Organizations driving positive social change:a review and an integrative framework of change processes

Academic and practitioner interest in how market-based organizations can drive positive social change (PSC) is steadily growing. This paper helps to recast how organizations relate to society. It integrates research on projects stimulating PSC – the transformational processes to advance societal well-being – which is fragmented across different streams of research in management and related disciplines. Focusing on the mechanisms at play in how organizations and their projects affect change in targets outside of organizational boundaries, we 1) clarify the nature of PSC as a process, 2) develop an integrative framework that specifies two distinct PSC strategies, 3) take stock of and offer a categorization scheme for change mechanisms and enabling organizational practices, and 4) outline opportunities for future research. Our conceptual framework differentiates between surface- and deep-level PSC strategies understood as distinct combinations of change mechanisms and enabling organizational practices. These strategies differ in the nature and speed of transformation experienced by the targets of change projects and the resulting quality (pervasiveness and durability), timing, and reach of social impact. Our findings provide a solid base for integrating and advancing knowledge across the largely disparate streams of management research on Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Entrepreneurship, and Base of the Pyramid, and open up important new avenues for future research on organizing for PSC and on unpacking PSC processes.

Human resource strategy:introducing a new management typology to make change stick

Human resource management (HRM) is now being seen as a strategic activity. This recognises that change processes must include the management of human resources as part of an integrated approach to strategy. Without also linking management development and business strategy, change will not stick and organisations will not develop. Contributing to the debate about integrating HR and other strategies, including linking management development and business strategy, this paper develops a new Generic Management Typology of co-existing management philosophies in order to help change agents diagnose the culture of an organisation and to modify that culture. The typology is derived from reflecting on research about the global transformation of public service organisations over the last twenty-five years.

Managerial cognitions in technological innovation processes:a study of interpretative processes

In this research, conceptualizations of the links between technological innovation and organizational change are explored and recommendations in the literature concerning such changes are reviewed and criticized. Such recommendations do not usually address the details of social interactions by which organizational changes take place. As a consequence, the issue of how these recommendations become relevant for the actors who would carry them out is not addressed. The complexity of organizational change processes highlights the role of actors' interpretations of organizational reality. Interpretations take place through the use of language in the interaction between actors. Theoretical contributions and recommendations concerning organizational changes should be seen therefore as discourses which contribute to these interpretations. They will influence the process of change only if they become relevant for organizational actors'. A method for analysing discourse in organizations is presented. It is used to identify the variety of discourses which are put forward in organizations, and to describe the structure of their distribution among actors. The structures of discourses in three companies suggest that knowledge about technological innovation processes becomes relevant to the extent that it contributes to political/discursive processes maintained by actors attempting to secure or change their role definitions. It follows that recommendations concerning planned organizational change should take into account these processes explicitly. It is therefore suggested that the analysis of discourse can be a valuable instrument for monitoring change processes. Suggestions for further research are made, concerning (i) the development of the method itself and its use in real situations (ii) the study of how discourse structures evolve over time and episodes of change.

An analysis of the role of soft systems methodology in the change process and the contribution of the facilitator within this process

This research aims to examine the effectiveness of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) to enable systemic change within local goverment and local NHS environments and to examine the role of the facilitator within this process. Checkland's Mode 2 variant of Soft Systems Methodology was applied on an experimental basis in two environments, Herefordshire Health Authority and Sand well Health Authority. The Herefordshire application used SSM in the design of an Integrated Care Pathway for stroke patients. In Sandwell, SSM was deployed to assist in the design of an Infonnation Management and Technology (IM&T) Strategy for the boundary-spanning Sandwell Partnership. Both of these environments were experiencing significant organisational change as the experiments unfurled. The explicit objectives of the research were: To examine the evolution and development of SSM and to contribute to its further development. To apply the Soft Systems Methodology to change processes within the NHS. To evaluate the potential role of SSM in this wider process of change. To assess the role of the researcher as a facilitator within this process. To develop a critical framework through which the impact of SSM on change might be understood and assessed. In developing these objectives, it became apparent that there was a gap in knowledge relating to SSM. This gap concerns the evaluation of the role of the approach in the change process. The case studies highlighted issues in stakeholder selection and management; the communicative assumptions in SSM; the ambiguous role of the facilitator; and the impact of highly politicised problem environments on the effectiveness of the methodology in the process of change. An augmented variant on SSM that integrates an appropriate (social constructivist) evaluation method is outlined, together with a series of hypotheses about the operationalisation of this proposed method.

