Power, Politics and Organizational Change

Recently, while visiting at Oxford for a few days, a senior colleague presented me with a challenge. While updating a textbook on Strategy, he found himself looking for an up to date view on the state of the literature on power, politics and organizational change. After a few sleepless nights, this was my response:

"I find it easiest to start interrelating the three concepts power,
politics and org change from the concepts of change. The recent change
perspectives sensitive to politics and power, I think, could be grouped
as follows:

1. The dialectic view on organizational change (Van de Ven & Poole in AMR 1995), which seems to treat organizational change as a result of conflict between political coalitions. The way I read Van de Ven & Poole, I would argue that they treat power in terms of a behavioral/decision making perspective, in which power is measured as the capability to promote one's interests in decisions of public or non-public domains (Lukes's first or second face of power).

The limitations with the dialectical view of change, as presented by these authors are 1) that they quote very few organizational studie (being content to stick with Marx, Hegel and the like), which makes it kind of hard to validate that there really exists a relevant stream of literature on dialectical change withing org studies. And 2) while they quote Marx, they don't seem to to address the ideological nature of power, summarized in Lukes's third face of power.

2. Critical management studies focusing on change. CMS authors often present power as their main focus area and change is one of their topics of interest. In their recent book Power in Organizations, Clegg, Courpasson and Phillips discuss organizational forms as political forms
(Chapter 11). They create a four-cell matrix where the axes are

- high/low level of contestation (level of internal debate) and
- high/low fragmentation (level of individualization).

The resulting political forms are

- collectivist-democratic (low, low),
- bureaucratic (high fragmentation, low contestation),
- collegial (high contestation, low fragmentation)
- and what they present as characteristic of today political change in organizations, polyarchy (high, high).

Anyway, I doubt that there is a one center piece for the CMS view on change, yet browsing through recent volumes of Organization would no doubt reveal a number of studies on change.

3. The recent focus on continuous change (or 'becoming'), as opposed to episodic change. I take Weick & Quinn, 1999 in Annual Review of Psychology and Tsoukas & Chia, 2002 in Org Science to be the main milestones in this movement. It is open to question whether the continuous change view really accounts for power or conflict. I certainly think that this view would be hospitable to political processes such as negotiation. Another interesting concept is dialogue,
which has been developed among others by Arne Carlsen in a recent Org Sci piece.

4. Literature on discourse and insitututionalization. Researchers on organizational discourse often deal with organizational change such as the building of new institutions. A recent theoretical piece on discourse and institutionalization is by Hardy and Phillips in AMR.
Discourse analysts such as Eero Vaara have studied major organizational changes from a discursive perspective (see, for instance the Vaara solo paper on merger discourses in Org Studies in 2002, or Vaara et al. 2003 in JMS on airline alliances). "