VSR Models of Change as Normative Practical Theory

This chapter offers a counterpoint to increasingly complex computational models of evolutionary change processes at higher levels of analysis. It explores the value of internal VSR (Variation-Selection-Retention) models as practical tools for managers. Individual change agents may actively and deliberately influence each of the three core internal processes and their balance and connect them with external VSR processes. Individuals may shape the organization’s current and potential future contexts beyond mere external adaptation to creation of novel future states. Broadening traditional assumptions of top-down rational decision-making, we include the potential of human imagination, and emotions of individuals and groups as engines of change as improvements to existing internal VSR models. A normative theory of internal VSR processes offers a practical tool for day-to-day operations of agents interested in understanding and affecting organization change. We encourage academics to bring renewed enthusiasm to teaching internal VSR models of change to practicing managers.

Social Movements and Organizational Change

Organizations are increasingly subject to political demands from outside actors and their own members. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are enabling a flourishing of grassroots social innovations and demands for justice that challenge traditional top-down theories of change. Over the past twenty years, scholars have found that social movement theory provides a useful approach to understanding movements within organizations, movements that target organizations, and movements that create organizations and industries. We review this recent work and propose an account that can help guide future research on the increasingly prevalent tide of politicallyoriented movements within organizations. We conclude that this is an especially promising domain for future research aimed at informing practice.

The Paradox Perspective and the Dialectics of Contradictions Research

This chapter compares paradox and dialectical perspectives on managing contradictions and engages the debate on the further development of the paradox perspective. This perspective provides guidance to managers on how they can increase organizational effectiveness in the face of seemingly irreconcilable tensions. It presents contradictions as persistent, stable, separable, and controllable. The dialectical perspective, in contrast, depicts contradictions as difficult to disentangle from their contexts, continuously changing, and transformed through oppositional processes. While paradox scholars have called for incorporation of dialectics into the paradox perspective, they have done so in a way that preserves rather than challenges or expands the conceptual core of the paradox perspective. This chapter advocates that scholars take a dialectical approach and experiment in establishing a new perspective that sublates the paradox and dialectical perspectives. This contradictions perspective would situate the experience of paradox as one moment in time within a never-ending dialectical process. I briefly discuss the possible outline of this perspective and highlight articles that have moved in its direction.

Historical Currents in Scholarship of Organization Change

Grounded in open system theory this chapter covers the primary contributions to our understanding of organization change since the early work of Kurt Lewin in the 1930s and 40s. Two areas of interest represented the theory and practice back then and since—what to change and how to change organizations. Most models of organizations covered both. Regarding the what models, the organization’s external environment, its strategy, culture, and structure are examples of what has been included. The how models developed mostly from practice with learning coming from experience about stages of the change process such as gathering data, diagnosis, developing a vision and communicating it, etc. The latter part of the chapter brings organization change thinking up to date with three articles that have reviewed considerable literatures. These reviews provide significant information regarding organization change that is evidence based, the importance of an organization’s history in terms of its relevance to effective change, and how leadership has a direct impact on organization change.

Stakeholder Model of Change

This chapter explores the various ways in which opposing and/or contradictory entities unfold and play out with regard to change in organizations. This is undertaken from two different viewpoints. First, from a micro-phenomenological perspective it examines how insights derived from critical theory and other critical traditions have influenced the development of change strategies, interventions, and techniques. Second, at a more macro-level, it explores the extent to which particular schools of thought with regard to organizational change and organization development (OD) have embraced and/or resisted, the inevitable and unavoidable critical challenges and opportunities presented by opposing agents, competing interests, conflicting entities, and contrasting meanings in organizations. The chapter concludes by discussing the scope for, and possible directions of, critical change scholarship and practice in the future.

Entangled Views of Exogenous and Endogenous Change

In keeping with identifying dialectics as one of four model of change, many of the chapters of this handbook identify various dualities as important to understanding organizational change. This chapter focuses particularly on the duality of exogenous and endogenous change (or external and internal change) and considers the various ways in which the two are entangled. It reflects on seven chapters of the handbook that provide a range of perspectives on the issue, and separates the range of orientations into three categories: chapters that take the difference between internal and external as an ontological fact and explore how separable entities interact with one another; chapters in which the difference between internal and external is an analytical process (and which are apparently agnostic about ontological differences); and chapters that reject an ontological distinction between exogenous and endogenous and explore the entangled nature of exogenous and endogenous within a single ontology.

Diffusion of Innovations

The main concepts of the diffusion of innovations represent a hybrid change research and practice paradigm that blends ideas that can now be found in life cycle, evolutionary, and teleological theories of social change. This chapter discusses why the paradigm developed in the ways that it did, including the shortcomings of this approach, especially for studying the role of organizations in change processes. The chapter also examines the rapid rise of dissemination and implementation science as conducted by health services and public health researchers and how those new literatures are related to diffusion. This paradigmatic evolution from descriptive and explanatory studies to intervention research utilizing diffusion concepts is a theme of this chapter, with emphases on organizational implementation of innovations, inter-organizational diffusion, external validity of innovations and how a recognition of the agency of adopters can reshape diffusion study.

Landscape Models of Complex Change

This chapter reviews recent advances in the NK modeling literature conceptualizing organizational change and innovation as a search over a complex landscape. It discusses both strengths and limitations of this perspective and delineates potential for future research directions. The key argument is that the NK model in its traditional form may be exhausting the theoretical insights that it can provide to the field. However, substantial modifications and extensions of the NK model or new classes of landscape models may provide fresh perspectives. Specifically, we consider the modeling efforts that endogenize the landscape construction as the next frontier in this literature. We also discuss several recent studies that incorporate various extensions of the NK model and allow for agent-driven changes to the landscape.

Connecting More Deeply with Life in Organizations

Each chapter in this volume was asked to accomplish three very basic objectives: 1) Current state of research related to the theory; 2) Concrete description with some examples of the theory in practice, and 3) Research-based principles of change (how does the theory suggest change may be promoted and how does it deal with resistance?) This chapter reflects on how the various contributions achieve these objectives, with a particular focus on how they engaged with real organizations and their complexity at a crucial time of social and business environmental changes that stress systems and demand new responses.

Evolutionary Dynamics of Organizational Populations and Communities

Evolution is conceptualized as a multi-level phenomenon (subunit–organization–organizational field–national economy) that links organizational and ecological systems. Analysis of population and community-level evolution emphasizes the roles of institutional change (e.g., industry deregulation, globalization, market reforms), technological innovation cycles (e.g., technological discontinuities, dominant designs), entrepreneurs, and social movements as triggers of organizational variation. Institutional and technological change transforms the dynamics of organizational communities by shifting the boundaries of organizational forms, destabilizing or reinforcing existing community structures, giving rise to consensus and/or conflict oriented social movements, and creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to shape new organizational forms.