Antecedents, mechanisms and processes of deinstitutionalization and institutional change:a case study approach to understanding enterprise under duress

Adopting a grounded theory methodology, the study describes how an event and pressure impact upon a process of deinstitutionalization and institutional change. Three case studies were theoretically sampled in relation to each other. They yielded mainly qualitative data from methods that included interviews, observations, participant observations, and document reviews. Each case consisted of a boundaried cluster of small enterprises that were not industry specific and were geographically dispersed. Overall findings describe how an event, i.e. a stimulus, causes disruption, which in turn may cause pressure. Pressure is then translated as a tension within the institutional environment, which is characterized by opposing forces that encourage institutional breakdown and institutional maintenance. Several contributions are made: Deinstitutionalization as a process is inextricable from the formation of institutions – both are needed to make sense of institutional change on a conceptual level but are also inseparable experientially in the field; stimuli are conceptually different to pressures; the historical basis of a stimulus may impact on whether pressure and institutional change occurs; pressure exists in a more dynamic capacity rather than only as a catalyst; institutional breakdown is a non-linear irregular process; ethical and survival pressures as new types were identified; institutional current, as an underpinning mechanism, influences how the tension between institutional breakdown and maintenance plays out.

Prediction with Gaussian processes: from linear regression to linear prediction and beyond

The main aim of this paper is to provide a tutorial on regression with Gaussian processes. We start from Bayesian linear regression, and show how by a change of viewpoint one can see this method as a Gaussian process predictor based on priors over functions, rather than on priors over parameters. This leads in to a more general discussion of Gaussian processes in section 4. Section 5 deals with further issues, including hierarchical modelling and the setting of the parameters that control the Gaussian process, the covariance functions for neural network models and the use of Gaussian processes in classification problems.

Gaussian processes:iterative sparse approximations

In recent years there has been an increased interest in applying non-parametric methods to real-world problems. Significant research has been devoted to Gaussian processes (GPs) due to their increased flexibility when compared with parametric models. These methods use Bayesian learning, which generally leads to analytically intractable posteriors. This thesis proposes a two-step solution to construct a probabilistic approximation to the posterior. In the first step we adapt the Bayesian online learning to GPs: the final approximation to the posterior is the result of propagating the first and second moments of intermediate posteriors obtained by combining a new example with the previous approximation. The propagation of em functional forms is solved by showing the existence of a parametrisation to posterior moments that uses combinations of the kernel function at the training points, transforming the Bayesian online learning of functions into a parametric formulation. The drawback is the prohibitive quadratic scaling of the number of parameters with the size of the data, making the method inapplicable to large datasets. The second step solves the problem of the exploding parameter size and makes GPs applicable to arbitrarily large datasets. The approximation is based on a measure of distance between two GPs, the KL-divergence between GPs. This second approximation is with a constrained GP in which only a small subset of the whole training dataset is used to represent the GP. This subset is called the em Basis Vector, or BV set and the resulting GP is a sparse approximation to the true posterior. As this sparsity is based on the KL-minimisation, it is probabilistic and independent of the way the posterior approximation from the first step is obtained. We combine the sparse approximation with an extension to the Bayesian online algorithm that allows multiple iterations for each input and thus approximating a batch solution. The resulting sparse learning algorithm is a generic one: for different problems we only change the likelihood. The algorithm is applied to a variety of problems and we examine its performance both on more classical regression and classification tasks and to the data-assimilation and a simple density estimation problems.

Requirements for modelling e-business processes

Companies must not see e-Business as a panacea but instead assess the specific impact of implementing e-Business on their business from both an internal and external perspective. E-Business is promoted as being able to increase the speed of response and reduce costs locally but these benefits must be assessed for the wider business rather than as local improvements. This paper argues that any assessment must include quantitative analysis that covers the physical as well as the information flows within a business. It is noted that as business processes are e-enabled their structure does not significantly change and it is only by the use of modelling techniques that the operational impact can be ascertained. The paper reviews techniques that are appropriate for this type of analysis as well as specific modelling tools and applications. Through this review a set of requirements for e-Business process modelling is derived.

