: 367-422. Greenwich, CN: JAI Press. 1984. Puts TD into an STS input, throughput, output model.

5. Action Research

This section refers to a Peter Reason typology (CI, PAR, AS/AI). Yet it does exclude all other cells on the game board (See Handbook of Qualitative Research 1996). More Recent Reason article:

·        Reason, Peter Knowledge as Social Praxis: A Review of Selener's (1997) Participatory Action Research and Social Change M@n@gement, Vol. 1, n. 1, 1998.

Participative Action Research (Fals-Borda & Rahman)

·        Chisholm, Rupert F., and Elden Max (1993) Features of emerging action research. Human Relations, 46(2), 275-298. A follow-up to Elden and Chisholm (1993). In summing up the conclusions drawn from articles in a special issue of Human Relations, the authors identify five main dimensions to action research: 1: system level of client system; 2: degree of organisation of research setting; 3: degree of openness of research process; 4: goals and purpose of research; 5: role of researchers.

Action Science/ Action Inquiry (Argyris; Torbert)

·        Action inquiry is about discovering actions in real-time personal and professional settings that alert, attune, and sometimes even align self, immediate others, organizational strategies, and global vision - and that encourage non-violent personal, organizational, and societal transformations

6. Appreciative Inquiry

·        David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva

-Rooted in Social Construction of Ken and Mary Gergen and Affirmative Postmodern networking - Virtual Faculty of Taos Institute.

-Does not endorse deconstruction

·        Srivastva, Suresh; Cooperrider, David L. (Eds.) (1990) Appreciative Management and Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

AI READINGS

·        Bushe, G.R. (1998) Appreciative inquiry with teams. Organization Development Journal, 16:3, 41-50.

·        Bushe, G.R. (1995) "Advances in appreciative inquiry as an organization development intervention". Organization Development Journal, 13:3, 14-22.

·        GEM Initiative [Case Western Reserve University] is to build organizational capacities of PVOs and NGOs to deliver effective development assistance at the grassroots and across organizational and geographic boundaries. Individual, organizational, and IO certificate programs.

·        Hammond, Sue Annis 1998 The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry (Thin Book Series) (Amazon).

·        Hammond, Sue. 1998 Lessons from the Field : Applying Appreciative Inquiry (Amazon)

·        Hammond, Auw and Joe Hall in the Inner Edge Newsletter: What is Appreciative Inquiry Chap 11 of Thin Book.

·        Mellish, Liz - A Case Study of Appreciative Inquiry in an Australian University - published in Hammond, S. & Royal C. (eds) (1998) Lessons from the Field: Applying Appreciative Inquiry, Practical Press Inc. Plano TX

·        Notre Dame is currently engaged in a process of evaluating and revising its curriculum by building on its academic strengths.

RAISING CRITICAL ISSUES ABOUT AI

I have already come across a consulting firm that asked people to rate how good the organization was on a number of items on a 5 point scale and called this appreciative inquiry.  A second concern is that some practitioners, especially graduate students, can develop a zealous attention to "appreciation" without any theoretical rhyme or reason to their practice.

7. Reengineering & Reinventing

INTRODUCTION

This page gives you access to the new movements. Some attempt to apply reengineering to reinvent government in the same old 2-party format. Others favor direct democracy, distributed work, and going beyond the two-party system to GREEN democracy

Part I: Reengineering

Reengineering gurus say that their work is not related to downsizing. Please begin with a review of downsizing studies to study this claim. Yet the work of Hammer/Champy and the most recent Tom Peters work is applied by consulting firms to do what we have called TD1 - transorganization networking in the global economy to benefit the virtual core of full time workers who have survived downsizing and marginalizing the mass of temporary and new contract workers. The result is a global division of labor networking core elites in the 1st world economies with poverty wage workforces throughout the rest of the globe. Reengineering is an apologetic for managerialism (see storytelling organization game) for definitions.

RELATED APOLOGETICS

·        Robin Cooper, When Lean Enterprises Collide: Competing Through Confrontation, Boston: Harvard Business School Press - Review prepared for The Journal of Japanese Studies -- Wolfgang Streeck (press here). Declares that Lean production is the stuff of Social Darwinism and we still need to do this to be competitive in the lean production world. An apologetic for neo-Taylorism and I assume reengineering. As Cooper states, "Competition has become a treadmill of exhaustion from which there appears to be no escape."

CRITIQUES OF TQM

·        Boje, D. and Rober Winsor 1992 "The resurrection of Taylorism: Total Quality management's hidden agenda." Journal of Organizational Change Management, 6(4): 57-70.

·        The Primary Effects of Scientific Management and The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement would seem to imply a romantic plot - from the board of directors' perspective that is. What could denote more imaginative freedom and daring violence in the expression of feeling through the decomposition of the working class than "destroying craftsmanship or increasingly emptying its traditional content" in lieu of a "fully thought-out labor process in which they
function as cogs and levers?" What could have more mysterious charm; characterized by picturesque strangeness or contrasts than increased class distinction, decreased political and social power, and class-based violence through a "Tailored" movement towards a lower cost per unit? This is indeed a tragedy that which excites pity and terror by a succession of unhappy events. I could also argue in favor of the CEO...the founder of a company, whom compete with the craftsman through scientific management and they win, forcing the craftsman to submit to a meagre position within the company. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!" That's the game of the market...you have a choice as to what your trade shall be. If you can produce your product more efficiently than the firm, then you shall gain competitive advantage as well as considerable market share. What are the chances of this? Minimal, theoretical, unpractical, and phenomenal "as it becomes apparent that it is increasingly difficult for a man of little capital to go into business for himself." Scientific management seems only right, for it is a fine-tuning of a process...it's human nature to want to progress. Technological advances in process requirements would seem to trickle down to the social level, where the surgeon uses metal-based surgical tools that were derived from metal-based machines used to assemble cars in a plant.

PART II: Tom Peters is a Neo-Reengineer

THE NEW TOM PETERS SEMINAR AND WOW BOOKS ARE DIFFERENT THAN OLD PETERS BOOKS -- OLD BOOKS FAVORED PEOPLE, NEW THEORY FAVORS THOSE ON TOP

·        Peters, Tom J. (1987). Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

·        Peters, Tom J. & R. H. Waterman (1982). In Search of Excellence: America's Best Run Companies. New York: Harper & Row.

·        The Tom Peters Seminar Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organizations - 1994 by Tom Peters Vintage Books / A Division of Random House, Inc. Or The Tom Peters Seminar by Peters, Tom ISBN: 0333628640; Paperback; Macmillan London 1999.. "Beyond Reengineering… The examples of Nike and Microsoft are used with a most wonderful quotation from The New York Times Magazine writer Fred Moody: "Microsoft's only factory asset is the human imagination". …challenging, and sometimes scary seminar that attendees pay $2000 to hear delivered in person… Chapter titles include "Toward the Abandonment of Everything,"

·        The Pursuit of Wow!: Every Person's Guide to Topsy-Turvy Times Author: Tom Peters, Random House, October 1994.

When We Debated Tom - At the 1996 Organizational Behavior Teaching Conference, Bob Dennehy, Grace Ann Rosile, Deb Summers, and I were asked to debate Tom Peters. Then days before the event we were asked NOT to debate Tom. We were told to do a follow up session. In preparing for this conference, we did our homework. Here is our story of the brief debate that did indeed take place during Tom's call for questions from the audience. He did not expect our questions. I (David) also turned my chair to face the back of the room after Peters compared himself to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. My non-violent and silent protest got me a lot of corrective email.

PART III: Reinventing Government
After Reengineering lost popularity in the downsizing craze in industry, it keeps consultants in billable hours in the reinventing government efforts at restructurization. The Mike Hammer Reinventing Government Awards consist of little hammers you get to wear on your lapel if you have reinvented government. There appear to be two related initiatives. One is RGN, the other America Speaks.

The Reinventing Government Network (RGN) is a transorganizational association of various individuals and organizations from around the world, seeking innovative public-sector reform. RGN currently has associates in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

America Speaks is an effort to bring more local and informed dialogue to democracy. It is a move away from representative democracy as it is currently practiced, but is not direct democracy (as for example in Emery's Participative Design for Participative Democracy).

There are many claims and counter-claims:

·        GOING BEYOND 2-PARTY DEMOCRACY - The Greens

What is Inclusive Democracy?

Inclusive democracy is a new conception of democracy, which, using as a starting point the classical definition of it, expresses democracy in terms of direct political democracy, economic democracy (beyond the confines of the market economy and state planning), as well as democracy in the social realm and ecological democracy. In short, inclusive democracy is a form of social organisation which re-integrates society with economy, polity and nature.

·        TWO PARTY SOLUTIONS - Reinventing Government

Really Reinventing Government Both parties promise to reinvent government. We asked the father of corporate restructuring to show them how by Peter F. Drucker.

Feb 1995, Atlantic Monthly: "Vice President Al Gore's promise to "reinvent government," proclaimed with great fanfare in the first year of the Clinton Administration, produced only a nationwide yawn."

·        REINVENTING GOVERNMENT OR REINVENTING OURSELVES

Vice President Gore's "reinventing government" initiative has made a significant contribution toward achieving President Clinton's New Democrat campaign promise to provide a "government that works better and costs less."

’Reinventing government’ applies to researchers, too By Beth Azar American Psychological Association Monitor: A new law calls on scientists to submit goals that show their work aligns with government's public-policy aims.

·        America Speaks. Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer, Chairperson- What structures and processes of governance can we fashion so that citizens can once again participate authentically in the policy decisions which are made in their names to solve their problems?

·        Democracy occurs in communities. While the citizen is the fundamental unit of a democracy and the family is the core of our society, democracy exists and thrives only within the interactions among citizens. While individual expression is essential, democracy is not really about solitary processes such as voting -- whether via the internet or within a curtained voting booth. Citizens in dialogue, articulating the values they share and understanding their differences, reaching conclusions which art acted upon -- that is the core democratic image we must nurture.

·        Shared responsibilities. Each community member must recognize the part he or she plays in the health of the community's democratic condition. Rather than becoming involved to fight a "not in my backyard" issue, participation can be motivated by an understanding that we sink or swim together. This awareness that our society is the sum of each of our actions moves the community beyond fractionary interest politics.

·        Public trust. The only way a healthy democracy can be sustained is through public trust. Trust depends upon inclusive processes overseen by leaders acting as stewards, who articulate and deliberate citizen concerns and bring all views to the table. It is such processes -- managed by leaders serving as stewards, not as career politicians -- which evoke the public's trust and are the foundation of the true authority of leaders in a democratic polity.

