·         a ‘rhizomic’ process model of change is set out

·         because these dominant models are couched paradoxically in the language of stasis and equilibrium rather than the language of movement and flux which the alternative ‘rhizomic’ model reflects

A ‘Rhizomic’ Model of Organizational Change and Transformation: Perspective from a Metaphysics of Change

Very briefly summarises the core content of the paper: a ‘rhizomic’ model of change framed by a perspective, or conceptual orientation, which draws on a specific metaphysical viewpoint about change

Using just a few key words, the title summarises for the projected readers what the focus of the paper will be

The idea of calling it a ‘rhizomic model of organizational change’ was inspired by reading Deleuze and Guattari’s Book ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ where the term ‘rhizome’ as opposed to ‘root tree’ logic was used. And since I was particularly concerned to show that change was more fundamental than stability it fitted the image calling it a ‘model of organizational change’

We are not good at thinking movement. Our instinctive skills favour the fixed and the static, the separate and the self-contained. Taxonomies, hierarchies, systems and structures represent the instinctive vocabulary of institutionalized thought in its determined subordinating of flux, movement, change and transformation. Our dominant models of change in general and organizational change in particular are, therefore, paradoxically couched in the language of stasis and equilibrium. This paper seeks to offer an alternative model of change which, it is claimed, affords a better understanding of the inherent dynamic complexities and intrinsic indeterminacy of organization transformational processes.

It is observed that people in general like to use hierarchies and taxonomies in order to think about change and aren’t good at thinking about movement and flux as it occurs in reality. Categories and taxonomies, by definition capture the ‘state’ (i.e., the static condition) of things. So even when words such as ‘process’ or ‘change’ are used, they are thought of in categorical terms. An alternative process model of change will be put forward that is designed to capture more fully these dynamic aspects of change.

The abstract rehearses, in summary, Robert’s overall argument. First comes the warranting: the evidence justifying why an alternative model of change is needed, because existing models tend to be couched in static terms and so miss out on the dynamics of change. Then come the two claims making up the conclusion: 1) that the alternative model will be offered, and 2) that it will enable better understanding of change than existing models.

The abstract was written and revised a number of times as the focus of the paper evolved in its clarity. I am never entirely sure what the final product of my writing effort will be at the outset. In many ways this exemplifies the very kind of truly dynamic and emergent character of ‘rhizomic’ change in living systems. I always start writing a paper with an ‘abstract’ to help me to keep focus. But as I work the argument from introduction deeper and deeper into the ‘meat’ of the matter, I often find it necessary to revise and rewrite the abstract since the focus has now ‘rhizomically’ drifted. For me that is the true nature of research; that you start off not knowing very clearly what and why you feel a need to research and write a paper. Writing a paper is first and foremost about clarifying for yourself what the key issues are. In persuading and clarifying for myself, I am at the same time clarifying for my readership.

As with most manuscripts the feedback from reviewers emphasised the need to be more closely connected with the dominant literature so I decided to incorporate more of the mainstream literature on organisational change. I did not consciously try to summarise and the final draft went through many iterations. When I first started writing I did not even know how the paper would end up. I tend to write in an ‘emergent’ manner.

It has become almost a truism to assert that we live in an age of unprecedented change and transformation, in which the rapidity and irreversibility of such changes are said to be fundamentally affecting every aspect of modern life. It has also become a major preoccupation amongst management and organizational theorists alike to point out that organizations are increasingly finding themselves under constant pressure to creatively adapt and respond to such changes in order to remain profitably viable and/or morally and ethically attractive to a widening spectrum of organizational stakeholders (Kanter, Stein and Jick, 1992; Kilmann, 1989; Nadler, 1998). It is argued that, amidst this bewildering array of socio-political and economic pressures brought about by the increasing complexification of economic and social transactions, the relentless advances of technology, changing cultural attitudes, and shifting ideological and political affiliations, captains of industry and public policy-makers, amongst others, are finding themselves more and more inundated with conflicting and often apparently incommensurable decisional imperatives, which none the less demand some sort of coherent strategic response.

Change is central to modern organizational life, as major theorists in the field have acknowledged. They assert that managers and policy makers are faced with increasingly difficult decisions that they cannot avoid but must somehow respond to.

Provides initial warranting to convince projected sceptical readers that the argument to be developed is of major practical significance and so is worth publishing and reading. Why does the topic matter? Because, according to Robert, it is common experience that the phenomenon of change is widespread and increasingly difficult for managers and policy makers to deal with. Robert shows that he is not alone in believing this. He adds weight to his view by referring to major theorists who share it.

I have a clear structure for my introductions. I firstly set the context or the domain you are contributing to, in my case organisational change. Secondly, you need to know who are the key figures in the field…

It is always much easier to begin with an obvious and almost unchallengeable statement of fact. This is more to persuade the reviewers initially at least since they are the ones who will decide whether or not to recommend acceptance of the paper.

