Citizenship and Sustainability in Organizations

Exploring and Spanning the Boundaries

David Murphy, Alison Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000342840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Citizenship and Sustainability in Organizations: Exploring and Spanning the Boundaries is the introductory book in the series of the same name and draws upon new conceptual thinking from some of the leading contributors to The Journal of Corporate Citizenship on topics of social responsibility, organizational citizenship, influencing and leading change for sustainability and individual agency. Chapter authors are influential thinkers, pushing the boundaries of conventional thinking about corporate citizenship and sustainability to generate innovative ideas, models and practices.

The book's core message is that the contexts within which organizations and individuals act are undergoing significant change and disruption. Existing corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate citizenship and business sustainability models and frameworks need to be adapted, abandoned or transformed. This book represents a starting point for dialogue about these challenges and presents commentaries, debates, essays and insights that aim to be provocative and engaging, raise some of the important issues of the day and provide observations on what may be too new yet to be the subject of detailed empirical and theoretical studies.

The book is aimed at researchers, students and practitioners in the fields of corporate citizenship, sustainability, CSR, business ethics, corporate governance and critical management and leadership studies.

Part I
People

1
(Intellectual) shamans as transformational change makers¹

Sandra Waddock

My late good friend, collaborator and colleague Malcolm McIntosh, founder and multi-time editor of this book’s predecessor, The Journal of Corporate Citizenship (JCC), wrote about the people profiled in Intellectual Shamans: Management Academics Making a Difference, “Shamanism is a spiritual presence and is not just found in people. [It is a] light [that] can shine from a place, a piece of music, or an object such as a tree or a rock.… Your shamans have seen that light and been brave enough to talk about it.” Of course, Malcolm himself was a visionary and shaman, who saw the world clearly and pulled few punches in describing it in his many books (e.g., with others, 1998, 2013, 2015) and the numerous articles, as he worked always to make the world better.

In the original editorial Turning Point in JCC, from which this chapter takes off, I argued that the world needs many more of us to assume the mantle of the shaman, particularly as academics and intellectuals. Today, I would add that we (and others) need to do so as change makers (Egri & Frost, 1991; Frost & Egri, 1994) or transformational change agents, activists and healers in all sorts of realms. Collectively somehow, we need to bring about systemic changes needed to ensure the survival and thriving of human beings on the planet – along with the multitude of other living beings with which we are intimately interconnected. Importantly, modern shamans are needed to help transform the whole system at multiple levels towards greater sustainability with dignity and flourishing for all. That transformation, of course, includes and involves businesses acting with their best side forward, as well as all other human institutions. Leaving today’s corporate citizenship – corporate responsibility – in place as is, is simply not a viable solution to the need for system transformation. Transformational change presents a daunting prospect, yet the troubled world we face calls us to such change. I will argue here that it is the shamans among us who can step forward as the change agents who are needed.

Shamanism yesterday and now

The reality is that, with the exception of some New Age practitioners, most of today’s shamans in the so-called developed world infrequently acknowledge (or perhaps are unable to see or lack knowledge about) their shamanic powers. Those powers can include “seeing,” seeing the system as it is and seeing possibilities for a better future. They can mean reaching across differences to create new innovations and insights. Or seeing, as the late, great songwriter Leonard Cohen said in his masterpiece Anthem, where the cracks are [in the system] because that is “how the light gets in.”² Shamanic power can mean framing, helping to understand and explaining what is happening to others. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs embodied this type of visionary “seeing,” as does Elon Musk today of Tesla Motors (though, of course, both faced various controversies in their work, as many such visionaries do).

These powers help outline the three core dimensions of shamanism: healing, connecting and sensemaking (Waddock, 2014; Frost & Egri, 1994; Egri & Frost, 1991). Shamanic power means being present to what is now and, to what Otto Scharmer calls, in discussing Theory U, the emerging future (Scharmer, 2009, 2018). It is a power to heal broken cultural mythologies (Dow, 1986), to connect across boundaries of various sorts to gain new ideas, insights and innovations and to make sense for one’s self and for others of what has been seen (see Waddock, 2014). Shamanic power involves a willingness to take risks, to do what one is called to do, whatever might stand in the way of doing so, and to step outside of convention if need be to find a new path forward (Waddock, 2014).

Accepting the call to shamanism, and it is a calling (Waddock, 2014, 2017), means taking on both the power and the willingness to transform. Transformation involves both self and community with the object of healing what needs fixing kept firmly in mind. It also means taking associated risks and bearing the burdens associated with doing or seeing things in new ways that may not yet be fully accepted. Today, some shamans are transformational change agents – from all walks of life acting as change agents and shapeshifters. Shapeshifters do what I have elsewhere called “shaping the shift.” That is, shapeshifters shift both themselves to meet the demands of a troubled world (often by enhancing their own awareness through a variety of reflective practices) and work to shift others and the world around them in the interests of healing. In doing so, they can work to reduce the troubles humanity is facing at multiple levels and in a huge variety of different ways.

