Re-thinking Security, Ethics and Information Management: Investigating body scanners at Washington Dulles International Airport – Organizational metaphors approach.
You represent a firm of consultants & have been given a case study connected to specific organizational controversy to analyze (who are you working for?). Explain the conceptual framework & how this thinking can provide ways of understanding management, organizational & technological change & development. Use conceptual framework to analyze the controversy – images – view problems, solutions, logics, approaches & practices. How particular groups & individuals may draw on particular images to provide a critique of practices or approaches or as solution. Critically reflect on how this approach enables you to examine different assumptions, problems & controversies. As managers need to be skilled at reading organizations & management practice from a variety of perspectives – show how you have developed different insights through a critical analysis of the case & different organizational images & how this could help inform the organization regarding this specific issue. Utilize Morgan’s images/metaphors of the organization to provide the analysis regarding the controversy. Perhaps decide on two images for the main focus of the report and maybe reference other images on a more minor level. Each report should have some reference to the machine image (this could be in the form of highlighting the problems of a simplistic view of an organization or a controversy (e.g. in terms of rules, bureaucracy, cogs in a machine approach, technology transfer/determinist view of problems and solutions). In order to show the importance of considering the flux and transformation concerned with organizing and managing, each project should also have reference to this image (through ANT). You can also use any of the other images, but each project should have a minimum of these two in order to fully address the focus of the assignment. Some assignments will focus on these two, while others will focus on three to five images and spread the discussion across the different images.
You need to make sure you explain to the directors you are working for why this approach to understanding organisational change and transformation through this images of organisations approach, can provide valuable insights to their organisation (why this is important in the current age of change, complexity and transformation in the 21st century). Within the earlier sections of the essay this will be through a conceptual discussion of how viewing organisations via the different images provides alternative ways of examining controversies (e.g. by engaging with problems and solutions, decision-making and understanding specific issues and controversies). Within the second part of the document (where you apply the images of organisation approach to the case study) you need to show how this approach can provide particular insights into the study of this specific controversy. You may use the model of organisational learning we discussed to highlight the point that you are not suggesting that all organisational analysis, problem solving or learning requires the manager or consultant to shift out fully to a reflexive image or view. Some more simple issues may require a basic single-loop learning approach. However, you can highlight the problems of getting caught in a single-loop learning where greater reflection is required (e.g. complex issues and problems, unintended consequences arising elsewhere or issues hidden beneath the surface). Some issues may require a greater shifting out to double-loop learning (associated with the brain metaphor) and other more complex issues may require more strategic and reflexive thinking by fully shifting out to this level in order to consider a much broader range of issues. Your project is based on this latter case in terms of examining a specific and complex controversy and this is why you need to consider the flux and transformation image (ANT) and the problems of becoming too caught up in more simplistic images that are not able to dig deeper and examine the complex and relational actions and translations in practice. When examining the case in terms of the ANT approach you need to think about the complex network of relations and the translations that lie behind the development of certain controversies and outcomes. This includes how certain problems and solutions emerge and become connected; how these may change or alter as different shared interests are enrolled and mobilised in relation to specific problems and solutions, how certain pathways become viewed as OPP (it seems as if this is the only or best way or it is not possible or easy to follow alternative pathways); how certain black boxes emerge and may appear to be stable in certain relations/networks (e.g. roles, relations, facts, truths, techniques, boundaries, divides, etc.); how others may become excluded or their importance diminished through specific translations, how certain actors may become seen as key (human and non-human) and how certain black boxing covers up all the networking that lies behind the actor appearing as a more stable and simplified black box (often with other problems and competing interests lay hidden beneath the surface). This is not to say that simplifications, standards and black boxing are not important in making things connect and work within organisations.
However, sometimes this process can cover up important issues that need to be examined in more detail. Therefore, where there is a complex controversy you need to work like a detective to uncover some of these processes and translations and show how things could have been different if the problems and solutions were viewed differently and how certain translations contribute to particular outcomes in specific ways. This can include how certain actors (human and non-human) can present a specific lens or view of the problems and how they connect to solutions. You can also use other images to highlight this (e.g. using more of a machine image to view problems in terms of a more technological focus (view the problem in terms of technological transfer or determinist position – airport scanner approach) or how others attempt to highlight something as a problem (bureaucracy) and undermine other current solutions and present their image as the ‘better’ solution (e.g. education case).