‘Living in the Blender of Change’: The Carnival of Control in a Culture of Culture
Richard Badham and Karin Garrety. Tamara : Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science. Las Cruces: 2003. Vol. 2, Iss. 4; pg. 22, 17 pgs

Abstract
Traditional structural-functional approaches to organizational change, as well as critics of those approaches, often offer overly structured and rationalized views of how change occurs. This paper attempts to build upon processual studies of change and critiques of overly hegemonic views of managerial control by seeking to capture the complex, emotive and fluid character of organizational ‘changing’. In pursuit of this aim, the paper documents these characteristics of change through a personalized ethnography of micro-incident – a critical change meeting – in an Australian steel making plant undergoing cultural change. In conclusion, it is argued that even the more sophisticated studies of the emergent process-like character of organizational change fail to fully capture the ambiguous, ironic, emotional, and uncertain character of events in the ‘blender’ of change.