Understanding policy implementation processes as self-organizing systems

Implementation studies and related research in organizational theory can be enhanced by drawing on the field of complex systems to understand better and, as a consequence, more successfully manage change. This article reinterprets data previously published in the British Journal of Management to reveal a new contribution, that policy implementation processes should be understood as a self-organizing system in which adaptive abilities are extremely important for stakeholders. In other words, national policy is reinterpreted at the local level, with each local organization uniquely mixing elements of national policy with their own requirements making policy implementation unpredictable and more sketchy. The original article explained different paces and directions of change in terms of traditional management processes: leadership, politics, implementation and vision. By reinterpreting the data, it is possible to reveal that deeper level processes, which are more emergent, are also at work influencing change, which the authors label possibility space. Implications for theory, policy and practice are identified.

Strategy, IT and dynamic change in enterprises

This paper explores the importance of collaboration between different types of organizations within an enterprise. To achieve successful collaboration requires both endogenous and exogenous factors of each organization to be considered and a shared meta-strategy supported by shared cross-organizational processes and technology. A rolling business plan would periodically review, assess and reposition each organization within this meta-strategy according to how well they have contributed. We show that recent technological advances have made organizational structures more agile, organizational infra-structure more connected and the sharing of real-time information an operational reality; we also discuss the challenges and risks.

Reform of the New Zealand Health System:problematization, mobilization and change

This paper will seek to explicate the changes in the New Zealand health sector informed by the concepts of problematization, inscription and the construction of networks (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987, 1993). This will involve applying a framework of interpretation based on the concepts of Latour's sociology of translation. Material on problematization and inscription will be incorporated into the paper in order to provide an explanatory frame of reference which will enable us to make sense of the processes of change in the New Zealand health sector. The sociology of translation will be used to explain the processes which underlie the changes and will be used to capture effects, such as changes in policy and structure, producing new networks within which 'allies' could be enrolled in support of the health reforms.

Majority versus minority influence, message processing and attitude change:the Source-Context-Elaboration Model

This chapter examines the contexts in which people will process more deeply, and therefore be more influenced by, a position that is supported by either a numerical majority or minority. The chapter reviews the major theories of majority and minority influence with reference to which source condition is associated with most message processing (and where relevant, the contexts under which this occurs) and experimental research examining these predictions. The chapter then presents a new theoretical model (the source-context-elaboration model, SCEM) that aims to integrate the disparate research findings. The model specifies the processes underlying majority and minority influence, the contexts under which these processes occur and the consequences for attitudes changed by majority and minority influence. The chapter then describes a series of experiments that address each of the aspects of the theoretical model. Finally, a range of research-related issues are discussed and future issues for the research area as a whole are considered.

The role of expertise in governance processes

In present day knowledge societies political decisions are often justified on the basis of scientific expertise. Traditionally, a linear relation between knowledge production and application was postulated which would lead, with more and better science, to better policies. Empirical studies in Science and Technology studies have essentially demolished this idea. However, it is still powerful, not least among practitioners working in fields where decision making is based on large doses of expert knowledge. Based on conceptual work in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) I shall examine two cases of global environmental governance, ozone layer protection and global climate change. I will argue that hybridization and purification are important for two major forms of scientific expertise. One is delivered though scientific advocacy (by individual scientists or groups of scientists), the other through expert committees, i.e. institutionalized forms of collecting and communicating expertise to decision makers. Based on this analysis lessons will be drawn, also with regard to the stalling efforts at establishing an international forestry regime.

Crisis and institutional change in urban governance

Recent studies of new institutional spaces typically underplay the uneven and contested process of institutional change by undervaluing the role of inherited institutions and discourses. This is a critical issue as neoliberal networked forms of governance interact with inherited institutional arrangements, characterised by important path dependencies that guide actors. Contradiction and tensions can emerge, culminating in crisis tendencies, and producing both discursive and material contestation between actors. It is with an understanding of path dependencies, ideas (structured into discourses), and (perceived and actual) crisis tendencies that this paper examines contested institutional change through a case-study analysis of one city, and a critical engagement with neoinstitutionalism. The purpose is to examine, firstly, the significance of inherited path-dependent arrangements in fostering conflict and crisis tendencies during interaction with emergent state action; secondly, the extent to which crisis is evident in processes of institutional change and the form that this takes; and, thirdly, the importance of ideas in producing institutional transformation. It is found that institutional conflict is evident between inherited institutions and emergent state action, and stems both from the way agents are organised by the state and from certain path dependencies, but that this does not lead to an actual material crisis. Rather, the nation-state, in partnership with senior city government actors, use ideational/discursive ‘crisis talk’ as a means by which to induce institutional change. The role of ideas has been in critical in this process as the nation-state frames problems and solutions in line with its existing policy paradigm and institutional arrangements, and with discourses further reinforcing existing material power relations.