Community Action and Organizational Change: Image, Narrative, Identity / Edition 3

by Brenton D Faber

Overview

Brenton D. Faber’s spirited account of an academic consultant’s journey through banks, ghost towns, cemeteries, schools, and political campaigns explores the tenuous relationships between cultural narratives and organizational change.

Blending Faber’s firsthand experiences in the study and implementation of change with theoretical discussions of identity, agency, structure, and resistance within contexts of change, this innovative bookis among the first such communications studies to profile a scholar who is also a full participant in the projects. Drawing on theories of Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu, Faber notes that change takes place in the realm of narrative, in the stories people tell.

Faber argues that an organization’s identity is created through internal stories.  When the organization’s internal stories are consistent with its external stories, the organization’s identity is consistent and productive. When internal stories contradict the external stories, however, the organization’s identity becomes discordant. Change is the process of realigning an organization’s discordant narratives.  

Faber discusses the case studies of a change management plan he wrote for a city-owned cemetery, a cultural change project he created for a downtown trade school, and a political campaign he assisted that focused on creating social change. He also includes detailed reflections on practical ways academics can become more involved in their communities as agents of progressive social change. Featuring six illustrations, Faber’s unique study demonstrates in both style and substance how stories work as agents of change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809324361
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2002
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	1,284,333
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)
Lexile:	1400L (what's this?)

About the Author

Brenton D. Faber is an assistant professor of technical communications at Clarkson University. He has worked for the government of Ontario and as a change management consultant for community groups and small businesses.

Read an Excerpt

Community Action and Organizational Change

Image, Narrative, Identity

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By Brenton D. Faber

Southern Illinois University Press

Copyright © 2002 Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8093-2436-1

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Chapter One

INTRODUCTION: RODEO

I know these are only words, but all the same ... (I am moved as though these words were uttering a reality). -R. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

"If it's taken a hundred years to get this far, what's another forty-five minutes?" The summer sun has faded to a yellow and purple glow reflecting between the clouds and the Wasatch mountains encircling the valley. Rebecca and I are among a crowd of celebrants waiting outside the Utah state capitol buildings for centennial year fireworks. The show was to start at 8:00, but a rumor circulating through the crowd suggests that we are waiting for the governor to return from a social function. Standing shoulder to shoulder with native Utahns, people with names like Hatch, Heber, Kimball, and of course Young, we are interlopers. Unlike the ancestry celebrated tonight, we flew here a mere year and a half ago when I enrolled at the University of Utah for my graduate studies. While the Mormons' route was west, mine was southeast, from Vancouver, British Columbia, and Rebecca, whom I met inVancouver, eventually found her way here after a research trip to London, England.

Our interloper status hasn't prevented us from experiencing and enjoying Utah's centennial celebrations. For the past ten months or so, we've been taking advantage of this centennial landmark to explore our temporary home and surrounding state. Tonight's fireworks are a prelude to tomorrow's weekend trip to a town fair and rodeo in central Utah. We've made it to three of these western festivals so far and have several more etched on the calendar. Despite our attempts to pass as locals, we always miss the subtle and not so subtle signs of membership exchanged in rural America. Our jeans carry the wrong designer label and have faded too much in the wrong places; my hands aren't calloused enough; my shirt is wrong. Even with Rebecca's authentic red cowboy boots (mine are brown), we simply don't fit in.

Several days after the delayed fireworks finally dazzled above the state capitol, we are now at a very different venue. Seated along wooded planks overlooking the sandy pit of the rodeo grounds, we watch and admire the clamor of neighbors and relatives waving, talking, selling summer crafts and produce, buying hot dogs and ice cream, and rescuing children who have wandered too close to the bulls. A woman in a floral dress passes me a picnic basket. "Here, can you pass that up the line?" she implores, pointing to a group of children seated three rows above us. I pass the dinner on to a burly farmer, who finds its rightful owners. Drinks are next, followed by apple pie and ice cream for dessert.

