Abstract
This paper addresses the question of how to cultivate organisational development to support organisations towards a sustainable future. Seeking to identify, systematise and elucidate the process of redevelopment in an Austrian small/medium enterprise by means of Language-Information-Reality, a multidimensional system of semantics, it is argued that sustainable organisational development can be explained by the enactment and management of four well-selected knowledge components: expertise, competence and capabilities in their operational influence upon organisational action, as well as explanatory meta-theoretical reflection. This paper contributes to the theory on organisational development by demonstrating the value of knowledge sharing by individual employees from different domains of expertise, and acknowledges the research leading to the paradigm of sense-making in organisations.
Highlights
Classical ‘socio-economic’, approaches, i.e., committed to the methodological behaviourism, to organisational development are often influenced by the metaphorical use of an evolutionary perspective (Aldrich, 1999)
In applying the evolutionary perspective on organisational development, the classical socio-economic approach, as presented so far, aims to show the impact of practice, routine and competence rigidities as structural inertia on organisational sustainability (Gilbert, 2005) and aids understanding of why and how decisions taken in the past can influence current practices: typically, initial internal evaluation and decision events that have led to successful outcomes in the first instance are stored as ‘capabilities’ in the form of mental models, routines, practices and structures within the organisation, which in turn often create a base for subsequent evaluation and decision-making: Henderson and Stern (2004: 47) refer to ‘path-dependence’ of internal evaluation and decision practices
(e.g., Teece, 2007; Gupta, Tesluk & Taylor, 2007; Puranam, Singh & Zollo, 2006; O’Reilly & Tushman, 2004; Benner & Tushman, 2002; Burgelman, 2002, 1983; Tripsas & Gavetti, 2000; Garud & Rappa, 1994); two, to put forward the L.I.R. approach as a co-option based on the notion of sense-making in organisations and an extension of classical knowledge management by means of model-theoretical structures; and three, to illustrate possibilities how to identify, systematise, assess and develop business continuity management practices and measures of an enterprise with the help of L.I.R
Summary
Classical ‘socio-economic’, approaches, i.e., committed to the methodological behaviourism, to organisational development are often influenced by the metaphorical use of an evolutionary perspective (Aldrich, 1999). In applying the evolutionary perspective on organisational development, the classical socio-economic approach, as presented so far, aims to show the impact of practice, routine and competence rigidities as structural inertia on organisational sustainability (Gilbert, 2005) and aids understanding of why and how decisions taken in the past can influence current practices: typically, initial internal evaluation and decision events that have led to successful outcomes in the first instance are stored as ‘capabilities’ in the form of mental models, routines, practices and structures within the organisation, which in turn often create a base for subsequent evaluation and decision-making: Henderson and Stern (2004: 47) refer to ‘path-dependence’ of internal evaluation and decision practices From this methodological perspective, historically evolved internal evaluation and decision practices have the potential increasingly to limit the absorptive capacity of organisations (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990) since they operate as ‘self-reinforcing routines’: as firms accumulate experience with internal evaluation and decision, which is the case with incumbent firms, the inherent beliefs, norms and values (capabilities) guiding the decision become reinforced. The model-theoretic systemic approach offered in this paper instead sees organisations as systems of multidimensional semantics, which includes the sense-making perspective (Weick, 1995; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2014), but goes beyond because in the context of studying sustainable organisational development it appears essential to extend the classical socio-economic approach ( in applying the evolutionary perspective on organisational development) by re-introducing semantics or meaning
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