RIS ID

16035

Publication Details

This article was originally published as: Badham, R, Garrety, K, Morrigan, V, Zanko, M & Dawson, P, Designer Deviance: Enterprise and Deviance in Cultural Change Programs, Organization, 2003, 10(4): 707-730. Copyright Sage Publications Ltd 2003.

Abstract

This article explores the value of investigating cultural change programmes as exercises in engineering deviance. It does so through a case study of an organizational development cultural change programme at Sprogwheels, a large Australian corporation. Drawing on and extending the classic work of Becker (1966), the article details how the programme combined a moral crusade against what it sought to have labelled as the ‘deviant conservatism’ of the existing organizational culture with social support for ‘deviant radicalism’, in the form of a counter-cultural, self-enterprising set of middle managers promoting corporate change. The article explores the complex and contradictory ideas of deviance that are deployed in such programmes, and examines the implications of a deviance analysis for an improved understanding of the dynamics of cultural change.

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Link to publisher version (DOI)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/13505084030104001