Are you a Collaborator, a Resistor, an Anarchist?

[Ed Jewett]

Doesn't the concept of change management and the question of personal categorization require some form of comprehension of context before it can be answered? Can it be discussed in a vacuum?

The concept is restructuring an organisation, often to impose a regimen of more work for less pay on inferior terms and conditions.

My point is precisely that the assumptions explicit in change management also shine light on the attitudes of the powerful towards ordinary people. There is no vacuum in my analysis.

Yes, and an apology for my hurried-and-incomplete reading. I imply no vacuums in your thinking, or spirit.

In the examples I can think of inside my own life within organizations*, I was a collaborator and even an instigator under the assumption that 1) increased efficiency and savings would allow the use of saved money and energy to be re-invested in some valid organizational goal that served an external and worthwhile purpose, that 2) "management" would be pleased to receive such ideas, and that 3) some small and appropriate "share" or reward would proceed into my pocket or career.

My experiences went dramatically in the opposite direction. I found my ideas spurned, rejected, the genesis of my diminishment in the organization, and a primary reason I left without reverting to anarchy. Eventually I ended up farther and farther from the center, on the fringe, soon unemployed.

*as a medical transcriptionist for a sizeable hospital; *as the sole staffer for an organization dually focused on providing continuing medical education and increased clout for the profession; * as a call center worker in a complex medical bureaucracy; * as someone working in the field of inter-agency coordination in crisis atmospheres.

The change management occurs when people with bright ideas and insights find enough capital to form a competitor, or even of them "secede" so as to leave the former organization able to chug onward into ineptitude.