Organisationspraktiker och målförändring : Exemplet svensk socialdemokrati

Sammanfattning: The thesis emanates from a comparison between three points of time in the history of the Swedish social democratic party (SAP); 1889, 1905 and 1933. The comparison is partly about the political and organizational situation of the party, and partly about the goals the party expressed. The problem that I study, based on this comparison, is the identified changes of the party’s hierarchy of goals.I argue that goal change should be viewed as a process, not as a decision. There is no simple rationality in goal formulations or in the relation between goals and practices where the practices are shaped by the goals.My case shows the importance of the opposite causal direction where the practices reshape the goals. The organization formulates goals and intermediate goals. These are connected to practices directed towards the intermediate goals. The more resources the organization attach to these practices, the more difficult it is to change them and the higher status in the organizational activity they will get. The primary goals can still be important as justification, but their role will be reduced to a ritual rhetoric without practical significance. They will have to be reinterpreted and reformulated in correspondence to the practices in order to regain a practical significance in the activity of the organization. Thereby we have a practical goal change, which shouldn’t be confused with at rhetoric goal change. The rhetoric of the organization can remain unchanged even though no practices are directed towards the rhetorically important goals.One implication of this is that goals cannot be understood by their formulations only. The importance and meaning of the formulations will change over time and should therefore be related to the context and the organization’s position in the organizational field. When we study an organization over time it will be hard to understand it adequately if we don’t relate the organizational changes to the context.