This paper formulates a new conceptual framework for understanding professional culture in organizational context. Our analysis begins with an attempt to identify the complex interplay between individual sense-making, group beliefs and culture. The process of professionalization and the development of professional cultures is described and the influence of professional belief systems on organizational culture is examined. The inter-relationship between four different types of professional subculture and organizational culture is illustrated in a casestudy analysis of an Australian home-care service. The stability of an organization's operating environment is identified as a major factor which facilitates and constrains the propensity for professional subcultures to radically transform or incrementally refine dominant organizational cultures. The paper concludes with a critical reappraisal of the significance of professional subculture as a determinant of an organization's cultural system.
This article is critical of monological research accounts that fail to accommodate polyvocal narratives of organizational change, calling for more fully informed case studies that combine elements of a narrative approach with processual/contextual analysis. We illustrate how contrasting versions of the same change event by different stakeholders and by the same stakeholder for different audiences, raise theoretical and methodological issues in the analysis and presentation of data on organizational change. Our argument is that research narratives (that seek to develop understanding of change processes) are necessarily selective and sieved through particular discourses that represent different ways of engaging in research. They are authored in a particular genre and written to influence target audiences who become active co-creators of meaning. Organizational change viewed from this perspective is a multi-story process, in which theoretical accounts and guides to practice are authored consistent with pre-selected narrative styles. These, in turn, are purposefully chosen to influence target audiences, but this subjective crafting is often hidden behind a cloak of putative objectivity in the written and oral presentations of academic research findings. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007.
A considerable body of literature exists on narratives and stories in explaining how individuals and groups make and give sense to their experiences in organizations. Classic Aristotelian narratives with a linear time structure (stories with a beginning, middle and end) are prominent in the storytelling literature, whereas retrospection, in drawing on the past in making sense of the present, is a temporal modality central to foundational concepts of sensemaking. In examining time and temporality in these related fields, the authors show how the conventional temporal sequence of a past, present and future dominates, with little consideration being given to time as a multiple rather than singular concept. The authors compare and contrast differences in the temporal aspects of mainstream theories and identify a growing interest in philosophical concepts of time. This review highlights how conventional explanations in these related fields of study are underpinned by linear conceptions of temporality (with an associated causality) and how there is growing recognition of fluidity in the way pasts and futures come together in temporal sensemaking of an emergent present. Although this movement towards explanations that engage with non‐linear modalities deepen insight, they do not explicitly address concepts of time. Time continues to receive scant attention, with temporal but ‘timeless’ theories taking precedence, ultimately constraining theoretical development. In building on this analysis, the authors characterize a range of temporal modalities from which they identify six pathways for charting out an agenda for future research in which multiple concepts of time and temporality are brought to the fore.
This article provides a series of reflections on the practice of carrying out processual research on organisational change. At a broad level, some of the main tasks associated with conducting company case studies are described and the benefits of this approach for dealing with complex change data are outlined. At a more specific level, the article addresses three main areas tied to the actual 'doing' of processual research. First, the notion of tacit knowledge and 'getting your hands dirty' by engaging in ongoing in-depth fieldwork. Second, the design and implementation of a longitudinal case study research programme. Third, the advantages and concerns of combining a range of different data collecting techniques in carrying out processual studies. Overall, the main intention is to provide some useful reflections and practical insights, as well as providing something of the flavour of carrying out this type of research.
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