PRACTISING "CULTURAL WORK" AND "ROVING" LEADERSHIP
IN A DOWNSIZING ACADEMIC INSTITUTION
Amarjit Singh
Faculty of Education
Memorial University of Newfoundland
E-mail: asingh@morgan.ucs.mun.ca
How do we make sense of downsizing? How should we make sense of downsizing? How do individuals actually experience downsizing? How should one experience downsizing? How is downsizing being managed? How should it be managed?
A way to answer these questions is to make sense of downsizing and of experiences people have had as a result of downsizing. There are many approaches to sense-making in respect to downsizing. One device is to orient oneself through learning to participate in the on-going conversations (discourses) that are taking place on the subject of downsizing in certain national and international cultural circles, while at the same time being able to participate in many other conversations which provide a much larger context in which downsizing takes place.
Such other conversations which provide a larger context for the sense-making of downsizing are conversations about the spread of Western capitalist modernity across cultures and nations. Yet other related discourses are on post-modernity, globalization and internationalization of all aspects of our life. Still other related conversations are on organizational change, organizational culture, organizational learning, organizational management and leadership.
Sense-making is a complex process but at the very least it can guide us to interpret these discourses as they relate to downsizing. Moreover, it can enable us to reach certain levels of personal and collective understanding about the interrelationship that may exist among various on-going discourses, e.g., between modernity and globalization.
If we can make sense of downsizing through participation in various on-going conversations, then we also need to ask questions about what consequences this form of participation has on one's daily experience as a citizen and as an employee in a downsized/ing organization. Weick (1995) is helpful here. He points out that "sense-making is about authoring as well as interpretation, creation as well as discovering" (p. 8). Sense-making is "a process in which individuals develop cognitive maps of their environment" (Ring and Rands, 1989, p. 342). And "people make sense of things by seeing a world on which they already imposed what they believe" (Weick, 1995, p. 15). Sense-making involves both individual and social activities.
Following the above line of thinking, I believe that participation and sense-making empower individuals and organizations during the downsizing process and enable them to enhance each other's well-being. The downsizing context also creates opportunities for individuals to function as a " transformational " leader and " cultural worker " in an organization. In this paper, therefore, I (1) reflect on what it means to take on these roles in an academic unit in a middle-sized university which has experienced and is still experiencing the process of downsizing, and (2) describe the language used by many of the participants in their attempt to function as leaders and cultural workers in different situations within the university setting.
Focus on Individual Level Change
Even though the author reasons that being able to participate in various conversations related to downsizing would stir up one's consciousness which, in turn, should deepen one's understanding about downsizing, it is beyond the scope of this paper to offer various on-going conversations on the topics mentioned previously . It is not difficult to visualize how discussion of other related discourses would enable individuals to reach new levels of understanding, and that this new understanding could guide individuals about how to experience and manage downsizing at the personal and collective levels.
To be sure, organizational change can be analysed at various levels - individual, institutional, cultural and social structural level. Participants in the life of an academic organization in their various roles such as managers, leaders, staff and faculty members, must decide at what level change needs to be sought in their organization, because once this is decided, strategies for change can be designed, implemented and evaluated.
This paper reflects on an attempt to bringing about change at the level of the individual because the author 's interest lies in encouraging individuals in a downsized/ing academic unit in the university setting to become cultural workers and democratic leaders, and through these roles learn to engage in a cultural practice that infuses hope in the downsizing situation typified by feelings of despair. Thus, as the author sees it, being a cultural worker and a hopeful leader first of all means talking (using language) about downsizing and related issues in certain ways. Using language in a certain way enables cultural workers and leaders to create a conversational context (condition) in which individuals may feel empowered and decide to adopt an outlook which leads them to believe that there is a life after downsizing. This means that both the downsized organization and the individuals in it can meet the new challenges effectively. In this way, almost all participants perhaps can extend helping hands to co-workers to overcome whatever negative feelings they might have toward a downsized/ing organization and become creative employees in the organizational setting.
