SUMMARY - ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change – Tsoukas & Chia
Organizational change is seen as exceptional rather than natural
But in this article: see change as normal condition of organizational life.
Central question: What must organizations be like if change is constitutive of reality?
Change = reweaving of actors’ webs of beliefs and habits of action to accommodate new experiences obtained
through interactions.
Change is ongoing process inherent in human action, and organizations are sites of continuously evolving
human action.
Organizations is secondary accomplishment, in double sense:
First: organization is attempt to order intrinsic flux of human action, to channel it towards certain ends by
generalizing and institutionalizing particular cognitive representations
Second: organization is pattern that is constituted, shaped and emerging from change.
Organization aims at stemming change but, in the process of doing so, it is generated by it.
Change has to be embraced more openly and consistently
3 reasons why its helpful to see organizational change (as object of study and as management preoccupation)
from perspective of ongoing change rather than stability:
1. Enable researchers to obtain more complete understanding of micro-processes of change at work
Exploration of micro-questions is of considerable importance in understanding dynamics of change and
will permit careful assessment of non-linear processes
To properly understand change, one must allow for emergence and surprise, one must take into
account possibility of change having ramifications and implications beyond initially imagined or
planned
2. See how change is actually accomplished
Even if we now that organization moved from A to B, we cannot show how change was actually
accomplished on ground – how plans were translated into action and, by so doing, how they got
modified, adapted and changed.
If you see change as juxtaposition to stability, we tend to lose sight of subtle micro-changes that sustain
and at same time, potentially corrode stability. If we see change as the exception, we underestimate
how pervasive change already is.
3. Major cause of dissatisfaction with traditional approach of change (approach which gives priority to
stability and sees change as exception) is pragmatic: these change programs do not produce change
Change programs ‘work’ insofar as they are fine-tuned and adjusted by actors in particular contexts – insofar
they are further changed on an ongoing basis.
We have to see change as ongoing process to overcome implementation problems of change programs
Main barriers to rethinking change are the ontological and epistemological commitments that have
underpinned research of change. We talk about change as an exception and not as an centrality of socio-
economic life
Orlikowski: change is ongoing improvisation. Change is grounded in ongoing practices of actors and their
experiments with everyday contingencies, breakdowns, exceptions, opportunities and unintended
consequences.
Weick & Quinn: shift from change to changing in vocabulary will make theorists and practioners more attentive
to dynamic, change-full character of organizational life.
Feldman: as long as people perform the routine, there is intrinsic potential for ongoing organizational change.
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,This article: to properly understand organizational change we need to stop giving ontological priority to
organization, thereby making change an exceptional effect, produced only under specific circumstances by
certain people (change agents). We should rather start from premise that change is pervasive and indivisible:
the essence of life is its continuously changing character
Orlikowski, Weick and Feldman do not go far enough
Weick and Quinn are ambivalent about ontological status of continuous change: say continuous is good but not
possible in all organizations such as bureaucracies.
Change is more pervasive than Orlikowski allows.
Change must not be thought of as a property of organization. Rather, organization must be understood as an
emergent property of change. Change is ontologically prior to organization – it is the condition of possibility for
organization.
Central question paper: what must organizations be like if change is constitutive of reality?
To highlight the pervasiveness of change in organizations, we talk about organizational becoming.
Change = reweaving of actors’ webs of beliefs and habits of action as result of new experiences obtained
through interactions.
This is ongoing process to extent that actors try to make sense of and act coherently in world, change is
inherent in human action.
Organization is attempt to order intrinsic flux of human action, to channel it towards certain ends, to give it
particular shape, through generalizing and institutionalizing particular meanings and rules.
At same time, organization is pattern that is constituted, shaped, emerging from change.
Understanding change
Synoptic accounts of organizational change: view change as an accomplished event whose key features and
variations, and causal antecedents and consequences, need to be explored and described.
- Knowledge is generated by approaching change from outside
- Stage model: entity that undergoes change is shown to have distinct states at different points in time
- Useful: provide snapshots of key dimensions of organizations at different points in time + explanations
for trajectories organizations followed
- Limitations:
Does not do justice to open-ended micro-processes that underlay trajectories described
Does not quite capture distinguishing features of change: fluidity, pervasiveness, open-
endedness and indivisibility
Why cannot stage models of change such as Lewin’s U-M-R, incorporate distinguishing features of change?
Concepts are discontinuous and fixed and unable to capture the continuously mutating character of life.
We try to understand change by transforming it into succession of positions.
Change is reduced to series of static positions – distinguishing features are lost from view. While its about
whatever goes on between the positions representing change.
Paradox: for making sense of change it uses series of immobilities; it makes sense of change by denying change
Therefore should dive into flux itself to get to know it from within
We can get to know phenomenon only by placing ourselves at the center of it
Bergson’s and James’s: intuition, knowledge from within and direct acquaintance
Perceiving is more important than conceiving because more likely to be attentive to qualitative differences, to
appreciate experiences and to acknowledge ever-mutating character of life
Whereas concepts help us name and bulk experience and thus obliterate differences, in perception we are
responsive to difference, to change. (feel bump in road because of difference between level of road and level of
top of bump).
The more sensitive one is to differences, ever more subtle, the more perceptive one will be.
