The SocioEconomic Approach to Management Revisited

The Evolving Nature of SEAM in the 21st Century

This volume is part of the ongoing collaboration between the RMC series and the SocioEconomic Institute for Firms and Organizations (ISEOR), a French interventionresearch think tank codirected by Henri Savall and Véronique Zardet. Building on an earlier collaboration on the ISEOR approach SocioEconomic Intervention in Organizations: The IntervenerResearcher and the SEAM Approach to Organizational Analysis (IAP, 2007) Buono and Savall bring together over 30 talented intervenerresearchers to explore and examine the ongoing evolution of the SocioEconomic Approach to Management (SEAM). This volume revisits the application of SEAM in the context of intervention challenges in the wake of the recent economic crisis and the disruptive change that has taken hold across the world. The basic foundation of SEAM built on the idea of strategic patience, the need to undertake holistic intervention in organizations, and the challenge to get organizational members to listen to themselves (through what they refer to as the mirror effect) has remained the same. In response to economic and organizational pressures in the current environment, however, there has been a concomitant emphasis on helping client organizations achieve shortterm results while still maintaining focus on the long term. Many ideas that have become part of the current discourse within ISEOR today were not as explicitly addressed in the initial volume from the destructive effect of the TaylorismFayolismWeberism (TFW) virus, to the need to focus on ways to ensure the sustainability of a SEAM intervention, the growing importance of collaborative interactions between external and internal consultants, and the growing importance of cocreating knowledge with client firms and organizations.