Jean Bartunek - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Jean Bartunek
Handbook of Transformative Cooperation
... First, we focus the chapter on designon how designing may be used in efforts to create moree... more ... First, we focus the chapter on designon how designing may be used in efforts to create moreeffective education. ... In particu-lar, we explore the possibility that design approaches developed primar-ily for elementary and high school math and science education ...
This article aims at advancing the still on-going conversations about the so-called research/prac... more This article aims at advancing the still on-going conversations about the so-called research/practice gap. Some academics argue that it is not possible to develop knowledge that is both academically valuable and helpful for practice, while others hold the opposite view, justifying it on the basis of works published in top tier journals. The paper argues that the main reason scholars hold such contradictory views on this topic central to management science is the lack of explicitness of a number of founding assumptions which underlie their discourses, in particular the lack of explicitness of the epistemological framework in which the parties' arguments are anchored. The paper presents methodological guidelines for elaborating scientific knowledge both from and for practice, and illustrates how to use these guidelines on examples from a published longitudinal research project. In order to avoid the lack of explicitness pitfall, the paper specifies scientific and epistemological f...
Journal of Management Inquiry
Human Relations
Organization change failure has typically been viewed as occurring when expected outcomes of chan... more Organization change failure has typically been viewed as occurring when expected outcomes of change have not been met. This view downplays key, but frequently hidden organizational dimensions such as deep structures and temporality. In this article, drawing inspiration from the story of Alice in Wonderland, we distinguish between surface-level intervention approaches to change, deeper process approaches and, deeper yet, structuration approaches, and suggest the different ways they approach change failure as well as the implications of these. On the basis of our exploration we propose a three-fold way forward: adopting a process-based, empirically grounded and reflective approach to understanding change and its often-failed outcomes; adopting methodologies that can capture deep structures and temporal dimensions; and incorporating expanded conceptions of time as a multi-level, nested construct. We illustrate our ideas of deep structures and temporality by drawing from a particularly ...
Organizational Research Methods
Background and Motivation With an ever-growing body of knowledge in various areas of management i... more Background and Motivation With an ever-growing body of knowledge in various areas of management including strategic management, organization theory, international business, organizational behavior, and human resource management, there is an increasing need to consolidate, organize, and synthesize the existing knowledge (e.g.
Academy of Management Discoveries
As academics, we study others’ practices as important and meaningful. Outside accrediting agencie... more As academics, we study others’ practices as important and meaningful. Outside accrediting agencies, websites that track the outcomes of our work and news media treat our own work as important and m...
Research in Organizational Behavior
How can a proponent of change mobilize groups and organizations in support of a common project? B... more How can a proponent of change mobilize groups and organizations in support of a common project? Building on an extensive review of social movement theorizing and action, we argue that shared interests, network connections, the availability of resources, and the emergence of political, market and corporate opportunities (the standard topics discussed in extant literature) may be necessary, but are often insufficient for spurring mobilization. Conversely, cultural factors such as frames, identities, or practices are essential. Their presence can facilitate coordinated action even among unlikely allies, and their absence can prevent such action. Inspired by the work of Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), along with contemporary illustrations, we construct a two-step model of the role of culture in mobilizing for change. We bring attention to a change proponent's cultural competenceskill in appreciating the different cultural meanings and values of those involved in a particular project of changeand cultural brokerageskill in bridging and negotiating among actors with different cultural repertoires, to reach a temporary truce or covenant. We focus on two types of activities that define cultural brokerage, integration and redefinition, and apply them to the cultural factors of frames, identities, and/or practices. Our paper contributes to contemporary research on social movements, institutional theory, and cultural sociology.
