fetish of change, The

Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science, 2003 by Grey, Christopher

Of course, an obvious objection to the treadmill view I am expressing here would be to point out that, although organisations generate change collectively, any individual organisation has little choice but to participate if it is to survive. It is here that the Darwinian metaphor comes into play - that survival is contingent upon adaptation, because organisations which do not change will lose business to those which do. Yet, there are surely reasons to doubt whether this is true. First, it cannot be assumed that organisational change does, in fact, lead to better or cheaper products (or to greater profitability), and if it does not, there is no reason to assume that adaptation will be commercially beneficial. Second, even if change does lead to better or cheaper products, it does not follow that customers will buy from that organisation rather than another. It may be that a less good or more expensive product is compensated for by other considerations, such as a particular personal relationship between buyer and seller, or habit, or convenience, or principle. To put it another way, there are all sorts of reasons why consumers are not the rational utility-maximising agents of economic theory.

Anticipating another objection, it might be thought that currently, change programmes are often directed at giving the customer what s/he wants, including all of the 'non-rational' considerations I have just listed. However, changes conducted in the name of the customer may be very far from being the same as changes desired by the customer, and may even coexist with monopoly supply of vital services (Ogden and Anderson, 1995). Even where this is not so, many supposedly customer-oriented changes are, in reality, just the opposite. Consider the recent trend towards creating central call centres for dealing with customer enquiries in industries such as banking and insurance. Typically, they involve long waits in telephone queues, dealing with elaborate automated menus, and finally being connected with an automaton with no personal interest in or knowledge of the customer. In such cases, whilst change is justified in terms of the increasingly demanding nature of customers, the actual practices would seem more animated by a concern to cut costs.

In any case, the person of the customer cannot be dissociated from the person of the employee. Thus, organisational change programmes which, for example, remove staff in the name of the customer and organisational survival, are damaging the capacity of those staff to act as customers and, therefore, the prospects for survival of those organisations relying on this custom. This, of course, is merely another aspect of the simultaneity of organisations and environments.

My argument in this section is that far from being a natural environmental given to which organisations must respond, change is better understood as a construction effected by the interplay (and its unintended consequences) of organisations themselves. To say it is a construct is not to say that it is unreal, but rather that its reality is an effect of organisational practices, rather than a precursor of those practices. Yet, by constructing a changing world, organisations also create the apparent necessity to 'manage change'. It is to this that I now turn attention.