¬12.
Transorganizational Development
Dissimilar to other TD Methods:
SUMMARY
of TD12:
Transorganization
Development:
Culbert et
al., did a paper outlining the theory and practice of TD in 1972.
Since then Boje, Cummings & Motomedi have worked to develop the
field. My own work with Jones and with Wolfe has been on the ICEND
approach. ICEND is Interactive, Communicative, and Experiential Network
Development; how to assemble the players so that networks emerge, change,
and develop. This involves storytelling, deconstruction of existing
hegemony, mythmaking, theatrics, and an understanding of the socio-economic
context of multi-organizational networking.
Similarities to other TD
methods:
Spectacle
NAVIGATION
ON THIS PAGE
Born
on:
September 16, 1999 |
Introduction to OD If you need to start with an overview of basic OD trends (press here) or see OD Institute and OD Journal (press here). I am seeking to move beyond OD to TD perspectives in what I call "the death of [traditional] OD" (Press here).
The
Rebirthing of OD as TD - Consulting
to networks of organizations is represents the rebirth of organization
development (OD) in the arena of relationships between organizations
that affect relationships within organizations. It is the move from
retelling one organization’s story, to retelling the story of the
entire network of organizations.
Transorganizational
Development (TD) Networking
is defined as planned change in the collective relationships of a
variety of stakeholders to accomplish something beyond the capability
of any single organization or individual (e.g. Culbert et. al., 1972).
The “something
beyond” the single organization is the story that the network
players fashion collectively.
I assume organizations are Storytelling
Collectives or plain Storytelling Organizations embedded in
Transorganizational Storytelling Networks. For more on Storytelling
Organization Theory (press
here).
Organizational
Development (OD) transcends single organization game playing.
The term “transcend” is used throughout this book in a
critical sense, to mean ways that the organizational players move
beyond their established and status quo universe of discourse and
action to discern alternatives, and fashion new stories (Marcuse,
1969: p. xi, note 1).
OD is
stretching to find new ways of multi-organization network development,
especially as we move from the modern to late modern postindustrial
life modes of the 1970s and most recently from post-Fordist production
and consumption to postmodern
capitalism of the 1990s. Very
simply put, the postindustrial supply chains are now global, and the
postmodern networks of contesting and contradictory protest groups and
advocacy stakeholders who want to redefine how business is conducted
is also global (for more on the move from OD to TD and its
postindustrial and postmodern roots see Appendix
A).
There are
many fine consultants doing great OD process consultation to effect
better conditions. The challenge is to move beyond the single
organization focus, or even the organization and its turbulent
environment focus, to the global playing field of TD networks. Since
most of the process consultation is rooted in philosophies of unitary,
isolated organization change, we will need to stretch OD’s
consultation horizon.
I am calling
for OD to rebirth itself as TD in order to move beyond the open system
model of an organization embedded in a "target model." A
target model places the one organization at the center of the
universe, draws a circle around it and puts supplier, customer,
subcontract, and collaborator relations around it. Yet, as with
Copernicus, we know the one organization is not the center of the
solar system or the universe.
Centered
(focal organization) models do not explain the dynamic patterns of
cosmology any more than target or ice-cube (unfreeze, move, refreeze)
models explain the collective dynamics of large system,
multi-organization change. TD involves us in the Alice in Wonderland
croquet game in which the mallets, loops, and balls move on their own
and never refreeze.
It is time
for a paradigm shift from unitary-OD to network-OD with polycentered
(many centers), polyvocal (many voices), and polysemous (many
meanings). That is the
new TD theory and it necessitates novel Transorganizational praxis. Yet, it is not entirely new. In this practice that Mary
Parker Follett wrote about in the 1920s, the consultant worked across
systems, across organizations, across the divide of management and
labor to bring about multiorganizational collaboration. Like, Follett,
the TD consultant is not tied to one CEO, or one firm, but networking
to effect changes in a Transorganization system within systems
orbiting fragmented global contexts. And these are transcendent
changes, changes beyond the one that affect the collective pattern of
relationships, practices, and possible futures.