Journal of Management Inquiry
Organizational crises have often stimulated scholarly theorizing that has been productive for our... more Organizational crises have often stimulated scholarly theorizing that has been productive for our field. Rarely, however, are there opportunities to theorize regarding crises that happen in our own professional associations. A crisis experienced by Professor Anita McGahan when she was the President of the Academy of Management, described in an accompanying article, has presented such an opportunity. In this set of nine brief reflections, several scholars have considered how McGahan’s actions with regard to that crisis can be understood conceptually and how they may stimulate development of previously established conceptual perspectives. These reflections make evident that McGahan’s actions cannot be appreciated without recognition of the complex dilemmas to which she was responding. These dilemmas include issues of trustworthy leadership, gendered power, leader voice, sensemaking and learning, organizational identities, psychological contracts, institutional leadership, and “good bu...
The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science
At the time the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science (JABS) began publishing 50 years ago, much ... more At the time the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science (JABS) began publishing 50 years ago, much social science scholarship took the form of basic research, with relatively little attention to practice. Thanks to the impetus of Kurt Lewin and the National Training Laboratories, the focus of JABS was much more on relationships between theory and practice than was most other scholarship; the expectation was that JABS would focus on scholarly knowledge that would also inform practice. Over the course of the past half century, however, there has taken place some separation of academic scholarship and practice with regard to organization development. During this same time period there have been several developments in other areas of management inquiry in which academic–practitioner links have been fostered. In this article, I will explore the patterns that have occurred, indicate some questions they raise for JABS going forward, and suggest some possible implications for publishing practice in JABS. These implications include both communication issues with regard to publishing and substantive issues regarding what “counts” as organization development.
British Journal of Management
This paper introduces the special issue focusing on Impact. We present the four papers in the spe... more This paper introduces the special issue focusing on Impact. We present the four papers in the special issue and synthesise their key themes, including dialogue, reflexivity and praxis. In addition, we expand on understandings of impact by exploring how, when and for whom management research creates impact and we elaborate four ideal types of impact by articulating both the constituencies for whom impact occurs and the forms it might take. We identify temporality as critical to a more nuanced conceptualization of impact and suggest that some forms of impact are performative in nature. We conclude by suggesting that management as a discipline would benefit from widening the range of comparator disciplines to include disciplines such as art, education and nursing where practice, research and scholarship are more overtly interwoven.
Academy of Management Proceedings
We used survey and archival data to explore relationships between participation in organizational... more We used survey and archival data to explore relationships between participation in organizational change, complexity of criteria for assessing change, and ratings of its effectiveness. Participatio...
Academy of Management Proceedings
Many approaches to organizational change assume that change recipients will resist and that this ... more Many approaches to organizational change assume that change recipients will resist and that this resistance is illegitimate and unfounded, as "right" sits with those initiating change. Working with data on senior managers, we challenge these assumptions developing a model that has implications for understanding of change and change agent practice.
Academy of Management Review
Following a long period during which scholarly attention was paid predominantly to the role of ch... more Following a long period during which scholarly attention was paid predominantly to the role of change agents in organizational change, change recipients and their experiences have finally begun to take center stage. Yet the typical view of recipients has been as passive reactors to change. In this article we take steps toward highlighting the central, active roles change recipients play in organizational change events. We discuss and distinguish between dimensions of valence and activation and introduce a circumplex of recipients’ affective and behavioral responses to change events. We describe the primary and secondary appraisal processes through which each response type emerges and discuss outcomes of each response type. We use our model to explain how change context and process variables affect recipients’ responses to change. Finally, we discuss implications of our model for theory, research, and practice.
Academy of Management Annals
In ever-changing environments, strategic change manifests as a crucial concern for firms and is t... more In ever-changing environments, strategic change manifests as a crucial concern for firms and is thus central to the fields of management and strategy. Common and foundational to all strategic change research is time-whether recognized in the extant studies or not. In this article, we critically review the existing body of knowledge through a time lens. We organize this review along (1) conceptions of time in strategic change, (2) time and strategic change activities, and (3) time and strategic change agents. This approach facilitates our assessment of what scholars do and do not know about strategic change, especially its temporal components. Our review has particularly revealed a need to advance scholarly understanding about the processual dynamics of strategic change. We thus extend our assessment by proposing six pathways for advancing future research on strategic change that aim at fostering an understanding of its processual dynamics: (1) temporality, (2) actors, (3) emotionality, (4) tools and practices, (5) complexity, and (6) tensions.
Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior
We review the recent development of evidence-based management (EBMgt), tracing its origins to lon... more We review the recent development of evidence-based management (EBMgt), tracing its origins to longstanding gaps between research and practice, discrepant findings across studies, and the emergence of evidence-based medicine (EBMed). We provide a definition of EBMgt and review four foundational articles advocating its use. We then review categories of articles that comprise the EBMgt canon: advocacy articles, essays or perspectives, teaching-related, empirical, reviews, and critiques and responses. Critiques include political, epistemological, and methodological issues directly pertinent to EBMgt as well as broader concerns about the scholarly research base on which EBMgt depends. Our suggestions for future research emphasize, first and foremost, increasing the production of high-quality empirical studies in EBMgt. Topics of particular interest include research co-creation by academics and practitioners, process and outcome studies of EBMgt implementations, and practitioners’ use of ...
Journal of Conflict Resolution
Choice Reviews Online
This document will continue to evolve as the IR expands. Additional guidelines will be drafted, a... more This document will continue to evolve as the IR expands. Additional guidelines will be drafted, as needed, over the coming months.
Academic–Practitioner Relationships
Research in Organizational Change and Development, 2016
This chapter addresses a topic which is rarely discussed but is a common feature of field-based a... more This chapter addresses a topic which is rarely discussed but is a common feature of field-based action research, namely whether and when research questions can legitimately change during the conduct of a study. We explore three common strategies for developing research questions before problematizing the assumption which these strategies share, namely that research questions are fixed at the outset and remain stable. We note that change can, does and indeed should occur in response to changes in the context within which the research is being conducted. Using an illustrative example of a longitudinal project, we identify refinement and reframing as two distinct types of research question development that might occur. Our conclusions suggest that greater transparency over when, in what circumstances and why researchers elect to change their research questions would be a healthy development for the field.
Handbook of Transformative Cooperation
... First, we focus the chapter on designon how designing may be used in efforts to create moree... more ... First, we focus the chapter on designon how designing may be used in efforts to create moreeffective education. ... In particu-lar, we explore the possibility that design approaches developed primar-ily for elementary and high school math and science education ...
This article aims at advancing the still on-going conversations about the so-called research/prac... more This article aims at advancing the still on-going conversations about the so-called research/practice gap. Some academics argue that it is not possible to develop knowledge that is both academically valuable and helpful for practice, while others hold the opposite view, justifying it on the basis of works published in top tier journals. The paper argues that the main reason scholars hold such contradictory views on this topic central to management science is the lack of explicitness of a number of founding assumptions which underlie their discourses, in particular the lack of explicitness of the epistemological framework in which the parties' arguments are anchored. The paper presents methodological guidelines for elaborating scientific knowledge both from and for practice, and illustrates how to use these guidelines on examples from a published longitudinal research project. In order to avoid the lack of explicitness pitfall, the paper specifies scientific and epistemological f...
Journal of Management Inquiry
Human Relations
Organization change failure has typically been viewed as occurring when expected outcomes of chan... more Organization change failure has typically been viewed as occurring when expected outcomes of change have not been met. This view downplays key, but frequently hidden organizational dimensions such as deep structures and temporality. In this article, drawing inspiration from the story of Alice in Wonderland, we distinguish between surface-level intervention approaches to change, deeper process approaches and, deeper yet, structuration approaches, and suggest the different ways they approach change failure as well as the implications of these. On the basis of our exploration we propose a three-fold way forward: adopting a process-based, empirically grounded and reflective approach to understanding change and its often-failed outcomes; adopting methodologies that can capture deep structures and temporal dimensions; and incorporating expanded conceptions of time as a multi-level, nested construct. We illustrate our ideas of deep structures and temporality by drawing from a particularly ...
