The Field Guide › Paper
An inductive study of employees assigned to business process redesign teams who build detailed process maps of their organisation's actual operations. The central finding: employees who engage deeply in this mapping work discover that what they had understood as purposively designed, relatively stable, and externally given is in fact continuously produced through social interaction — emergent, patchy, and largely uncoordinated. This realisation simultaneously empowers them (it can be changed) and alienates them from their central roles (which they now see as reproducing the organisation's inefficiencies). Most subsequently move voluntarily to peripheral change roles, choosing peripherality not because they are marginalised but because they have seen enough to know that meaningful change requires distance from the core. Challenges established assumptions that change comes from the periphery because peripheral actors are disadvantaged — here, central actors choose the periphery. The paper connects to PS through two arguments: first, that structural knowledge of how an organisation actually works is a precondition for meaningful voice (you need to understand the system to challenge it); second, that the gap between official accounts and lived operations is itself a source of alienation. The CEO's response when walked through the process map — 'this is even more fucked up than I imagined' — captures the dissonance between formal and informal organisation that PS research is fundamentally about.