دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی یک دیدگاه جامعه شناختی برای توسعه سازمانی - الزویر 2017

In 2008,David, amember of“Kimono’s”(pseudonym) board of directors, invited me to improve the firm’s poor performance. Kimono is an Israelifirmthatdevelopsmarine products for an export to West Europa and Japan. At the time the consulting process took place, two business groups owned Kimono, Adventure (51%) and Genesis (49%). The roots of the company’s poor performance, according to David (pseudonym), were in John and Bill’s “stubborn personality” and ineffective communication. John was the head of Kimono’s agriculture farm that produces the marine products and Bill was the head of marketing.My consulting role was to help John and Bill develop better interpersonal communication in order to improve Kimono’s poor performance. As common among Organization Development (OD) practitioners, I conducted interviews with John and Bill and with all Kimono’s participants (six board members and five marine biologists). OD is a conceptual and practical field that focuses on organizational change. The interviews indicated that John and Bill’s interpersonal communication was indeed ineffective. However, from the interviews I also learned that the roots of Kimono’s poor performance were mainly the constant power struggles between Adventure and Genesis, the two business groups that own Kimono. These struggles, I found, started years ago with fights over issues such as Kimono’s ownership and shares, strategic direction, necessary capital investment and main operational processes.

CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

When he invited me to Kimono, David (the board member) defined Kimono’s problem as a psychological phenomenon. For him, and probably for the rest of the board members, Kimono’s poor performance is the product of John and Bill’s personal inability to communicate effectively.

As accepted in today’s modern individualistic social structure and in mainstream OD then David viewed John and Bill as psychological subjects who are the producers of meaning, values and behavioral norms (like Kimono’s poor performance) and therefore they should be the target of the organizational change process. For him, all the consultant (me) had to do in order to stop the poor performance was to fix its source, that is, to help John and Bill grow personally and improve their communication skills.

The HOC, on the other hand, views managers mainly as sociological subjects. The managers then are not only the producers of meaning, values and behavioral norms, but also the products of meaning, values and behavioral norms defined by the organization’s social structure. From this perspective, one that views John and Bill as sociological subjects, we can understand Kimono’s poor performance not solely as a product of John and Bill’s ineffective communication but of the interaction between that communication and Kimono’s social structure diffused by the contested habitus. John and Bill adopted the contested habitus and, in fact, in their daily reciprocal communication refined and improved it.