Organizational Research Methods
Background and Motivation With an ever-growing body of knowledge in various areas of management i... more Background and Motivation With an ever-growing body of knowledge in various areas of management including strategic management, organization theory, international business, organizational behavior, and human resource management, there is an increasing need to consolidate, organize, and synthesize the existing knowledge (e.g.
Academy of Management Discoveries
As academics, we study others’ practices as important and meaningful. Outside accrediting agencie... more As academics, we study others’ practices as important and meaningful. Outside accrediting agencies, websites that track the outcomes of our work and news media treat our own work as important and m...
Research in Organizational Behavior
How can a proponent of change mobilize groups and organizations in support of a common project? B... more How can a proponent of change mobilize groups and organizations in support of a common project? Building on an extensive review of social movement theorizing and action, we argue that shared interests, network connections, the availability of resources, and the emergence of political, market and corporate opportunities (the standard topics discussed in extant literature) may be necessary, but are often insufficient for spurring mobilization. Conversely, cultural factors such as frames, identities, or practices are essential. Their presence can facilitate coordinated action even among unlikely allies, and their absence can prevent such action. Inspired by the work of Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), along with contemporary illustrations, we construct a two-step model of the role of culture in mobilizing for change. We bring attention to a change proponent's cultural competenceskill in appreciating the different cultural meanings and values of those involved in a particular project of changeand cultural brokerageskill in bridging and negotiating among actors with different cultural repertoires, to reach a temporary truce or covenant. We focus on two types of activities that define cultural brokerage, integration and redefinition, and apply them to the cultural factors of frames, identities, and/or practices. Our paper contributes to contemporary research on social movements, institutional theory, and cultural sociology.
Journal of Management Inquiry
Organizational crises have often stimulated scholarly theorizing that has been productive for our... more Organizational crises have often stimulated scholarly theorizing that has been productive for our field. Rarely, however, are there opportunities to theorize regarding crises that happen in our own professional associations. A crisis experienced by Professor Anita McGahan when she was the President of the Academy of Management, described in an accompanying article, has presented such an opportunity. In this set of nine brief reflections, several scholars have considered how McGahan’s actions with regard to that crisis can be understood conceptually and how they may stimulate development of previously established conceptual perspectives. These reflections make evident that McGahan’s actions cannot be appreciated without recognition of the complex dilemmas to which she was responding. These dilemmas include issues of trustworthy leadership, gendered power, leader voice, sensemaking and learning, organizational identities, psychological contracts, institutional leadership, and “good bu...
The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science
At the time the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science (JABS) began publishing 50 years ago, much ... more At the time the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science (JABS) began publishing 50 years ago, much social science scholarship took the form of basic research, with relatively little attention to practice. Thanks to the impetus of Kurt Lewin and the National Training Laboratories, the focus of JABS was much more on relationships between theory and practice than was most other scholarship; the expectation was that JABS would focus on scholarly knowledge that would also inform practice. Over the course of the past half century, however, there has taken place some separation of academic scholarship and practice with regard to organization development. During this same time period there have been several developments in other areas of management inquiry in which academic–practitioner links have been fostered. In this article, I will explore the patterns that have occurred, indicate some questions they raise for JABS going forward, and suggest some possible implications for publishing practice in JABS. These implications include both communication issues with regard to publishing and substantive issues regarding what “counts” as organization development.
British Journal of Management
This paper introduces the special issue focusing on Impact. We present the four papers in the spe... more This paper introduces the special issue focusing on Impact. We present the four papers in the special issue and synthesise their key themes, including dialogue, reflexivity and praxis. In addition, we expand on understandings of impact by exploring how, when and for whom management research creates impact and we elaborate four ideal types of impact by articulating both the constituencies for whom impact occurs and the forms it might take. We identify temporality as critical to a more nuanced conceptualization of impact and suggest that some forms of impact are performative in nature. We conclude by suggesting that management as a discipline would benefit from widening the range of comparator disciplines to include disciplines such as art, education and nursing where practice, research and scholarship are more overtly interwoven.