·        Healthy struggle. We believe that creative tensions are imbedded in society's most contentious issues. These tensions are the heart of democratic struggle and are the wellspring of a vibrant, vigorous society; they must be worked out in public, in direct processes that engage citizens and leaders in open dialogue.

·        "Both-and" relationships. The capacity to find common ground amongst, and incorporation of, diverse solutions must be restored, sanctioned, and preserved. The processes that yield to accommodation and integration must be strengthened and pushed to meet the healthy challenges of diversity in America.

·        Thoughtful deliberation. Supporting the five foregoing principles is the capacity for thoughtful deliberation. The necessary skills include listening, inclusion, mediation, dialogue, reflection, and closure, each of which is recognized as a fundamental tool for strong and effective governance.

PART IV Direct Participative Democracy

·        Participatory Economics, Michael Albert - "According to most economists, the activities of separate groups of producers and consumers can be coordinated by markets or by authoritarian planning—but there is no "third way." ... We disagree. The truth is that socialism as originally conceived has never been tried, but not because it is impossible. Council communists, syndicalists, anarchists, and guild socialists fell short of spelling out a coherent, theoretical model explaining how such a system could work."

·        ParEcon, Anarchy and Politics by Brian Dominick "One of the most common questions posed by anarchists looking at the parecon model concerns the existence, or nonexistence, of a state in a society with a functioning participatory economy."

·        Direct Democracy ...the only just form of government. "In a direct democracy there are no representatives. All decisions are made at the level of the people. When a budget or law needs to be passed, then the idea goes to the people. This obviously could get very complicated but if broken down into state levels of the same system it could be sorted out. There would be no political action groups because they would have to "pay off" the entire population of the country. Corruption and "pork" would be eliminated. Taxes could not be raised without the permission of the people. The few would no longer rule the many and the government would not cost billions of dollars just to operate.

·        The First International Congress on Direct Democracy was convened in Pribram (a suburb of Prague), in the Czech Republic, on August 25-27, 1998

·        ISDW - Institute for the Study of Distributed Work, Charles E. Grantham - Telecommunities electronically integrate work, education, and civic action. Summary: Increasingly, a worker is no longer required to transport himself to work; the work can be moved to him. As corporations expand their market and human resource base, the trend to distribute work will become a significant factor in the recruitment, training, and retention of qualified employees. In urban areas, this takes the form of collaborative relationships with community development leaders and other businesses committed to the urban infrastructure.

·        Democracy: Can the development of telecommunities foster a greater rate of citizen participation in the political process? Can this process create an opportunity for movement toward a more direct participatory form of democracy than we currently have?

8. Frameworks

Tales of multiple large systems change models competing in Interorganizational arena - Most widely known is Burger & Luckmann, Erving Goffman, Gareth Morgan, and Stewart Clegg. My own work is:

·        Boje, D. M., White, Judith. & Wolfe, Terance J. 1994. "The Consultant's Dilemma: A Multiple Frame Analysis of a Public Housing Community." In R. W. Woodman & B. Passmore (Eds.) Research in Organizational Change & Development, Vol. 8: 181-242. This article contains some of the fieldwork done through 1994

Frameworks - This is our Goffman analysis of the Public Housing Community. People make interpretations on what is going on around their world through the framework (schemata of interpretations) that Goffman calls the primary framework. Two main types of primary frameworks: natural (just physical) and social (by person's will or action). We consulted to a framework embedded in contesting frameworks. There was a division of consulting labor among the varied frameworks of the network of organizations in which we did our TD work. Our transcripts attest to the Theatrics of Everyday Life and to the Metaphorization in that TD arena. For example, the Housing Authority of the City of LA referred to themselves as the "Authority".

Framework of Frameworks - Goffman means the cosmology or belief systems of a culture. White, Wolfe, and I (1994) were interested in the public housing community where more than one consulting frame was in what Goffman calls tension with other frames. Our approach was to try to see if we could get come kind of dialogue and understanding happening across the frames. People like to hold onto their frames so frame breaking, morphing, and stretching is uncomfortable to us all.

Theatrics of Everyday Life - Goffman adopts a theatrics metaphor that can be related to the Postmodern Theatrics approach. In Everyday Life we are all drama queens, dramatizing and mystifying what we do. We act out to give an impression of ourselves. At an organization level, I have been looking at how organizations like Disney and Nike present an official storied facility to their publics and how activists critique their theatrics hoping for script changes. Goffman points out that in our professions as consultants or professors we dramatize and we coach the dramatic performances of CEOs, workers, and community leaders. And we conceal part of our dramatic performance and keep little "secrets" (Goffman 1959: 43-48). Back of backstage is the harried performer. Goffman's analogy is the everyday life is theatrical involving dramaturgical performances. We play our theatric roles to elicit desired impressions of our self to others. We have tacit agreement or "working consensus" as to whose claims and theatric frames play in different situations. Some definitions of the theatric scene we play have a "moral imperative." The consulting task is to confront clients with their habituated and institutionalized scripting of so-called "objective reality" to show it is all-subjective, so we can get together and change the enacted scripts. As with Jerome Blumer and Alfred Shutz, there are phenomenological "typifications" that are socially cast, that can be redefined.

Metaphorization - Gareth Morgan points out that we live in a symbolic universe of metaphors. Berger & Luckmann (1966) tell us that through therapy we learn to stop playing in metaphor universes that bring us dysfunction. We learn to play in the institutionalized and legitimate or official metaphors. In organization metaphor therapy, Morgan helps clients play with new metaphors to creatively open up their horizons. It is not clear what Morgan does with metaphors that do not have legitimated ontological status in organization and TD consulting. Here, I mean the power issues of whose metaphors are going to hold sway. Berger & Luckmann (1967) refer to this as the "maintenance" aspects of the social system. From a critical postmodern perspective, deciding who has the monopoly on metaphors is an important question, especially if your symbolic universe is at the margin. We are socialized into accepting the symbolic universe around our institutions as something we can just take for granted. So TD here has the praxis of intervening in reality-maintenance metaphors and in frameworks of power.

The Other Framework: Stewart Clegg's Frameworks of Power.

Boje & Grace Ann Rosile (1999) Critical Postmodern Readings of Empowerment-Disempowerment: Follett meets Clegg (paper currently in review).

Clegg (1989: 230), building upon Foucault’s theory of power and resistance (as well as Lukes, Laclau and Mouffe) puts relations of meaning and agency into an overall theory of circuits of power to give both empowerment and disempowerment an embedded and highly contingent context.

However, it is not only as a result of struggles which occur explicitly over relations of meaning and membership that social change occurs. It can also be a function of those changes in the process of innovation which always pose potential transformations for the extant structuring of empowerment and disempowerment, dependent upon extant techniques of production and discipline (Clegg, 1989: 215).

Clegg’s circuits of power constitute a "discursive field of force" socially constructed by human agency by virtue of organizing (1989: 17). Circuits of power is a three dimensional theory. First is the episodic power relations, which is agencies in social relations. Second is dispositional power, the obligatory passage points fixed in rules of meaning and relationship. The third dimension is the facilitative power relations of the techniques of discipline and production. Clegg (1989: 239) proposes that power can be analyzed as moving through three distinct and interacting circuits in his relational articulation of how power flows and is calibrated in organizations at the juncture between social and system integration. For Clegg (1989: 239) it is the fixing, or rules of practices, that make facilitative the "core of power."

Epistemology/Ontology - The ontology is that the world is multiple realities. It is subjectively created, but objectively internalized as objectivity. The epistemology is one of a continued dialectic cycle of subjective knowledge being apprehended as objective while forgetting its subjective initiations (Hegel). Berger & Luckmann (1967) express this perspective and it is widely known as "social construction" of everyday "reality." We do our theatrics to construct our frames and to interact with the frames of others.

References

Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann, 1967, The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor

Clegg. S. R. Frameworks of Power. London: Sage; Modern Organizations: organization studies in the postmodern world. London: Sage.

Goffman, Erving, 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor; 1974 Frame Analysis. New York: Harper; Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Penn. Press.

Morgan, Gareth, 1997, Images of Organization. CA: Sage; Imaginization: New Mindsets for Seeing, Organizing, and Managing

9. Mythmaking Systems

Some Background on Mythmaking

Mythmaking. Mythmaking has important implications for TD networking. Rather than looking at myth as a fiction, I prefer to define myth as a very special, sometimes even sacred kind of story that interprets the world around us. While all stories interpret something, and offer an ideology, myths do something more than most stories. Myths provide deeply felt and believed schema, such as the mechanistic view that the organization is a machine, or the organic view that the organization is evolving to some more progressive and ideal state. A myth explains the origin of life, illustrates moral values, links cause and effect (e.g. cog in this here machine), and explains grand powers over human beings and social organizations (Boje & Rowland, 1977). While science seeks to discredit, or demythify all mythology, we still seem to live our life by our myths, and their metaphoric logics. We each have a life narrative of our life, our family, our work, our community, and our world. Together, these stories constitute our personal myth. Our myth gives meaning to our life, constructs our own and others? identity, our taken-for-granted assumptions, and becomes a framework for everything we think and do. As Carl Jung asked long ago: "What myth are we living ?"

Mythmaking in organizations is, not untruth, as much as it is the way in which “elements of organizational culture are conceptually organized into a system of organizationally relevant logic” (Boje, Fedor & Rowland, 1982: 17). We seem to be disowning myths of mechanistic, organic or other logic, in favor of chaos the chaos myth, using the new physics language of fractals, cusps, non-linearity, and other chaos-terms to fashion our post-Newtonian stories. Mythologic is defined, here, as a narrative, meta-logic, as opposed to a Cartesian, logical empirical, or even post-Newtonian ways of knowing the social world. There is scientific, but also narrative knowing. This does not mean that science is beyond narrative logos. As Lyotard (1984) points out, science is a metanarrative tied to the myth of progress and enlightenment.

Mythmaking is the Big Story, a form of metanarrative, a grand universalizing claim, that differs from local stories, or what Lyotard (1984) calls “local narratives.” Mythmaking systems in organizations, as a metanarrative way of knowing, constrains the choices of meanings by constituting a common sense, taken-for-granted, objectified experience. Local accounts can supplement or contest dominant myths (Cummings & Brvcklesby, 1997; Boyce, 1995; Boje & Lasko, 1980; Boje, 1981a; 1981b). “Myths (and stories) collide and compete in the ongoing negotiation of power and privilege among groups, attempting to determine the dominant myth-making system” (p. 18, additions, ours). According to Boje, Fedor & Rowland (1982: 18-20):

1. Myths create, maintain, and legitimate past, present, or future actions and consequences.
2. Myths maintain and conceal political interests and value systems
3. Myths help explain and create cause and effect relationships.
4. Myths rationalize the complexity and turbulence of activities and events to allow predictable action taking.

