Translating Organizational Change - Review

Administrative Science Quarterly,  March, 1999  by Pasquale Gagliardi

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Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevon, eds. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996. 284 pp. DM 138.00, cloth; DM 58.00, paper.

The chairman of the board of directors of a large multinational company whom I recently interviewed in the course of a research study told me with satisfaction, "In five years we've changed our organizational structure three times, just like changing a glove, different each time and each time a perfect fit." While the metaphor vividly evokes the institutionalist idea of formal structure as ceremonial facade relatively decoupled from operational activities (Meyer and Rowan, 1977), the pride with which it was uttered expressed the idealization - and therefore the symbolic value, of change in modern managerial culture. Even if change is usually justified in terms of instrumental rationality, emphasis on the forms of change often obscures its purposes. The equation between change and progress is taken for granted, and a capacity for radical change, even to the extent of altering one's very identity, seems to have become a virtue in itself (Jeambar and Roucaute, 1988). The emphasis on form and the blurring of purposes become even more marked when the forms of change embody contemporary ideologies and values (I am thinking, for example, of the impressive panoply of the techniques and practices of organizational development and of their underlying values of democracy, participation, self-fulfillment, and social integration). The mythic character of many organizational practices - and the symbolic value of change as such - helps to explain the extraordinary proliferation and popularity of the management-oriented literature on organizational change and development. The book reviewed here deconstructs the myth of organizational change and proposes a more complex and problematic interpretation of those offered in the academic literature by the dominant theories of rational choice and environmental adaptation.

The book consists of an introduction by the two editors, each of whom has also contributed an essay, eight essays, and a sort of afterword by John Meyer, who comments on the essays, pointing out directions for further research. It is unusually homogeneous for a work of this kind. Its organization is clearly the result of a collective endeavor: the authors met on several occasions to discuss their contributions; each of them (and not only the editors) knows the others' work well, actually showing that the ideas of the others have enriched and integrated with their own. The majority of the authors, almost all of whom are European, belong to the Scandinavian community of organization scholars that has made such a distinctive contribution to elaborating that strand of thought - characterized by a penchant toward the "erosion" of rationality (see e.g., Cohen, March, and Olsen, 1972; Brunsson, 1985) - that has its roots in the cynical tradition of European political science.

The authors, who share a constructivist epistemology and an interest in an institutionalist reading of organizational phenomena, set out to remedy what has also recently been pointed out (Barley and Telbert, 1997) as a shortcoming in neo-institutionalism, especially American; namely, that it is an approach that has well demonstrated the impact of institutions and cultural values on formal structures but has largely ignored the way in which institutions are created and reproduced. The focus of the book is therefore on institutionalization and deinstitutionalization, in particular on the role played in the diffusion of models and organizational practices by, on the one hand, fashions, their creators, and intermediaries and, on the other, by organizations in their constant effort to embody success and to assume identities coherent with rationalized models of progress. In their reading of these processes, the authors employ concepts recently advanced in social theory and methodology and inspired by postmodern and deconstructionist perspectives. As the editors declare, "there is no intention of coming up with a 'new theory' which will explain organizational change once and for all"; rather, the intention is to furnish plausible accounts of the processes explored and theories "which do not so much attempt to 'solve' paradoxes as they try to preserve them in order to understand their role in the life of organizations" (p. 3). This position entails an attempt to collapse a series of modernist dichotomies: micro/macro, innovation/imitation, voluntarism/determinism, idea/matter, technology/society, nature/culture, stability/change, and scientific discourse/narrative. Moreover, almost all the contributors discuss the processes of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization, making reference to a metaphor (the travel of ideas) and a concept - that of translation-proposed by Callon and Latour (1981), who in turn borrowed it from Michel Serres. The heuristic value of this concept lies in its polysemy: it simultaneously denotes, in fact, transference, transformation, and the rendering of something in another medium or form, embracing both linguistic and material objects, and it is convincingly used as a key concept for understanding organizational change throughout the book.