Een boek dat organisaties in een ander licht zet. Wanneer mensen over organisaties en verandering van organisaties praten, hebben ze altijd impliciet een metafoor voor wat een organisatie is en hoe deze werkt. Morgan werkt acht verschillende perspectieven uit en laat zien dat de machine metafoor niet de enige manier is. De perspectieven die Morgan beschrijft zijn: machine, organisme, hersens, cultureel systeem, politiek systeem, psychische gevangenis, flux en transformatie, instrument voor overheersing. Elk van deze perspectieven brengt een bepaald aspect van organisaties aan de voorgrond. Daarmee ook de waargenomen problemen en dat leidt weer tot nieuwe handvatten om verandering te realiseren.
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Onderstaande pagina sprak mij aan over ontwikkelingen in organisaties en samenleving.
Marx never wrote about the dialectical method employed in his work, preferring to demonstrate it in the concrete analysis of specific situations. Not surprisingly, his view of dialectical analysis has thus been subject to a wide range of interpretation. One of the clearest and most influential statements is found in Frederick Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, which, despite its rather deterministic flavour, provides a useful perspective on how Marx’s theory of social change reflects three principles
- The mutual interpenetration (struggle, or unity) of opposites
- The negation of the negation
- The transformation of quantity into quality
The first principle accounts for processes of self-generated change whereby phenomena change themselves as a result of tension with their opposite. This principle underpins the idea of contradiction, and is used by Marx to explain how one social arrangement inevitably gives way to another. For example, an act whereby one person attempts to rul or control another tends to set up a process of resistance or countercontrol that undermines the initial attempt of control. The act of control itself sets up consequences that work against its effectiveness.
The second principle explains how change may become developmental in the sense that each negation rejects a previous form, yet also retains something from that form. Thus an act of control may be negated by an act of countercontrol, which is in turn negated by a further act of control (negation of the negation) and so on. Each successive pattern of control will retain an element of the previous negation.
The third principle accounts for processes of revolutionary change whereby one form of social organization gives way to another. Marxist call them ‘totality shifts’. In nature there are many processes where changes in quantity eventually lead to a catastrophic event leading to a change in quality. Water will absorb increases in temperature until the boiling point, when it changes into steam. A camel can be loaded with more and more weight until the final straw breaks its back. Similar processes can be observed in patterns of social organization. A process of control and countercontrol may continue until control is no longer possible, leading to a new phase of collaborative or destructive activity. Cumulative changes in society may thus provide the platform for a revolution that changes the underlying basis of that society.
When we combine these three dialectical principles we arrive at a rich and complex picture of the nature of change. Marx’s analysis of society stresses that social arrangements generate inner contradictions that defeat the purposes for which they were set up, leading to a continuing pattern of negation and counternegation. The negation of the negation allows for the progressive development of the system until a limit is reached where its inner contradictions can no longer be contained.
These three principles help to explain the transformation of all social systems.
Bron: Images of Organization, p258 (exhibit 8.6)
