Organizational discontinuity: Evolutionary, revolutionary and re-evolutionary change
Juergen Deeg, University of Hagen
To assert that we live in an age of unprecedented change and transformation, in which nearly every aspect of life is affected by the rapidity and irreversibility of such changes, has almost become a truism (Chia 1999, p. 209). Thus the ability to cope with such radically, i.e. discontinuous changing contexts is now a key variable for success, performance and growth (Brown/Eisenhardt 1998, Nadler/Shaw 1995). Therefore organizational discontinuity is a major challenge in present organizational practices (Prahalad 1998, p. 14) and a “true test” for future organizational science as well (Mohrman 2001, p. 63). But whether organization science has read the signs of the future in this respect is highly questionable. Not only the scientific discussion of change is extremely fragmented and no commonly accepted theory of change is in sight for such a multifaceted, contradictory phenomenon, rather discontinuous change has rarely been addressed at all. The paper therefore aims at contributing to a radical critique of the organizational change discourse and providing an integrated view of organizational discontinuity as the epitome of future change processes. Such an integrated orientation becomes increasingly relevant as the discussion on organizational change is in many respects and for various reasons substantially inappropriate, insufficient and one-sided and thus cannot address the phenomenon of discontinuity adequately. Firstly change is far too optimistically seen as stable, predictable, and manageable process (Sturdy/Grey 2004, p. 4). Secondly research about organizational change has mainly focused on gradual change (e.g. Organizational Learning as a continuous process; Senge 1990, p. 3) and thereby widely neglected radical forms of change. Thirdly most concepts of change are still based on the equilibrium model (Minzberg/Westley 1992) and regard change as an exception of order and continuity.
Accordingly, the “changing nature of change” (Ford/Ford 1994) towards more discontinuity requires new ideas and visions, on how this different kind of organizational change can be analysed and explained. Having “hope in paralogy” (Czarniawska 2001) the paper tries to integrate the opposite paradigms of determinism and voluntarism in organizational change discussion with a paralogic method. By combining continuous and discontinuous aspects of change and simultaneously focussing on episodes and processes of change and stability, an integrated perspective will be outlined. The paper proposes that with respect to discontinuity incremental and fundamental change do not exclude (Hamel 2001), but rather complement each other. Consequently, organizational discontinuity is seen as an intermittent interplay of order and disorder, where the underlying duality of action and structure constitutes the driving force. As discontinuous processes represent an interrelation of purposeful, enabling vs. erratic, restraining forces, they can be explained by evolutionary and revolutionary theories of change linked together in a model of “constructive destruction”. Thus, a “re-evolutionary” perspective is presented, conceptualizing the delicate interaction between evolutionary (structural) and revolutionary (political) processes. Finally some implications for theory and research on organizational change are also provided. Over all, the paper tries to contribute for the contemporary odyssey in organization science by offering a passage between the rocks of dogmatic determinism and the whirlpools of volatile voluntarism via an integrated view of organizational discontinuity as co-determined, “re-evolutionary” event.
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