UK pharmaceutical company CAST STUDY  solution

Read the following case situation and answer the questions at the end. The politics of introducing change : competing 'truth claims'

 Pharma-co is a UK pharmaceutical company. Until the early 1980s it had been a government-owned research laboratory, and by the mid-1990s there was still evidence in part of the company of the technically focussed culture which had historically predominated. During the mid-1990s a decision was made to implement a new information management system. The dominant rhetoric used by the project team to justify the need for change was that the changing nature of their markets required significant changes to be made to improve the competitiveness of their production facilities. An important figure to Pharma-co's project was the World Manufacturing Director, who strongly championed it. When the project started he had been a relatively recent recruit to the organization. As part of Pharma-co's long-term strategy of adopting more commercial and cost-sensitive operating practices a need had been identified to introduce such attitudes to its senior management. The recruitment of the World Manufacturing Director was one of these appointments. Thus his 'commercial' knowledge from working outside of the company was highly regarded by senior management. However, resistance to the proposed changes emerged from middle managers within the production function. They suggested the proposed changes were fundamentally unnecessary, and that Pharma-co could remain competitive through staying focussed on the development and production of technically innovative products. The traditional culture which had been historically predominant within Pharma-co was focussed around production. One of the main factors strengthening the argument of production management was their detailed knowledge of the company's internal manufacturing practices. Thus at the start of Pharma-co's change project there was a highly political conflict between those for and against change which centred on the validity of their knowledge and the way they used it to legitimate their different analyses of the extent to which change was needed.

 Questions :

(a) In situations such as described in the case, to what extent is it possible to objectively evaluate the competing arguments and decide on the 'correct' course of action ?

 (b) What does the different perspectives of the interests group say about the cultural embeddedness of knowledge ? To what extent are the view points of those in conflict derived from the values and ideas of the organizational communities they are embedded in ?