Moreover, the author's experience in several downsized/ing institutions of higher learning has led him to focus on the individual level of change. Working in and being associated with those institutions for over thirty years, the author has come to observe that each individual can be a "manager", a "leader" and a" cultural worker " in different contexts in the everyday life of a complex organization, and that if each person chooses to function as a cultural worker, then she/he defines himself/herself as having tremendous power. Once the person perceives herself/himself to be empowered, she/he develops an appropriate self-image, which in turn moves the individual to act in ways which empower others. This seems to be in line with the research of Bolman and Deal (1994), who found that leadership can be exercised from anywhere and that it is not synonymous with positions people hold in an organization. Depree's (1989) idea of roving leadership is also helpful here. He describes how this concept can provide a key element in the day-to-day expression of the participatory process. The concept of roving leadership points out that "no one person is the 'expert' at everything" (p. 46).
Managing Change As Cultural Work and Practice
Managing change is a cultural work involving cultural practices and the use of whatever cultural resources (capital) are available to individuals in their immediate environment as they go through the routines and rhythms of daily lives in a downsized organization. Thus, it is through cultural and pedagogical practices operating at various sites in the organizational structure that cultural workers are most able to influence the management of organizational change by providing timely and appropriate leadership.
The qualities of managerial leadership from the framework of cultural work includes the ability of cultural workers to (a) establish empowering relationships with others in a downsized/ing organization, (b) take the pedagogical and political dimensions of cultural work seriously, (c) self-consciously engage in cultural work at various sites within a downsized organization, and (d) enhance the well-being of the co-workers and the organization as a whole.
The central message of this paper is that taking the role of cultural workers enables individuals to develop unique and specific orientations toward understanding organizational change and organizational cultures. And their particular orientations toward downsizing, when coupled with their managerial leadership qualities, play a crucial role in enhancing the well-being of the remaining labour force in a downsized organization, as well as the well-being of the whole organization. The author further develop these ideas and reflects on them . Based on his observations, he then describes the language used by various cultural workers in different sites in an academic organization which has been drastically downsized during the last six or so years. This is done by focusing on the literature which deals with management qualities of leadership. A discussion on paradigms in organization theory and the concept of cultural workers are also provided to make a point that the notion of cultural worker is yet to be incorporated into organizational theory. Another point is that management and leadership should be seen as cultural work involving pedagogical practices.
Having made these general comments regarding organizational theory and the notion of cultural worker, the paper identifies four management qualities of leadership. These are: (1) ability to work as cultural worker, (2) ability to engage in empowering relationships with others, (3) desiring to engage in cultural work, and (4) having skills to enhance the well-being of the organization and the people working in it. These qualities are given meaning by way of providing discussion of on-going discourses on (a) cultural work, cultural workers, sites, cultural practices and the pedagogical dimensions of cultural work, (b) well-being, (c) the notion of empowerment, empowering relationships, and well-being, and (d) experiencing and functioning as cultural workers in a downsized/ing organization.
Paradigms in Organizational Studies
The concept of cultural workers, as described in the previous section, has not yet been explicitly incorporated in the sense-making process of how complex organizations and people in there function. To be sure, attributes associated with the concept of a cultural worker do appear in the literature on organization, but they are discussed in relation to well entrenched concepts in the organization theory. However, it is clear that until not long ago the dominant organizational theories have often used positivism as the major paradigm. Other paradigms such as interpretivism, criticism, postmodernism, feminism, cultural studies and other new perspectives are of recent import in organization studies. Aronowitz and Giroux (1995) and Giroux (1988, 1993) articulate the concept of the cultural worker by providing a critique of positivism.
