Summary of the paper by Haridimos Tskouas & Robert Chia with the topic: On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change. For the course Organizational Change in the school year 2020/2021.
On Organizational Becoming:
Rethinking Organizational
Change Summary
Authors: Haridimos Tsoukas & Robert Chia
Intro
Traditional approaches to organizational change have been dominated by assumptions
privileging stability, routing and order. As a result, organizational change has been reified
and treated as exceptional rather than natural.
The central questions we address is as follows: What must organization(s) be like if change is
constitutive of reality?
Change = reweaving of actors’ webs of belief and habits of action to accommodate new
experience obtained through interactions. Change is an ongoing process inherent in human
action, and organizations are sites of continuously evolving human action.
Several calls have recently been made to reorient both organization science and
management practice to embrace change more openly and consistently. This is easier said
than done. As Orlikowski admits, “for decades, questions of transformation remained largely
backstage as organizational thinking and practice engaged in a discourse dominated by
questions of stability”.
3 reasons why it’s helpful to see organizational change (as object of study and as
management preoccupation) from perspective of ongoing change rather than stability.
- It would enable researches to obtain a more complete understanding of the micro-
process of change at work.
- As well as not knowing a lot about micro-processes of change, we do not know
enough about how change is actually accomplished. This would provide more
understanding in the “how”.
- Traditional change programs – the approach that gives priority to stability and treats
change as an epiphenomenon – comes with a major cause of dissatisfaction and
often do not produce change.
Understanding change
As several reviews of the literature of organizational change have shown, the bulk of
research have been oriented towards providing synoptic accounts of organizational 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.
Such knowledge is generated by approaching “change” from the outside and, typically, it
takes the form of a stage model in which the entity that undergoes change is shown to have
distinct states at different points in time. Synoptic accounts are useful insofar as they have
, provided us with snapshots of key dimensions of organizations at different points in time,
along with explanations for the trajectory’s organizations followed.
The limitation of synoptic view is that is does not do justice to the open-ended micro-
processes that underlay the trajectories described and it does not quite capture the
distinguishing features of change- its fluidity, pervasiveness, open-endedness and
indivisibility.
Change has been a time-old philosophical puzzle and that’s the reason the distinguished
features of change cannot be incorporated in stage models of change. Our readiness to
transform the perceptual order (what our senses can apprehend) into a conceptual order
(making sense of our experience through concepts) is the cause for the assumption that
space and time infinitely divisible. The trouble with concepts is that they are discontinuous
and fixed, and, as such, unable to capture the continuously mutating character of life. Thus,
the only way to make concepts coincide with life is to arbitrarily suppose “positions of arrest
therein”. So, understanding change by transforming it into a succession of positions. This is
best illustrated in the case of motion.
Motion is getting from A to B. The more “positions” we identify in an object’s movement the
better we describe its motion. The positions do not contain an element of movement and
the stages into which you analyze a change are stages. The change itself goes on between
the positions. By doing this change is reduced to a series of static positions and the
distinguishing features are lost.
James and Bergson: To make up for the loss of the distinguishing, and thus make sense of
change, you need to dive back into the flux itself. Turn your face toward sensation; bring
yourself in touch with reality through intuition; get to know it from within or just simply
don’t think, but look. Only by placing ourselves at the center of an unfolding phenomenon
can we hope to know it from within.
Intuition, knowledge from within, and direct acquaintance make up Bergson’s and James’s
method for apprehending the flux of reality. Perceiving is more important than conceiving
because it’s more likely to be attentive to qualitative differences to appreciate particular
experiences and to acknowledge the 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. For example: I can feel the bump in the road because of
the difference between the level of the road and the level of the top of the bump.
The more sensitive one is to differences, 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.
Perception has limits:
- Differences can be so small that we cannot detect them
- May have become accustomed to new state before our sense could tell us that is is
new
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