p.537 What might be meant by power? In brief: all forms of organization are forms of organization of
social relations. All social relations involve power relations. Power is evident in these relations as relations not only
of ownership and control but also of structuration and design. These relations take many forms... Such relations are likely
to be both differentially distributed and socially constructed as well as exist in differential demand in differentiated markets.
Power is also evident in the various forms of knowledge that constitute, structure, and shape these markets and organizations.
p.538 From an academic point of view, managing involves creating an ordered ensemble of relations between past histories
and future actions as strategies that construct the present.
p.539 managers have drawn on many forms of knowledge.
p.541-542 Business paradigms, as the sensemaking methods in use of everyday business people, may be seen as an example
of what Foucault (1979) termed the pastoral guidance of each epoch; they represent the changes in the 'imaginary' of managers
between one epoch and another. These imaginaries define who one is by showing one how to construct reality, what place one
has in it, as well as the place of others and other things. Through such imaginaries on is able... to stigmatize and marginalize
those who do not accept the reality of the epoch that one is in the business of creating.
p.542 Business paradigms synthesize ideas that represent the world from the point of view of managers
and businesspeople, responding to their perceptions of the changing business environment, often as interpreted by popular
writers and consultants. They provide systems of value, with which managers can interpret reality, act on
it, and place ethical limits upon behaviour. The meaning given to concepts... not only orient social
practices but also provide the means deemed adequate for those purposes. They provide a set of images that
orient the conduct of individual organizations, considering specific materials, relations, and procedures.
p.544 The old orders seem to be melting away, however contingently solid they once might have seemed, under the pressures
of reflexive knowledge working.
p.545 Working knowledge, typically, involves 'a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual
information and expert insights that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information'
(Davenport and Prusack 1998: 4). Such knowledge, as Davenport and Prusack immediately go on to point out, 'often becomes
embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organizational routines, processes, practices
and norms'.
p.545 As Morin (1982) suggests, one needs a theory of error rather than of order.
p.546 Practices always have to implemented through local regimes.
p.547 Barnett goes on to say that increasingly modern 'knowledge is generated in action. Characteristically,
the knowledge-in-action that is most highly prized in the modern world is that which is produced in situ in the domain of
work...' (Barnett 2000: 16)... the authenticity of knowledge comes from its ability to be put to work; work is a source
of knowledge and work offers a means of testing knowledge (Barnett 2000: 17). For the former, the authenticity of
local knowledge comes from the rebukes it offers to universalizing claims.
p.549 Many MBA and Executive Management programs now use a method of switching frames as a learning device.
Using new frames or seeing through different assumptions means that the managerial and organizational world not only looks
different; it becomes different, because it is the way that we see it.
p.550 It is clear that 'the new' is not so new as one always believed. In this sense paradigms could be interpreted as
the introjection of some representations and values that were sleeping for a long period of time, giving place to a new social
imaginary that orients practices and discourses in a new way.
p.554 managers will act with reference to the reality that their paradigm constructs.
p.559 alternate images of organizations opens the doors of perception
p.561 creating new paradigms can call to attention neglected and potentially destructive aspects of present practice.