In organizational theories, it appears that the conceptualization of the notion of cultural worker has much in common with the thinking of writers like Argyris (1982), Argyris and Schon (1974), Senge (1990) and others whose work has been reviewed herein. These and other authors conceptualize organizations as learning organizations and discuss organizational cultures. Combining insights gained from the work of these writers with that of Giroux's, it can be said that a cultural worker is a critical and reflective practitioner who is always engaged in learning activities. Argyris (1982) and Argyris and Schon (1972) talk about the role of a reflective practitioner in the organization, and they provide insights concerning the gap between espoused theory and theory-in-use. Schon's (1983) theory of reflection-in-action helps us comprehend how we may come to know our theories-in-use. He explains,
"Our knowing is ordinarily tacit, implicit in our patterns of action and in our feelings for the stuff with which we are dealing. It seems right to say that our knowing is in our action" (p. 49).
Learning new options available to us and seeking feedback should help us in closing the gap between what we believe and what we do. If leaders need to be reflective practitioners, then their work essentially involves continuously learning from others and teaching others. In other words, what they say and do has pedagogical implications. Their actions can be seen as involving various forms of pedagogical and cultural practices at different sites.
Thus, it seems that certain forms of leadership processes - such as transformational, dialectic and democratic - cannot be separated from pedagogical practices and cultural work.
Similarly, various perspectives on organizations - such as a cultural, a political, a theatrical or a brain perspective - provide a great many insights which seem similar to that found in the discussion of cultural work, practice and pedagogy:
For example, within a cultural perspective on leadership... what the leader stands for and communicates to others is considered important. The object of leadership is the stirring of human consciousness, the interpretation and enhancement of meanings, the articulation of key cultural strands and the linking of organizational members to them (Sergiovani, 1984, p. 8).
Giroux, in different ways, explains that cultural politics is concerned with the production and representation of meanings and with the analysis of practices that are involved in their production. Because power is unequally distributed in different spheres of society, power relations are often contested. People as cultural workers and in various leadership roles contest asymmetrical power relations through engaging in various textual, verbal, and visual practices which result in a form of cultural production. Pedagogy understood this way is deeply involved in the construction and organization of knowledge, desires, values, and social practices.
Giroux points out that to some extent all men and women are intellectuals and cultural workers, but not all of them function in society as cultural workers. Aronowitz and Giroux (1985) analyze the social function of educators as cultural workers/intellectuals by using four categories: (1) transformative intellectuals, (2) critical intellectuals, (3) accommodating intellectuals, and (4) hegemonic intellectuals. These they claim, are ideal-type categories. The function of transformative intellectuals/cultural workers, according to them, is to create conditions in society whereby new values and beliefs can be produced.
The discussion of the "prototype" by Senge (1990) in his book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, provides many insights for people to function as cultural workers in organizations. Senge (1990) talks about openness, shared vision, participative openness and reflective openness, openness and complexity, the spirit of openness, freedom, localness, the illusion of "being in control", control without "controlling", and forgiveness. And he talks about imbalance between work and family and how personal mastery and learning can flourish at work and at home. He talks about individual's and organization's roles in overcoming this conflict between work and family.
He discusses many other things. We find his discussion of the "prototype" more relevant to the concept of a cultural worker. This is so because many assumptions which guide cultural workers' practices are akin to assumptions guiding individuals in the learning organizations.
(a) The Concepts of Cultural Worker and Related Concepts
Traditionally, the concept of "cultural worker" has been associated with the works of artists, writers, and media producers. The concept also refers to the social categories of "intellectuals" and ' intelligentia ", and their functions in society.
There have been many formulations of these social categories but the focus here is limited to the function of "cultural workers" in the downsized organization. However, even this limited focus requires a brief discussion of the concept and other related concepts to fully relish the implications of this concept for the understanding and experiencing of downsizing. Therefore, we expand on the concept of cultural worker, and in doing so draw mainly upon works of Aronowitz and Giroux (1985) and Giroux (1988).