TD practice can take one of at least four positions with reference to mythmaking Muayyad (1997) and Kaye (1996) has also looked at myth and the type of change strategy to deploy. Boje, Fedor, and Rowland’s (1982) scheme:

1. Demythifying, by substituting the cannons of behavioral science for mythological constructions.
2. Myth exchange, by allowing systems actors to bracket their own ways of knowing, in order to see the world as others are seeing it, and being able to translate one into the other.
3. Myth balancing, by dialoging many alternative views that oppose dominant perspectives.
4. Myth enrichment, by helping people reconstruct their experiences in ways that promote a higher quality of working life.

In the first case, demythifying denies the validity of non-science based world views. In the second and third, TD can help people to stretch their world view. It is in the forth case, that we are concerned in this paper. That is, ways in which remythologizing, to use Will McWhinney’s term (McWhinney & Battista, 1988), allows the organization participants to do reconstruct their mythic logic. Boyce (1995) has also examined this approach. It is our purpose here, to build upon the notion that there is a storytelling system, call it a mythmaking system, which constitutes metanarrative logics for organizational participants. As the organization encounters new environments, the mythologic changes. The reverse is also true. As the mythmaking changes, and new stories get constructed, new environments become sensible.

·        The power elite engages in mythmaking, producing oversimplified logics and stories that keep them in power. Chomsky calls this the "manufacture of consent." Elites create the illusions of participation, while keeping the majority of people out of meaningful participation and governance.

·        80-20 Rule - Chomsky argues that 80% of the populace is side-tracked into fundamentalist, silly, and time-wasting propaganda, so that 20%, the relatively well-educated elite can manage, write, and vote.

·        The Manufacture of Consent - The media filtered and selected fragmented topics, emphasizing certain issues and marginalizing others, and bounding national debate within certain limits.

References

Boje, David and Kendrith M. Rowland
1977 "Spatial and Temporal Patterns as Sense-Making Devices in Organizational Development: The Role of Symbols, Metaphors, and Myths," (with Kendrith M. Rowland), Academy of Management Conference, Orlando, Florida, August.

Boje, David and Joan Lasko
1980 "An Historical Analysis of the GSM Learning Community Myth" Organization Behavior Teaching Conference, University of Southern California, California, June.

Boje, David
1981a "Intervening Through Organization Myth Making," California Folklore Society Meeting, UCLA, April 2-5.

1981b "Myth Making: A Qualitative Step in OD Interventions," OD Division Session of the Academy of Management Meetings, Las Vegas, Nevada, August.

Boje, David, Donald B. Fedor, and Kendrith M. Rowland
1982 "Myth making: A qualitative step in OD interventions". Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, vol. 18: 17-28.

Boyce, Mary
1995 "Collective centering and collective sense-making in the stories and storytelling of one organization." Organization Studies. 16 (1). 107-137.

Cummings, Stephen & John Brvcklesby
1997 "Towards demokratia - myth and the management of organizational change in ancient Athens." Journal of Organizational Change Management. 10(1): 71-95.

Epston, David
1989 Collected Papers. Adelaide, Australia: Dulwich Centre Publications.

Jabri, Muayyad
1997 "Pairing myth with type of change: implications for change communication." Journal of Organizational Change Management. 10(1): 21-29.

Jones, M. O., D. M. Boje & B. Giuliano.
1983 "Myth, Symbols and Folklore: Expanding the Analysis of Organizations," Conference with 40 presenters and 200 attendees, Santa Monica, California, March 10,12, 1983. Sponsored by grants from National Endowment for the Humanities and the Skaggs Foundation.

McWhinney, W., and J. Battista
1988 "How remythologizing can revitalize organizations. " Organizational Dynamics Vol. 17 (August) 46-58.

Thompson, Michael G.
1996 "Can narrative therapy heal the school?" unpublished paper.

White, M.
1989 Selected Papers. Adelaide, Australia: Dulwich Centre Publications.

1991 "Deconstruction and therapy." Dulwich Centre Newsletter. 1, 21-40.

White, Michael, & David Epston
1990 Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York: W. W. Norton & Company,

10. Learning Organization/Knowledge Organization & Stakeholder Methods.

SUMMARY - The postmodern theory of stakeholders is critical of the modernist stakeholder approaches. Their assertion is that the modernist approaches for centering the analysis and praxis with a "managerialist" bias. From a narrative view this means the managerialists write the strategy, read the links to power marginalize other stakeholder voices and use various rhetorical devices to make it appear stakeholders have voice and participation in the process. The result is what Mitroff called "stakeholders of the mind." Managers and experts sit down and develop stakeholder models, transaction costs, and stakeholder maps without the kind of PDPD (see Emery square) search conference invites. Instead of joint stakeholder control over the process, there is a story told of participation, while an expert-rational-deductive model gets implemented from one stakeholder view (the managerialist view). The postmodern approach is multi-voiced with a focus on "action learning (see TD gameboard "Action Research"). The narrative approach to stakeholder praxis is a focus on sense making through collective and collaborative storytelling. Carlton & Kurland point out that agency/expert theories of stakeholders do the analytic work, but the stakeholder voice in various value matrices and process models is one more top management game of privilege. "Without stakeholder participation in a trust-building process, the prospect of lower transaction or contracting costs remains problematic (p. 160). Several TD2 approaches include both storytelling and "real time" stakeholder participation to control the process (e.g. PDPD, Action Research, ICEND TD, and some Network Organizing work). The TD1 approaches do a Kantian "King Solomon" move, where "the metaphysical director [managerialist] becomes a metaphoric embodiment of the ideal manager-agent who should exercise discretion in balancing conflicting stakeholder claims in a manner consistent with Kantian moral rationality" (p. 161). The problem with making the manager the "agent" of Solomon is it is a stakeholders in his/her mind meeting, not people meeting and having their own voice. It is not community conversation where marginal groups come together to deconstruct and dialogue with patriarchal hierarchical monologues. Carlton & Kurland look to emerging postmodern network organizational forms (Clegg 1999) where issues of participation and democratic discourse and trust-building dialogue are critical to the process (Boje & Wolfe, 1987; Wood & Gray, 1991; Lewicki & Bunker, 1994). They work through the Saturn Case as their example. They conclude "agents and stakeholders become co-authors, voicing and acting out the intertextual 'script' that defines each other's responsibilities and expectations within an ongoing, multilateral, interdependent relationship. Thus collaborative, trust-building praxis drives the shared epistemological community conversation that defines meaning within and among emerging organizational forms" (p. 165).

·        TD2 METHOD BOOK ON WEB - "Appreciation-Influence-Control (A-I-C) A Self-Organizing Process" by William E. Smith 1998 - uses storytelling and community mapping and is rooted in "Kurt Lewin's field theory, Eric Trist's socio-technical system's and Russell Ackoff's interactive planning- and is consistent with the New Sciences - Relativity, Quantum physics and Chaos theory" (also Participatory Action Research, Open Space, & Future Search) AIC is a philosophy based on an understanding that power relationships are central to the process of organizing. - The model is named after the three fundamental and universal relationships involved in the design of any purposeful system-- the relationship to the whole (appreciation), the relationship between the parts of the whole system( influence), and the relationship of the individual part to itself (control). the approach is interdisciplinary in terms of the TD Gameboard approaches: " in the appreciative phase it can use brainstorming, search conferences, Delphi techniques, story-telling, art, etc. In the influence phase, it uses methodologies such as dialogue, open-space, negotiation and conflict resolution. In the control phase it can use such methodologies as management by objectives, the Logical Framework, ZOPP, and PERT." AIC is an organizing process which consists of:

a) identifying the purpose to be served;
b) framing the power-field around that purpose -- those who have control, influence and appreciation relative to the purpose;
c) selecting those with the most influence relative to the purpose (stakeholders) from the three circles and designing a process of interaction between them; and
d) facilitating a self-organizing process which ensures that the stakeholders:

1) step back from the current problems to fully appreciate the realities and possibilities inherent in the whole situation;
2) examine the logical and strategic options as well as the subjective feelings and values involved in selecting strategies; and
3) allow for free and informed choice of action by those responsible for implementing decisions.

TD and Green Scenarios

·        My friend and colleague Steve Best did a book review which speaks to the transorg aspects of relation between narrative, ecology, and global capitalism. The books are: Which World? Scenarios for the 21st Century: Global Destinies, Regional Choices by Allen Hammon Covelop Press and Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor by Tom Athanasiou Little, Brown, and Company

·        On Hammon Book: "The important point is that unless we first imagine various futures, both good and bad, and utilize socially progressive and ecological visions as ethical and institutional maps, we will have nothing to guide us in the constitution of a viable future, and we will travel in time like lost seafarers... In its interesting design, Hammond's book begins with the importance of constructing stories or “scenarios” as critical maps of the present and guideposts for the future.

Reviewed by Steve Best:

As the planet spirals ever deeper into social and natural disaster, with all things becoming ever more tightly knit into the tentacles of global capitalism, there is an urgent need for new maps and compasses to help steer us into a viable mode of existence. Karl Marx's 1843 call for a “ruthless criticism of everything existing” has never been more urgent and appropriate, but all too often today critique is merely academic, stratospheres away from concrete action and progressive social policies. Yet, social critique and change in the slaughterhouse of capitalism needs to be guided and informed by powerful descriptions of what is--the degraded forfeiture of human potential in a world where over a billion people struggle for mere existence--but also by bold new visions of what can be, imaginative projections of how human beings might harmoniously relate to one another and the living/dying earth. Where some people concede defeat, some declare this the best of all possible worlds (I'd hate to see the worst one), others announce the end of history (Fukuyama and Baudrillard), and others still continually settle for lesser evils (i.e., the neoliberalism of the Democratic Party), one of the first conditions of change is the realization that things could be otherwise, that humanity has choices, and, indeed, that we are currently at a crucial crossroads in the history of the earth where what we do or fail to do in the next few decades might decide the ultimate outcome of all advanced life on earth. One of the major crises today is a crisis of the imagination. In the tradition of neo-Marxism, and the work of thinkers like Murray Bookchin, it has been recognized that so-called “utopian” visions are not, when authentic, starry-eyed dreams of (soy)milk and honey meadows, but rather are empirically grounded in actual social tendencies and potential for a rational, egalitarian, and compassionate mode of life. For such utopians, the “ought” can become an “is.”