Attachment to everyday reality, narrows vision
We get more direct vision of reality and thus begin to really appreciate its dynamic complexity, by occasionally
turning our attention away from practical matters towards reflection
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,Perception has limits:
- Differences can be so small that we cannot detect them
- May have become accustomed to new state before our senses could tell us that it is new
- What we directly experience or concretely engage with is very limited in duration
Looked at synoptically, reality appears more stable than it actually is.
Statements about stability and change should be labelled by reference to some descriptive proposition, so that
logical type to which ‘what changes; and ‘what stays stable’ belong, should be clear.
Both synoptic and performative accounts of organizational change are necessary
Serve different needs
Synoptic: enable us to attain vision of the far and scattered alike, and make us notice patterns at different points
in time that normally escape our perceptions
Performative: through their focus on situated human agency unfolding in time, offer us insights into actual
emergence and accomplishment of change
Given literature is dominated by synoptic accounts
If we want to understand how change is actually accomplished, change must be approached from within as a
performance enacted in time
Organizational becoming
Weick: organizing consists of reducing differences among actors; it is the process of generating recurring
behaviors through institutionalized cognitive representations
For activity to be organized: it implies that types of behavior in types of situations are systematically connected
to types of actors. Activity which provides actors with given set of cognitive categories and typology of actions
Organizing implies generalizing; process of subsuming particulars under generic categories
Generic categories and purposes are socially defined and subject to potential change
Organization is both a given structure and an emerging pattern
Although organization fixes definition of representations for certain purposes, it does not have total definitional
control over them.
Closure of meaning must be effective. Closure occurs but its potentially temporary for 2 reasons:
1. Definitional control is impossible because of organizational interactions with outside world
We have to respond to cases in which we don’t know what to do because its nonprototypical
and thus because of interaction of actors with these situations we change them
Humans have intrinsic ability to interact with own thoughts and therefore draw new
distinctions, imagine new things and employ metaphor, metonymy and mental imagery.
We humans operate in cognitive domain, the domain which we interact with our own
descriptions as if they were independent entities. These interactions give rise to further
descriptions with which we subsequently interact in an endlessly recursive manner. New
descriptions are the result of intrinsically human ability to be reflexive on observer role.
Categories cannot be understood in themselves – they have no essence. They derive meaning from broader web
of background assumptions, experiences and understandings shared in culture.
Concepts stability is conditional on stability of cognitive models shared within a culture.
Still able to make intelligent judgements about problematic cases because we can understand in what ways
they diverge from conditions of prototypicality.
Applications of particular concept in nonprototypical cases have potential of extending radius of application of
concept, thus transforming it.
Summarize:
Most categories are radially structured. They have a stable part made up of prototypical members and an
unstable part made up of nonprototypical members radiating out at various conceptual distances from central
members.
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, Conceptual stability comes from the prototype structure of categories AND the stability of background
assumptions and understandings that define a communal practice.
This makes it possible to talk about clear and unproblematic cases in which we know what to do.
But there are also cases in which we don’t know what to do and these are far from rare.
When members interact with the world, there is a potential for change
Responding to nonprototypical cases requires imaginative extensions beyond central cases to peripheral ones.
2. Organizational closure is only temporarily established because of inevitability of human interactions
Interactions with oneself and interactions with others
Both kinds of interactions tend to be interwoven
Illustrations
Feldman: illustration of how interactions potentially alter established categories
By performing the routine and reflecting on the purpose of the routine, new experiences that actors need to
accommodate, reform, modify and transform the routine
Interactions in increasingly wider context may generate nonprototypical cases, which are dealt with by
extending the categories applied to prototypical cases.
Conclusions and implications
Human agency + social interaction
Organizations are taken to be locally organized and interactionally achieved contexts of decision making and of
enduring institutional momentum
Human agency: actions and inactions of social actors, is always and at every moment confronted with specific
conditions and choices
These conditions are locally made relevant by actors
Ethnomethodological approach: capture dynamism and ever-mutating character of organizational life.
Organizational phenomena are not treated as entities but as enactments.
What looks from outside like behavior controlled by rules and norms is actually a delicate and dynamic series
of interactionally located adjustments to a continual unfolding and working out of just what is going on and
being made to go on, which is to say, the organizing of action. -> organizations do not simply work; they are
made to work.
Organizations are sites within which human action takes place.
Organizational members make their behaviors more predictable by institutionalized categories.
Insofar as organizational members try to reflectively adapt those radially structured categories to local
conditions, they cannot help but modify them, minimally or maximally.
Minimal modification: dealing with more-or-less prototypical cases
Maximal modification: dealing with nonprototypical cases. These extend the radius of application of
organizational category, thereby changing it.
Change is immanent in organizations: in carrying out their tasks, actors are compelled to interact with the
outside world and, thus to accommodate new experiences. and actors having inherent ability to be reflexive,
are prone to drawing new distinctions and making fresh metaphorical connections.
Sensible reality is too concrete to be entirely manageable.
Double meaning of organizations:
- Organizations are sites of continuously changing human actions
Input into human action
- Organization is making of form, patterned unfolding of human action
Outcome of human action
Organizations aims at stemming change but in process of doing so it is generated by it
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