infonet-economy

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate, how applying individualistic discourses to social relations in organizations rather hinders than facilitates change in organizations. The initial idea was to find out how social relations are constructed in organizations, thus de-focussing from the increasing popularity of concepts such as 'soft skills' or 'social competences'. However, when the study was carried out, one of the main discourses of constructing social relations in organizations was the individualistic. This paper will show the functions and consequences of the individualistic discourse on social relations in organizations. The research is grounded in a social constructionist approach (Gergen, 1994), using discourse analysis as methodology (Grant, Hardy, Oswick, & Putnam, 2004). For gathering texts, 21 problem-centred interviews (Witzel, 2000) and 13 group discussions (Steyaert & Bouwen, 2004) with altogether 106 participants were carried out in two large Swiss organizations. The following analysis showed, that one of the main discourses constructing social relations is, that only one person renders responsible for the quality of the social relation, thus ignoring the feature of the 'in between' of the social situation. Investigating the functions and variations, stabilizing interpretive repertoires (Potter & Wetherell, 1987) are described. One repertoire is that soft skills are part of a persons 'character' rather than his or her 'abilities'. This 'character' gets constructed as originating in upbringing and school. When the person then enters the organizations (s)he is constructed as 'finished', thus the organization hardly gets any agency to train or change the social realities.
Consequences of these results for organizations are to closely consider how they stage their training and education regarding 'soft skills' or 'team building'. In a second step discourses from the study which de-focus from the individual and thus offer a more flexible approach for changing realities of social relations within organizations will be offered.