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Organizational change, Management culture, Management theory, Australia
This paper traces the emergence of a social movement that has attempted to transform the fundamental character of organizations in Australia. Unlike many other such social movements, this worldwide social movement has been largely unresearched and even unnamed. We refer to it as the organizational renewal movement. The story we tell here demonstrates how this new social movement gained momentum and influence and eventually contributed to today's prevailing management orthodoxy. We present the case that change initiatives moved from being heresies to orthodoxies. In particular we trace the movement through three phases. The first phase traces the foundations and acceptance of humanistic change interventions. The second phase traces the challenges to the humanistic agenda and the emergence of new directions. The third phase demonstrates the process of strategic alignment, where heresies became accepted as orthodoxies. The paper concludes with some observations on future directions for the movement.
Australian industry was a late adopter of many of the behavioral and social science interventions used in other countries to address organizational problems and modify managerial practices (Dunphy and Ford, 1971, p. 6). For most Australian managers, practices associated with the human relations school were foreign, while the ideas found in sociotechnical thinking relating to team work and worker autonomy were regarded with hostility and treated with suspicion (Andreatta, 1974; Emery, 1974a,b). Many Australian managers in the late 1960s and early 1970s were working in an industry climate which reinforced authoritarian attitudes and promoted hierarchical distinctions between managers and the managed, the leaders and the led (Pym, 1971; Lansbury and Gilmour, 1977). The following quote from leading Australian management researchers at the time is very revealing:
The quality of Australian managers has been criticized by Denis Pym on four counts: firstly, the highly derivative nature of Australian management thinking, which is highly dependent on imported ideas and practices; secondly, conformity to the bureaucratic model of organization due to an unwillingness to accept the need for change; thirdly, a fear for anyone who might threaten the established order, through the introduction of radical ideas, finally, the dominance of sleepers over thrusters in Australian managers. The vision of the future held by Australian managers, according to Pym, is little more...