In sum, OD is being reborn.
HISTORY of TD WORK - A
pluralistic assembly of Transorganizational Development (TD)
consultants attended OD rebirth. There was Samuel A. Culbert, J. Max
Elden, Will McWhinney, Warren Schmidt and Bob Tannenbaum acting as OD
midwives in their 1972 call for Transorganizational praxis to go
beyond traditional OD practices.
Despite
Thayer's (1973) similar call, the ghost of OD continue the same
practices untile the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1978, Kurt
Motamedi sent a wake up call for the evolution from
interorganizational design into TD. In 1979 and 1981, I called for
activist TD interventions into networks of organizations. Motomedi and
Cummings (1981) did the same.
Kurt Motamedi and I experimented with Transorganizational Development (TD) while we worked at UCLA in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972 the UCLA department I would join had written the original work on TD (see list below). My own approach was rooted TD in storytelling and folklore. I started writing about it in 1979. Work with Michael Jones of UCLA folklore and mythology helped extend the storytelling aspects into the ICEND model of consultation to large interorganizational network for long-term change (see below). I assume organizations are Storytelling Collectives or plain Storytelling Organizations embedded in Transorganizational Storytelling Networks. Several approaches (e.g. Emery-Search Conference, AI, Future Search, Learning Organization, etc.) involve storytelling and TD. The ICEND theory, along with various search conference models assumes that by convening people to interact, communicate their stories, and form common experience, a network for action and change develops around their collective storytelling (See Boje, 1982).
The work of
Boje, Motomedi and Cummings got little notice among the ghosts of OD.
One exception was Tom Cummings, who in 1984 reconstructed Motomedi's
and my work into his revitalization of sociotechnical systems.
I tried again
in 1989 (with Wolfe) to call for TD to replace OD. Finally, the call
for TD got heard, not by reading Culbert et al., (1972), Thayer
(1973), Motomedi (1978), Boje (1979), Cummings (1984), or Boje and
Wolfe (1989) but from awakening to the realities of global economic
restructuration of corporate work life. The burgeoning field of large
systems change or TD, as I prefer to call it, is today a jungle of
contending epistemologies and ontologies that seek to be successor to
OD throne. And succession to the throne means big consulting bucks.
What is TD
Consulting? – At
a very practical level, TD networking involves consulting strategies
ranging from IT reengineering, knowledge organization, learning
organization, appreciative inquiry, participative democracy,
sociotechnical systems, network organization design, supply chain
management, military cyber-war game simulations to various postmodern
approaches such as restorying spectacles of mass production and
consumption with more ecocentric and socially responsible ethics
(Boje, 1999c). As we moved from the modern to late modern
postindustrial life modes of the 1970s and most recently from
post-Fordist production and consumption to postmodern capitalism of
the 1990s traditional OD practice focus on a single firm and its
environment is being replaced by TD consulting. TD consulting takes a
network of firms embedded in a community of action as the starting
point. This article is written for people engaged in large system
change decisions, those doing comparative work, and teachers of TD
practice and theory. We will examine ways to trace, visualize and
develop multi-organizational systems using storytelling processes, but
first a brief look at billion dollar consultation firm strategies.
Beyond OD to TD Current TD efforts seek to look at the more postmodern aspects of fractionated and chaotic networks including cyber activism and cyberwar collective storytelling (see Network Organization). See for example the critical and postmodern themes in Journal of Organizational Change Management (JOCM, press here). Postmodern applications of chaos and complexity theory are being applied to . There are several global trends. The first global trend is to move to "lean" and "green" Supply Chain distribution to complement lean and green consumption and production webs. Second, a two-tier global structure is developing in Supply Chain management. There has been a consolidation of the carrier base, with many transnational companies employing a central logistics provider who in turn employs numerous sub-contractors (Radstaak & Ketelaar, 1998). Please let me know if you have a TD story to share - David Boje. If you are thinking of turning postmodern, work through these study guides: How to become a postmodern theorist
ICEND is a term that David Boje and Michael Jones coined in 1982 to develop a story-based model of TD. The ICEND theory is that by convening people to interact, communicate their stories, and form common experience, a network for action and change develops around their collective storytelling (See Boje, 1982). Three subsystems are formed. Subsystem One (outside process consultant) facilitates the formation of the second subsystem (internal problem solving networking cycle) so people can crystallize issues, identify leaders, form a temporary organization (of organizations) that will change the status quo response patterns of a TD1 (Subsystem Three: Extended Network Involvement Cycle).