In his new book, Which World? Scenarios for the 21st Century, Allen Hammond offers some significant visions of such future worlds. Hammond is a senior scientist and director of Strategic Analysis for the World Resources Institute, which bills itself as a non-profit and non-partisan policy studies center based in Washington, D.C. A prolific writer of books and scientific articles, Hammond received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard. For such a quantitatively trained thinker, he is to be commended for his ability to integrate science and theory, facts and politics, and analytical and visionary thinking.

Which World? stems from Hammond's involvement in a the “2050 project,” a five-year-long research program of ecology and sustainability organized by the Brookings Institute, the World Resources Institute, and the Santa Fe Institute, involving dozens of scholars from around the world. The project advanced a “systems theory” view which sees societies as systems that interact with one another and the earth in complex ways, the effects of which ultimately are unpredictable. The project attempted, in physicist Murray Gell-Mann's phrase, “a crude look at the whole,” studying the interactions of numerous factors--demographic, technological, political, cultural, and environmental--that constitute societies and shape their future outcomes.

Drawing from this project, Which World? attempts to map how such dynamics currently operate in various regions of the planet, how they interact in the global economy, and it seeks to project various possible outcomes of current social processes. The emphasis here is on possible because, in line with his systems theory approach and the science known as “chaos theory,” Hammond insists that while current trends may predispose societies to certain outcomes, these futures are too complex and contingent on uncertain variables for exact prediction.

This means that however things are presently constructed, they can be deconstructed and reconstructed by human beings in different ways. It means, moreover, that whatever futures might be likely or probable, such as one of global social and environmental collapse, it can be anticipated and prevented in favor of quite different results. The important point is that unless we first imagine various futures, both good and bad, and utilize socially progressive and ecological visions as ethical and institutional maps, we will have nothing to guide us in the constitution of a viable future, and we will travel in time like lost seafarers. To begin marking the signposts, Hammond argues, our first task is to examine long-term trends in various regions and the globe as a whole.

Hammond is a sharp, dialectical thinker able to hold simultaneously in his mind both the negative and the positive, seeing how we are barreling down the road to hell, but also how other paths open at our current developmental crossroads. Specifically, Hammond envisages three main possibilities for humanity: we can journey into the Market World of untrammeled capitalism, the Fortress World of social collapse and authoritarian control, or the Transformed World of benign capitalism that prioritizes social justice and establishes a rapprochement with nature. If the menu of options seems slightly limited, something like what a steakhouse offers a vegetarian, it is, for it fails to consider a Left or anarchist vision of a revitalized socialist economics.

In its interesting design, Hammond's book begins with the importance of constructing stories or “scenarios” as critical maps of the present and guideposts for the future. He then broadly describes the nature of the three worlds/roads he believes face us in the current crossroads of social evolution. Finally, he applies each scenario to various regions of the world, always with a close eye on how each region interacts with the global economy as a whole, and how social development is inextricably bound to the ecological systems of the earth. Specifically, Hammond studies crucial regions such as Latin America, China and Southeast Asia, India, Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe, North America, Europe, and Japan.

Thus, the regional and the global, the social and natural worlds, are theorized together as one system, but with different outcomes available to society and nature, depending on the wisdom and effects of human choices. In each region, Hammond advances an empirical analysis of current trends relating to issues such as population, economics, and technology, and from there imagines three possible futures such trends could foster. The scenarios are highlighted with italics and read with the immediacy of vividness of the morning paper. In confronting these imaginary outcomes, one can easily imagine being in a different future, with all the repulsion or joy (or scepticism) this experience may bring.

The first scenario Hammond investigates as one possible future is the Market World. As championed by entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and political conservatives and liberals alike, this world is an extension of current capitalist globalization dynamics. The idea here, as trumpeted ubiquitously in the media, is that free markets and technological innovation can bring peace, prosperity, and stability to nations around the globe. With the development of NAFTA, the loans of the IMF, and the computerization of the planet by IBM and Microsoft, this capitalist utopia will bring the dream to as many people as possible.

This scenario asks us to believe in trickle-down economics theory on a global scale, even though so far it has not worked in any single country. Conspicuously absent from the Market World vision is a keen appreciation of the environmental toll global consumerism and prosperity would involve. To the extent such problems may be anticipated, thinkers from this paradigm hold they will disappear with a wave of the magic technofix wand, whereby some technology or “revolution” or other (like the celebrated “green revolution”) will save the day--and hopefully the whales too.

Should this future fail to materialize, should its technofixes, tepid reforms, and free market voodoo prove unable to solve the world's problems, Hammond shares the fear of many others that something like a Fortress World will come about instead of the Happyville of the Market World. On this scenario, tracing another possible outcome of contemporary dynamics, Hammond projects how the growth of the market might fail to bring greater prosperity to anyone but the elite, such that the intensified class differences and social insecurities could bring a Hobbsean war-of-all-against-all. This would be an inverted Market World characterized by “islands of prosperity, oceans of poverty” (Madhav Gadgil). As social insecurities advance, armies of the disaffected would arise. Here, as Hammond describes, the dark side of global capitalism would emerge, leading to greater worldwide poverty, a growth in social instabilities and violence, and environmental ruination and collapse. In such a volatile state, society may become militarized, where the elite use whatever means necessary to defend their property and privileges. Looking at countries such as China and India, Hammond finds that current trends make this scenario possible.

But if, for Hammond, the PR of the Market World is too optimistic, the autopsy on the Fortress World is too pessimistic. Hammond believes that current trends could lead to still another possible future--the Transformed World. Here too, capitalism makes good on its promises for greater peace, prosperity, stability, and environmental protection. The main difference between the Market World and the Transformed World is that this third future is created out of the realization that an unfettered marketplace and unregulated technological innovation alone cannot bring social and environmental progress. Rather, on this vision, progress requires some form of deliberative and democratic shaping of economics and technology, more participation from citizens, and a different set of values that overcomes the pathologies of competition, individualism, and greed in favor of more communal, cooperative, and “spiritual" outlooks. Sheer quantitative change alone--more production and more technology--cannot bring about the kinds of qualitative changes Hammond thinks are necessary for a truly Transformed World.

Looking at current trends, Hammond finds evidence that present tendencies could evolve into the Transformed World. Among other things, he cites the emergence of a variety of local democratic cooperatives and grass roots organizations, numerous projects for urban renewal, a peaceful transition of power from whites to blacks in South Africa, the spread of the Internet and new possibilities for communication, new partnerships between environmental organizations and corporations, a new concern for “sustainable development” and the environment in the corporate sector, increased philanthropy, world environmental conferences such as occurred in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, and a more effective U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Hammond makes it clear that he intends these three possible futures to be ideal types. “In reality,” he argues, “the world in 2050 is likely to contain elements of all three scenarios ... [b]ut the scenarios nonetheless provide a convenient shorthand for widely held but contrasting visions of human destiny.” While the future is yet to be invented, Hammond usefully underlines the available resources for progressive social change, for a world in relative harmony with itself and its natural surroundings. Whatever happens in any country or region, Hammond is quite clear that different national and regional fates are intertwined; in the world of NAFTA, the economic and political systems of all countries is so interlocked that “global destiny depends on regional choices.”

Hammond is well aware that current dynamics could unfold in catastrophic ways. He points, for example, to gradual destruction of the rainforests; the reality of global warming; the impending doubling of the human population; the growing diminishment of useable land and water supplies; the ageing and economic strain of advanced industrial societies; in addition to the rise in crime rates, the global arms market, and the number of diseases afflicting human beings. To Hammond's list we could add the resurgence of fascist ideologies in the U.S. and Europe, the technocratic takeover of universities and resulting instrumentalist myopia, ecological troubles in China (as a fifth of the world's population begins trading in its bicycles for cars, its rice paddies for hamburger patties), a portentous economic unravelling of Russia, attacks and counter-attacks in the “new war” of terrorism, nuclear saber rattling between India and Pakistan, and the worldwide rise in meat consumption that exacts a huge toll on animal life, human health, and the world's environment.

·        Most likely, I am not alone in being unconvinced that the current global dynamics are unlikely to carry us very far toward anything but the Fortress World, and that our salvation does not lie in “green capitalism,” the “green revolutions” of mechanized agriculture, genetic engineering, or Bill Gates' “road ahead.” Despite the useful empirical analyses and the value of his scenarios, Hammond's book ultimately represents a massive collapse of critical thinking and a stupendous failure of the utopian imagination.

·        It is outrageous, for example, to see progressive value in alliances between McDonald’s and the Environmental Defense Fund in order to achieve better waste recycling, while saying nothing about the relation between cattle grazing, rainforest destruction, and global warming, all of which dwarf the ludicrous insignificance of better packaging of Happy Meals.

·        According to Athanasiou's figures, the gap between the world's rich and poor doubled between 1960 and 1989, “by which time the richest fifth of the world's people received 82.7 percent of the world's total income and the poorest fifth received only 1.4 percent -- a ratio of 60 to 1!”

·        SUM - Given these shocking statistics, Athanasiou hinges the fate of the earth on whether or not the ever-widening gap between the world's rich and poor can be bridged in a politics of social justice.

·        NARRATIVE IMPLICATIONS - Greenwashing techniques substitute image management for crisis management, involving the corporate world's various attempts to present itself as environmentally friendly, while in fact they are hastening ecological collapse.

11. Restorying and Narrative Therapy Tutorial

OVERVIEW:

PART I - Restorying. This section introduces restorying and work being done in family therapy and recently being applied in organization and transorganization settings We include links to Barry & Elmes (1997 AMR article along with Boyce's work in Organization Studies. There are also practical items usable in workshops written by Rosile. (See White, Michael, & David Epston 1990 Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York: W. W. Norton & Company).

PART II: The New Storytellers. This contrasts of several narrative approaches. Czarniawska’s (1997) Narrating the Organization; Boje (1991, 1995); Boyce (1995) Storytelling Organization; Clair’s (1997) Embedded Narratives; O' Conner's narrative approach; TwoTrees (1997) approach to the Living Story; and Grace Ann Rosile's work on narration and horse sense. It requires grounding in multiple narratologies and deconstruction. The applications are being worked out. You may not get this level unless you have had grounding in the first three parts.

