Tsoukas, and Chia
Introduction
What would be the benefits if "organizational change," both as an object of study and as a
management preoccupation, were to be approached from the perspective of ongoing change
rather than stability?
- it would enable researchers to obtain a more complete understanding of the micro-
processes of change at work.
- we do not know enough about how change is actually accomplished.
- a major cause of dissatisfaction with the traditional approach to change—the
approach that gives priority to stability and treats change as an epiphenomenon— is
pragmatic: Change programs that are informed by that view often do not produce
change
We start from the assumption that 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 the premise that change is pervasive and indivisible and then see what this
premise entails for our understanding of organizations
Change must not be thought of as a property of organization. Rather, organization must be
understood as an emergent property of change.
The central question we address in this paper is as follows: What must organization(s) be
like if change is constitutive of reality?
Understanding change
the bulk of research has 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
limitation of synoptic view: Given its synoptic nature, it does not do justice to the open-ended micro-
processes that underlay the trajectories described; it does not quite capture the distinguishing features
of change—its fluidity, pervasiveness, open-endedness, and indivisibility.
Concepts are discontinuous and fixed, and, as such, unable to capture the continuously mutating
character of life.
we try to understand change by transforming it into a succession of positions. This tendency is best
illustrated in the case of motion. Motion = getting from A to B.
the stages into which you analyze a change are states; the change itself goes on between them.
How to make sense of change: turn your face toward sensation; bring yourself in touch with reality
through intuition; get to know it from within
Only by placing ourselves at the center of an unfolding phenomenon can we hope to know it from
within.
We normally look at the categories things belong to, rather than things per se
Direct knowledge (intuition)and conceptual knowledge are complementary of each other. One provides
what the other cannot
statements about stability and change should be labelled by reference to some descriptive proposition,
so that the logical type to which "what changes" and "what stays stable" belong, should be clear
Similarly, in the case of organizational routines, at a certain level of analysis— that of the routine itself
—a synoptic account highlights the routine's self-contained, thing-like, and stable character. However,
Introduction
What would be the benefits if "organizational change," both as an object of study and as a
management preoccupation, were to be approached from the perspective of ongoing change
rather than stability?
- it would enable researchers to obtain a more complete understanding of the micro-
processes of change at work.
- we do not know enough about how change is actually accomplished.
- a major cause of dissatisfaction with the traditional approach to change—the
approach that gives priority to stability and treats change as an epiphenomenon— is
pragmatic: Change programs that are informed by that view often do not produce
change
We start from the assumption that 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 the premise that change is pervasive and indivisible and then see what this
premise entails for our understanding of organizations
Change must not be thought of as a property of organization. Rather, organization must be
understood as an emergent property of change.
The central question we address in this paper is as follows: What must organization(s) be
like if change is constitutive of reality?
Understanding change
the bulk of research has 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
limitation of synoptic view: Given its synoptic nature, it does not do justice to the open-ended micro-
processes that underlay the trajectories described; it does not quite capture the distinguishing features
of change—its fluidity, pervasiveness, open-endedness, and indivisibility.
Concepts are discontinuous and fixed, and, as such, unable to capture the continuously mutating
character of life.
we try to understand change by transforming it into a succession of positions. This tendency is best
illustrated in the case of motion. Motion = getting from A to B.
the stages into which you analyze a change are states; the change itself goes on between them.
How to make sense of change: turn your face toward sensation; bring yourself in touch with reality
through intuition; get to know it from within
Only by placing ourselves at the center of an unfolding phenomenon can we hope to know it from
within.
We normally look at the categories things belong to, rather than things per se
Direct knowledge (intuition)and conceptual knowledge are complementary of each other. One provides
what the other cannot
statements about stability and change should be labelled by reference to some descriptive proposition,
so that the logical type to which "what changes" and "what stays stable" belong, should be clear
Similarly, in the case of organizational routines, at a certain level of analysis— that of the routine itself
—a synoptic account highlights the routine's self-contained, thing-like, and stable character. However,
