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Thomas Schumacher
“…these workshops are like Sunday´s church visit - but then it is Monday again…“ A systemic view on interaction and decision making
2015-01-21
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Schumacher, Thomas
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Krautzberger, Marc
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Dominici, Gandolfo
This paper presents detailed insights into the challenges of the organizational renewal in an engineering company. Our action research is based on a single case study and focusses on one of the key challenges of organizational renewal: to put talk (words, communication, discussion) into action (doing, practice, acting). The paper investigates and discusses the talk versus action gap from a systemic communication theory perspective and puts forward two main arguments: First, it shows how the face-to-face communication differs from but is linked to the decision making process in organization. Second, it reveals that beside the often considered aspects of information and utterance the aspect of understanding in the definition of communication adds an impactorientated take on communication and a broader understanding of the talk versus action gap. Literature shows three different streams, that capture the differences between talk and action. First, Brunsson (2003) conceptualizes the difference between talk, decision, and action to describe the gap between these forms of operations as a strategy of political organizations to handle different demands of their environment. By talking, deciding, and acting inconsistently political organizations can satisfy inconsistent demands which might lead to positive and negative effects of an organized hypocrisy (e. g., Krasner, 1999; Lipson, 2007; Weaver, 2008). A second stream of literature is linked to the first one and explores the inconsistency between talk and action of organizations in their corporate social responsibility (CSR). The literature analyzes the difference of talk and action in this particular area as a highly functional strategy of organizations and a problem for its environment (e.g., Christensen, Morsing, Thyssen, 2013; Fernando, 2010). The third stream views the gap rather as a weakness and argues that organizations try not to fail in doing what they talk and decide (e. g., Hardy, Palmer & Phillips,2000; Herarcleous, Barrett, 2001; McClellan, 2011). Putting talk into action in this understanding is an organizational challenge and not a strategy.