TRANSORG RESEARCH WORK - "Learning with The Natural Step: A Jointly Told Tale of the Early Stages, 1988-1994." by Hilary Bradbury March 1998. This is "the story of the Swedish organization Det naturliga steget /The Natural Step. The Natural Step, or "TNS", was founded in 1989 as an educational foundation to promote sustainability in society." It is transorganizational in that "Natural Step is described by Robert as "a federation or network of autonomous associations, in which projects are undertaken to support sustainability. The network's main goal, however, is for all the members to agree on and support the concept of sustainability-to hold the same understanding in their minds about what sustainability is (Robèrt, 1997.)" The network collects about a charismatic leader and uses consensus as its learning approach. Bradbury's work applies the learning organization theory of Chris Argyris, among others. "Learning histories can be to [social] science what a microscope is to the physical sciences." - Chris Argyris. Critique - Good use of story analysis to do an historical study of a learning network of organizations.

An example of Transorganizational storying and restorying can be seen in Boje's recent analysis of the Nike case. Phenomenal Complexity Theory and Change at Nike: Response to Letiche. "As a virtual organization Nike retains direct (Beaverton, Oregon) control of the marketing and advertising, while subcontracting both production and distribution (except for NikeTown which is owned). Nike's GCC (Global Commodity Chains) embeds the one factory the University of Oregon marketeers studied in a complex system of relationships. The three-tiers of post-Fordist production subcontracting include an upper tier of semi-peripheral country factories (South Korean and Taiwan subcontractors manufacture the most expensive and sophisticated styles and often subcontract to the next tiers), a second tier periphery (Indonesia and China doing volume production using less flexible manufacturing and vertically integrating the material supplies such as leather, rubber and assembly), and a third tier of "developing" sources (Thailand and Vietnam known also for cheap labor). To study one factory in Vietnam is to miss the complex interdependent relationships in this producer network. I would like to add a fourth tier to Carty's typology. That is, the sub-contracting that subcontractors do with other subcontractors (part of the second tier above but happening as I understand it in all three tiers). The importance is that while Nike may admit several professors and Andrew Young to a factory tour, what is missed is the difference between conditions in such "model" (ready for inspection sites) and the subcontractors to the subcontractors of Nike. In Australia this involves home manufacturing while in Asia it can and does mean highly militaristic, even lower wage and higher overtime sweatshops." The storying and restorying here is how the NGOs and activists deconstruct and reconstruct the stories of Nike. And how Nike restories itself Just In Time to postpone change.

12. Transorganizational Development

TD Background Section

TD Assumptions

1. Network participants collectively define and negotiate the issues around which a TD action is organized. Some do environmental scanning, others future search.

2. Domains or divisions of labor are created as stakeholders identify their special interests in these issues. Natural tendency is to create bureaucratic hierarchy.

3. Resource exchanges link participants together in interdependent relations. The collective interests define the relationships and the ongoing relationships reflect those issues.

4. Both TD1 and TD2 processes interpenetrate the same systems. This is not a choice or some kind of transformative function (See Boje & Dennehy, 1999, Chap 2 for more on Mary Parker Follett's work on "interpenetration" as a way around duality. I do not mean TD1/TD2 as a duality.

Three Types of TDs interact link ying and yang around problem-saturated domains of interorganizational action at local and global relations.

TD1 The first type of transorganizational network tells the "good story" of progress through business and masquerades predatory and exploitative behaviors such as massive layoffs through reengineering and downsizing behind Greenwash advertising, public relations spin control, and token efforts to elevate world poverty and environmental degradation. The largest U.S. based consulting firms such as IBM Global Services with $29 billion in 1998 revenues focuses upon the highly mechanistic business process reengineering in its IT outsourcing and supply chain work. A long list of other firms follow that lead. In fact, most TD consulting is based in mechanistic, social engineering approaches to large systems multi-organization change and centrist control. In sum, TD1 network consulting seeks to recombine and control the community or global division of labor such that fragments of the self, social, and market can keep the status quo capital accumulation machine in tact (Boje, 1999: 14-189). Barker (1999: 171) refers to how in concertive team concept control, the market acts as a transorganizational means of discipline:

"They [teams] had a hierarchy of abstract moral gods, with "transorganizational" conceptualizations of being productive and successful as a team at the top, meaning that their understanding of success and productivity was more than, say, a quantitative indicator of meeting the production schedule" (p. 171, emphasis mine).

In TD1 instrumental-reasoning fashion the team came to believe that "team' "quality" and "service" in a disciplined regime equaled happiness and a functionalist solution to turbulent and changing market forces.

TD2 is defined as seeking and actively organizing networks to change/resist or go beyond the status quo relations of a dominating TD1 networks (Boje, 1979; Boje & Wolfe, 1989). TD2 networks take advocacy positions on global ecology and social responsibility. Examples range from community organizing of multi-organization networks such as the work of Saul Alinsky and Ted Watkins. Participative democracy search conferences by the Emerys is another example of an advocacy model. In the Emery case it is advocacy for environmental and purposive system reasoning in somewhat less hierarchical arrangements. There are also more postmodern and critical theory approaches to consulting that advocate either more grassroots or more ecocentric praxis options. KPMG International is a multi-billion dollar consulting firm based in Europe that does what I would term TD2 consulting by advocating environmental accounting practices, bring firms together to work on environmental and world hunger projects. In sum, TD2 networking seeks to attain greater democratic control and local community accountability over multinational as well as local corporate behavior. TD2 networking seeks to resist or modify the behavior of TD1 networks by forming an alternative TD2 network to conduct campaigns of resistance and power realignment that change TD1 behaviors (Boje, 1999: 14-18).

Middle Range TD1/TD2 There are middle range approaches between TD1 and TD2 or involving combinations of both. For example many firms apply Learning Organization, Appreciative Inquiry, or "Alliance Collaboration" (Anderson Consulting) among competing firms in order to bring business practices into more sustainable and socially responsible praxis. Ernesto Cortez continues Alinsky's more radical approaches with somewhat more bureaucratic and multi-issue, rather than single issue advocacy praxis. Ernst & Young and other billion dollar U.S. based firms adopt a Knowledge Organization approach as a successor to the more traditional Learning Organization models of Senge, Argyris or Schein-models. There is some experimentation by Ernst & Young with complexity and chaos theory modeling based in spin off operation from Santa Fe Institute. In sum, middle range approaches deviate from the profit maximization, free market economy view of TD1 to a non-traditional approach which may on occasion yield social or ecological advocacy or approach collective dynamics from a more multi-paradigm vantage point.

In sum, I find in most industrial and service sectors of the economy as well as the lucrative government consulting area, a contestation among TD1, TD2 and mixed TD1/TD2 consulting ontologies (views of being in the world), epistemologies (how knowledge is attained of that world) and praxis (practices in use that operationalize ontology and epistemology).

TD2 is based in based in ecocentric and communitarian ontologies.

These range from John Dewey’s communitarian liberalism, Amitai Etzioni's limits to privacy, and Philip Selznick's focus on mutuality and social justice.

These are what I will call "radical communitarian" positions, which I critique below, before introducing my own postmodern ontologies. Radical communitarians argue that "individualism" ontologies are causing the deterioration of the social good. They assert that the pendulum needs to swing back a bit. Individualism does not mean you can yell "fire" in a theater to get a laugh. Individualism does not mean Big Buck corporations can sell your privacy and destroy family life.

FIRST ETZIONI

·        The Limits of Privacy by Amitai Etzioni. Cyber-libertarians, such as the Cato Institute and the ACLU, are still fighting Big Brother (Etzioni). "They haven't yet realized that the greatest threat to privacy comes not from the state but from companies and privacy merchants who sell off our privacy for profit. The Privacy Paradox suggests that we'll need to lean on Big Brother - the villain that champions of privacy traditionally fear most - to better protect privacy from Big Bucks." The communitarian response is to keep privacy rights to the point they do deteriorate the common good. Etzioni the book promo says, "speaks to all who care about the moral, legal and policy issues raised by the tension between personal privacy and the common good, especially public health and safety... The book closes with a call for a whole new legal conception of privacy. One based on the notion of equal concern for the common good (public health and safety) and privacy, rather than according privacy a privileged position." Etzioni argues in this book that privacy claims have been accepted too often in recent decades at the expense of the civilised communitarian society.

·        Interview with Amitai Etzioni. "Q: Are you suggesting that we give up individual rights for the good of society and the wider community? A: I have never advocated that we give up our rights. The rights of individuals in our society must be cherished. However they must also be balanced with a concern for the common good."

·        Paper by Amitai Etzioni - "The End of Triumphalism" Responsive Community Quarterly. Volume 8, Issue 4, Fall 1998. He argues that since 1998, the American form of capitalism is being increasingly rejected. "The reasons for the worldwide failure of American capitalism and the rising backlash against it are numerous. Most important is the fact, often ignored by Americans, that many of the societies involved do not have the cultural, social, and political infrastructure a free economy requires. In these countries the most obvious expression of this deficit is the large-scale lawlessness that prevails. More is required than a few new laws, deregulation, and currency convertibility." Etzioni argues that instead of a return to centrist command and control planned economies, "Numerous nations are about to experiment with different combinations of varying degrees of capitalism with various forms of social protections for their people." It is American capitalism transplanted blindly that is being rejected, not all forms of capitalism.

SECOND SELZNICK

Paper by Philip Selznick, "Social Justice: A Communitarian Perspective" from The Responsive Community, Volume 6, Issue 4, Fall 1996. Selznick argues "communitarian commitment to social justice... makes social justice a moral imperative." Selznick is critical of the communitarian agenda, since the focus on crime, health, and safety can turn into immorality defined by the "haves" as a "lower-class evil" to be controlled by morality campaigns. The result can be a more conservative culture. Selznick seeks to resituate communitarianism by focusing in investing in community. He picks up on Etzioni's concepts of community as a "community of communities though Selznick prefers his own "unity of unities" construct. "Hence what we prize in community is not unity of any sort at any price but unity that preserves the integrity of the parts." He sees these concepts as bridging Biblical and Enlightenment thought. His corollary is "community presumes separateness as well as integration." Individuals are embedded in social contexts, "socially embedded, socially implicated, even socially encumbered." [Note - this connects to the Holon Theory in the next section]. Selznick brings out the danger of the "caste principle," "communitarians are hardly egalitarian—we recognize that significant differences in wealth, income, and education tend to create and reinforce beliefs that affluent people are inherently more worthy than their disprivileged brethren." He counters the caste principle with an appeal to social justice. "We cannot vindicate moral equality—and thereby do justice—if we do not remedy the most important effects of domination and impoverishment."

