Article 1: On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational
Change (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002)
Abstract
In this paper, we set out to offer an account of organizational change on its own terms. To treat
change as the normal condition of organizational life. The central question we address is as follows:
What must organization(s) be like if change is constitutive of reality? Change is:
The reweaving of actors’ webs of beliefs and habits of action: to accommodate new experiences
obtained through interactions.
An ongoing process: that is to the extent actors try to make sense of and act coherently in the
world, change is inherent in human action, and organizations are sites of continuously evolving
human action.
Organization is a secondary accomplishment, in a double sense:
1. It is a socially defined set of rules: aiming at stabilizing an ever-mutating reality by making human
behavior more predictable. Organization is the attempt to order the intrinsic flux of human
action, to channel it towards certain ends by generalizing and institutionalizing particular
cognitive representations.
2. Organization is an outcome: a pattern, emerging from the reflective application of the very same
rules in local contexts overtime. Organization is a 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.
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Benefits if organizational change were approached from the perspective of ongoing change rather
than stability:
1. Understanding of micro processes of change: it would enable researchers to obtain a more
complete understanding of the micro-processes of change at work. To explore such micro-
questions is of considerable importance in understanding the dynamics of change and will
“permit the careful assessment of nonlinear processes.
2. Understand how change is actually accomplished: Feldman state that change is an emergent
accomplishments; they are flows of connected ideas, actions, and outcomes that perpetually
interact and change in action.
3. Don’t look at change as being pragmatic: a major cause of dissatisfaction with the traditional
approach to change is pragmatic the approach that gives priority to stability and treats change
as an epiphenomenon.
Change programs, like organizational routines, need to be made to work on any given occasion, they
do not work themselves out. Change programs “work” insofar as they are fine-tuned and adjusted by
actors in particular contexts. So long as human actors perform the routines, there is an intrinsic
potential for ongoing organizational change.
In this paper we aim to show that the full implications that follow from Weick’s, Feldman’s, and
Orlikowski’s insights:
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.
What must organization(s) be like if change is constitutive of reality?
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,Structure of the article:
Describe an approach for making sense of change by drawing on, primarily, the writings of
Bergson and James.
Discuss the notion of organizational becoming and explain the sense in which change in
organizations is pervasive as well as how organizations emerges from change.
Outline implications of our view of organizational becoming for theory and practice.
Understanding change
Synoptic accounts view change as an accomplished event. Whose key features and variations, and
causal antecedents and consequences, need to be explored and described. Synoptic accounts does
not quite capture the distinguishing features of change, its:
Fluidity
Pervasiveness
Open-endedness
Indivisibility
We try to understand change by transforming it into a succession of positions. This tendency is best
illustrated in the case of motion (definition):
The occupancy of serially successive points of space at serially successive instants of time
This fails capturing what is distinctive of motion – getting from a to b. Critique on breaking change
down into stages is that by doing so, change is reduced to a series of static positions—its
distinguishing features are lost from view. If an intellectualist understanding of change leads to
paradoxes and, ultimately, denies the very nature of change, what is the alternative?:
Dive back into the flux itself
Turn your face toward sensation
Bring yourself in touch with reality through intuition
Don’t think, but look
Intuition, knowledge from within, and direct acquaintance make up Bergson’s and James’s method
for apprehending the flux of reality. Perceiving for them is more important than conceiving. Whereas
concepts help us name and bulk experience and, thus, obliterate differences, in perception we are
responsive to difference, to change. According to Bateson, our sensory system is activated by
difference. The more sensitive one is to differences, ever more subtle, the more perceptive one will
be. Perception, however, has its limits. There are differences so small we cannot detect; or we may
have become accustomed to the new state of affairs before our senses could tell us that it is new.
From the above it follows that both “synoptic” and “performative” accounts of organizational change
are necessary. They serve different needs:
Synoptic accounts: enable us to attain vision of the far and the scattered alike, and make us
notice patterns at different points in time that normally escape our perceptions.
