Page 97 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chapter 5 ■ Theories of change: critical perspectives
not enough? Implementation will lead to costs being incurred. Thus the legitimacy
of the decision process becomes part of the question. This is controversial both in
practice and in the change management literature, for the following reasons:
1 Too often a unitary frame of reference is assumed, i.e. that the interests of all
involved are shared and common, or at least can be reconciled, whether share-
holder, manager or employee and irrespective of gender, ethnicity or religion.
2 The so called classical and human relations schools tended to see external fac-
tors such as economic or demographic change and technology as not man-
ageable in practice.
3 Moreover, proponents of both viewpoints tended not to consider size of organ-
ization as being particularly important.
4 The contingency theorists (and those writing in the Peters and Waterman
genre, popularized by the success of In Search of Excellence (1982)) and others
concerned with corporate culture (from Schein onwards but perhaps not
including some recent contributions), shared one particular assumption. These
observers accept contingencies as given and largely immutable. But this is
clearly not true, not least because organizations can choose where they work
around the world. Thus in time and space given contingencies may indeed be
immutable but organizations can and do choose to respond by reorganizing
globally.
5 Some have attempted to work with these limitations. If a simplistically applied
and objective science cannot resolve these issues then a more complex para-
digm may be developed and here culture models such as that offered by Goffee
and Jones (1998) and Trompenars (2001) and theories of organizational learn-
ing (e.g. Senge (1990)) are of relevance.
6 Clearly it is necessary to construct ideas about change which encompass the
notions of power and politics (e.g. Pettigrew, 1973).

While all of this is of real interest to students of organization and change, and
perhaps even to practising managers, each comprise ways of looking at organiza-
tional reality from a partial perspective, whether of scientific management,

power and politics, technology, individual and group motivation and so on.
But the changes outlined at the start of this chapter have demanded an alto-
gether more flexible response from organizations. The emergence of rapidly chang-
ing markets, and significant changes of consumer expectation and taste require
ever more flexibility of response. Not least I refer to rapid changes to expectations
regarding supply, access, delivery and price. While particularly predominant in the
private sector it increasingly also applies to the public sector . . . healthcare being
the obvious case, at least in those countries with public provision.
It is not difficult to find examples of once great companies which have failed
this ‘test’ of expectation. Thus in an issue of Fortune magazine (February 2006) we
see an analysis of the position of the US automobile giant General Motors.
Having once been a defining organization for US-based global capitalism and
having been the major force in the US market for new cars, with 45 per cent of
that market in the 1980s, it now has only 27 per cent and falling. With an under-
performing automobile business and other substantial liabilities the GM share

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