Catching Values in Flight: A Process Perspective on Researching Values in Organisations

Gry Espedal

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37748-9_10

Abstract

Values are often hardly visible and taken for granted in organisations, leaving us with the question of how to study them. An emerging stream of studies on values work utilises a process approach to research values, work and practice in organisations, identifying how values and value practices are brought into being in organisational life. This chapter focuses on the use of process studies in relation to the investigation of values work in organisations. The chapter explains and exemplifies how values work can be studied through a strong-process perspective identifying work and practices that develop, grow or terminate values over time. Process studies identify various mechanisms related to the performative, situated and agentic nature of values work. Different methodology approaches are suggested for process studies investigating values work and institutionalising processes.

Highlights

During the last few decades, the concept of process studies has become increasingly visible in social studies (Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & de Ven, 2013; Langley & Tsoukas, 2010, 2017), incorporating a new stream of how to study values work (Gehman, Trevino, & Garud, 2013; Vaccaro & Palazzo, 2015; Wright, Zammuto, & Liesch, 2017), shedding light on how values work is shaping organisational forms, practices and activities
Espedal identifying values work as strong-process studies, as how reality is brought into being in every instant, as well as weak-process studies—as interactions constituting institutionalising processes in organisations
In strong-process studies, change is not necessarily investigated as something that happens to things but as how reality is brought into being in every instant

Summary

Introduction

During the last few decades, the concept of process studies has become increasingly visible in social studies (Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & de Ven, 2013; Langley & Tsoukas, 2010, 2017), incorporating a new stream of how to study values work (Gehman, Trevino, & Garud, 2013; Vaccaro & Palazzo, 2015; Wright, Zammuto, & Liesch, 2017), shedding light on how values work is shaping organisational forms, practices and activities. Through a systematic analysis of three highly value-salient issues within a faith-based organisation, the study theorises the process of value inquiry as an open-ended process of questioning and reinterpreting the meaning of the dominant value frames To adapt to this situation, institutions are inquiring the dominant value frame in order to seek out and find institutional values and practices to form new behaviours that realign with the common good and the values and agency of the organisations (Espedal, 2019). One may question if the recent stream of studies of values work in organisations has gone far enough in including the process nature of institutions and institutionalisation in their investigation of values (Surachaikulwattana & Phillips, 2017). In this chapter, I will cover how values work enhance actions and agency in influencing actors and institutions exemplified through a recent study of values work in a faith-based healthcare organisation

Process Studies and Values Work

Values as Part of Institutionalising Processes

Concluding Remarks