May 30, 2007
Since I started posting on my Recruitomatic blog about a year ago I have linked back to Ebbe Munk’s The Technostructure versus Morgan’s Metaphors a few times. In my opinion, it is an excellent work:
This is a study of the technostructure as described by J.K. Galbraith and Henry Mintzberg. Their notion of the technostructure is compared to Gareth Morgan’s eight metaphors in “Images of Organization” to see if Morgan’s metaphors can provide new aspects of the technostructure…
In 1967 John Kenneth Galbraith wrote The New Industrial State. In the book he analyzed his new finding The Technostructure as a part of his description of modern economic life. He defines the technostructure as the leadership of the modern industrial enterprise. He found that it is the complex of specialists and technicians that exercise the decisive power.
In 1983 Henry Mintzberg published both Structure in Fives and Power In and Around Organizations, which among other topics describe the technostructure as taking part in the management and development of individual organizations.
In 1986 Gareth Morgan published Images of Organization where he is using various metaphors to scrutinize our perceptions of organization. The book does not treat the notion of the technostructure as such. Second edition was published 1997.
Since my introduction to Gareth Morgan’s book in 1988 — golly Olly, I’m getting old — it has been a recurring reference for my research and a helpful tool for reconciling some of my experiences in, and at, work. To the extent that have returned over and over to a new reading of Morgan’s metaphor’s I have hardly read John Kenneth Gailbrath or Henry Mitzberg. Ebbe Munk’s reasearch — which is not recent — has rekindled a desire to revisit them more often. And I will.
Ah, metaphors…here’s another that goes with Morgan’s Psychic Prisoner Metaphor - enjoy!
May 27, 2007
Dion Hinchcliffe posts Enterprise 2.0 as a corporate culture catalyst and raises some interesting points that serve to remind me that this has to be one of the most extraordinary periods of history to be a change agent or involved in business with an All-things 2.0 orientation.
However, I have yet to find something equally substantive to read that addresses the more fundamental issues of how to create an environment in which Web 2.0 applications and social media can be adopted when the underlying management style, corporate thinking, vested interests and technology are typically All-things 1.0. Perhaps I should look harder.
Tom Davenport who is referenced in Dion Hinchcliffe’s post writes in Why Enterprise 2.0 Won’t Transform Organizations on Harvard Business Online. He suggests that organizational hierarchies and the centralization of power within larger bureaucracies will thwart the aspirations of advocates who would advance the agenda for a flattening of traditional models but offers no thoughts on how to reverse this dystopian — and likely accurate — view of the future. Rather Tom Davenport asks, “Is Enterprise 2.0 a way to create more democratic organizations?”
Well, to my own question — how to facilitate adoption of Enterprise 2.0 in the face of prevailing convention — and Tom Davenport’s tease regarding the creation of democratic organizations, quite frankly, I don’t know. I do think social media enables a vanguard of activists — agent provocateurs, intraprenuers and “radical transparencists” — to force rapid and irreversible change by deploying technology and widgets and things to oblige accountability, transparency, authenticity and responsibility.
The question then is, how many are there willing to lay it on the line for an ideal which may never profit them directly? For sure, they will more likely be crucified than promoted to positions of “power” and influence. Historically, the vanguard and avant-garde have been the culture catalysts but rarely the beneficiaries of social change.
I don’t see social media and mashups in of themselves changing that much about how corporate culture is catalyzed, do you? Maybe it will take an Army of Davids and then some. Or is that wishful thinking too?
