The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change

David Boje, Bernard Burnes, John Hassard, David Boje, Bernard Burnes, John Hassard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415556453
• eBook ISBN: 9781136680892
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Organizations change. They grow, they adapt, they evolve. The effects of organizational change are important, varied and complex and analyzing and understanding them is vital for students, academics and researchers in all business schools.

The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change offers a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field. The volume brings together the very best contributors not only from the field of organizational change, but also from adjacent fields, such as strategy and leadership. These contributors offer fresh and challenging insights to the mainstream themes of this discipline.

Surveying the state of the discipline and introducing new, cutting-edge themes, this book is a valuable reference source for students and academics in this area.

Part 1 Planned change and organization development

Introduction.

Bernard Burnes

DOI: 10.4324/9780203810279-2

Though the practice of organizational change is as old as organizations themselves, its emergence as an academic discipline seeking to develop and utilize theory to understand and better implement change is relatively new. Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) is usually considered as the founding father of the discipline. It was Lewin’s creation of ‘planned change’ which transformed organizational change from a collection of idiosyncratic and confusing nostrums into the coherent, theory-based and practice-orientated discipline of Organization Development (OD). Coalescing around planned change, OD emerged in the 1950s and 1960s and went on to dominate the theory and practice of organizational change until the early 1980s. Social, economic and technical changes in the late 1970s and early 1980s led to a challenging of previous views of the nature of organizations and how change occurs (Burnes, 2009). This gave rise to a number of alternative perspectives on change, most notably the processual, emergent and complexity approaches, which are reviewed and discussed in Part II. In particular, these criticized Lewin’s planned approach to change as at best being unsuitable for modern organizations, and at worst fundamentally flawed (Burnes, 2004). It also led to a general questioning of the appropriateness and future of OD by both its detractors and supporters (Greiner and Cummings, 2004). However, nearly 30 years after these challenges began, OD still remains the most widely used approach to organizational change, and one which has spread from its origins in the US to be adopted across the world.

As the seven chapters in this part will show, OD has not stood still. From its inception to the present day, it has continued to grow, adapt and diversify. These adaptations and diversifications have led even its proponents to question whether OD has lost its way and abandoned its original purpose and values. Others, though, see them as appropriate responses to changing times, multiple challenges and different national cultures, which have allowed OD to remain true to its origins whilst maintaining its practical relevance. Central to this debate is the legacy of Kurt Lewin. Is Lewin’s work as relevant now as it was 70 years ago and is it still central to OD?

In Chapter 1, Burnes describes Lewin’s background and examines the development and substance of his planned approach to change. In so doing, he shows how planned change became the core of OD. He also argues that Lewin provided OD with an ethical rationale which focused on the human side of the organization and the promotion of democratic-humanist values. In addition, Burnes maintains that far from being outdated, the organizational challenges addressed by Lewin, and the methods and values he espoused, are still vital for today’s organizations.

Lewin passionately believed that theory and practice go hand in hand. Indeed, it was he who coined the phrase ‘There is nothing so practical as a good theory’ (Lewin, 1943–4: 169). Bargal explores Lewin’s pioneering work in uniting theory and practice in Chapter 2. He focuses on the importance of Lewin’s action research paradigm and its significance for organizational and social change. Bargal argues that in developing action research, Lewin removed the barriers between theory, research and action/action practice. He argues that Lewin led the move from an epistemological approach, which gave priority to formal knowledge (theory and research), to a dialogical (interdependent) approach, which perceived production and utilization of knowledge as a mutual enterprise shared by all parties involved. In addition, Bargal’s exploration of Lewin’s psychological-phenomenological approach to reality shows that Lewin’s work had more than a touch of the postmodern about it.

In Chapter 3, Coghlan extends the discussion of action research by showing that it has important roots and strands that exist outside of OD, e.g. action learning, action science, Appreciative Inquiry, cooperative inquiry and developmental action inquiry. Similarly, he shows that the forms and challenges of OD have developed over time. Despite these separate developments, Coghlan maintains that in today’s postmodern world, the collaboration of OD and action research is, if anything, more relevant than ever before.

It has to be recognized, of course, that the birth and development of OD did not take place in a politically neutral or value-free climate. In Chapter 4, Cooke draws attention to the seemingly paradoxical situation whereby OD, which its proponents saw as a vehicle for progressive social change, came to maturity in the US in the Cold War era. This was a time when many left-leaning, New Deal liberals were hounded by Senator McCarthy and his sympathisers. This made life very difficult for those seeking to promote OD, with its participative-democratic ethos. Cooke shows how the work of leading figures in the creation of OD, Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt, John Collier and Goodwin Watson, was affected by the political climate of their times.