I -
Interactive - Share stories around issues
C- Communicative
- Stories of the collective
E-Experiential
N-Network
D-Development
(Press here)
for Table 11 on more
ICEND definitions.
ICEND
Model of Transorganizational Development
Three
subsystems are formed. Subsystem One (outside process consultant)
facilitates the formation of the second subsystem (internal problem
solving networking cycle) so people can crystallize issues, identify
leaders, form a temporary organization (of organizations) that will
change the status quo response patterns of a TD1 (Subsystem Three:
Extended Network Involvement Cycle).
Subsystem
One: Outside Process Consultation Cycle
Subsystem
Two: Internal Problem Solving & Networking Cycle
Subsystem
Three: Extended Network Involvement Cycle
(Press Here) to see ICEND Topographical Mapping of system interventions.
(Press Here) to see recent TD work that involves mapping networks over time using simulation procedures.
Other TD Applications:
NEW Paper "Chaos and Complexity in Supply Chain
Transorganizational Development Networking" by David M. Boje,
October 9, 1999 (press
here). The paper reviews global
trends that have TD potential in an excellent archive of articles you
can find at the Supply Chain Network (press
here).
One trend in TD is to develop grassroot organizing approaches (press here) to Supply Chain Networking in conjunction with advanced simulation modeling techniques for NuThink, Inc. grassroot and (press here) for their free simulator download options. Grace Ann Rosile and I are working in similar directions with Mike Coombs as the NMSU Physical Science Laboratory.
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.
An example of
sectors is presented in Figure 1 (above). [Source of Figure 1. (Boje
& Wolfe, 1987: 738)].
In
Exhibit II, work of the Second Subsystem is shown over its seven time
phases as it works with the extended network involvement cycle until
the temporary organization disbands having effected its changes. The
example is taken form a proposal I wrote to the Department of Commerce
in Washington D.C. for a network development model to bring
stakeholders together from two industries, Automobile and the Hi Tech,
following a massive lay off of automobile workers. The plan was to do
a series of search conferences including focus groups,
mini-conference, and teleconferencing to build extended network cycles
of involvement across the two industries and various public and
private training programs. Out of the conferencing we anticipated that
a High Tech Advisory Council would form to facilitate the on-going
retraining efforts by developing communication and resource support
linkages that were not there in the early phases.
Both TD1 and TD2 processes interpenetrate the same
systems.
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, 1986). 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).
The term
"collective dynamics" is defined by Lang and Lang (1961: 34)
as "those patterns of social action that are spontaneous and
unstructured inasmuch as they are not organized and are not reducible
to social structure" (italics as in original).
Collective
network dynamics are assumed here to be considerably more complex and
chaotic than dyadic concepts of organization and environment dyadic
relations, and go beyond the organization and its immediate set of
dyadic relationships. In addition, I assume that storytelling and the
collective dynamics of TD networks are related in important ways.
Finally, I assume that what is important about the relationship of
storytelling and collective networking dynamics goes beyond
traditional organizational development (OD) theory and praxis.
Elsewhere (Boje, 1999a), I argue that OD is a stretching in concept
and praxis because so many organizations are now transorganizational
involving TD, not OD. I therefore call for more TD theory and praxis.
In addition, I assert (Boje, 1999b) that TD is rooted in Holon
relations called networks of holons. A holon is a whole/part, not a
whole or a part, but both since people and organizations are involved
in a series of holon relations that are increasingly
transorganizational be it through Internet, professional association,
supply chain, global e-commerce, or other embedded networks.
