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Designer Deviance: Enterprise and Deviance in Cultural Change Programs (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.

Publication details
Download http://ro.uow.edu.au/commpapers/149
Publisher Research Online
Repository Research Online - University of Wollongong (United States)
Keywords change, culture, deviance, Myers-Briggs, organizational development
Type text

Cited publications (1)
Folk devils and moral panics : the creation of the Mods and Rockers / Stanley Cohen (1973)