The Management of Meaning in Organizations

The Cultural Analysis of Soft Systems Methodology and the Configuration Model of Organizational Culture

“…This required the employee/researcher to be brave and persistent but this will not necessarily work in other organizational settings. The unease researchers might experience in powerladen and oppressive environments explains, as stated by Magala (2009), the scarcity of research projects devoted to the problem of power and power struggles. With regard to action research in the context of systems thinking, Checkland (2012) regrets the rarity of work undertaken within actual situations.…”

“…Analysis Three deals with issues such as politics and power, which incorporate its expression, allocation, or distribution (Checkland & Scholes, 1990). According to Magala (2009), issues of power, their genesis, evolution, and sense-making in organizational settings are more often discussed and interpreted in informal communication such as gossip than in formal research reports.…”

“…Q = quotations; PO = participant observation; IS = interview session; PM = project manager; PD = project development not simply influenced by these issues, he deliberately manipulates or uses them so as to further foster his own personal as well as political power. Comparable with the description of Magala (2009), the socio-political system depicts the hidden power structure within the organization, which is in stark contrast to the neat depiction of the organizational chart. To understand the influence of the socio-political system on the development of the organization, the preliminary findings were compared with the configuration model of organizational culture.…”

Alliance strategy: context, process, and requirements

“…Within this system, organizations provide stakeholders valuable experiences while covering their expenses by the price they ask for products or services (private ISS), or by others means of funding and resourcing (public and NGO). Current research emphasizes the usefulness of organizational outcomes to others when defining value (Magala, 2009). Stakeholders in a particular context define value by the way they use products and services (Chandler and Vargo, 2011;Moore, 1995).…”

“…While value creation has been understood as a fairly static process of developing an organizational business model, recent work emphasizes the dynamic and innovative nature of business models. Since value takes on an ephemeral quality (Magala, 2009), business models become less useful as reified concepts. They are reframed as evolving, intersubjective constructions for substantiating paths of innovation in search for new value (Chesbrough et al, 2013;Demil and Lecocq, 2010;Merli, 2013).…”