The world of human beings seems to have always had its shamans. Today’s world is no exception. Perhaps the world’s oldest set of spiritual and wisdom traditions are those of the shaman, and shamans have been found in virtually all Indigenous cultures of the world (Eliade, 1964). Depictions of who are believed to be shamans are among the world’s oldest human art found in cave drawings. Shamans are the healers of traditional and Indigenous communities. Indeed, shamans fundamentally are, as Serge Kahili King (2009) says, healers of relationships of all sorts – to self, to others, among others, and with and in human institutions, and humans in nature. All of these tasks are among the work that shamans do.

Undertaking these three tasks – all in the service of a better world for intellectual shamans – can be done in virtually any field. Thus, shamans are said to have been the world’s first weather forecasters, timekeepers, storytellers, priests, therapists and artists, not to mention magicians and doctors (Krippner, 2004). My argument here is that shamans can still be found in modern cultures and in many occupations and practices – but we typically do not recognize them as such – or call them by that name. Maybe we need to do so, particularly in the arena of much-needed organizational and systemic change. Frost and Egri (cf., Frost & Egri, 1994; Egri & Frost, 1991) first discussed organizational development (change) agents as shamans in the only articles about shamanism in the management literature that I could find prior to my own work on intellectual shamans and my current thinking about transformational change agents as shamans.

Of course, we need to adopt the idea and practice of shamanism in our own terms and ways, suitable to current times, without necessarily appropriating the ways of Indigenous peoples. Each culture has its own time-honoured and culturally appropriate approaches to shamanism. In other words, if we in the industrialized world are to be (or, for some, acknowledge) that we are shamans, we need to find our own culturally appropriate ways of doing so (see Waddock, 2017, for elaboration).

Shamans healing, connecting and sensemaking

The word shaman comes from Tungus-Manchzur language of Siberia. The word sham in Tungus means knowledge, while the word man means “liker” or lover. Combining the two stems into shaman, you get “lover of knowledge,”³ that is, a wise and knowing person interested in continual learning (Waddock, 2019). Shamans in traditional contexts are typically powerful and respected elders, both male and female. Far from perfect human beings (they are flawed just like the rest of us), in their communities they are known for their sagacity, insight and wise guidance. Though they may not go by the label shaman, many of today’s most respected people arguably also fit the category of shaman, if they were to acknowledge it – and explicitly use their healing powers for good.

As Kahli King argues, shamans are healers of relationships (Kahili King, 2009). Shamans first and always are healers – of relationships of people, communities and organized human enterprise, including our relationship with nature. In traditional cultures, they are the medicine men and women whose main responsibility is individual-level healing. In our world, however, healing may be needed at the individual level, and also at the community, organizational and even, as argued here, at the whole system or societal level. Indeed, in calling for modern shamans to serve as change and transformation makers, I am explicitly pointing out that the healing that is needed today is systemic in nature, looking to the functions and practices of human institutions of all sorts, in their relationships to each other and to nature. These relationships are ones we need to heal now.

Equally importantly, shamans are connectors (or, as Frost and Egri called them, boundary spanners), crossing boundaries of different sorts to find new knowledge, insights and information that may not always be available in one realm. For traditional shamans, those boundaries are spiritual, involving spiritual journeying often in trance states (Eliade, 1964), across realms to gather information needed for purposes of healing. For many of today’s shamans, particularly as change makers, boundaries can be of many different types. Of course, boundaries can still be spiritual, and they can also be interpersonal, intercultural, artistic, disciplinary, sector and institutional, among others. The key for the connecting function is that information and insights from different realms can be brought together in new and insightful ways to be used in the healing process, whether that process is oriented towards an individual, a group, an organization or institution or even whole societies.

Finally, shamans are sensemakers in the capacity that Egri and Frost (1991; Frost & Egri, 1994), discussing organizational change agents, called spiritual leadership. As sensemakers, shamans literally make sense of what they have learned or what they see for others, providing new insights and learnings, and drawing out important lessons that can help others see the world in new ways, also in the interests of healing (Waddock, 2014). In this capacity, shamans are often seen as visionaries – people who envision and inspire the future. They can also be storytellers and artists who see, say and show the world in new ways. In common sense terms, sensemaking, a term that comes from scholar Karl Weick (1995), has been defined as “the negotiation and creation of meaning, or understanding, or the construction of a coherent account of the world” (McNamara, 2015). Weick characterizes sensemaking as having multiple characteristics: identity, which helps us understand who we are and what our place in the world is. It is retrospective, that is, we need to reflect on what has happened to make sense of it, and that in turn depends on our socialization, who and where we are in the world. Sensemaking is also an ongoing process, which builds on cues from our perceptions that provide plausible and sufficient explanations or stories about our world (Weick, 1995; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005).

As sensemakers, shamans develop and tell new stories and narratives that help people better understand their place in the world, their communities and ultimately who they are. When necessary, shamans do their work at the level of healing or changing cultural mythologies That is because in traditional cultures, the belief is often that when people and communities are dis-eased (out of ease) and dis-ordered (out of order), it is because there is something wrong with the local cultural mythology (Do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• About the contributors
• Introduction
• Part I People
• Part II Partners
• Part III Processes
• Afterword
• Index