Working in the areas of critical pedagogy and cultural studies, these writers have developed the concept of educators as intellectuals. Recently, Giroux (1993) has extended his notion of teachers as intellectuals and, in doing so, he talks about educators as cultural workers. Giroux (1993:5) extends the concept and practice of cultural work by including educators and other professionals and by emphasizing the primacy of the political and the pedagogical. In his words,
The pedagogical dimension of cultural work refers to the process of creating symbolic representations and the practices within which they are engaged. This includes a particular concern with the analysis of textual, aural, and visual representation and how such representations are organized and regulated within particular institutional arrangements. It also addresses how various people engage such representations in the practice of analysis and comprehension.
Further, Giroux says:
The political dimension of cultural work informs this process through a project whose intent is to mobilize knowledge and desires that may lead to minimizing the degree of oppression in people's lives. What is at stake is a political imagery that extends the possibilities for creating new public spheres in which the principles of equality, liberty, and justice became the primary organizing principles for structuring relationships between self and others.
Cultural workers are involved in critical pedagogy which "has borrowed significantly from post-modernism, feminism, literary theory, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis" (Giroux, 1993: 149).
The involvement of cultural workers in the area of pedagogy leads them to engage in various forms of struggle. These struggles are generally directed toward expanding democratic practices in communities and organizations. Grossberg (1994:9) talks about struggles and the relationship between various forms of pedagogy from the cultural studies perspective:
The question of cultural studies is not so much whom we are speaking to (audience) or even for (representation), but whom we are speaking against. And consequently, the resources we need, the strategies we adopt, and the politics we attempt to define must always take into account the particular context in which we are struggling.
Willis (1990: 137) claims that pedagogy is:
Making (not receiving) messages and meaning in your own context and from material you have appropriated is, in essence, a form of education in the broadest sense. It is the specifically developmental part of symbolic work, an education about 'the self' and its relation to the world and to others in it. Where every day symbolic work differs from what is normally thought of as 'education' is that it 'culturally produces' from its own chosen symbolic resources.
Giroux (1993: 160) points out that cultural workers can engage in various forms of pedagogies, depending upon their effective practices, investments, possibility of social mobility and placement at a particular time in socially determined structures. He states that:
Pedagogy is both exhilarating and dangerous. It's one of the few forms of cultural politics that cannot simply be consigned to academia. Its central questions of ideology and politics are how people take up what they take up; that is how they participate in, produce, and challenge particular ways of life. This issue is not simply how people are inserted into particular subject position but also how they create them. To raise that question is automatically to engage the language of specificity, community, diversity, difference, and struggle for public life.
More recently, Giroux (1993: 28-36) has developed a form of pedagogy for cultural workers which he calls border pedagogy - a model based upon notions of border, border crossing, and borderlands. These borders are both physical and cultural. He suggest that in the postmodern world, we need to cross the borders we have created and enter into borderlands created by others in which others feel safe and at home. We should also feel secure enough to let others enter our own borderlands. We have already alluded to the importance of border crossing in the organizational cultures when we reviewed Schein's (1996) work. He states that
we will not learn about the power of culture unless we cross real cultural boundaries (p. 239).
A final point that should be made here is that cultural workers practice pedagogy at various sites. The notions of cultural sites and cultural practices are defined in particular ways in the realm of certain forms of cultural studies and the critical theory.
For example, Simon (1994) explains that a cultural-political site is not an ordinary situation. It is a complex and conflict ridden location where intricate representational forms are worked out and produced. According to Simon (1994: 40),
The notion of 'site' refers... to specific material form with a particular relationship to time and space within which mode of production and distribution of representations are accomplished.
A site is a contested terrain where, according to Simon, "the past is traversed by competing and contradictory constructions." Further, he suggests that:
Cultural workers intending to initiate pedagogies of historical reformation need an understanding of topography on which these struggles are taking place (Simon, 1993: 128).
To struggle at a site means to take into account the specificity of the particular context in which one is located in relationship to others.