In the
relation of storytelling and networking at the level of
"collective dynamics" the problem is how to understand and
represent or otherwise map patterns of transorganizational relations
over time. Barry (1997) argues that storytelling and restorying past
stories is a major aspect of organizational change. In my own (1991)
study of an office supply firm, its vender, customer-organization,
branch organizations, and parent company relations stories were used
in many ways. For example to craft strategy by putting a story of a
new venture into a revised story of the founder, sharing focus groups
stories of vendors and customers with corporate mangers, and story
sharing events designed to impress the holding company. There were
frequent story meeting to decide what spin to put on selling off a
branch operation, discharging a vice president for sexually harassing
managers, and what to do then the word was on the street that the
office supply firm was for sale by its holding company. And we were
aware the holding company told its stories of the office supply
companies it was acquiring nationally to sell them all off to a group
of investors. This level of storytelling moves beyond the organization
as the unit of analysis to the collectivity of an interorganizational
network of customer, supplier, investor, and branch or affiliate
relationships. Here are
some examples.
First, a
transorganizational network can emerge spontaneously out of a single
storytelling event, such as Martin Luther King's "I have a
dream" speech with its subsequent impact on reforming coalitions
among many civil rights organizations. Rachael Carson's book, Silent
spring stimulated much TD among environmental action groups. De las
Casas diaries about Columbus and colleagues' slaughter of West Indies
native populations changed policies in Spain. In terms of TD,
consulting firms use storytelling to restructure companies and
industries. Boje, Rosile, Dennehy, and Summers (1997) looked at how
reengineers use storytelling as part of their training in several
ways. For example, telling stories of past reengineering successes,
coaching CEOs on how to tell the story of the impending reengineering,
characterizing those to be down-sized as the "fat" to be
trimmed or the "casualties" of the war on global quality.
CEOs and managers are trained how to story press releases and how to
view the rollout of the reengineering change as a story with several
acts. De Cock (1999) also provides a critique of reengineering
rhetorical tactics.
Second,
transorganizational networking can grow out of many facilitative
stories recounted in temporary organizations, such as a search
conference, future search event, open spaces meeting, or task force of
organization stakeholders. For example, Saul Alinsky's community
organizing efforts often rested upon getting a power-wielding slum
lord's story of predatory exploitation to become the rallying point
for networks of community based church, social, business, and public
agencies. Also, the Emery-search conference uses a jury system to
select community stakeholders from the public and private sector (many
are organization representatives) to convene to scan their history,
environment and future in ways that promotes the formation of a
temporary core organization that will diffuse change initiatives to a
larger embedding network.
Third,
transorganizational-networking dynamics can grow or shift from
spontaneous stories shared among consumers about a star's bathing suit
on Bay-Watch. Fad-fashion stories become rallying points for supplier,
producer, distributor and consumer clubs that are here one week and
gone the next. Czarniawska (1997) in her study of Swedish public
administration traces how stories affect trends in administration.
Narrating the organization is affected by what is seen as fashionable
administrative practice. In TD consulting, I assume that distinctive
competence is sustained by claiming your firm, but it IBM Global
Services, Ernst & Young, or McKinsey & Company has the newest
approach that the competition does not. Such claims of uniqueness and
fashion can be studied by reviewing the billion dollar consulting
firms' web sites and linked web documents (Boje, 1999c).
Fourth,
networks of organizations can collect stories to trace and influence
mass culture trends in digital storytelling arenas such as the Coke
storytelling theater in Las Vegas or various Internet collection
points. Major corporations such as HP, Xerox, IBM, etc. are sending
their people to digital storytelling training to learn how to use
stories to influence mass consumption trends. In Las Vegas, visitors
to the Coke Bottle building enter a theater, hear and see digital
stories, fill out a response survey, and can volunteer to add their
own favorite Coke story to the collection.
