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First Pages

Chapter

4

What Changes

in Organizations

Learning Objectives

On completion of this chapter you should be able to:

• Understand the distinction between first-order and second-order change.

• Outline alternative concepts of change.

• Identify a range of common changes that confront organizations such as downsizing,

introducing new technologies, and mergers and acquisitions.

• Be familiar with a variety of issues that emerge at the “front line” for those charged

with managing these changes.

• Appraise your ability to engage with such changes in the future.

Some commentators suggest that, whereas organizational change prior to the mid-late

twentieth century was likely to be incremental and infrequent, by the latter part of the century such change was likely to be significant and traumatic.1 A study by Meyer, Brooks,

and Goes2 provides support to this position. Their study showed how changes in hospitals

in the 1960s were evolutionary and related to a stable environment. During the 1970s and

1980s, the environment changed with mounting concern about health-care costs, which led

to revolutionary strategic and structural changes in health-care corporations.

Other commentators take a different line, arguing that radical or discontinuous change

is not new to the current period but is something that occurred between 1900 and 1950.3

More generally, others suggest that too much attention has focused solely on large-scale

transformational change without appropriate acknowledgment of the role of other changes

in maintaining organizational survival.4

In this chapter, we pick up these issues in two ways. First, we distinguish between

different types of change such as first-order and second-order change. We identify alternative ways of conceptualizing change that try to move beyond categorizing change as

either first-order or second-order. Second, we identify three common organizational

changes that are likely to confront change...