Academy of Management Proceedings
We used survey and archival data to explore relationships between participation in organizational... more We used survey and archival data to explore relationships between participation in organizational change, complexity of criteria for assessing change, and ratings of its effectiveness. Participatio...
Academy of Management Proceedings
Many approaches to organizational change assume that change recipients will resist and that this ... more Many approaches to organizational change assume that change recipients will resist and that this resistance is illegitimate and unfounded, as "right" sits with those initiating change. Working with data on senior managers, we challenge these assumptions developing a model that has implications for understanding of change and change agent practice.
Academy of Management Review
Following a long period during which scholarly attention was paid predominantly to the role of ch... more Following a long period during which scholarly attention was paid predominantly to the role of change agents in organizational change, change recipients and their experiences have finally begun to take center stage. Yet the typical view of recipients has been as passive reactors to change. In this article we take steps toward highlighting the central, active roles change recipients play in organizational change events. We discuss and distinguish between dimensions of valence and activation and introduce a circumplex of recipients’ affective and behavioral responses to change events. We describe the primary and secondary appraisal processes through which each response type emerges and discuss outcomes of each response type. We use our model to explain how change context and process variables affect recipients’ responses to change. Finally, we discuss implications of our model for theory, research, and practice.
Academy of Management Annals
In ever-changing environments, strategic change manifests as a crucial concern for firms and is t... more In ever-changing environments, strategic change manifests as a crucial concern for firms and is thus central to the fields of management and strategy. Common and foundational to all strategic change research is time-whether recognized in the extant studies or not. In this article, we critically review the existing body of knowledge through a time lens. We organize this review along (1) conceptions of time in strategic change, (2) time and strategic change activities, and (3) time and strategic change agents. This approach facilitates our assessment of what scholars do and do not know about strategic change, especially its temporal components. Our review has particularly revealed a need to advance scholarly understanding about the processual dynamics of strategic change. We thus extend our assessment by proposing six pathways for advancing future research on strategic change that aim at fostering an understanding of its processual dynamics: (1) temporality, (2) actors, (3) emotionality, (4) tools and practices, (5) complexity, and (6) tensions.
Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior
We review the recent development of evidence-based management (EBMgt), tracing its origins to lon... more We review the recent development of evidence-based management (EBMgt), tracing its origins to longstanding gaps between research and practice, discrepant findings across studies, and the emergence of evidence-based medicine (EBMed). We provide a definition of EBMgt and review four foundational articles advocating its use. We then review categories of articles that comprise the EBMgt canon: advocacy articles, essays or perspectives, teaching-related, empirical, reviews, and critiques and responses. Critiques include political, epistemological, and methodological issues directly pertinent to EBMgt as well as broader concerns about the scholarly research base on which EBMgt depends. Our suggestions for future research emphasize, first and foremost, increasing the production of high-quality empirical studies in EBMgt. Topics of particular interest include research co-creation by academics and practitioners, process and outcome studies of EBMgt implementations, and practitioners’ use of ...
Journal of Conflict Resolution
Choice Reviews Online
This document will continue to evolve as the IR expands. Additional guidelines will be drafted, a... more This document will continue to evolve as the IR expands. Additional guidelines will be drafted, as needed, over the coming months.
Academic–Practitioner Relationships
Research in Organizational Change and Development, 2016
This chapter addresses a topic which is rarely discussed but is a common feature of field-based a... more This chapter addresses a topic which is rarely discussed but is a common feature of field-based action research, namely whether and when research questions can legitimately change during the conduct of a study. We explore three common strategies for developing research questions before problematizing the assumption which these strategies share, namely that research questions are fixed at the outset and remain stable. We note that change can, does and indeed should occur in response to changes in the context within which the research is being conducted. Using an illustrative example of a longitudinal project, we identify refinement and reframing as two distinct types of research question development that might occur. Our conclusions suggest that greater transparency over when, in what circumstances and why researchers elect to change their research questions would be a healthy development for the field.