Fifth,
stories such as the leak of the Ernst & Young audit of one Nike
factory in Vietnam revealing contradictions to CEO speeches, corporate
press releases, and official code of conduct principles can create a
media, activist, political and Nike-counter story transorganizational
network with complex and even chaotic dynamics. Nike seems
particularly plagued by the leak of stories from its Asian factories
that make their way to activist web sites and then to the front page
of the Washington Post and slowly become the topic of academic
research. The cycle is typically so slow, that Nike does not have to
actually change labor practices. Since 1980, Nike only had to put a
spin on the story, challenge the credibility of the storyteller, or
promise changes. Only in the last five years, has Nike actually had to
make changes, and the release of a credible Ernst & Young social
and environmental audit had much to do with Nike increasing wages,
implementing OSHA health and safety standards, and other actual labor
process changes.
In
sum, in each case a transorganizational network dynamics and patterns
emerge or are organized around storytelling. Stories set off new
patterns of collective networking dynamics. In each case stories are
the currency of collective networking dynamics. In each the storied
plots and characterizations infect collective networking dynamics. In
each a story can render a TD network more or less stable and more or
less centered or fragmented by the manner of its telling and retelling
or diffusion. Stories can reinforce or disrupt habituated or more
spontaneous collective dynamics among organizations. Sometimes
storytelling dynamics will follow initially emergent patterns in
repeated cycles to fashion loose coupling into more habituated tight
coupling. Other times, just the opposite will happen and stories will
jump channels and move through loose ties to create chaos in embedding
social structures. I assume that a significant portion of
transorganizational activity involves some kind of storytelling, be it
formal accounting to investors and regulators or informal stories
shared across email. Finally, stories are hard of
"authorities" and "officials" to control. A story
about office sex or Watergate can topple a presidency. In short,
storytelling is a collective behavior that dynamically transforms
network patterns of behavior until the next story or restorying of the
old story changes the ebb and flow.
TD1 tends to focus on what Barry and Elmes (1997: 439) term
"technofuturist genres" of strategy-as-story. The
technofuturist genres is part of an epic narrativeof using
"quasi-science" network mapping appraoches such as temporal
sequencing of who consults whom, who sends email to whom, who trades
how much with whom? These are transactional and transmission
level positivist data maps where the domain of strytelling is at a
very abstract and aggregate level. Usually the content in terms
of human feelings, history, and thought is not being explored in the
technofuturist simulation studies and abstract model topographical
maps of TD1 consulting firms. Another way to keep
the strategy-as-story at a high level of abstraction is to use what
Barry and Elmes (1997: 440-1) term "urist narratives."
Porter's "cost leaders" and "focusers" and Miles
and Snow's "defenders" and "prospectors" are
abstract characterizations of antagonists and protagonists that
universalize and essentialize (Boje, 1995) system actor behavioral
profiles into simple frameworks, typologies, and mappings. Spoken
accounts of grounded stakeholder behavior can be avoided in favor of
abstractions.
The
more polyphonic strategy-as-story approaches involve more dialogical
and mutlual authorship of strategic understanding of networking
dynmaics. This can mean "surfacing, legitimizing, and
juxtaposing differing organiztaional stories" as well as
differing stakeholder logics (Barry & elmes, 1997: 444).
Postmodernist and critical theory perspectives on collective narration
and expert narration of strategy-as-story focus on how people are
central to or martinal to the strategic discourse that dominates a
given context. The approach is to use deconstructive anlaysis of the
on-going story exchanges that map a particular network.
The postmoderists in particular look at more polyvocal (many voiced)
and polysemous (many meaning) explorations of
storytelling-as-strategy. This is a move away from purist
narratives of Porter or Miles & Snow as well as the monologicial
narratives of a SWOT expert-recipe story of strategic choice making
behaviors that involve collective dynamics. My own work on
Tamara organizations as storytelling networks (1995) and as networks
of stortyelling organiztions fits here. Instead of a mono-voice
reading of that Tamara Organization or network of multiple Tamara
Organizations looks at rapidly changing readings as wandering audience
chase and trace a multitude of simultaneous storytelling events on
many performance stages.
In and among
storytelling organzitions, the currency of the relationship is the
stories, but like so many exchanges we do not know exactly where the
story originated, how it is retold and restoried as it traverse the
many stages, and whose storytelling enactment will become more
fashionable. Instead of a centralized and monolithic account of
strategy athe Tamara model focuses upon the storytelling networking of
mutltiple stakeholers engaged inmultiple transorganiztional
relationships.
