I came to action research and, indeed, my academic career in
organization behavior, due in part to “imprinting” experiences near the beginning
of my first full-time job. These experiences taught me two things: 1) Organization
Development was powerful, and 2) there had to be a better way to conduct OD
interventions than the ones I was experiencing.
In the fall of 1969 I was a new high school teacher. The school where I
was teaching had hired three Organization Development consultants to work with
our faculty at faculty meetings that August. The aim was to foster enhanced
faculty participation in school decision-making, especially using consensus
methods, and in general to lessen hierarchical structures in the school. We
participated in a several day OD workshop in August, in short sessions in the fall,
and a day-long workshop in January.
The OD effort had quite negative effects. To make a long and
complicated story very short, its focus on more equal participation led at least
one faculty member to believe that if he acted in ways that were inappropriate
and improper with female students (which he did) the principal did not have the
authority or legitimacy to unilaterally stop him. When the principal of the school
found out what he was doing she did order him to stop and threatened to fire him
if he didn’t change his behavior.
Before this could happen, at the beginning of the day long OD workshop in
January he and two friends stood up and dramatically announced that they were
resigning, because of the general lack of a collaborative climate in the school, but
they would consider an invitation back if it was made. Despite the fact that only
the school principal had knew what had happened, and for appropriate reasons
was not telling other faculty members present, the OD consultants led the faculty
in spending the entire day consulting with the principal on whether to invite the
three people back. “We” eventually decided not to invite them back. After that
meeting there were no more consultants and was no talk of, or wish for,
participation in decision making by anybody for the rest of the school year.
The following summer I helped run a summer camp for inner city and
suburban children. The camp counselors included both inner city and suburban
high school students. In order to assist their working together, OD consultants
were called in to conduct introductory workshops.
The workshops were so successful in getting the camp counselors to bond
with each other that the camp counselors decided they were more interested in
spending time with each other than in working with the youngsters attending the
camp. They often left all of campers involved in a game like kickball while they
spent time with each other.
The combination of outcomes was quite puzzling. In the prior experience
the OD intervention clearly hadn’t worked. In this case the OD intervention had
succeeded, but so well that it had interfered with the camp counselors actually
doing the work they were supposed to. This was clearly powerful, but couldn’t it
have its intended impacts?
These early experiences affected my choice to get a doctorate in social
and organizational psychology. They also led me to be interested in action
research as an underlying framework for organization development. In particular,
they affected my desire as a researcher to study various forms of OD
interventions and many other types of planned organizational change efforts as
these have evolved over the course of the past 30 years or so.
Over time, it has become evident to me and many others that the
intervention tools that used to be used for OD when I first participated in it (such
as consensus exercises) are inadequate for even beginning to accomplish
meaningful (and effective) organizational change. It has also become evident
that scholarly understandings of organizational change, its processes and its
outcomes, require the ability to see change efforts with the eyes of multiple
participants in a change effort. These include the change agents as well as
multiple other categories of participants.
This latter point was brought home forcibly in a study I was conducting
about 15 years ago of a change effort in a school. The principal was interested
in me studying the change effort, in part, I eventually came to learn, because she
was sure it would be a success, and thus she hoped that I would write about the
success. When the change effort was not successful in the original time frame in
which I was studying it, the principal did not want me to write about it, because,
as she put it, why would one want to write about something (even in a scholarly
way) that seemed to be a failure?
My reflection on the principal’s concerns, as well as the differing
viewpoints I had experienced in a wide variety of change situations, led me to
develop means of studying and writing about practitioner-led action research
projects in which I, as an external researcher, collaborate with members of the
setting to describe and analyze what happened there and then to write about the
events (e.g. Bartunek et al., 2000; Bartunek et al., 1996; Bartunek et al., 1999;
Bartunek & Louis, 1996). In joint insider-outsider analyses the writing itself
becomes a kind of action research project in which insider authors reflect on their
experience together with the external researcher. All of those involved have the
opportunity learn from their experience, and in some cases, at least, the insider
authors start to act differently on the basis of the learning.
Over the course of time my aims for exploring planned organizational
change and action research methods have changed; I know better than to
assume that any planned change methodology will be successful according to all
participants’ assessments. But I hope I’m contributing to a broader
understanding of the dynamics involved in change efforts and of ways they affect
the outcomes experienced.