THIRD - OTHER APPLICATIONS OF ETZIONI/SELZNICK

·        Service Learning: A National Strategy for Youth Development Prepared By Susan M. Andersen. September 1998 - Service Learning and Communiarian Ontology -The Connectedness Axiom - "Active participation is required for democratic societies to thrive, and this makes policies designed to facilitate civic engagement of national interest. Service Learning is such a strategy. A vibrant civil society exists when people participate in civic and public affairs, and can identify shared values about the common good, while celebrating diversity and individual freedom." "The importance of "connectedness" suggested by recent evidence makes it clear that discovering ways to provide all youth, irrespective of family circumstance or income, the opportunity to work together with each other and with adults to build social capital is warranted."

·        Communitarian Network. Find the Responsive Community Quarterly.

·        The Responsive Communitarian Platform: Rights and Responsibilities. "American men, women, and children are members of many communities--families; neighborhoods; innumerable social, religious, ethnic, work place, and professional associations; and the body politic itself. Neither human existence nor individual liberty can be sustained for long outside the interdependent and overlapping communities to which all of us belong." "The exclusive pursuit of private interest erodes the network of social environments on which we all depend, and is destructive to our shared experiment in democratic self-government."

FOURTH, A POSTMODERN CRITIQUE OF COMMUNITARIANISM

The Communitarian Network and their hero Etzioni take a radical position to tame individual rights and forms of American capitalism that are not responsive to the needs of overlapping multiple communities and to the ideal of the "social good." My postmodern critique is there is not much being said about ecocentric concerns, the focus is on American-defined communitarian interests, and the initiatives seem to invite Big Brother back into the living room. What is valuable is the focus on taming individualist free-market capital interests that eroded overlapping and embedded networks of family, neighborhood, community and other social environments. What is missing is mechanisms of grassroots involvement and a focus on ecology. Maintenance of the institutions of civil society, to me, could mean more Big Brother, and Big Brother is controlled by Big Bucks, not the little people. Building shared values, habits and practices is the application of "universal" norms, which ignore the fragmented, multi-cultural reality of postmodern plurality. Who sets the universal norms by which community values and practices get judged? There is an assumption that through reasoned dialogue convergence and consensus among divergent voices can arise without hegemony. Restoring the "moral voice" and "family values" sounds like "moral majority" and the platforms of national party politics. And voting, their answer, seem a shallow way to implement communitarian ideals. It is not clear how voting will achieve the transcendent and romantic ideals of communitarian democracy or contain the greed of Big Bucks capitalism. As an unknown pro-communitarian author (1995) summarizes, "Communitarians allege that liberals, by presupposing that human beings are best seen as separate individuals pursuing their private goals are led to see society as a mere means for the pursuit of those separate goals." I would agree that communitarianism is a radical opposition to free-market, self-steering liberal ontology. Yet, there must be a more moderate position. For me this lies in resituation of communitarian into a more postmodern direction.

13. Festival, Spectacle & Carnival

I see three inter-related systems: Festival, Carnival, and Spectacle. Festival is what we get if we are able to disengage from lives of over-consumption and violent production. Carnival is when power gives its to nod to parody and satire of the powerholders and celebrities of spectacle. it is that bit of theatrics when the workers dress up like the boss for the day and act out in ways to get the attention of power the their exploited condition. Spectacle is what is accumulated all around us in acts of production and consumption. Disney and Las Vegas are just the obvious examples. The Spectacle approach is based in Guy Debord's work and that of Steve Best and Douglas Kellner. I have a book on the topic under review called Spectacle and Festival. A few of the topics:

·        Postmodern Chaos & Complexity

·        Virtual Organizations and Knowledge Networks

·        Digital Storytelling - Coke Theater in Las Vegas

·        Biotech Century - How is the Spectacle of Production and Consumption Changing our Life? Where do Spectacle and Festival intermingle? Posted by David M. Boje.

·        NEW - See Toronto Academy of Management Session on Festival, Spectacle and Carnival - David Boje and Brace Ann Rosile

Festivalism is an alternative to both the spectacles of state socialism and the late capitalism. Festivalism is rooted in Ahimsa, the practice of non-violence to all species. It provides an alternative to production and consumption practices rooted in violence to life. Festival is the self-management and self-design of our own leisure time and space, the realization of what we need to live and evolve as a species, with the most minimal harm to any other species. Festival is a way of doing business that respects people, communities, and the ecology. Festival balances stakeholder interests in the future generation (stakeholders include workers, managers, owners, investors, customers, local communities, future generations, and the ecosystem). Please consult study guide on Festivalism.

Carnival - Carnival is the theatrics of parody and satire sanctioned by power. It can even be organized by power as a way for citizens to let off steam. In a more enlightened era carnival was a way for power to see how it felt to be under foot. I did some re-reading of Kristeva (1980: 65) and found it was on Bakhtin's dialogic of text and context and particularly his concepts of the polyphonic and carnivalesque novels that Kristeva demarcated intertextual from structural or comparative analyses. Kristeva (1980: 78) says carnival is the double, "it is a spectacle, but without a stage; a game, but also a daily undertaking; a signifier, but also a signified." The context of the carnival is the crowd, the stage, the actors, and the game itself. Intertextuality analysis has moved carnival aside. For example, I note that Fairclough's (1992) approach to intertextuality analysis does not include carnivalesque, but instead gives it a different (and still useful) twist. For Fairclough the bottom line is a hegemonic analysis of intertextuality. With this move he resituates intertextuality analysis into the philosophy of critical theory, into the vertical axis of not only context but power.

Spectacle is above all a legitimating narrative for social engineering and social control masking the violent (non-Ahimsa) acts of production and consumption. By spectacle I mean Debord’s (1967) the Society of the Spectacle, the often violent and oppressive social control that masquerades as a celebration of betterment by recycling pseudo-reforms, false-desires, and selective sightings of progressive evolution, never devolution. By violent I mean the wilful and careless and often unnecessary disruption or extinction of the life of another, including the life of non-human species.

Consider the similarities. Both spectacle and festival combine theatrics, storytelling, crafts, and other arts into a community of performance. Both festival and spectacle incorporate food, story, theatrics, music, art, and other entertainment. I want to open up the question of what is festival for more rigorous exploration. They are oftentimes found together, occupying the same time and place. The same work organization has both festive and spectacle garniture.

People do resist spectacle - there is hope for spectacle transformation. There are eco-teams forming in Europe and North America to look at ways to cut back on our over-consumption patterns. Consumer groups are forming that resist shopping addictions, credit card addiction, workaholism, and television/Nintendo/Web cyber dependency. Turning Point for example runs full-page ads to raise questions about the impact of technology and transnational corporate strategies on the environment and the ability of nations to sustain growing populations with a quality of life for their people. It is in this context that I am proposing transorganizational theory and praxis rooted in festivalism and efforts to contain the spread of spectacle.

14. Postmodern Theatrics Notes

·          What is TD ICEND Theater (TD-ICEND-Theater)? TD ICEND Theater is based on the groundbreaking "Theater of the Oppressed" work of Brazilian activist Augusto Boal. Originally developed to help peasants explore solutions to their own problems, it is now used all over the world for social and political activism. We think it is a great tool for changing entrenched and problem-ridden stakeholder network dynamics. Postmodern theatrics can be applied to TD networking dynamics to make political economies of collective strategy more visible. "Who gets to script the TD strategy? How are collective dynamics linked to power? who is marginalized in the writing and revisions of networking scripts? What plotline is being collectively enacted (e.g. romantic, tragic, comedic, ironic)? How can problem-saturated plotlines be restoried and rescripted?" Postmodern theatrics stresses how a community of stakeholders creates a scripted direction in theatrical dramatics. These directions can be oppressive and mono-logic or mire dynamic and poly-logical. We assume dynamic multi-organization networks act out a TAMARA of scripted tales and repetitive motifs and that these embedding scripts of enactment can be changed-

Note: Grace Ann and I offer "TD ICEND Theatrics Workshops" and labs to corporations, community organizations, educational institutions as well as supply chain networks, industries, and other multi-stakeholder groups who want to restore and prescript their networking relations and collective dynamics. Our TD ICEND Role Playing Workshop is based upon Theater of the Oppressed and work in Postmodern Theatrics, including TAMARA. We start by collecting repetitive stories of problematic dynamics, coach stakeholders on how to stage them to a stakeholder audience, and do stop-action critical postmodern self-reflective "spec-actor" critique, and end with staging restoried scripting of improved collective dynamics. Our aim is to move from "spectacle theatrics" to more "festive theatrics."

·        What is Theater of the Oppressed? The Theater of the Oppressed is a vast array of theater games, techniques and exercises designed to break down the barriers between "actors" and "spectators." In the late 1970s, Augusto Bola’s groundbreaking text on theater theory, Theater of the Oppressed was published. there is a link between Postmodern Theatrics and Spectacle/Festival work. According to Boal, the separation between the "actor" and the "spectator" in traditional theater is disempowering. Spectacle Theater is inherently oppressive, a cultural form of imperialism that was contributing to the de-intellectualization of the native. In TD work the application is to transform human relationships in TD theater from the "monologue" of traditional OD performance into a "dialogue" between multiple stakeholders and the monologue oppression ensues. The idea is to develop TD Postmodern Theatrics workshops that extend ICEND 9Interactive, Communicative, Experiential, Network Development) through live-stage interaction, dialogue coach, critical thinking dramatizations, stop-action, restorying, rescripting, and fun. "Spect-actors" in TD theatrics workshops have the opportunity to both act and observe, and then restory to engage in self-empowering processes of festive dialogue that help foster critical thinking and large systems change.

·        Postmodern theatrics is a training ground for playing out oppressive network dynamics, doing stop-action critical analysis and deconstruction, and experimenting with new restoried and resituated relationship patterns. TD theatrics is a combination of short impromptu and scripted exercises involving the live audience in TAMARA-productions of the wandering audience (Boje, 1995) combined with the group of stakeholders being brought together periodically to discuss the collective dynamics they are experiencing and propose script changes in the next wave of TAMARA stagings. During the events, the consultants help stakeholders use postmodern, deconstruction and critical thinking skills to assess root causes of problem-saturated networking dynamics in their community or industry.

