Organizational change and development
Introduction
The critical enterprise consists, ideally, of three aspects: (1) explanation and critique of current systems and the historical currents that have given rise to them, (2) an alternative vision of organizations and society that resolves the problems and oppressions in the current systems, and (3) an account of how one moves from the current system to the envisioned one, either naturally or through planned change. Critical research on organizations has generally been weakest in terms of this third aspect. No doubt this is due, in large part, to the Sisyphean tasks of explaining the subtle and often hidden means of control that pre- serve current systems and going beyond them to en- vision alternatives that are exceptionally difficult to distill and express in terms that make them plausible to most readers. Living in a world dominated by current ideologies and disciplinary practices, many people experience difficulty understanding that there are alternatives, much less accepting them as plausible and attainable. Having devoted extensive labor to developing these two aspects, critical scholars have tended to pay less attention to explaining how one transforms the organization or the process by which transformation takes place.