Stories
collected out of their performance contexts, can be sifted and sorted,
classified and rendered into abstract taxonomy by expert-academics,
but the stories' meaning has been obliterated without its grounded
context investigation. What I would like to do is look at the various
ways of mapping stories and storytelling networks over time that move
beyond abstract, monolithic expert modeling to grassroots explorations
of collective storytelling dynamics. And then I want to propose
a middle ground where we can oscillate between the two approaches to
network consulting.
Story mapping
analysis seeks to understand the complex dynamics of storytelling
among the ties of people across their social networks. The basic
assumption is that social network and stories have a mutual influence.
There are several network-mapping variations that relate to stories. This first approach was very popular in the late 1970s when I did my dissertation work. The idea is to map centraly and differentiations of exchanges using simple linking data such as who talks to whom or how many times they talk to whom. There is no analysis of the storied content of those exchanges or of shifts in transmission patters over time.
Figure
One: Time-bound Transaction Mapping of Network Exchanges
The nodes
(e.g. the numbered circles in Figure One) can be names (of people,
places or organizations) and the links (lines in Figure One) connect
stories among the nodes. The dotted lines are clusters within the
network.
Some
alternative approaches suggest themselves. First, stories can be
mapped as nodes to other stories by their linking themes. Here each
node in Figure One would be a story. Second, stories can be connected
in time sequence to other stories, past, present, and future. For
example S1 could come before S2 and S3 after them both. Third,
contexts can be nodes and linking stories can connect them. The
microstorians traces embedded stories in their historical context
without using a contemporary lens or bagging them together in
decontextualized collections. Fourth, there are multidimensional
mappings of story networks. Venn diagrams can be used that make nodes
and lines bigger or smaller, use color schemes, and multiple symbols
to depict and map story networks.
I have reviewed major system change approaches as being TD1, TD2 or
some middle range positioning. I have also attempted to show how
network dynamics can be mapped by using a combination of storytelling
processes including story sharing in search conference approach to
network involvement cycles. Through different approaches to network
mapping, the story of the network's development and intervention
cycles can be displayed to participating stakeholders. This would
improve consultation involvement, problem diagnosis, strategy
formation to change network patterns, and the evaluation of
consolation activities. Through network graphics the problem solving
network systems and extended network involvement cycles can be
visualized and evaluated. Storytelling is important in several ways.
First it is through story sharing that participants crystallize their
experiences in the network being change, formulate visions of possible
futures, and form alliances. Second, the consultant can facilitate
story sharing between the temporary organization that undertakes
network change initiatives by diffusing stories throughout the
extended network. As the extended network gets involved in the stories
of the unfolding initiatives, the development of networking options
continues. Storytelling is therefore the currency by which network
development achieved and large systems change is realized. In the
collective dynamics of TD storytelling plays a critical role in
facilitating change and in understanding he changes that are unfolding
throughout complex networks.
REFERENCES ON TRANSORGANIZATION NETWORK DEVELOPMENT (TD)
De
Cock, Christian (1999). "Organizational
Change and Discourse: Hegemony, Resistance and
Reconstitution" Article published in M@n@gement Journal (press
here).
Deleuze,
Gilles (1990). The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester
with Charles Stivale from the French 1969, Les Editions de
Minuit. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. NY: Columbia
University Press.
Eisenberg,
E. and Goodall, H. (1987). Organizational Communication:
Balancing Creativity and Constraint. NY: St. Martin's Press.
See pp 38-39 for discussion of family metaphor and cast
metaphor.
Fairhurst,
G. T. & L. L. Putnam (1999).
"Reflections on the organization-communication
equivalency question: The contributions of James Taylor and
his colleagues." The Communication Review. Vol.
3(1-2): 1-19.
Hollis,
R & Sibley, B. (1988). The Disney Story. London: Octopus
Books.
Koestler,
Arthur (1967). The
Ghost in the Machine Arkana, London.
