Part 1: I have personally experienced resistance to course content and approach.
The circumstances of this resistance was connected to delivering course material for - Level 4 and 5 Units - Higher National Diploma Course (HND) in General Business (Pearson) programme and it Power-point delivery method and chalk and talk style of teaching.My resistance to taken-for-granted assumptions (TFGA) about learning could reveals the following regarding the role of the student and the role of the teacher.
- Emotions might have a role to play in the effectiveness of training and talent management interventions.
- Irrational reaction against necessary efforts to re-engineer an organisation to be more effective.
- Parochial self-interest (i.e., putting one’s own interests ahead of the interests of the organisation) or misunderstandings about the nature of the change or the reasons for it.
- My willingness to stop and to look at things that no one else has bothered to look at - a source of creativity. Edward De Bono (1992, p. 46).
- Seeing the potentially productive or useful aspects (problem or opportunity) of the resistance.
- Organisational commitment and desire to see my organisation develop and change successfully.
Various ways in which my resistance manifests itself
Private manifestations (i.e. thoughts and feelings), or are there external signals that might reveal your resistance to others?
- Reaction against this notion of not-knowing, with learners reverting to tactics and assumptions that are more familiar to them; that is, they resort or revert to the domain of the known.
- These include demanding that teachers and facilitators give clear directions and provide the correct answers, in other words, that they conform to the pedagogic role conventionally associated with teachers in early school education – teachers who are assumed to know everything that is being covered.
- This is an interesting and provocative idea, especially within the context of the action inquiry approaches that were discussed previously, with their ethos of facilitation rather than direction of learning. Simpson and colleagues (2000)
Experiences map
Prasad and Prasad (1998), depict four categories of resistance behaviour, which could emerge in many different organisational situations:
Open confrontation:
- Examples include industrial action, the initiation of grievance procedures or whistle-blowing.
- Within the learning and talent development domain, they might include raising a complaint about a particular course or a particular teacher/facilitator.
Subtle subversion:
- Examples include deliberate acts of carelessness, slowdowns, foot-dragging, spreading of rumour or gossip.
- Within the learning and talent development domain, they might include small acts of disruption to online discussion groups, assessment arrangements, etc.
Disengagement:
- This usually refers to a lack of enthusiasm or commitment to tasks and activities.
- Many scholars classify humour and cynicism as acts of disengagement, which may be an attempt to shore up one’s personal sense of identity against the perceived identity demands of the organisational and/or learning intervention.
Ambiguous accommodation:
- This refers to a kind of ‘playing the game’ in which employees appear to be engaging with a programme by using the right language and saying the right things, but where there is no deep or true commitment.
- These are all behaviours with which most instructional designers, trainers and learning facilitators will be very familiar.
- It is important to reflect on how you might try to manage any such manifestations of resistance, because such behaviours, if left unchecked or unacknowledged, might influence the outcome or reputation of the programme and/or compromise the quality of the participants’ learning experience.
Other ways in which resistance within a learning context can manifest for you?
As a learning technologist - frustrated that non-LT will not raise their game
4.4.7: Resistance and culture
Part 2: Read ‘Resistance and struggle in leadership development’ (Carroll and Nicholson, 2014), which is also available in your printed Reader.
Reactions to the learning approach discussed in this paper.
LDPs (Leadership Development Programmes) that stifle and quell participants’ resistance.
- This often results in a development process more akin to seduction, leading to conformity, anxiety and the privileging of a very few desired identities (Sinclair, 2009).
- How the relationships between participants and facilitators could be redefined in development interventions to create a bridge between ever-present realities of power, resistance and struggle.
Co-opt resistance - divert to or use in a role different from the usual or original one - and use it to discipline participants;
- Traditionally, resistance has been understood as a form of ‘asymmetric’ or ‘oppositional influence’ (Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007: 1354), locking it into the activities of sub-ordinates (as opposed to bosses),workers (as opposed to managers) and followers (as opposed to leaders) in a primarily reactive mode of ‘using power to create something that was not intended by those in authority’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2007: 43).
- In this formulation, resistance looks like ‘disguised dissent’ (Collinson, 2005a: 1430) or ‘“noise”, deviance and discord’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2008: 301) and can range from open opposition and confrontation to humour and ‘work-slow’ strategies. Unsurprisingly, the managerial stance has been predominantly orientated at managing and even eliminating resistance.
Prize conformity over dissent.
- Interest in resistance and power has sparked new inquiries in organizational studies (Courpasson etal., 2012; Fleming and Spicer, 2007, 2008; Mumby, 2005; Thomas and Davies, 2005; Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007).
- This work challenges the traditional reliance on power and resistance as oppositional poles in a binary logic, the contrast of subordinates’ resistance with managers’ power, and the manifestation of resistance as either active or passive dissent.
- Such challenges have resulted in a more nuanced understanding of the interdependent, interstitial and multidirectional interplay of power and resistance to create new and complex discourses, identities and relation-ships (Kondo, 1990).
- It opposes research that constructs participants and/or leaders as compliant and that ignores how we simultaneously consent and resist.
- The theorization of resistance has been underpinned by a set of binaries: with power, leaders and control on one side and resistance, followers and dissent on the other. Deeper dualisms such as ‘organized and unorganized, formal and informal, and individual and collective’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2007: 31) along with ‘reason/emotion’ and ‘fixed and fluid meaning’ (Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007: 1340) anchor the distance between resistance and power.
- This kind of binary thinking means more privileged constructs (such as power) shape and tend to marginalize less privileged constructs (such as resistance) (Mumby, 2005).
- What ensues is a way of thinking that ‘artificially divorces’ one con-struct from another and often romanticizes each (Collinson, 2005a: 1420). Kondo’s (1990: 224) description of the impossibility of an ‘authentic, pristine space of resistance’ speaks to the simplistic theorizations that result.
