Transformative agency: The challenges of sustainability in a long chain of double stimulation

The sustainability of innovations and transformations in organizations requires the participation and involvement of all parties. This paper addresses the question of the sustainability of participants' transformative agency in a work unit. The sustainability of transformative agency can easily be diminished by activities becoming routine-like after a formative intervention ends. However, can employees maintain and develop their transformative agency by sustaining the principle of double stimulation initially used in the formative intervention? In this paper a qualitative analysis of double stimulation and the method of analyzing discursive expressions of transformative agency are integrated to look at the sustainability of transformative agency. The double stimulation setting emerged as a process during which the employees constructed the first stimulus explicating the need for participatory development of their work activity. The second stimulus was constructed in a longitudinal process of designing a meeting practice with the help of material artifacts and instruments. The continuous use of the second stimulus enabled the sustainability of transformative agency. Based on our findings we suggest that it is possible to sustain transformative agency when employees, with the help of a durable yet flexible second stimulus, persistently keep identifying problems and constructing means to solve their problems after the formative intervention.