We are seated among 250 or so fans in the stands of the town's dedicated rodeo grounds. At first glance, one would think this is a baseball diamond; however, mazes of weathered wooden rails that fence in cattle pens, horse shelters, and animal runs distinguish tonight's endeavors from solely human contests. As the boy next to me keeps repeating, mimicking a radio deejay's intonation, "Tonight, the animals get even." Like most small-town rodeos, tonight's event is the capstone of a full week's activities. Week-long exhibitions have featured the judging of local animals, vegetables, and baking. The chamber of commerce has sponsored a community merchant display in front of the school, and there has been a beauty contest to name the rodeo princess. The town's pageant is the first stage in a series of regional, statewide, and then national contests that will eventually lead to the crowning of Miss America. Today's events included a pancake breakfast, parade, and amusement rides at the fairgrounds, and tonight, the big rodeo. We left our apartment in Salt Lake at six this morning and unfortunately missed the big breakfast; however, we've hit the parade, seen the fairgrounds, lost some money throwing plastic rings at milk bottles, and now we're at the big event.

To start things off, a group of eleven cowgirls riding quarter horses gallop into the ring carrying an assortment of colored flags. They clip around the dirt stage in two opposing circles, raising the dust into a dense, choking cloud. On their final pass, they stop to form a single jagged line. Then, in what seems like a silent ritual, the men remove their hats, and the crowd stands up to greet the town's rodeo princess atop a huge white horse. She's carrying the Star-Spangled Banner, and the national anthem begins to boom through the loudspeakers. As the anthem plays, the conquering horse high-steps through the clouds of dust now settling around the ring. The princess, dressed in white, stares straight ahead, keeping a firm grip on the reins. No one waves, no one takes a picture, no one sings.

At the conclusion of the anthem, to the whoops and cheers of the crowd, all twelve women spur their horses, and the princess leads a chain of unbridled energy around and around the ring before bolting out of the arena. The dirt is phenomenal; the crowd, insane. They've come to rodeo. The loudspeakers switch to America's current Francis Scott Key, Garth Brooks, and the announcer preps the crowd for the first event, the bareback ride. The actual event is a bit anticlimactic as six of the eight cowboys get thrown early. The audience does not mind; they've settled in, passing hot dogs, beer, and soda pop back and forth along the rows. By this point, most of the teenagers have taken Daddy's money and are beginning to congregate around the competitors, trying desperately to be seen while feigning dispassionate coolness.

Between the bare backs and the saddle backs, the announcer wins the audience's attention and polite applause by announcing local birthdays. Then he directs our attention to the far end of the ring, "just above the Dodge truck sign," and asks an elderly couple to stand. "I'd like to introduce a special couple who you probably all already know." The crowd begins to hush as the announcer starts to tell us a story: "Ted and Mary Heber met each other at this rodeo fifty-five years ago today. I don't know why it took them so long, but five years later they were married, and for their honeymoon they came right back to those two seats. And folks, they've been coming back to those two rodeo seats every year for the last fifty years. Let's wish them a blessed and a happy fiftieth anniversary and many, many more happy years and happy rodeos!" The crowd cheers; Ted stands up and offers a friendly wave; Mary remains seated and gently claps her hands while waving to a few friends. "In a world of constant change," the announcer booms, "it sure is nice to see that a few good things never change."

Linking Universities and Communities: The Academic Consultant

This book is about two separate but related issues: the process of organizational change and the process of researching organizational change. First, this book is about the ways people cope with change. It is about how people create change, how they adapt to change, and how they try to resist change. In other words, it is about what I call the stories of change. Second, this book is concerned with how we research and talk about change and the connections we create and sever between theory and practice, the researcher and the researched, and the academic and the community. I intentionally list these terms as binaries because they articulate an all too prevalent relationship between the university and the nonacademic community. This book will argue that such separations are rooted in everyday practices, methods, and assumptions but that we need to move beyond them in our research methods and teaching, in our ideas about universities and about community. Thus, in writing about change, this book is also an act towards change. My aims in this introduction are to discuss the approach I used to research and write about change and to orient the reader to the different projects and politics that found their home in this study.

