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Thomas Schumacher
"Sub-Cutane Change" as a practice for protective interrupting : Handling stability and change in a pluralistic organization
Communicative Dynamic to Reconstruct Paradoxes in Organizations
2010-06-11
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Tuckermann, Harald
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Schumacher, Thomas
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Ruoss, Sabine
Taking a process perspective, we explore stabilizing and changing. Building on insights of routines, improvising and changing scripts, we on the relationship between a change initiative and the daily organizing and explore the question: how is stabilizing of a change initiative accomplished while it attempts to alter daily organizing in which it is embedded? Within a single longitudinal case of introducing a new surgical treatment practitioners explained their conducting change as "sub-cutane change". We interpret sub-cutane change as an emergent process pattern to conduct a change initiative within an organizational setting like surgery that requires a high degree of stable practice. Sub-cutane change addresses the topic of simultaneously stabilizing a change initiative while changing the daily organizing in which it was embedded. An important insight of the presented case is that both require mutual protection from each other. Changing is precarious because it means to interrupt ongoing daily practice. But as the organization continues operating, it enacts that which is to change. Continued operating provides functional legitimacy that can block the change initiative. As a conclusion, stabilizing in change is understood as an ongoing accomplishment.
2010-07-01
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Tuckermann, Harald
,
Schumacher, Thomas
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Rüegg-Stürm, Johannes
The paper explores the question of how paradoxes become reproduced in daily organizing practice. Based on a single longitudinal case study of changing a nursing department, we demonstrate not only historically how a specific paradox emerged, and was unfolded successfully. But more so, and inspired by social systems theory, we use a the concept of communicative dynamic to depict how the paradox was reproduced within the daily organizing in which it is situated locally. In our view, the communicative dynamic provides a promising approach to explore paradoxes within organizations for academics and practitioners alike. It contributes to the understanding of paradoxes as integral to organizational life to pursue both/and approaches and encourages a paradoxical lens on organizational phenomena such as change processes.