What Does Organizational Change Mean - 17842 Words

Available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on doi: 10.1006/mare.2001.0176 Management Accounting Research, 2001, 12, 403 435 What does organizational change mean? Speculations on a taken for granted category Paolo Quattrone* and Trevor Hopper†  Despite widespread research on why and how organizations change, what constitutes change is often taken for granted. Its definition is avoided. Studies based on individuals’ rational choice imply that change flows from purposive actions in accordance with an objective, external reality whereas contextualism argues that change results from institutional pressures, isomorphisms and routines. But both depict change as the passage of an entity, whether an organization or accounting practices, from one†¦show more content†¦Post-modernists and historical materialists (Miller and O’Leary, 1994, 1998; Arnold, 1998; Froud et al., 1998), and critical Marxists and Foucauldians (Neimark, 1990, 1994; Hoskin, 1994) have argued over whether accounting transformations represent exercises in rhetoric and ritual rather than practice, and the political implications of methodological choices for whether one is for, against or indifferent to the status quo. Yet despite all this eff ort, this paper will argue, little is known about what change is—its epistemological status is left unexamined. What the concept of change means, whether it can be conceptualized independently from its process and how these factors relate to the practice of accounting is taken for granted and is poorly understood. Latour contends that ignorance of key concepts in scientific analysis is commonplace: We know very little about what causes sciences, technologies, organizations and economies. Open books on social science and epistemology, and you will see how they use the adjectives and adverbs ‘abstract’, ‘rational’, ‘systematic’, ‘universal’, ‘total’, ‘complex’. Look for the ones that try to explain the nouns ‘abstraction’, ‘rationality’, ‘systems’, ‘universe’, ‘science’, ‘organization’, ‘totality’, ‘complexity’, without ever using the corresponding adjectives or adverbs, and you will be lucky to find a dozen. Paradoxically we know more about the Achuar, the Arapesh or the Alladians than we know aboutShow MoreRelatedThe School Of Public And Environmental Affairs1568 Words   |  7 PagesChange is to make the form, nature, content, future course, etc. of something different from what it is or from what it would be left alone (notes). 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