Changing to stay itself

Helge Kahler, Markus Rohde
1996 ACM SIGOIS Bulletin  
In the recent years there has been a vivid discussion about new organizational ideas and concepts that were driven to a considerable extent by technological changes and were meant to help organizations survive and be successful in the dynamic and complex environment of the global market. The suggestions include "reengineering the corporation" and building "virtual", "fractal", or "object oriented" organizations. The main idea of all of those approaches was to stress the importance of the
more » ... of designing, manufacturing, or providing a service. In order to reach the desired efficiency the new concepts for organization rely on the shift from a tayloristic approach to building teams or "fractals" that are responsible for a process. While less tayloristic and less hierarchic organizational structures promise to support financial success they also foster the tendency for "organizational diffusion". People working in outsourced parts of an organization or in project-related teams tend to have strong relations to their organizational subunits rather than to "the whole thing" -so keeping the organization together becomes harder and harder. However, while on one hand small autonomous teams tend to "drift away" from the organization that their members belong to, on the other hand they are also part of it and thus can contribute to "organizational integration". Such integration aspects keeping the organization together strongly depend on an organization's culture and identity. Thus, organizational learning does not only mean learning to have commercial success but also learning to change and not fall apart, still have coherent goals and an identity that distinguishes the organization from others. Furthermore the question arises whether CSCW technology strengthens the diffusion effects and how to develop this technology in order to support cooperation and integration. The following chapters discuss the approach of learning organization as a concept of permanent structural change, theories of organizational culture and identity, and an approach of integrated organization and technology development. Learning Organizational learning is the key characteristic of a "learning organization", (cf. Sattelberger (1992)). The concept of learning organization means more than learning in organizations, and it means more than the organization of learning. "Learning organization tries to bridge and integrate the different worlds of strategy-, structure-, and culture-development -intuition and ratio, chaos and order, mind and action,
doi:10.1145/242206.242323 fatcat:fg7dnjgonre53i3siipcblwfy4