Lang,
Kurt & Gladys Engel Lang (1961). Collective Dynamics.
NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company.
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Maanen, J. (1991). "The smile factory: Work at
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Appendix A: Why
is OD becoming TD? We are moving into what Peter
Drucker calls post-industrial capitalism and what my friends Steve
Best and Douglas Kellner, call the postmodern adventure.
It is a strange fusion of postindustrial networks of suppliers,
distributors and producers with the even stranger conglomeration of
postmodern consumers bent on finding out who makes their clothing,
what goes into their food, and how the workers are being treated in
far away countries. In
late modern there was a significant turn in large system change praxis
from modern to late modern assumptions. We learned to make
organizations flatter, open, flexible, and populate them with
self-managing teams. This
represented our move away from Fordism. Modern Fordism forms of
capitalist production relied on mass production and mass consumption
and paid high wages for union support including reluctant support of
the welfare state. "Fordism involved a period of stable economic
growth and capital accumulation that lasted until the late 1960s in
the United States" (Otero, 1996: 4).
After World War II, the economy of capitalist nations transformed
from a centered Fordist massive economy to a decentered postindustrial
service economy of flexible and lean production, but still very
massive in its distribution. In the 1960s transnational corporations
(TNC) began to perceive a crisis in growth combined with excess
capacity, began to niche and adapt to alternative consumer life style
habits. By the 1970s it became increasingly obvious that U.S. worker
output had fallen behind Japan and Germany. Not wanting to give up
Fordist assembly work, TNCs began to locate manufacture and assembly
to "less unionized parts of the United States or to Third World
countries" (Otero, 1996: 4).
A neo-liberalism philosophy of "Post-Fordism" began to
take hold that stressed linking national production and markets to
global ones, de-unionizing, decreased regulation by the State, and
free market economics. As firms left capitalist, union-countries in
droves, the State promised everyone cushy jobs at slightly lower
salaries in the service industry (now called KW). This late modern
(Post-Fordist and Post-industrial) trend accelerated with the end of
the Cold War. Patterns of global commerce also began to combine the
polar opposites of standardized centrist mass production with the
flexible and fragmented production.’
Organizations stretched as a construct when the perspective of the
collective embedded in webs of holons became more fashionable than old
"organization and environment" vantage point. The Greek word
"holon" became popularized in Arthur Koestler's (1967) book,
The Ghost in the Machine. A "holon" is Greek for
"whole/parts" meaning literally the whole that is
simultaneously a part, and vice versa.
Tracing out the holons gets us into the multiplicity of network
relations into which organizations and people are webbed.
Ken Wilber (1996a, 1996b) has also applied holon in numerous ways
we will soon explore. "We exist in fields within fields, patterns
within patterns, contexts within contexts, endlessly" (1996b:
65). Here I am concerned with people in their whole/part relation to
organizations that are whole/parts of mechanistic networks, organic
communities, organizations, nations and the bios-universe, and the
formistic ideal types our theories and metaphors (even these) impose
on the world.
Holons and stories - While postmodernists and poststructuralists
are critical of Grand narratives (Lyotard, 1984) that violently
aggregate it all into universal histories. Yet most of postmodernists
take a less radical stance that says, "you can not just toss all
grand narratives" because some are humane and they just keep
being constructed all about us (Best, 1995; Best & Kellner, 1991,
1997). A middle ground is to see the relation of micro and macro story
as part/whole or holon. Microstories are embedded within macrostories
within Grand narratives, and contexts within contexts. It is without
foundation and without end.
Not only are organizations stretching, they are cracking.
From a Holon perspective part/wholes are fragmented and
dispersed across different geographic locations so that no convergence
of "organization" exists.
The organization does not locate its fragment in one place. We
have lived through the death of the author and the subject. We have
seen how writing is a corporate project, especially in academia where
reviewers and journal editors and the discipline of the Academy have
made single-author writing an illusion.
We are not living through the death of the organization, as it
is rediscovered to be just fragments attached to networks of other
fragments, that constitute transorganization networks.