Page 78 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

Cross-Disciplinary Scientific Foundation for Sustainability Chapter j 3 55

Organizing and the Organizational Paradigm
When actual changes in a family, community, group, or community of any
kind are organized, they become a change in the paradigm as seen in the
actors’ understanding of formal structures, goals, politics, management
processes, and resources, and are all in all a result of the organizational reality
and the way of functioning in the everyday of life. They contain a living
dimension in a connection of shared and meaningful symbols manifested in
interactions, interpretations, myths, ideology, values, and multiples cultural
forms of expressions as a result of interaction processes and interpretations. An
important part of this everyday of life is the business area that is based on
previous actions oriented toward what to produce, which resources and tech-
nology one should use, and an understanding of the existing knowledge and
needs for knowledge development in relation to the business area. This could
also be understood as what Diamond (1990, p. 34) named as “the organiza-
tional identity.” Organizational identity is the product of the group’s inter-
subjective organization of experience at a given point of time: the “story” they
share about what is real to them. It is a picture of the meaning, purpose, and
intention, collectively and unconsciously assigned to common experience and
behavior of organizational members especially during critical incidents, or
what Benson (1977) calls “organizational morphology,” which refers to the
officially enforced and conventionally accepted view of the organization. It
refers to the organization as abstracted from its concrete, intricate relations
with other aspects of social life. This is the administrators’ vision of the
organization, the form that they try to impose upon events. Since they are
partly successful, the morphology may also be somewhat accurate as a
description of the organization.
It is the connection between the actors’ knowledge, their understanding of
the business area, and their organizational actions that create the orientation
toward and the mode of handling organizational activities. This should be seen
in the light of the actors’ attitudes of and intentions with the activities. The
actors’ development capability is constituted by the interaction process and by
the actors’ interpretation and knowledge of the business area. The actors’
change of moving reality picture is therefore important in a situation in which
a contradiction exists between the business area and the experiential space.
This can be seen in situations in which one shifts to new technology and new
products, enters new market, changes services, etc., or an extension of the
experiential space. In each of these situations there is a need to change the
knowledge. Therefore a recognition among the actors of the problem, new
actions, or actions in a new way are important. An experienced need among
the actors to develop knowledge should be seen in relation to the organizing
and the organizational paradigm.