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Understanding change in organizations in a far-from-equilibrium world

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 9; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

1532-7000

Bob Hodge, Gabriela Coronado Suzán,

Complex Systems and Decision Making

This paper addresses issue of in organizations in new conditions of contemporary world. We argue that linear theories and models still dominant in organizational sciences are inadequate to understand different modalities of today. We deploy Prigogine's concept of far-from-equilibrium dynamics, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and Zadeh's fuzzy logic, to develop more complex and adequate ideas of in organizations. We show value of these ideas for organization studies and theories of postmodern world, illustrating their explanatory power by analyzing aspects of success and failure of Enron, as a case study of organizational in a chaotic world. Introduction Change and occupy a paradoxical place in discourses about organizations. Business people and media they consume talk enthusiastically of and continual revolutions managedby successful businesses, as challenge and opportunity for those who can live with (Hodge &. Coronado, 2005). Tom Peters' 1980s bestseller on theme, Thriving on Chaos, celebrated a new rate of change, seeing chaos per se as source of market advantage, not as a problem to be got around (1987: xii). Yet some writers argue that organization sciences tend to see and emphasize stability in organizations (e.g., Orlikowski, 1996; Tsoukas &. Chia, 2002). It is this tension we seek to explore. We shall claim that scale and complexity of changes facing business and organizations today are even greater than in popular hype, yet in spite of best efforts of some recent writers, organization sciences are still sy stemically ill equipped to provide models for understanding and chaos. Change has always been a feature of world of business, but scale and scope of today have reached a qualitatively new level, requiring a new theoretical framework. That framework, we argue, must look for models and concepts in two areas: from theory on one hand, and theories of postmodernity on other. Invisible in organization sciences In business discourse, change is dragon slain by each heroic incoming CEO, or yoked to his triumphal chariot. Yet organization science as science finds a difficult concept to grasp and theorize, whether to understand or critique this hyperbole. This is substantially because it draws its models and criteria mainly from most influential and prestigious form of science, classical (Newtonian, linear) science. In an important article on which we draw substantially in this section, Tsoukas and Chia (2002) explore surprising invisibility of in understanding apparently unproblematic forms of change. They quote philosopher of science, Henri Bergson (1946: 131), on this paradox: The point is that usually we look at but we do not see it. We speak of but we do not think about it. We say that exists, that everything changes, that is very law of things... In order to think and see it, there is a whole veil of prejudices to brush aside, some of them artificial, created by philosophical speculation, others natural to common sense. For Bergson, a pervasive mindset makes it difficult to see and describe as change, whether evolution or revolution.Tsoukas and Chia focus on problems they see in Lewin's influential three-step model of (1975): unfreezing-moving-refreezing. In this model, movement and occur, necessary and important, but hedged between two stages characterized as stable and immobilized; like blocks of ice, in Lewin's strong metaphor. Tsoukas and Chia deepen their argument by drawing on William James. James noted an intrinsic difficulty, that concepts to describe and everything else are discontinuous, whereas reality is full of continuous phenomena: the stages into which you analyze a are states; itself goes on between them. …