Change management in complex organizations

• Main Author: Carol, Nathalie
• Other Authors: SILVA (SILVA), AgroParisTech-Université de Lorraine (UL)-Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement (INRAE), Centre Européen de Recherche en Economie Financière et Gestion des Entreprises (CEREFIGE), Université de Lorraine (UL)
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2018
• Subjects: Strategy-as-Practice; Sensemaking; National Forestry Office; Middle managers; [SHS]Humanities and Social Sciences; Iceland
• Online Access: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03515223; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03515223/document; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03515223/file/EURAM_DC_2018_CAROL_Nathalie_TEXTEN-TYP_4a-VF.pdf

International audience The new road map adopted by the French National Forestry Office (ONF), charged withmanaging public-owned forest, has raised critical questions for its staff who have voiced concerns about a profit-driven approach to forest management. To what extent will public forests be sacrificed for the greater interest of productivity and commodification? And, is profitability genuinely in the public’s best interest? This scenario of ‘organizational dissonance’ represents a unique case study with which to explore and test the theory of sensemaking developed by Karl E. Weick relative to the collective meaning and the dynamics its construction. The process of collectively constructing meaning, the cornerstone of organized action, takes place essentially through communicative interaction in social situations. It is through interactions with each other that agents of the ONF reach agreement about the meaning of a given action. This work integrates a complementary theory to operationalize key concepts involved in the sensemaking process. The Strategy as Practice (SAP) theory and its three core concepts, Praxis, Practices and Practitioners, was selected for its distinctive approach of focusing on the actors, their actions, their interactions and the context within which strategic micro-actions take place. According to this theory, strategy is not “something that an organization has but something that its members do” (Golsorkhi, 2015). Relatively few studies have addressed the role of middle managers in the strategic sense making process: are they merely transmitters of information between top management and operational teams, or are they themselves meaning makers acting as partner of the top management team? Aimed at providing new insights on this critically important question for the strategic management of an organization, the present work studies the role of ONF territorial unit managers in collective meaning construction.