Creating Value-Based Collaboration: Life Forms and Power in a Change Project

This paper explores collaboration in one innovative project in a production company. The focus is on one particular relationship—that between change agents and project participants with the emphasis on the relations of power between the life forms of ordinary project participants and the change discourse applied. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s concept of “language games” and Foucault’s concept of “power”, this case demonstrates how the change discourse constructs its own image of who the participants are, and how these constructions shape the main content of the change project. Rather than becoming employee-driven and guided with reference to employee identities and life forms, project participants and project activities are constructed by concepts, methods and techniques that are opposed to the extant identities and life forms within the company.

[1]  M. Polanyi.  Chapter 7 – The Tacit Dimension , 1997 .

[2]  Stewart Clegg,et al.  Power, Rule and Domination : A Critical and Empirical Understanding of Power in Sociological Theory and Organizational Life , 1975 .

[3]  Alan McKinlay,et al.  Managing Foucault: Foucault, Management and Organization Theory , 1998 .

[4]  M. Haugaard.  The Constitution of Power: A Theoretical Analysis of Power, Knowledge and Structure , 1997 .

[5]  C. P. Goodman,et al.  The Tacit Dimension , 2003 .

[6]  R. Harré,et al.  The Discursive Mind , 1994 .

[7]  Stewart Clegg,et al.  Frameworks of power , 1989 .

[8]  L. Smircich.  Concepts of Culture and Organizational Analysis. , 1983 .

[9]  B. Massumi,et al.  The postmodern condition : a report on knowledge , 1979 .

[10]  W. Powell,et al.  The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis , 1993 .

[11]  M. Foucault,et al.  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , 2020, On Violence.

[12]  Barbara Czarniawska.  Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity , 1997 .

[13]  R. D'amico.  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , 1978, Telos.

[14]  David Silverman,et al.  Organizational work : the language of grading, the grading of language , 1976 .

[15]  B. Flyvbjerg.  Thinkers for Civil Society , 1998 .

[16]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation , 1991 .

[17]  J. Brown,et al.  Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective , 2001 .

[18]  M. Shubik,et al.  A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. , 1964 .

[19]  M. Foucault,et al.  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. , 1978 .

[20]  G. Wickham.  Power and power analysis: beyond Foucault? , 1983 .

[21]  Tyrone S. Pitsis,et al.  Governmentality Matters: Designing an Alliance Culture of Inter-Organizational Collaboration for Managing Projects , 2002 .

[22]  Cynthia Hardy,et al.  The Power Behind Empowerment: Implications for Research and Practice , 1998 .

[23]  Bent Flyvbjerg,et al.  Хабермас и Фуко: Теоретики Гражданского Общества (Habermas and Foucault: Thinkers for Civil Society?) , 1998 .

[24]  G. Burrell,et al.  Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: An Introduction , 1988 .

[25]  Stephen Fox.  Communities Of Practice, Foucault And Actor‐Network Therory , 2000 .

[26]  J. March,et al.  A Behavioral Theory of the Firm , 1964 .

[27]  W. G. Astley,et al.  Administrative Science as Socially Constructed Truth. , 1985 .

[28]  Stewart Clegg,et al.  Foucault, Power and Organizations , 1998 .

[29]  Gibson Burrell,et al.  Modernism, Post Modernism and Organizational Analysis 2: The Contribution of Michel Foucault , 1988 .