Performative accounts: on the other hand, through their focus on situated human agency
unfolding in time, offer us insights into the actual emergence and accomplishment of change.
They are accounts of change par excellence.
What is organizational change?
Synoptic accounts Performative accounts
Change is an accomplished event whose key Takes human agency seriously, every
features and variations, and causal process (routine) is a situated
antecedents and consequences need to be accomplishment and they keep changing
explored and described
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, Uses stage models, describing ‘states’ of You have to be perceptive of the
change in different moments in time performative, what actually happens and
Do not capture the distinguishing feature of how that changes
change: its fluidity; its indivisibility Occasionally turn attention away from the
Works with concepts that are based in practical matters (the goals) toward
immobilities, denying change reflection
Appreciate the dynamic complexity
Synoptic accounts dominate the literature.
Understanding change:
Planned change = emergent change
Planned change is not episodic, just another response to exogenous change
Change programmes triggers ongoing change and are integrated in the ongoing/emergent
change, made to work (adapted, interpreted, etc)
Managerial intentionality: “managers need to clear their vision to see what is going on (notice!)
and at the same time help fashion a coherent and desirable pattern out of what is going on
(provide a synoptic account); they need to perceive” (p. 579)
A change program is only a new discursive template to make certain things possible, new
interpretative codes/concepts
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, Organizational becoming
In Weick’s view, organizing consists of reducing differences among actors; it is the process of
generating recurring behaviours through institutionalized cognitive representations. For an activity to
be said to be organized, it implies that types of behaviour in types of situations are systematically
connected to types of actors. Thus, organizing implies generalizing; it is the process of subsuming
particulars under generic categories. The organization is both:
A given structure (i.e., a set of established generic cognitive categories)
An emerging pattern (i.e., the constant adaptation of those categories to local circumstances)
Cognitive categories must be stable enough to be consistently and effectively deployed. However,
such closure, while it certainly occurs, is potentially temporary. Two reasons why definitional control
of organizational representations is limited:
1. Organizational interactions with the outside world: the carrying out of an organizational activity
simultaneously involves the existence of certain generic rules containing a canonical image of the
activity to be carried out (i.e., “If X happens, do Y, in circumstances Z.”) and the noncanonical,
particularistic practices of the actors involved in it, which are consequences of the inherent open-
endedness of the context within which organizational action takes place. To summarize, most
categories (or concepts) are radially structured. They have a stable part made up of prototypical
(central) members and an unstable part made up of nonprototypical (peripheral, marginal)
members radiating out at various conceptual distances from the central members. Conceptual
stability comes from the prototype structure of categories and the stability of the background
assumptions and understandings that define a communal practice. All this makes it possible for
us to talk about clear and unproblematic cases in which we know what to do. Patterns of action
stemming from acting on central cases tend to be stable. But the stability of action is precarious.
2. Humans have the intrinsic ability to interact with their own thoughts: therefore, to draw new
distinctions, imagine new things, and employ metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery. From
the preceding analysis it follows that organizational closure is only temporarily established
because of the inevitability of human interactions—interactions with oneself and interactions
with others (both individuals and objects). The human ability of reflexivity and reinterpretation
and the radial structure of categories render an actor’s web of beliefs continually reconfigurable.
Organizational becoming:
Organizational change as ongoing process instead of the juxtaposition of stability?
Create complete understanding of micro-processes of change at work
o Who, how, when are new organizational templates uncovered, legitimized, created?
o Take into account the ramifications and implications that were not planned yet
happened.
How is change actually accomplished? (instead of looking at a “post-mortem dissection”
Change is always there, we must only care to look
Change programs need to be made to work
So what is change?
What is change? Organizational becoming…
“the reweaving of actors’ webs of beliefs and habits of action as a result of new experiences
obtained through interactions” – ongoing improvisation (Orlikowski, 1996)
Organizing: the attempt to order the intrinsic flux of human action, to channel it toward certain
ends, to give it particular shape, through generalizing and institutionalizing particular meanings
and rules (and sets the framework for further organizing, it is recursive).
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