Change works: A critical construction

Abstract

In this chapter I speak of “mainstream” and “critical” approaches to organization - approaches that ‘go together’ in that each helps to define the other. I use this duality as an analytical and organizing device for the purposes of explication and not as a truth, with better-worse or ‘right-wrong’ implications. The distinction may help readers to ‘bridge’ from the better known “mainstream” to a “critical” approach. In this context I am using the word “approach” to refer to what Fleck called a “thought style” (Fleck,1979). A thought style is bigger than a theory but ‘softer” and “weaker” than a paradigm (Chia,1995). My own may be broadly described as (a) critical, (b) social constructionist, and (c) processual. I focus on ongoing processes of organizing (and not organization) and, in so doing, put change at the center of my theorizing. As I outline my approach I do two things. First, I re-construct some traditional issues and practices in mainstream treatments of change and second, I explore some ‘new’ possibilities for change work theory and methodology. Whilst I take the view that there is no such thing as ‘a social constructionist method”, critical constructionism does generate and validate some changed forms of change work (e.g., Hosking, 1999). These involve practical acceptance of (a) actors as part of – rather than apart from – reality construction processes (b) multiple, ongoing, construction processes

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 33 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.