The stories of change recorded in this book bring together a dual focus in order to talk about organizational change and simultaneously offer a model for university and community partnerships and research. In order to achieve this dual focus, I hope that this book will bring together readers interested in change both from community groups and university contexts. When referring to community readers, I look to people in business, in not-for-profit organizations, and in community action groups who are interested in a sustained examination of change. I expect that these readers want to know how to harness the power of stories as agents of change in communities and workplaces. At the same time, I look to those academic readers who want to find ways to participate more actively in, and potentially change, the communities in which they live and work. My goal is to find ways to bridge the academic/community divide, and I hope that this book initiates constructive discussions among readers who share a similar interest.

My interest in linking the academic and community emerges both from my own personal objectives and from fairly dramatic external pressures that seek to alter higher education in the twenty-first century. Put simply, North American universities are under considerable pressure to become more accountable and more relevant to the publics and constituents they represent, serve, and support. As I note in other places in this book, the critics of higher education have been sharp and sweeping in their assessment of modern schools. Stan Davis and Jim Botkin argue that "school systems, public or private, are lagging behind the transformation in learning that is evolving outside of schools, in the private sector, at both work and play, for people of all ages." Donald Hanna, citing a public demand for universities to respond to adult learners, returning students, and distance learning, has argued that universities require "fundamental changes" that will involve "not just a shift in norms, structures, processes and goals, but also an essential alteration of views, perspectives, and understanding about what a university is and does." Similarly, Jeanne Meister, consultant to many of America's corporate universities, portends, "Just as the American healthcare system has moved from an inefficiently managed cottage industry dominated by the public sector to a market driven system, the American educational system must now transform itself to meet consumer demands for convenient and high quality on-demand education." The criticisms of higher education have not come solely from corporate America. University educator and social critic Stanley Aronowitz argues that there is little higher learning going on in the United States. By "higher learning," Aronowitz refers to "places where students are broadly and critically exposed to the legacy of Western intellectual culture and to those of the Southern Hemisphere and the East." Aronowitz further argues that as an educator, he does not wish to "reform the existing system" of higher education in America, because he is "not at all persuaded that it is possible."

Thus, the stories recorded in this book emerge at a problematic time for higher education in America, and while these stories were not the direct result of any specific criticism, they did have their genesis in my own attempts to become a more engaged and community-minded academic. The stories relay a series of change-management ventures I completed as an "academic consultant," a term that will become a potentially controversial centerpiece throughout this book. In some ways, the concept of an academic consultant could be seen as heretical. Yet, like most acts of heresy, it is a stance that can also be ultimately freeing. In my own academic discipline of rhetoric and composition, academics and consultants usually are seen as two distinct species with separate goals, unique cultures, and very different worldviews. Although humanities scholars have a strong tradition of social and political critique, and although we have been able to build social awareness, community building, and critique into our teaching, we have thus far been less able to form a theoretically rich tradition of research based on our community activism. It is the purpose of this book to combine the two positions of academic and community activist in order to initiate a much needed, empirical-yet-activist discourse about change and community action.

Rodeo Stories and Rodeo Culture

Ted sits back down and shares a quick kiss with Mary. The crowd settles in for more rodeo action as the bulldoggers warm up their horses by doing short sprints in the grass behind the south side cattle pen. It's an odd sight: waves of four and five horses and riders accelerating away from the two ambulances, fire truck, and nearby beer tent and public outhouses. One might think some cowboy terrorist organization has just bombed the concession booth. Or, once the cowboys start swinging their giant lassos, it looks like waves of drunk, injured rodeo participants are trying to escape without paying their entrance fees. Rodeo is a culture of its own, and though numerous coffee table books, Hollywood fantasies, and country music songs have tried to capture the dry grit of rodeo, very few readers appreciate the cultural role rodeo manifests in hundreds of small towns across America. Rodeo is a performed memory of the past, of the days when the West was newly settled and honest people did honest work. It's a testament and reminder of the backbreaking work good families did to tame the West.

