SoMResearchInsights

A synopsis of his DBA research, by John Pillay at Cranfield School of Management.

Corporate turnaround as knowledge subversion: a dialogic perspective on transformational change

John Pillay
Cranfield International Executive Doctorate (DBA)

My DBA research focuses on the subversion of knowledge in transforming organisations. Like much research, my topic went through a number of iterations before settling on a key area of interest. Initially, I was interested in finding out why organisations didn’t seem to learn more from the changes that they undertook. But then I started to think about the converse view: what do we need to unlearn in order to successfully transform an organisation? After examining the literature, I came across the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher (1895 – 1975). Bakhtin was interested in how meaning is created and transformed through social interactions and dialogue. Bakhtin was useful to me because his work spans many of the areas that I wanted to explore in more detail: how language reveals deeply held beliefs, the destabilisation of meaning through dialogue, and the rituals required to subvert knowledge. Some of these ideas have precedents in change theory but are somewhat underdeveloped.

To develop the concepts I engaged with an organisation that had undergone profound organisational change to find out how it had transformed itself. I also decided to focus on corporate turnaround as a subset of change for two reasons. Firstly, it is a variety of change which is particularly dramatic: the ongoing existence of the organisation is at stake. Secondly, the outcome of a corporate turnaround tends to be more clear-cut than many other varieties of transformational change: the organisation either fails or survives. The company that I chose to research was a turnaround in the UK payments industry. Over a period of nine months, I gathered perspectives from interviewees across the organisation on the changes that had happened and the key events leading up to and following the turnaround. What I found was that processes of knowledge subversion were present throughout the period of the transformation. This provided evidence that knowledge subversion played an important part of the turnaround of an organisation and that this was something that needed to be developed further.

In my next project I focused on broadening the empirical base. Over a twelve month period, I interviewed and spent time with successful corporate turnaround practitioners to find out how they viewed transformational change and to learn about the practices that they applied to turn around an organisation. What I found from these practitioners was a high degree of consistency in their view of change and in the methods that they applied. They all engaged closely with the organisation at all levels from the board room to the shop floor. They were also attentive observers of the key assumptions and patterns held within the organisations. In transforming the organisation they actively set about challenging these deeply held organisational beliefs. This required a range of approaches, some spectacular: one practitioner described how he stole a fleet of trucks to demonstrate the lax security practices at a haulage firm. Some approaches were more subtle: another interim CEO described how he turned up during the night shift in a logistics company to meet up with the overnight supervisors. Needless to say, no top level manager had ever engaged with staff in such a direct way before in that company. All of these activities gave the turnaround professional unfiltered access and an opportunity to short circuit the rhetoric that managers were providing. These challenges to the dominant narrative were part of the process of disrupting beliefs and existing ways of working and thinking: essential to resetting the organisation and setting it on a different path.

Bringing together these findings, the main outcome from my studies was a model for corporate turnaround that puts knowledge subversion at the centre of the change. In this view I combine the classic Slatter et al (2006) framework on the phases of a corporate turnaround with developing stages of knowledge subversion in the organisation. The first stage is to understand current knowledge structures in the organisation and the ways in which they are woven into the fabric of the organisation (or “architectonics” to use the Bakhtinian term). The second stage is to undermine and subvert these structures through dialogue, deconstruction and debasement of the dominant narrative (the Bakhtinian concepts of “polyphony” and “carnival” are at play here). The final stage is to embed new narratives and routines, to cement the change and to stop rollback to previous ways of thinking and working. This model for knowledge subversion is represented diagrammatically in Figure 1 below.

There is much more that I could tell about the concepts and the doctoral process, but I hope that gives you a flavour of the topics at the heart of my thesis and the DBA journey that I went through.

Cranfield School of Management doctoral programmes