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Editor's note: A review by C. Jama Adams of From Transformation to Transformation: Methods and Practices by David Gutmann appeared in Volume 10, No. 2 of the Journal. Dr Guttmann requested that we publish his response. We agreed to do so and also offered Dr Adams the opportunity reply, which he took. Both follow.
The concept of institutional transformation, described in this book, is the result of over thirty years of intellectual and practical learning by experience with various institutions. Such is indeed the coherence that I claim. However it seems that this concept remains unknown to Dr C. Jama Adams.
Putting forward instead the idea better known as ‘organisational change’, he cannot truly get to the issue which is at stake.
In the grip of his prejudices, C. Jama Adams provides here a caricatured judgment of the book From Transformation to Transformaction based on absolute rejection rather than on a contradictory analysis full of nuances.
He accumulates the formal criticisms, considering too rarely my reflection and the concepts presented. The accumulation of negative comments kills any constructive criticism.
In other words, rather than trying to understand the process of transformation, as we conceive it, and to comment on it better in the riddle of the criticism, he tries to empty it of its substance by presenting it in a very superficial way, as if the heart of the book was denied in its essence. He fails to understand the difference between the conduct of change in an organisational environment and institutional transformation.
Anyone may certainly question the attempt to think innovatively proposed here and take refuge in the more conventional academicism: this is not new.
Therefore, Adams is contesting both the continuity and the evolution of a stream of thought which has adapted and questioned