Radical Organizational Change

Introduction

Understanding organization change is, today, a central question within organization theory. It was not always so. Prior to the 1970s, change was rarely an explicit concern. Instead, most perspectives on organizations assumed change per se to be of modest importance and not particularly difficult to accomplish. Partly, lack of concern with change was because organizational contexts and strategies were relatively stable, making change unnecessary.

Today, it is commonplace to note that the volatility of changes confronting organizations has dramatically increased. Consequently, greater attention is given to understanding two kinds of change. First, there is the traditional concern with how organizations can remain flexible and adaptive, constantly adjusting to shifts in market opportunities. The second concern is variously labelled ‘radical’, ‘archetypal’, ‘divergent’ or ‘quantum’ change and focuses upon whether, and how, an organization can move from one organizational form to another. This chapter is concerned with radical change.

Prior to the mid-1980s, theories of radical organizational change were rare, if non-existent, with the exception of the organization life-cycle model (Greiner 1972; Kimberly and Miles 1980; Quinn and Cameron 1983). Most theories of change were about organizational development or organizational adaptation. Organizational development is about improving an existing organizational form and focuses upon processes inside the organization, emphasizing team building, inter-personal communication and facilitative management (cf, Burke 2002). It fits more comfortably with change portrayed as flexibility.

Despite the absence of formal theories, we still learned about change, but from within the basic perspectives of organization theory. Structural-contingency theory, resource-dependence theory, institutional theory, population ecology theory and so forth each said something about change. Section II reviews these theories and their contribution to our understanding of change. The intention is to outline the theory, not provide a detailed and comprehensive review. One organization theory - network theory - does not neatly fit this historical ordering because it did not really develop until after our pivotal date of the mid-1980s even though its origins were earlier. Nevertheless, we include it in Section II because it more closely resembles the stance of the basic theoretical perspectives in that it is not per se a theory of change.

We note two shifts in emphasis from the 1960s through the 1970s. The 1960s imagined change as non-problematical. Structural-contingency theory and strategic choice theory, the early dominant approaches, hardly discussed change and assumed it would happen when necessary. The behavioural theory of the firm took a less sanguine stance, but still emphasized organizational adaptation. Towards the late 1970s, change became seen as problematical. Resource-dependency theory, configuration theory, institutional theory and ecological theory, each highlighted obstacles hindering change. There was also a shift in focus from the organization to populations or networks of organizations. These later theories outlined how the embeddedness of organizations in their contexts (‘fields’) seriously impeded organizational change. From about 1977 onwards, then, organizational theories portrayed change as problematical and adopted an inter-organizational level of analysis. In an important way, however, the theories differed. Structural-contingency theory, institutional theory and ecological theory saw organizations responding to contextual dynamics. Organizations were reactive, environments determinant. Resource-dependence and strategic choice theories emphasized how organizations could shape, even dominate, their environments.

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