·          What is a TAMARA NETWORK
TAMARA networks have multiple and poly-voiced (polyphonic) stakeholder organizations in dynamic interaction. Each is a storytelling organization embedded in TAMARA network with multiple, parallel story logices. A TAMARA network has flexible links among its stakeholders, as they chasing competing storylines and logics. In a TAMARA network knowledge and collective system dynamics are rapidly changing as new stories are told and reinterpreted to alter patterns of interaction. Different storytellers story the network dynamics differently based upon their net-position and their unique experience history in the network patterns. Someone for example, who wandered through links A-B-N-K will have a different story to tell then someone who experienced A-B-O-K strands. The problem in a TAMARA Network is there is no universal story-reader to tell one universal history or give one monological, unilateral, and linear historical reading of the network dynamics. The network is polyphonic (multi-voiced) and polysemous (many meanings). it is in these networks, that we think TD ICEND Theatrics Workshops can have an impact. What matters in such workshops is find a way to depend collective understanding of network dynamics, competing logics, and the depth of human relationships. The focus is on how people narrate their experience and in experiential enactments of the theatrics of network dynamics. As always we assume "storytelling is the preferred sensemaking currency of human relationships among internal and external stakeholders" to these networks (Boje, 1991: 106).

TD Workshop ICEND steps have been adapted from NYC Theater of Oppressed approach to theatrics:

·        1) Workshop stakeholders are asked to volunteer to tell the story of an incident of oppression in a transorganizational setting that has happened to them, and that is likely to recur.

·        2) When all the stories have been heard, the stakeholder group votes and chooses one story that has evoked the greatest collective resonance and network dynamics. The protagonist of the featured story then chooses fellow stakeholder-participants to play the other characters of the story, and together they improvise the scene.

·        3) Next, the protagonist makes an exaggerated image, involving the whole body, of how he/she felt and saw each of the other character during the preceding scene, and gives them their corresponding image. They, in turn, take it, wear it, and freeze. The protagonist finally makes an image of how he/she felt and saw him/herself, and freezes. Keeping their images as masks, the characters then begin to improvise the same story, repeating the same dialogues and interactions.

·        4) Each of the other stakeholder-characters then gets to create a set of images that all will wear during successive improvisations. Each time, the dialogue and the interactions are filtered by the masks. The number of improvisations depends on the number of characters.

·        5) When all the images have been generated, the "collective" scene is improvised once more. This time, however, the characters can alternate between the masks that they have worn; they can chose at any given moment the one that feels most comfortable to them or that best helps them to obtain what they want.

·        6) At this point, the study of a circular, closed situation ends, and there begins a new moment: attempts to transform the situation itself. The characters shed all masks and improvise the scene one last time. But now, members of the audience become "spect-actors." They can yell Stop and intervene in the action at any given moment by replacing the protagonist in order to show him/her alternatives to the behavior illustrated in the scene, alternatives that they feel are more empowering.

·        Finding Festival Theater in Midst of Mono-Spectacle Theatrics - In TD1 spectacle theatrics in various systems and networks it is assumed the domination and command thinking prohibits the oppressed from being who they are and from exercising their basic human rights as festival beings. Adopting a more festival theatrics allows voices that are not being heard to be expressed and stories that defy verbalization to get acted on the postmodern stage. In TD2, new bridge work is experienced between oppressor and oppressed to remove separation between actor (the one who acts) and spectator.

15. Network Organizations and Transorg

Figure One: Interorganizational Architecture

NEGOPY "One of the oldest network analysis programs, NEGOPY finds cliques, liaisons, and isolates in networks having up to 1,000 members and 20,000 links. In use at over 100 universities and research centers around the world.

INTRO TO TD Network Organizing

Network organizing is challenging the hierarchies and markets approach of Williamson (1975). The basis for networks is cooperation, trust, and reciprocity whereas for markets it is free and supposedly open competition to minimize transaction cost and contracts to control for mistrust and managers' opportunism. For Weber, the excuse for bureaucracy is its positional authority and division of labor to control for efficiency and professionalization of roles to control for mistrust of managers who would otherwise be coercive. Weber also saw in bureaucracy the iron cage. Networks of organizations organize, it is said, to gain economies of scale and to coordinate activities that affect their joint fate (i.e. cooperative research and development, joint insurance pools, supply chain management, etc.). Member firms form cooperative TD networks in order to get beyond the limitations of hierarchies and markets. They also form network organizations to change market dynamics, such as when artisans form networks to distribute their wares. What is less clear is how do networks evolve and what are network dynamics? Do they becomes hierarchies or markets or are networks a mix of all these forms? Further, just how do organizations who may be bureaucratic, quest, chaos, or postmodern organize and coordinate their networking? Network Organizations is a term to describe four popular approaches to TD. Without critical review, the first three TD network approaches can become the servant of the fourth, Cyberwar games. What Deleuze & Guattari (1987) term the War Machine.

Approach 1: Social Network Structures
Approach One applies Social Network Structuration Theory to assess and in praxis change the centrality, density, and differentiation of a network of organizations. The Interorganizational architecture of Figure One. The focus of this network analysis is on the overall structure and interdependence of positions and constraints in the network.

·        Guy Hagen, Dennis K. Killinger and Richard B. Streeter "An Analysis of Communication Networks Among Tampa Bay Economic Development Organizations" 1997. This is an empirical network study with variables of centrality and density based in an open systems model (Katz & Kahn, not Emery). "Clusters" of organizations (as indicated by structurally equivalent sets) are differentiated by color and shape. Good overview of structural approach to networks.

·        A similar analysis looking at centrality in IO networks in Illinois. Boje, D. M. and Whetten, D. A., "Effects of Organizational Strategies and Constraints on Centrality and Attributions of Influence in Interorganizational Networks," Administrative Science Quarterly, 26, pp. 378-397, September 1981. (We used Negopy to develop measures of network centrality).

·        Example: Inter-System Penetration: organizational domains and industrial access. "Policy today is made in a process involving a plurality of both private and public organizations. Of special interest are networks at system boundaries, here between research and industry."

·        Example: Control Networks: The political control of an organizational system is visualized above. "two groups of government agencies have been fitted to two lines on the top while the controlled organizations are fitted to a circle."

·        Example: World Trade Networks -The structure of world trade of between 28 OECD countries in 1981 and 1992. For bibliography of Network Graphic Analysis

·        Excellent Network Social Analysis Packages and examples- Linton Freeman. The recent approaches allow for simulations, changes in visual displays, and transformations of networks over time.

·        ARTICLE: Visualizing Social Networks by Linton C. Freeman 2000 vol 1 (1) Journal of Social Structure

·        ARTICLE: Eigen Analysis of Networks by William Richards and Andrew Seary - vol 1 (1) Journal of Social Structure

Weak or Strong Ties? Granovetter (1993) has a theory of weak and strong social network ties that has implications for TD networks. For example #22 in Figure One has direct or indirect weak ties with three different clusters. Within each cluster there are strong ties. To gain new ideas and contacts it is the weak ties that are more important than strong ties. Why? Because a weak tie, might for example, span very different clusters of strong relationships in various sectors of a network (See Figure One). Burt (1982) continued developed the idea a bit further by looking at "structural holes" in the network. Structural holes are defines as buffers between two non-redundant contacts. So there is a difference between a network of strong ties to similar others and one that has a lot of weak ties across many structural holes throughout a very diverse network. More and better ideas come from a variety of different information ties.

Beyond the Architecture of Networks - The structural aspects of weak, strong, centrality or diffuse relations do not capture, for me, the most critical aspects of network. While it is important to look at how networks adapt and evolve over time it is equally important to look at process issues. For example, in Mythmaking, Meyer and Rowan (1977) argued that interorganizational relations (and networks) transfer institutional myths and rituals between complex organizations through imitation. See "Institutional organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony." American Journal of Sociology. 83: 929-984. We therefore want to amend the structural approach to include processes of story networking:

NET-SIM and TD STORY NETWORKING - We need to be able to track the storytelling and symbolic interpretation process dynamics that occur in networks (See Ring & Van de Ven, 1994; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Network relationships are built up over time, and have a history, that is more reciprocal and multi-faceted than simple market transactions. For example, Grace Ann Rosile and I are working with Michael Coombs at Physical Science Laboratory to tie TD studies of the domain content of storytelling and storytellers over time to NETWORK SIMULATIONS or what we call NET-SIM. In doing so we think it is possible to begin to marry ethnographic studies of network stories with dynamic displays of network patterns during a network TD intervention. While we can not show you NET-SIM - "Top Secret" we can give you a brief idea of what we have in mind. What is happening in simulation work?

NET-SIM will allow us to collect multiple readings of a system change effort over time to give clients and consultants and understanding of the on-going unfolding impact of their network change strategies.

Embeddedness and TD Networking. The reason why storytelling and the history of relationships is so important to study is because of what Granovetter (1985, 1992) and Uzzi (1997), building upon the work done by Polanyi (1944) call "embeddedness." (Granovetter, 1985) argues that the embeddedness of collaboration is accounted for in wider institutional structures. The embeddedness of networks in the institutional, social and political contexts explains how the power of mutual obligations in networks is an alternative to market mechanisms. And to study it requires narrative and historical theory. Even among the most profit and greed-driven markets in capitalism, the social embeddedness of networking transforms organizational behavior.

Why postmodern and Networking - Pescosolido and Rubin (2000) and White (1992) argue that while the rational choice theorists pursue the "embeddedness" theory, the postmodernists focus on "contextualization" i.e. how people experience the world of chaos.

White (1992:287) argues that two myths characterize our culture and our social science-the myth of the person as free-standing entity, and the myth of society as an embracing whole. Ironically, at present, solutions at both intellectual extremes embrace the first myth and reject the second. Both the postmodernists' focus on letting the "data speak for themselves" and the rational-choice theorists' focus on the individual's internal complex cost-benefit analysis celebrate the individual over the collective, even if the former focus emphasizes contextualization and the latter emphasizes embeddedness. They differ in why they do so, with the former focus seeing individuals' experiences as the only "real" subject of study in a chaotic world and the latter struggling valiantly to impose a rational order on social life and individuals' actions in that chaotic world. Both are important, but neither captures the complex interplay of context and behavior (Pescosolido and Rubin, 2000).

Postmodernists demand a deeper textual understanding of the nature and meaning of networking, while structuralists apply architectural metaphors and rational choice theorists modify market models with explanations of embeddedness.

