Organizational Change

Organizational change is all around us and it is duly noticed, studied and theorized upon in spite of the fact that it is heavily over-psyched and easily under-socialized. There are many complex reasons and many streams of interwoven contextual constraints, which must be studied in order to understand how we arrived at the present predicament, but it appears that one of the main underlying constellations of causal factors has to do with the spread of formal professional organizations as the privileged way of shaping social processes. To put it in a nutshell: we would like to identify ourselves with the avant-garde elites of the knowledge intensive firms and institutions, but we would also like to feel the warm solidarity of the populist appeals fired by our professional activities and spreading sustainable wealth, sophisticated culture and democratically distributed power to the previously excluded, locked out, "e; nickel and dimed"e; . Managers and sponsors, bureaucrats and gate keepers cannot see what we as professional researchers refuse to see and to study with due diligence. Can we correct this one-sidedness, reduce the imbalance, offer a more credible and sustainable promise?