One problem I have with management theory is the emphasis on change. The highest values are to promote and manage change. As I've said, this reflects a perpetual sense of crisis that goes back to the 60s at least--first the crisis of corporate legitimacy prompted by the counter-culture, then stagflation and the oil crisis, deindustrialization, and so forth. As I've said before, I entered business school in an environment shaped by anxiety over competition with Japan, and our perceptions of what this was going to require of us culturally. And there is the point that change is constant. But here's the thing. In actually working on budgets, a great deal of what you are doing is making sure that funding continues for the things the organization and the people in it are doing today.
This is coming from reading Barbara Czarniawska's Narrating the Organization. Earlier this week I wrote about an article she and Mazza did on consulting as part of a ritual, and I've been trying that on for size. There are certainly ritualistic elements, and it has some qualities of creating a separate space outside of normal routines for everybody. But in a lot of cases in my work, and what I see of others, the process does not have the clear structure that one associates with a ritual. It does not always end with the presentation of a report, in fact less so all the time. The end of the process is ambiguous, and in a lot of cases the consulting work merges more with the everyday work.
Czarniawska talks about rituals here as well, this time in the budget process. There is a lot in a lot of budget processes that absolutely has a ritualistic character. Actions that are repeated each year, words repeated. But so often, as Czarniawska points out, "a sad ritual without much suspense" (p 136). People wish the budget process was the time when new resources would come, opening the door to new activities and a transformation of the institution, but across higher ed, the story is generally resource constraint, outside of the top economic tier of institutions in a highly polarized system.
A lot of the time, I find myself zeroing in on one very specific phrase. Probably not a great strength in the way I consume material. But here it is. She's not talking about budgets per se, but in a discussion of interruptions and frictions in organizational narratives--part of a discussion about how important paradoxes are as sources of innovation. "...interruptions and 'frictions' both hamper and assist change and renewal" (p 172). Change is everywhere, but maybe what I am missing in management theory and elsewhere is renewal.
For a budget, most of what you are doing has to do with renewal. You are determining the extent to which you can continue funding to allow the people doing what they are doing to keep doing it. You are renewing your programs for another year. And this is a good thing. Students want to know that they will have access to more or less the same courses the students in the class before had last year. They want to know advisors and support services will be available. Employees want to know that they will get paid. And so on ad nauseum. Count up every dollar in a budget--almost every dollar will be associated with keeping something going. A huge goal for people up and down the process is to renew as much as possible.
Right now budget processes are usually built in a way where a successful outcome would seem to be celebrating and supporting new things. A process that largely consists of continuation seems pointless. It lacks suspense. The ritual fails to achieve transformation.
Could you get an organization organized around rituals of renewal? It seems like we don't do a lot of that in our culture. The other day, I arrived late at a big gathering, and I saw my wife talking to the awesome person who married us (who campaigns against the death penalty). I suggested we should renew our vows, we had everything we needed--my wife, the minister, and a bunch of friends. I'm sure this was not as clever as I thought, and I think I just got an eye roll from my wife. But I think it is also true that such renewal rituals are few and far between, although I might be overlooking something subtle and embedded.
Any attempt to introduce rituals of renewal into the budget process could go wrong in so many ways. I don't know if rituals like this can be constructed or that they evolve, from conversations in an action net, to borrow from Czarniawska. I can imagine moving budgeting in different directions by opening the conversations in ways that admit more polyvocality (I think this is one of the big requirements for equity-based budgeting). Right now budget conversations are most often about trying to achieve univocality, and carry strongly authoritarian elements even at the hands of people who see themselves as community-oriented.
But I can imagine a world in which the budgeting process is one of the ways people in the organization talk to one another about what it is they do, and celebrate how much they are able to keep going, how they as a group have sustained this service for yet another year. Perhaps you would take a longer look back, and reflect on how long it has been going on.
As someone who lives with a precarious and variable income stream, it is great to know that things will go on for another year. "Oh death, won't you spare me over for another year"--yes, this is a morbid song, but part of its beauty is capturing gratitude for getting to continue. People and organizations are not immortal.
The church is built around rituals that repeat continuously and frequently. These rituals can be cast as change that happens over and over--that the host is transformed at each celebration of communion, that in confession we are reminded that grace is continuous, and God continuously transforms the broken human substance with divine redemption. But most of this can also be seen as renewal and continuation to equal effect.
Barbara Czarniawska. 1997. Narrating the Organization. Chicago.
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