Doing “the work” of conscious capitalism: Leading change and changing leaders
Abstract
The purpose of the present study is to investigate how a consulting and leadership development firm facilitates individual and organizational transformation, in the service of the greater good. Informed by perspectives in business and organizational communication, this study embeds the efforts of Devenir (pseudonym), the organization that was the site of the study, within a hypercompetitive business environment where rationality, order, and speed are the norm as it attempts to affect positive change in the world through dialogic methods and Conscious Capitalism. Given this environment, organizational communication scholars can provide valuable insight into organizational members' messy, multiple, and conflicting experiences such as tensions between desires for transformation and resistance to change. Multiple qualitative methods were used in this project including semi-structured, open-ended, as well as informal, ethnographic interviews with Devenir members and clients; participant observations of phone-based teleclasses, meetings between Devenir members, and all-day training and development workshops; and document analysis of Devenir Web materials and training content. Upon analysis, two stories emerged that paint the picture of "The Work" of individual and organizational change: (a) a pragmatic, functionalist story of effectiveness where discursive positioning and discourse as a strategic resource are key themes; and (b) a critical and postmodern story where I explicate a variety of micro- and macro-level tensions involved in the "The Work." The combination of these two stories offers several key theoretical contributions by (a) providing observational data on organizational tensions; (b) empirically exploring Conscious Capitalism as an emerging discourse; (c) explicating tensions and resistance to change on micro and macro levels through applied, engaged scholarship; (d) helping "materialize" "The Work" of dialogic change methods; (e) demonstrating the intra-action between the human and nonhuman in individual and organization transformation efforts; and (f) proposing how efforts toward Conscious Capitalism can be undermined by the very microdiscursive practices designed to facilitate them.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Buzzanell, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Management|Communication|Organizational behavior
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