Boram Do

Considering Planned Change Anew: Stretching Large Group Interventions Strategically, Emotionally, and Meaningfully

Large Group Interventions, methods for involving “the whole system” in a change process, are important contemporary planned organizational change approaches. They are well known to practitioners but unfamiliar to many organizational researchers, despite the fact that these interventions address crucial issues about which many organizational researchers are concerned. On the other hand, these interventions do not appear to be informed by contemporary developments in organizational theorizing. This disconnect on both sides is problematic. We describe such interventions and their importance; illustrate them with extended descriptions of particular Future Search and Whole‐Scale™ change interventions; summarize research on strategy, emotion, and sensemaking that may inform them; and suggest questions about the interventions that may stimulate research and reflection on practice. We also discuss conditions that may foster effective engagement between Large Group Interventions practitioners and organizational researchers. Our approach represents a way to conduct a review that combines scholarly literature and skilled practice and to initiate a dialog between them.

The sacralization of Christmas commerce

Discussions of Christmas sometimes focus on the paradox of its being both a Christian Holy Day and a secular shopping season, implicitly suggesting their equivalence. In this article we demonstrate the inadequacy of such statements. We explore the ongoing evolution of Christmas in the Northeast United States since the 17th century, and we show how, thanks in part to Calvinist theology brought by the early Puritan settlers, commerce associated with Christmas has been sacralized over time, become sacred, to the extent that it now, to a considerable extent, subsumes the religious commemoration of Christmas. We suggest some implications of this process.

Driving down memory lane: The influence of memories in a community following organizational demise

In this paper, we explain how defunct organizations influence the communities they leave behind through ongoing processes of communal memory work, a twofold social process through which members of collectives develop shared memories of a defunct organization and behaviorally engage with its mnemonic traces. We explore how individuals’ shared construal of their environment shapes their emotional orientation towards their past, which in turn gives rise to particular forms of memory work. We further show how communal memory work influences changes in an organization’s role in a community’s identity and members’ construal of their environment. We develop our theory through an analysis of a case study of South Bend, Indiana, in the 54 years following the closure of the Studebaker Corporation’s automotive factory in 1963. We close by discussing the implications of this work for memory scholarship.