There could be many sites of production for a particular struggle. Later we will see how one could function as a cultural worker at different sites in a downsized organization. These sites could be many - informal and formal. It could be a casual conversation with colleagues at lunch, at coffee time, while walking across the street or in the hallway. It could be conversations in formal meetings of various types. It could be a seminar, a forum, a colloquium or a conference setting where various questions regarding the organization's changing environment are raised, discussed and talked about. It could be conversations during award presenting ceremonies and graduating functions. It could be conversations at social gatherings of one sort or the other. It could be numerous routine, verbal and non-verbal exchanges that take place each day among the employees and the staff of an organization, including for example the times when documents are being signed, letters are being typed and fixed, etc. It could be conversations that take place during in-service consulting seminars and other learning and teaching activities that are routinely carried out in an organization.
These are some of the sites where individuals as cultural workers are involved in defining their own self-images and representing others. Here conditions exist in which issues related to self-identities and identities of others come to the surface. There are opportunities for individuals to learn to recognize their own voices and the voices of others. It is on these sites that one learns the significance of having autonomy and power at one's work place. It is through interactions on such sites that a person learns how to empower others and to develop new shared visions. Here one becomes aware of myths and symbols of organizations in which one works, develops language of hope and other forms of language appropriate to specific tasks at hand and as a cultural worker practices pedagogy. Finally, it is important to remember that cultural workers engage in issues relating to identity, representation, and other such issues with specific forms of consciousness (Giroux, 1993).
(b) The Concept of Well-Being
There are several discourses on individual well-ness and organizational well-ness and how these factors can ameliorate and exacerbate the effects of downsized/ing organizations. One of the managerial qualities of a leadership role is the ability to help organizations and employees improve their well-ness both before and after downsizing.
The key assumptions underlining the concept of well-being are: that individual well-being is always the result of interaction between the "person" and "the environment"; that individuals can take greater control of themselves, if not their environment; that individual well-ness means managing both psychological and physical issues; that being in touch with our personal belief system, feelings and emotions, spiritual life, self-esteem, lifestyles and stress patterns and interpersonal relationships adds to our psychological well-being, and that resistance to illness, energy level and overall "hardiness" adds to our physical well-being. Similarly, informal networks provide the context in which people interpret the world around them, which in turn contributes to peoples' well-being.
The organization itself can be conceived as a "living" entity and thus we can talk about whether the organization is healthy or unhealthy. In a downsizing organization "survivor sickness" is viewed as an unhealthy symptom.
The way an organization functions on both business and personal levels affects its well-being. Thus, understanding the dynamics of individual and organizational well-ness is something managers, leaders and cultural workers cannot ignore.
The quality of interaction among people is crucial for individual and organizational well-being. Senge (1990, p. xiv) is helpful here when he reminds us
that our organizations work the way they work, ultimately, because of how we think and how we interact. Only by changing how we think can we change deeply embedded policies and practices. Only by changing how we interact can we share visions, understandings, and new capacities for coordinated action to be established. This notion is pretty new for most of us. We have a deep tendency to see the changes we need to make as being in our outer world, not in our inner world. It is challenging to think that while we redesign the manifest structures of our organizations, we must also redesign the manifest structures of our organizations, we must also redesign the internal structures of our "mental models (pp. xiv-xv).
Managers and leaders in the role of cultural workers can manage downsizing in the best possible way by improving the quality of interactions at various sites in the organization. This form of interaction is more likely to improve personal and organizational well-ness, which in turn is more likely to improve personal and organizational effectiveness.
(c) Empowerment, Empowering Relationships and Well-Being
Carlson (1996) explains that
empowerment comes about as a result of involvement but also through a sense of accomplishment, through management in verbal interactions that help persuade and develop some emotional arousal, and through observing change in others (p. 297).
Noer (1993) points out that
no one likes to be directed, organized, coordinated, or controlled. When these things are done 'to' employees, they turn around and do them 'to' someone else. The result is a manipulative, co-dependent work force bonded around everything but good work (p. 130).