- The alternative to such binary approaches are dialectical forms of inquiry that shift the research orientation from ‘either-or’ to ‘both-and’ thinking (Collinson, 2005a: 1420); to exploring ‘dynamic tension’ and ‘inter-play’ (Collinson, 2005a: 1420); and to understanding dualisms as ‘mutually implicative and co-productive’
Critical organizational scholarship guides us to explore how power and resistance co-exist to the point where it is difficult to analytically divide them.
The leadership development literature has paid scant attention to resistance, yet it seems to us that working with resistance is an energizing and unsettling experience for both facilitators and participants.
Interested in framing leadership development as a site of ‘resisting work’ and exploring how such work can be productive and generative for leadership and learning –without underplaying how fraught this process can be.
Our interactions show either the possibility for, or the reality of, resistance as an act of live leadership within a programme.
Explore how facilitators could work with resistance so that it flourishes as a productive learning, leading and facilitation process.
Building on previous research regarding power relations in leader-ship development, we have sought to explore how power can spark resistance, especially from the participants: yet we acknowledge the asymmetrical power dynamics whereby facilitators often have greater access to discourses of expertise and can allow themselves to be less visible than participants.
Our data suggest resistance worked with productively can result in ‘crucible moments’ (Bennis and Thomas, 2002) of huge significance for both facilitators and participants, provided that both parties hold an ethic of care along-side an ethic of criticality.
Conceptually, this study supports recent research regarding the process and effects of productive resistance in the workplace.
If leadership development mirrors the dynamics of organizations, then working with these concepts raises several questions: what are the relational processes involved as people resist, consent and cope concurrently together?
How do technologies of power and the self-utilized in LDPs become boundary objects able to facilitate realignments of power?
What kinds of resisting work most characterize leadership in organizations?
The leadership development literature has paid scant attention to resistance, yet it seems to us that working with resistance is an energizing and unsettling experience for both facilitators and participants.
Interested in framing leadership development as a site of ‘resisting work’ and exploring how such work can be productive and generative for leadership and learning –without underplaying how fraught this process can be.
Our interactions show either the possibility for, or the reality of, resistance as an act of live leadership within a programme.
Explore how facilitators could work with resistance so that it flourishes as a productive learning, leading and facilitation process.
Building on previous research regarding power relations in leader-ship development, we have sought to explore how power can spark resistance, especially from the participants: yet we acknowledge the asymmetrical power dynamics whereby facilitators often have greater access to discourses of expertise and can allow themselves to be less visible than participants.
Our data suggest resistance worked with productively can result in ‘crucible moments’ (Bennis and Thomas, 2002) of huge significance for both facilitators and participants, provided that both parties hold an ethic of care along-side an ethic of criticality.
Conceptually, this study supports recent research regarding the process and effects of productive resistance in the workplace.
If leadership development mirrors the dynamics of organizations, then working with these concepts raises several questions: what are the relational processes involved as people resist, consent and cope concurrently together?
How do technologies of power and the self-utilized in LDPs become boundary objects able to facilitate realignments of power?
What kinds of resisting work most characterize leadership in organizations?
How can critical leadership practices avoid the reality that resistance acts may be used to constrain or discipline the resisting participant?
What emerged over the course of this inquiry is the proposition that if leadership development sites can reflect, replicate and construct the complexities of leading in organizations, then development interventions could be a practice site of meaningful mindset and behaviour change.
What emerged over the course of this inquiry is the proposition that if leadership development sites can reflect, replicate and construct the complexities of leading in organizations, then development interventions could be a practice site of meaningful mindset and behaviour change.
- Underlying our argument is an assumption that LDPs could very well have a progressive purpose of changing organizational rationalities and realities. Courpasson and colleagues (2012: 806) delineate three core steps of a resistance process.
- The first they call ‘enclave insurgency’ where a temporary and shifting alliance builds from the energy generated by difference. Second, there is ‘temporary realignment of power relations’ (Courpasson et al., 2012: 806) as the enclave and other parties undergo interactions that disrupt each other.
- Finally, there is accommodation, where ‘the co-production of change’ (Courpasson et al., 2012: 802) can take place. Central to this process is an ‘object of resistance’ (in their article this is a memo or letter) that acts as a boundary object in facilitating an engagement between the enclave and other parties.
In order to do this, developing resistance as a leadership practice is vital.
LDPs that are informed by constructionist and critical concepts and pedagogies seem ideal for such a purpose.
This is a big ask, and we are aware that supporting leaders to become more resistant in their organizations is possibly a threatening and risky move for the individual.
Refer back to the three levels of resistance management diagram (Figure 4.8), and critically evaluate Carroll and Nicholson’s approach as an example of level 3.
Facilitating resistance,
‘Cope, consent and resist’. Kondo’s (1990: 224)
Suggest the value of facilitators - claiming resisting work as a core process in development work.
Building ‘a sense of resilience alongside a sense of openness to allow things to happen but to hold on enough, construct the space enough that people know where they’re playing’.
The ethical tension here is between wondering ‘what right have I got to float a truth’, and realizing that some participants instead need ‘the support of nurturing’.
Carroll & Nicholson (2014)
Part 3: When you have completed your personal reflections and the reading, go to the TGF where your tutor will have started a thread for this activity. Be prepared to share some of your own reflections on resistance, and to discuss how they might be used constructively when planning and designing learning and talent development programmes for others. You will also be prompted for your reactions to the Carroll and Nicholson (2014) paper, including whether you empathised with any of the learner resistance being reported, and whether you agreed with the facilitators’ responses to it.
This TGF encourages you to use your reflections on your own experiences as a ‘tool’ for designing HRD interventions for others.