Trust and TD Networking. Another key issue is trust. The "existence of these trust relationships will mean that the individual or collective actions of the group differ from the behavior associated with either pure market-contracting or hierarchically organized relationships" (Gordon & McCann, 2000). Trust and history are both important to study in networks because "socially embedded in the sense that these depend upon norms, institutions and sets of assumptions shared among a group of actors and are not, in themselves, simply the outcome of economic decisions" (Gordon & McCann, 2000). Networks, unlike markets, have their own rituals, norms, and stories. Scott and Lane (2000) argue:

"Through embeddedness in this organizational community, people instantiate its values, outsiders are transformed to insiders, social entanglements and commitments are formed, and ingroup members reinforce each other's beliefs and participation."

References in this section

Gordon, Ian R & Philip McCann (2000) "Industrial clusters: Complexes, agglomeration and/or social networks? Urban Studies. Volume: 37 (3): 513-532.

Granovetter, M. S. 1973. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology 78:1360-80.

Granovetter, M. (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91(3),481-510.

Keeble, D. Lawson, C., Lawton Smith, H., Moore, B., and Wilkinson, F.. (1997) Internationalization processes, networking and local embeddedness in technology-intensive small firms, in M. RAM, D. DEAKINS and D. SMALLBONE (Eds) Small Firms.- Enterprising Futures, pp. 60-72. London: Paul Chapman.

Pescosolido, Bernice A & Beth A Rubin (2000) "The web of group affiliations revisited: Social life, postmodernism, and sociology." American Sociological Review. Volume: 65 (1): 52-77.

Scott, Susanne G & Vicki R Lane (2000) "A stakeholder approach to organizational identity"
Academy of Management. The Academy of Management Review. Volume:
25 (1): 43-62.

Uzzi, Brian. (1997) "Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm Networks: The Paradox of Embeddedness." Administrative Science Quarterly 42:35-97.

Approach 2: Network Organizations and STS Search Conferencing

·        Rupert F. Chisholm in his recent book (1998) Developing Network Organizations: Learning for Practice and Theory. Addison-Wesley OD Series (Reading, Mass.).

·        Powell, WW (1990) "Neither market nor hierarchy: Network forms of organization." In L. L. Cummings and B. Staw (Eds), Research in organizational behavior. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 295-336.

·        Powell, WW, Koput, K.W & Smith-Doerr, L (1996). Interorganizational collaboration and the locus of innovation- Networks of learning in biotechnology. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41, 116-45.

·        Considine, Mark, and Jenny M. Lewis. (1999). Governance at Ground Level: The Frontline Bureaucrat in the Age of Markets and Networks. Public Administration Review 59(6): 467-80.

Chisholm applies his Action Research and STS background to the problem of Network Organizations. His approach uses the Search Conference we have reviewed in the Emery and Non-Emery approaches, as well as the Design Team approach of classical STS large system change. He relies a good deal on Emery's work here including Emery and Purser's (1996) The Search Conference. I was glad to see Trist (1983) work on the Referent Organization that to me was one of the pioneering TD theory pieces. Rupert works closely with Max Elden in the action research approach (see TD game board).

Powell (1990) also proposes a theory of network organizations, based on trust, reputation, and friendship, emerged in response to the need for long-term interdependent organizational exchanges whose commodity values are not easily measured. In a study of Biotech firm networking, Powell et. al.(1996) found a 'sea of informal relations of knowledge exchanges' that embedded more formal relations.

·        Maggellans of the Web - ABC News. 1999 - Network models of how the Internet is structured in physical space. greatest concentration of Internet addresses are in the United Kingdom. In the end, such maps could help solve the classic “traveling salesman” problem in cyberspace — finding the shortest physical distances between two servers to direct data with greater efficiency. In a study released last week, found that pages on the World Wide Web are so closely linked that any two given pages are only an average of 19 clicks away

Approach 3: Social Reengineering Networks & Knowledge Revolution

Networking across organizations is also applied by many of the current Knowledge Work approaches. The work is rooted more the Tom Peters Seminar and Hammer Reengineering approach - see TD Gameboard.

·        Unland, Brendon - The Knowledge Revolution and the Future of Organizations First Quarter 1998 - If the networked computer is not the cause of the Knowledge Revolution, what is? In Reengineering the Corporation, Hammer and Champy enumerate three forces, which they call the ``three Cs"7 that are spurring business forward

·        " Autonomous work explains why networking has become so important." Tom Peters, guru of management.

·        Virtual Conference at Collaborate on Organizations of the Future and Virtual Teamwork Nov. '99. This is a large group meeting process based on Open Space. Someone starts a conversation by posting in writing and then everyone that arrives can respond

·        Networking emergence and complexity studies initiative complexity based exploration of health care Boston 28 – 30 October 1999

·        September 22, 1999 What Price Will Be Paid by Those Not on the Net? By PAM BELLUCK "The latest Federal survey of who is using the Internet presented some sobering results. The "digital divide" is widening" between haves and have-nots along racial and economic lines

Approach 4: The Network War Machine Among Organizations.

Tom Clancy's book Net War captures the military industrial complex mania for cyberspace war game consulting and information age warfare. This the post-cold war strategic planning, counter-planning and dirty tricks industry and it is growing exponentially. IT consultants sell their TD skills to prevent transorganizational information from being infiltrated by the enemy or to disrupt and destroy an enemy's network. Tactics include (1) sending a virus to destroy enemy files, (2) disclosing a classified list of spy identities, (3) creating disinformation to fog enemy networking,(4) raids on information nets (e.g. "Experts argue plan to raid Milosevic’s bank accounts" and (5) unleashing the butterfly of chaos to flap wings of havoc upon an enemy (e.g. posting a notice that the enemy is giving aware free arms so they are overloaded with calls that crash their system). Clancy presents the tactics of a SWAT squad of network techies to do network offense and defense with their hacking and combat skills.

STOP 16. Attend Some Deprogramming Classes

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. - Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

And thus the need to deprogram shallow understanding of the political economy of transorganizational change work.

Collins, Alvesson and Willmott and Fulop & Linstead among many others have been doing work that uses Critical Theory to critical the guru consulting that happens in micro and macro OD.

The approach is rooted in Marx, the Frankfurt School's resituation of Marx's labor process and in the work of the postmodern implications of Nietzsche (if you have no background in Marx, please read Chapter 10- of Das Kapital - The Working Day).

Deprogramming - I am using the term "deprogramming ironically and self-reflexively. I am concerned that each of the approaches on the Game Board, by in large in insular from other approaches.

There are many exceptions to this statement as I have attempted to explore in these presentations. It would seem that Joanne Martin was right in observing, for example, that between Appreciative Inquiry and Narrative Therapy/Deconstruction there is much that is in common. And, we can look at ways of working in TD inter-disciplinary praxis. This would involve a deeper understanding and respect for our epistemological and ontological differences.

At the same time, I must be honest. I spend a good deal of time giving presentations these past 20 years on large system change. And, what I observe is that people are trained in just one way and have a good deal of difficulty breaking out of their box. I know I get stuck in my own. I therefore look to some ways to get us to all to think out of the boxes. I have presented cross-ties between the TD Game Board paradigms of TD. In doing so I seek more rhizomatic understanding and an appreciation for how TD is situated in the political economy theories.

I think one place to begin is to get a good critical reading of TD and Macro OD. Collins (1998) is a starting point for me.

David Collins, 1998, Organizational Change: Sociological Perspectives ( Routledge NY/London). Following Burrell & Morgan's classic 4-paradigm model, Collins posits four approaches. I have much disagreement with the 4-part model. Some of you have read the on-going debates in Organization Studies. Yet, it is a place to start, so I will not get into all that here. This is my own summary of his work and concerns the more macro TD implications:

FOUR MODERNERNIST THOERY MACRO TD APPROACHES

1. Unitarist/Functionalist TD (What I have been calling Guru TD1).

·        Focus - Organizational effectiveness, adaptation and avoiding conflict

·        Limits - Focus on harmony excludes conflict (except psychological). No credibility with expressions of discontent. Restructuration is done without sense of human consequence.

·        ODC - No opposition to management, therefore it is tool of management to impose a TD vision on workers; to overcome resistance.

·        Open Systems theory is one of the dominant models in organizational analysis represents a unitary modeling of organizations" It asserts harmony is natural state of affairs in many, but not all applications.

2. Pluralist TD

·        Focus - Organizational effectiveness and adaptation by conflict management to maintain stability.

·        Limits - narrow view of conflict (psyche-rooted). No state view or Eco-view of context.

·        Implications - Allows opposition expression. Negotiate compromise on ends and processes of change

·        METAPHORS - Dialogue, Stakeholder Systems of systems.

·        Political sovereignty doctrine-Final absolute authority is in society

·        Assumption - Need consent of competing interest groups; disputes are the motor of change

·        Process- Collective bargaining to encourage dialogue compromise

3. Radical Humanist TD

·        Focus - Change society to change workplace; industrial decision making

·        Limit - participation is easily reversible; Management hijacks participation rhetoric of empowerment to Unitarist ends/processes (A good deal of critical theory management writing debunks popular empowerment literature).

·        Assumptions - Open, equal & democratic forms of production and power with no evidence of managerial commitment to this agenda

·        State plays a key role in conditioning and socializing the workforce to accept status quo (p. 157).

·        The factory-discipline of school days is fading.

·        H. Clegg (not S. Clegg) - Argues against co-management since it damages independent stance of trade unions. Keep the oppositional stance.

4. Marxist ODC TD

·        Focus is on the workplace as a key site of control and domination. Views society within a political superstructure.

·        Limitation - Structural arguments tend to predominate. Marxist arguments tend to demonize management.

·        Implications for TD - Management's focus on change and their inability to solve management problems is indicative of structural problems that define capitalist social relations of production.

So What? Collins does not give many solutions to how to go beyond these four. He certainly points out the need to look at differences in ontological and epistemological assumptions of the various TD approaches. The various TD approaches look at managing the stories, metaphors, systems, and networks among organizations. And it seems that TD does occur with in several political economies. Some TD approaches take an interpretativist or social construction approach that is removed a bit from material conditions. Others assume a social engineering approach to the material conditions without much attention to symbolic universes. I think TD is creative social engineering of more or less democratic networks among stakeholders invited to some OD events. Collins 91998: 193) does argue for a shift from top-down to bottom-up views. And many of the TD approaches do take a grass roots approach, but that does not mean that we can not work with both top and bottom, as well as the stakeholders excluded from the varied approaches to search conference. Since the world of organizations is exceedingly complex and multifaceted as well as fragmented it seems to me that a multiplicity of TD approaches are necessary. There is no one best TD approach. There are some that I think do more damage to people and ecology than others.