Transforming management fashions into praxis

Abstract

We analyze the way action research can be used to take a very conventional kind of imposed change process and turn it into a more deeply transformative and yet practically successful intervention. In the project with the automotive supplier `AutoParts' our goal was to implement team organization. AutoParts' motive was a need to give the impression of being a `lean' company, and teams were thus seen as necessary. The top manager thought of the implementation as a planned process that should be discussed in the management team and then implemented. We participated in these discussions, but meanwhile worked out practical solutions together with the actual teams of workers as an action research project. The management team did not make any progress while the bottom-up strategy was quite successful. The main reason, as we will argue, was that this process helped the teams to reach beyond the `black box' approach and start reframing how the team concept could be useful in their particular work situation. The two teams we will describe also came up with quite different team concepts because their challenges were different. In our opinion, the success could not have been achieved without the action research method, where we were considered both insiders and outsiders, spent a lot of time on the shop floor, and worked together with the team members as co-researchers to define their own concepts of the team.

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