Though the 1950s and 1960s saw OD make major strides in establishing itself as the main approach to organizational change in the US, it has not stood still in the intervening years. In Chapter 5, Rees addresses two key questions which have arisen in OD’s journey from the 1950s to the twenty-first century. First, as it has been applied to a wider range of change situations, to what extent has OD lost its identity and has merely become an amorphous collection of tools and techniques which no longer constitute a distinct, coherent and value-based approach to change? Second, as OD has become a truly international movement, how have practitioners operating in different countries under different national cultures adapted OD to their specific situations without undermining its distinct ethos and values?

In Chapter 6, Bushe discusses Appreciative Inquiry (AI), which he describes as one of the first post-Lewinian forms of OD. He sees AI as having catalysed the subsequent proliferation of Dialogic OD methods that operate outside the Lewinian paradigm. Bushe argues that one of the fundamental underpinnings of AI is that it sees organizations as socially constructed realities which are constrained only by human imagination and the shared beliefs of organizational members. Thus AI seeks to accommodate OD to the rise of postmodern, social constructionist perspectives on organizations. For Bushe, AI offers the possibility of OD practitioners working with organizations to transcend the limitations imposed by their ‘objective’ reality in order to create a new, more favourable reality.

Oswick and Marsham, in Chapter 7, examine the role played by metaphor in shaping traditional and newer forms of OD. Traditional OD, they argue, is based on the twin metaphors of change as a journey and organizations as sick/ill and in need of treatment. However, they see newer forms of OD as being based on the twin metaphors of change as a conversation and organizations as mystery. Oswick and Marsham do not see traditional OD as being superseded by newer forms of OD. Instead, just as Bushe sees social constructionism as helping to renew and maintain the relevance of OD, Oswick and Marsham see traditional and newer forms of OD as mutually supportive. Rather than the two sets of metaphors leading to conflicting outcomes, they maintain that they are complementary.

In summary, the key challenge for OD since its inception has been how to maintain its relevance in a changing world without losing its core values. As such, it has had to expand out from its original concern with the human side of the organization, especially its focus on the effectiveness of small groups, to address the full range of organization-wide and interorganizational issues that modern organizations face. OD has also had to address the changing landscape of the academic debate on the nature of organizations and organizational change, whether this be the processualists with their focus on power and politics, the postmodernists and their multiple realities, or the complexity theorists with their recourse to the mind-boggling mathematics which govern change in the natural world.

Returning to the question posed earlier: Is Lewin’s work as relevant now as it was 70 years ago and is it still central to OD? In the 1980s, the expectation was that planned change and OD would collapse under the weight of the challenges they faced; however, this has clearly not happened. OD has shown a remarkable capacity to address new challenges and incorporate new perspectives. As Bushe shows in Chapter 6, in some cases, this has led to the development of post-Lewinian forms of OD. However, as Oswick and Marsham argue in Chapter 7, these appear to sit side by side with rather than overthrow Lewinian OD. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the last 30 years has been that Lewin’s work, rather than being sidelined, seems to have developed a new relevance. The attacks on his work have led to its being reinvestigated and re-evaluated. This has not only shown that Lewin’s work is still central to OD but also that instead of being replaced by newer perspectives on organizational change, such as postmodernism and complexity, Lewin’s work appears to have remarkable synergies with them (Boje and Rosile, 2010; Burnes, 2005).

The fact that planned change and OD have survived the controversies and challenges that they have faced does not mean that these have been resolved – far from it. However, it does indicate that the battle has not been the walkover it once appeared. This first part of The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change seeks to illustrate and discuss the development, challenges and controversies faced by planned change and OD over the last 70 years. In so doing, the seven chapters in this part portray OD not as a fixed and cohesive whole, but as a developing and contested terrain whose proponents can be as critical of it as its opponents. The key measure of its continuing relevance must be Lewin’s (1943–4: 169) assertion that ‘There is nothing so practical as a good theory’. For Lewin, any approach to change had to be based on robust theory and produce practical results. This continues to be the yardstick by which OD, in whatever form, must be evaluated. It is also the yardstick against which newer approaches to organizational change must be measured if...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction: the emergence of organizational change
• Part 1: Planned change and organization development
• Part 2: Newer approaches to change
• Part 3: Perspectives on change
• Part 4: Change in practice
• Part 5: Key issues
• Part 6: The future
• Postscript: change in a changing world – where now?
• Index