Caldwell, Raymond: Agency and Change in Organizational Theory

Abstract

How we conceive our capacity for "agency" in the world has enormous implications for how we think about the possibilities and limits of our ability to manage change in organizations and society. For Raymond Caldwell, agency is the prism through which we think about change. If we conceive ourselves as things, as "substances" that simply think and act intentionally or rationally, we will end up with extremely limited epistemologies for understanding agency. For Caldwell the old models of knowledge and power, rationality and control, and agency and structure in organizations have fallen apart. The idea of "distributed agency" partly captures this reality by treating change as an ongoing process defined by practices, which in turn questions explanations of change that rely on intentional action or abstract notions of organizations as entities that change from one relatively fixed state to another. In sum, he treats agency as a practice and change as a process. But Caldwell's recent work, partly under the philosophical influence of Whitehead, takes these ideas further by including the nonhuman in how we define distributed agency: agency is potentially everywhere in a social-material

Does change agent selection procedure matter? A strategic decision-making toward a more objective selection approach

“…While the nature of change is considered to be quite diverse (Stouten et al, 2018) and the notion of change agency is an interdisciplinary topic (Hughes, 2017), it would be natural for scholars to include competencies from a variety of fields. With this consideration, it would be unfeasible to possibly declare the provided competency table as exhaustive.…”