Empowerment is about communication with others which is open and honest. This kind of communication is associated with the ideal of participatory management. Labig (1995) states that
participatory management involves employees and supervisors in decision making. It values listening to employees and treating them with respect. It creates adult-to-adult relationships in which trust is built on mutual respect, mutual need, and shared goals and values. Participatory management means moving away from power relationships of one-up-one-down to empowering and open communication (p. 140).
In any hierarchical system empowerment generally means passing on authority and responsibility to people in the lower rank. Thus, in a hierarchical organization, empowerment refers to passing on authority and power to the employees. When this happens, the employees are perceived to experience a sense of ownership and control over their job.
At individual levels power means efficacy. Feeling empowered in this sense means to believe in one's abilities and capabilities to influence circumstances in positive ways. When employees feel empowered they know that their jobs belong to them and that they have much to say about how the job should be done. Knowing this, it is believed, the employees will feel more responsible, show more initiative in their work, get more done, enjoy the work, and feel self-satisfied (Wellins, Byham & Wilson, 1991).
A sense of efficacy is not a fixed entity; it can be developed in individuals. Sources of developing a sense of efficacy include: actual accomplishment, verbal persuasion, emotional arousal, and observation of others (Bandura, 1986).
Being able to be involved in difficult situations created by downsizing enables individuals to discover their abilities. This boosts their confidence in facing new challenges in changing organizations. Being verbally persuaded by a leader in face-to-face, open and honest two-way communication situation plays an important role in reinforcing the perception that downsizing is not the end of life, that there are many things to be done in the new downsized organizational cultures. Sharing the reality of downsizing with employees in a human and honest way and making comments that praise employees and express confidence in them are important in helping followers or employees to build on their positive thoughts.
People learn, negatively or positively, through observing others. When managers and leaders emote the positive, the employees feel empowered about the change process. For example, managers should have no illusion that the workforce in the downsized organization is looking at how the employees who are leaving are being treated by the management. Labig (1993) states:
If the process has been fair, if people have been treated with respect, if senior managers have been open with their feelings and perspectives and have given clear and credible rationales for their decisions, then employees can share their own reactions honestly and reach new levels of empowerment and participation in the new organizations. Old tensions can be overcome and new work partnerships forged. On the other hand, if the downsizing is not done effectively, individuals may descend into a morass of depression, denial, blame, job insecurity, resentment, and confusion to the point of becoming violent (pp. 170-171).
(d) Experiencing Downsized/ing Organization and Functioning As Cultural Workers
A downsized organization provides several sites for people who remain employees of the organization. The author has been part of downsized/ing institutions of higher education and has observed what people say and do to enhance the well-being of their colleagues, as well as the well-being of the organization.
Thus, while experiencing downsizing in a real life situation, the author has compiled a set of statements by people who attempt to function as cultural workers in downsized/ing institutions. These statements also indicate their orientation toward making sense of organizational change while functioning as cultural workers.
As cultural workers, it appears that these individuals are consciously interacting with others by taking into consideration certain assumptions as taken for granted or as given realities . These perceived realities or " truths " seem to help them create certain types of self images. These self images appear to make them believe that what they are claiming is geared toward generating hope and new possibilities for both the downsized organizations and the individual working in it. Thus as committed participants they perceive themselves as engaged in changing the environment around them into their own self images ( Fig.1).
That is, they seem to be attempting to infuse the following claims in their interaction with others to create a type of interaction context which approximate their self images as leaders and cultural workers:
1. That the present day environment in which many organizations operate is becoming increasingly pluralistic, unsettled, and uncertain.
2. That traditional orientation to leadership and management is being called into question and new ways of seeing are being suggested.
3. That there are differences between those who provide leadership in organizations and those who attempt to manage or administer the organization.
