Explaining Development and Change in Organizations

@article{Ven1995ExplainingDA,
  title={Explaining Development and Change in Organizations},
  author={Andrew H. Van de Ven and Marshall Scott Poole},
  journal={Academy of Management Review},
  year={1995},
  volume={20},
  pages={510-540}
}
This article introduces four basic theories that may serve as building blocks for explaining processes of change in organizations: life cycle, teleology, dialectics, and evolution. These four theories represent different sequences of change events that are driven by different conceptual motors and operate at different organizational levels. This article identifies the circumstances when each theory applies and proposes how interplay among the theories produces a wide variety of more complex… 
View via Publisher
web.mit.edu
3,453 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
233
Background Citations
1,224
Methods Citations
267
Results Citations
30

3,453 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

Breakdowns in Implementing Models of Organization Change
Executive Overview Practice theories of implementing change are lagging behind process theories of organizational change and development. To address this gap, this paper examines common breakdowns in…
Pathways of Change: Organizations in Transition
This article discusses and illustrates organizational changes as initiated by ownership transition. It develops and elaborates three different pathways that organizations might follow through the…
A System Dynamics Model of Planned Organizational Change
TLDR
It is suggested that an induction of change program leads to contemporary impairment of organizational performance in the form of initial dip in processes of planned change.
Critical Perceptions of Organisational Change
Abstract The literature on change management and organisation development contains several established typologies of change. These categories are primarily important to change theorists to understand…
Toward a Theory of Organizational Cultural Evolution
This article proposes a theoretical framework for elucidating how organizational culture evolves as an organization goes through its life cycle. This framework reveals that as the organization goes…
Toward a Theory of Organizational Cultural Evolution
This article proposes a theoretical framework for elucidating how organizational culture evolves as an organization goes through its life cycle. This framework reveals that as the organization goes…
Exploring the Organization Environment Link: Change as Coevolution
Building on coevolution theory and existing knowledge about strategic and organizational change, this paper develops a conceptual framework for studying change in organizations as coevolution. The…
Organizational change and development.
TLDR
Conceptualizations of inertia are seen to underlie the choice to view change as episodic or continuous, whereas continuous change follows the sequence freeze-rebalance-unfreeze.
Organizational Discontinuity: Integrating Evolutionary and Revolutionary Change Theories
Facing an age of tremendous change and transformation, the ability to cope with such radically, i.e. discontinuous changing contexts is not only a major challenge in present organizational practices,…
Beneath and Beyond Organizational Change Management: Exploring Alternatives
This essay introduces contributions to a special issue exploring alternative accounts of organizational change management (OCM). It begins with identifying why such alternatives are needed by…
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 95 REFERENCES
Evolutionary dynamics of organizations
The book presents the latest research and theory about evolutionary change in organizations. It brings together the work of organizational theorists who have challenged the orthodox adaptation views…
Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow
Foreword This author maintains that growing organizations move through five distinguishable phases of development, each of which contains a relatively calm period of growth that ends with a…
Models of the Organizational Life Cycle: Applications to Higher Education
A review of models of group and organization life cycle development, this paper also discusses the applicability of those models for institutions of higher education. The paper suggests that an…
REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE THEORIES: A MULTILEVEL EXPLORATION OF THE PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM PARADIGM
TLDR
Models from six domains are compared to explicate the punctuated equilibrium paradigm and show its broad applicability for organizational studies: how it is triggered, how systems function during such periods, and how it concludes.
Research on the management of innovation : the Minnesota studies
This is a reprint of a classic work of research on innovation first published in 1989. Resulting from the Minnesota Innovation Research Program (MIRP), the book includes a revised and expanded…
Suggestions for studying strategy process: A research note
Intraorganizational Ecology of Strategy Making and Organizational Adaptation: Theory and Field Research
This paper presents an intraorganizational ecological perspective on strategy making, and examines how internal selection may combine with external selection to explain organizational change and…
Innovation: Mapping the winds of creative destruction☆
Organizations and Environments
When Organizations and Environments was originally issued in 1979, it increased interest in evolutionary explanations of organizational change. Since then, scholars and practitioners have widely…
The Population Ecology of Organizations
A population ecology perspective on organization-environment relations is proposed as an alternative to the dominant adaptation perspective. The strength of inertial pressures on organizational…
...
...