That's one story of rodeo. Of course, if you walk in the head office of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), they'll tell you a mighty different story, and if you ask any of the rodeo managers who direct these traveling P. T. Barnum-esque shows throughout Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming, you'll probably get yet another story. However, these different stories are so divergent, so removed, and so antithetical to each other that they have little chance of ever intersecting and an even less chance of really influencing each other. If anything, when these stories clash, they seem to only reinforce each other. For example, several months ago we decided on a whim to go see a movie at a downtown Salt Lake City movie theater. However, our plans were disrupted by a crowd of thirty-five or so rain-drenched anti-rodeo protesters standing outside the main entrance to the theater. We didn't know this, but the theater was showing the rodeo movie 8 Seconds, the story of bull rider Lane Frost, the first person in over three hundred attempts to ride a famous bull named Red Rock. Frost and Red Rock were 1987 national rodeo champions, Frost the champion rider and Red Rock the champion bull. In the spring of 1988, Frost and Red Rock completed a seven-event playoff, seven rides at seven different rodeos. Frost won the competition, four rides to three throws. In the process, Frost became the only person to ever ride Red Rock, and he immediately became a hero among rodeo faithful. In 1989, Frost was killed by a bull named Taking Care of Business at the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo. 8 Seconds was much more than a rodeo movie; directed by John Avildsen, of Rocky and Karate Kid fame, the story canonized a fallen hero.

Finding the rodeo protesters' attempts to change the minds and attitudes of some pretty serious fans far more interesting than another evening at the movies, I stood by and watched as rural Utahns in Wranglers, cowboy boots, and hats forged their way through lines of Berkenstock-clad demonstrators who waved signs and umbrellas as they chanted slogans condemning rodeo's treatment of animals. Even the parking lot surrounding the theater illustrated the fact that these were cultures with little in common as half- and full-ton trucks competed for space with foreign station wagons, sedans, and an occasional VW bus. It was soon apparent that although the people standing in the rain genuinely wanted to change the opinions of those whose pickups were being targeted with pamphlets, leaflets, and other assorted materials, tonight they were only insulting their audience. In the minds of moviegoers who had named their kids "Lane" and "Lynette," the protesters were desecrating a culture, a history, and, more importantly, the stories they told themselves and their children. Here, change was all about stories, but because the stories were so divergent, so opposite to each other, there was no possibility that either side was about to change. Instead, those in each group simply reinforced the other group's stories and perceptions held of their opponents. No one had created or presented a larger story to pull these people together; there was no common narrative they could both embrace. As a consequence, without a unifying story, one that spoke to both groups, neither side was about to change.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Community Action and Organizational Change by Brenton D. Faber Copyright © 2002 by Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

	List of Figures	vii
	Acknowledgments	ix
1.	Introduction: Rodeo	1
2.	Reading the Stories of Change	19
3.	Time, Habits, and Change: Brokers, Bankers, and the Old West	44
4.	Narratives and Organizational Change: Stories from Academe	69
5.	Image: Power, Rhetoric, and Change	108
6.	Discordance and Realignment: Stories from the Final Frontier	138
7.	Organizational Change as Community Action	166
	Notes	199
	Bibliography	207
	Index	215

Editorial Reviews

“This is an excellent book! It is well conceived, beautifully written, and compelling in its case for using narratives to reconnect universities to their communities. . . This book has potential to be considered an important, ground-breaking study in the area of community studies and organizational studies.”—H. L. Goodall Jr., author of Casing a Promised Land: The Autobiography of an Organizational Detective as Cultural Ethnographer 

From the Publisher

Faber (technical communications, Clarkson U.) examines issues relating to the process of organizational change and the process of researching such change, including how people cope with, create, adapt to, and resist change; how people research and talk about it, and the links created and severed between theory and practice, the researcher and the researched, and the academic and the community. The text combines theoretical discussions of these issues<-->drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu<-->with Faber's firsthand experiences in the study and implementation of change. For academics, businesspeople, not-for-profit organizations, and community action groups interested in a sustained examination of change. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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