4. That support should be given to the idea that leadership and management roles are equally important.
5. That subjectivity has influence in managing organizations.
6. That problems are not neat little packages that can be clearly delineated and then neatly wrapped in a rational planning process.
7. That there are many means to explain and interpret the multiple layers involved in human action within an organizational context.
8. That in an organization people play different roles and that these roles are not fixed, and that depending on the issue and situation at hand people may shift back and forth.
9. That there is a place for humor in organizations and that there are positive and negative sides to humor.
10. That most discussions of organizations stress right-brain thinking.
11. That emotion and intellect are not separable.
12. That many dualities exist in organizations.
13. That healing dualities can significantly enhance survival of individuals and society.
14. That integration of opposites or dualities, such as reason and emotion, is something we need to learn.
15. That human beings have the capacity to observe-think-do-reflect and that this serves as a very significant model for structuring and examining organizations' functions.
16. That it is very important to process information and to learn from the process.
17. The processing of information and learning from it is crucial to individual development and to the development of organizations.
18. That sometimes persons learn from their individual actions while the overall organization continues to resist change and keeps making errors.
19. That learning depends on how we think, how we think about people, process information, come to think about a situation and these are the consequence of social cognition.
20. That it is possible for social cognition to have different sides to it - women's cognition is different from men's.
21. That women's reality is different from men's reality.
22. That organizations as systems can be addictive and that addiction can be reinforced in subtle ways within organizational contexts.
23. That addictive systems provide all kinds of promises which may provide temporary relief from the daily stresses and strains in the organization.
24. That addictive systems fabricate personality conflicts and seek solution to conflict in simple dualism, i.e., relegate a very complex universe to two simplistic choices.
25. That organizations can unconsciously reinforce employees' addictive behaviors and thus make co-dependent individuals and groups who then avoid confronting the addictive behaviors of others.
26. That addictive organizations can act as addictive substances when they over-emphasize the notion that work can provide a platform for finding one's identity because over identification with work can lead to workaholism - a destructive form of behavior.
27. That spirituality and morality play a significant role in an organization's effective functioning.
28. That addictive organizations and workaholism can lead to loss of spirituality and morality.
29. That addictive organizations often display distorted patterns of communications.
30. That the brain has two sides - the right and the left.
31. That individuals have multiple intelligences.
32. That power struggles are endemic to organizations.
33. That power has negative and positive sides.
34. That the negative side of power is associated with exploitation and dominance, and the positive side enables people to be creative and visionary.
What Do Cultural Workers Do?
What we say depends on our consciousness. Our consciousness creates our culture and the way we see the world. Our world views create our cultural practices.
Cultural workers' world view enables them to engage in varieties of cultural practices at different sites in their downsized organization. Based on my observations , below I list a few things done by people who engage themselves at various sites in a downsized/ing organization, and who see themselves as cultural workers.
1. As cultural workers they wish to facilitate change in an organization.
2. They are engaged in articulating a vision and are committed to creating enthusiasm and support among co-workers and survivors of downsizing.
3. They are engaged in building trust among different occupational groups in the organization, e.g., the academic and non-academic staff.
4. As cultural workers they desire to help encourage persons to think creatively about their organization.
5. As cultural workers they are keen to offer various perspectives on organizations to their colleagues which help them choose an appropriate intervention methodology that matches the organizations' current situation.
6. As cultural workers they participate in multiple performances in their organization and thus are involved in creating multiple meanings within the organization, e.g., organizing various functions and social get-together.
7. As cultural workers they remind their co-workers about the episodic nature of their context and encourage them to adopt or to change their attitudes.
8. As cultural workers they challenge persons in the organization to move away from the status of audience to that of participants in an organization's play.
9. As cultural workers they attempt to create conditions which enable others to understand the traditional themes of honor and vengeance, ambition, power, and love.
