Raymond Caldwell: Agency and change in organizational theory

Abstract

How we conceive our capacity for "agency" in the world has enormous implications for how we think about the possibilities and limits of our ability to manage change in organizations and society. For Raymond Caldwell, agency is the prism through which we think about change. If we conceive ourselves as things, as "substances" that simply think and act intentionally or rationally, we will end up with extremely limited epistemologies for understanding agency. For Caldwell the old models of knowledge and power, rationality and control, and agency and structure in organizations have fallen apart. The idea of "distributed agency" partly captures this reality by treating change as an ongoing process defined by practices, which in turn questions explanations of change that rely on intentional action or abstract notions of organizations as entities that change from one relatively fixed state to another. In sum, he treats agency as a practice and change as a process. But Caldwell's recent work, partly under the philosophical influence of Whitehead, takes these ideas further by including the nonhuman in how we define distributed agency: Agency is potentially everywhere in a social-material world in which the ontological divide between the social and the natural world no longer makes much sense. Always provocative, always challenging, Caldwell's work is an important contribution to redefining the boundaries of how we think of agency and change in organizations. After briefly noting some early influences on Caldwell's work, the chapter organizes his contributions into three major phases: Agency and change, agency as practice, and change as a process. A key insight section then reflects on how his early contributions have influenced others. The chapter concludes with legacies and new directions in Caldwell's search for a process-in-practice perspective on organizational change.