10. As cultural workers they approach interaction with the understanding that healing the dualities( e.g. competition - partnership, loose - tight, control - entrepreneurship, action - reflection, business logic - technical logic, change - continuity, flexibility - focus, top-down - bottom - up, etc.) can significantly enhance our survival as individuals.
11. As cultural workers they emphasize integration of individual learning and corporate learning so that the organization can reflect on and modify its behavior.
12. In practice, cultural workers' orientation is that people and organizations grapple with change in a turbulent and unpredictable environment created by the forces of globalization. In this context a capacity to react, reason, emote, and create is indispensable.
13. In practice, cultural workers view events in a mutually causal way or prefer to think in circles rather than in terms of straight lines.
14. Cultural workers are most interested in the right-brain development in individuals and in the organization, because they appear to believe that the right-brain development allows people to engage in the re-framing process, i.e., enables individuals to generate new observations and new explanations.
15. Cultural workers encourage use of positive power to balance selfish tendencies against a greater social good.
16. Cultural workers expect people in their organization to develop skills and understanding in the areas of agenda setting, network and coalition building, and bargaining and negotiating.
17. Cultural workers want their co-workers to understand the sources of power which include formal authority, control of scare resources, use of organizational structure, rules and regulations, control of decision processes, control of knowledge and information, control of boundaries, ability to cope with uncertainty; control of technology, interpersonal alliances, networks, and control of 'informal organizations', control of counter organizations, symbolism and the management of meaning, gender and the management of gender relations, structural factors that define the stage of action, and the power one already has.
18. Cultural workers function within the norms of "participative" and "reflective" openness.
19. In their practice, cultural workers assume that there is something more than mere self-interest which motivates people to act; people truly want to be more than themselves, part of the things larger than themselves.
20. Cultural workers do things with others; they prefer building alliances with others.
21. Cultural workers act as reflective practitioners. That means their vision concerns their families, their organizations, and others in the world.
22. Cultural workers contribute to an organization's shared vision and vice-versa.
23. Cultural workers assume that there is something more than mere self-interest which motivates people to act; people truly want to be more than themselves, part of things larger than themselves.
24. Cultural workers are capable of developing a new vocabulary which promotes healthy conflict in an organization's cultural and occupational groups.
25. Cultural workers promote alliances with "hot groups", "managers' lib", team and collaborative work.
26. Cultural workers promote forms of democratic representations and participation that would be responsive to social identities of various cultural groups in an organization.
27. Cultural workers refuse the taken for granted discourses of essentialism and separatism when they refer to self-identity and to the identities of others.
28. Cultural workers are aware of the role that culture, race, class and gender play in the formation of difference and identity.
29. Cultural workers are aware of one's location in hierarchical arrangements of society (stratification) and the relationship of one's location and voice.
30. Cultural workers constantly engage in the process of reinventing and reconstructing new spaces for practicing critical pedagogy in the form of pedagogy of place or location.
31. Cultural workers are interested to know and explain to others how structures of inequalities and injustices can be understood and transformed.
32. Cultural workers are self-conscious and reflective about their own cultural and political locations and the relationship of these with their own voice.
33. Cultural workers are willing to turn tools of dialogue and self-criticism upon their own work.
34. Cultural workers are not content to be in one discourse; they feel more "at home" with multiple and contradictory discourses.
35. Cultural workers are border crossers ; they are involved in "double-loop" learning as opposed to "single-loop" learning. That is, cultural workers' thinking habits and behaviors exclude such needs as to be in control, self-protective, more rational and less emotional and need to minimize choices and risks.
36. Cultural workers are educators and thus are involved in pedagogical practices.
37. Cultural workers are involved in cultural work which involves both production and reproduction of new visions, hope and "imaginary communities".
38. Cultural workers attempt to create discourses of agency and new possibilities.
39. Cultural workers are concerned with moral and ethical aspects of modernity and postmodernity.
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Also see REFLECTIVE NOTES ON DOWNSIZING AND CHANGE PROCESSES