Nowhere is this concern for the changing organizational environment and its effects more emphatically made than in the current literature on the management of change, renewal and transformation (Beckhard and Harris, 1987; Pettigrew and Whipp, 1991; Quinn and Cameron, 1989; Tichy, 1983). There is also a growing realization that our current theories of change are not sufficiently ‘process-based’ to adequately capture the dynamics of change. This has led the American Academy of Management (AOM) recently to call for papers that specifically address the issue of change from a processual perspective. ‘Learning to think temporally and processually’ they maintain ‘are increasingly important skills for scholars and practitioners’ alike (AOM call for papers, July 1998).

Concern about the changing environment for managers is especially strong amongst academics who write about managing change. But there is increasing acknowledgement amongst leading academics that the current change theories don’t capture the dynamic nature of change. So much so that the Academy of Management (the premier US learned society for the field) is calling for papers on the topic.

Extends the warranting about the importance of the topic begun in Paragraph 1. Reference to some key publications of leading researchers on organizational change shows that these authoritative figures have written about their concern that the environment for managers is changing. More specifically, the Academy of Management (a highly authoritative learned society in the field) has acted on this concern by calling for the submission of academic papers that focus on change as a process. Weight is added to this point by selecting a direct quotation. The quotation demonstrates in the words of the Academy of Management journal editor that the topic is important both for academics and practitioners. Using this direct quotation is likely to be more convincing for sceptical readers than if Robert simply made the same assertion.

These publications are generally well known and important reference points for the debate on organizational change. People like Pettigrew, Kanter and Van de Ven are key figures in the field. The AOM [Academy of Management] has the largest membership of management academics in the world and its journal’s circulation is world-wide, so a ‘call for papers’ is a very important reference point for me to anchor my contribution as an attempt to participate in the debate and to clarify the nature of organizational change.

Yet, despite this heightened awareness, the dominant approach to the analysis of change continues to view the latter as something ‘exceptional’ rather than as a sine qua non of all living systems, including especially social systems. There has been little attempt to understand the nature of change on its own terms and to treat stability, order and organization as exceptional states. This is because, for most of us, our deeply ingrained habits of thought surreptitiously work to elevate notions of order, stability, discreteness, simple location, identity and permanence over disorder, flux, interpenetration, dispersal, difference and change. Our understanding of the social world is thereby conceptualized through the overly dominant static categories that obscure a logic of observational ordering based on the representationalist principles of division, location, isolation, classification and the elevation of self-identity. The widespread use of typologies, hierarchies, systems and structures as well as other forms of taxonomic classification in the analysis of organizational reality, for example, is one striking instance of this pervasive tendency in academic theorizing (see for instance, Kanter, Stein and Jick, 1992; Kilmann, 1983; Tushman and Romanelli, 1985; Van de Ven and Poole, 1995; Wilson, 1992). Typologies, taxonomies and classification schemas are convenient but essentially reductionistic methods for abstracting, fixing and labelling what is an intrinsically changing, fluxing and transforming social reality. Whilst they may serve as convenient handles for identifying the different types of organizational change processes observed, they do not get at the heart of the phenomenon of change itself.

Although there is greater awareness of the changing environment for managers, most theorists assume that change is exceptional rather than intrinsic to organizational life. The language they use to classify and analyse change emphasises what is static, rather than what is changing. They can be useful in identifying aspects of change processes but they divert attention from the ever changing nature of the phenomenon of change.

Begins to provide warranting for Robert’s Claim 2 that his model of change will enable deeper understanding of the change process than current process models. Evidence for this claim is that the dominant process models attempt to examine a process through a language which misses a significant part of the phenomenon of change: the fact that it is fluid and always evolving. That language focuses on categorising elements of the change process and so provides a distorted picture of change. It fails to capture how change is an ever-changing phenomenon. This paragraph prepares the way for Robert to position himself as offering something new: an alternative to the established view which adds to our theoretical knowledge of organizational change.

What is wrong about what they [the key theorists] say? Why are they missing the point?  What are their weaknesses?

The key words are ‘temporally’ and ‘processually’. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that most management academics adopt a commonsense view about time and process which process philosophers such as Bergson have examined and elaborated on extensively and which I was familiar with. I wanted to show that despite their genuine intentions, the language of stasis dominated their thought processes.

This paper draws on a relatively forgotten tradition of process philosophers to throw fresh light on to the true nature of change, and to explore genuinely alternative approaches to the understanding of organizational change, renewal and transformation. It pits a metaphysics of change, in which primacy is accorded to movement, change and transformation, against the still-dominant Parmenidean-inspired metaphysics of substance which elevates stability, permanence and order. A metaphysics of change acknowledges the existence of an external fluxing reality, but denies our ability to accurately represent such a reality using established symbols, concepts and categories precisely because reality is ever-changing and hence resistant to description in terms of fixed categories. All representational attempts, according to this view, are forms of human abstraction emanating from our will to order. Representations do not simply correspond to reality. Rather they are simplifying devices which enable us to deal with what would otherwise be an intractable reality indifferent to our causes. Such a metaphysical position, therefore, accepts ontological realism, but rejects epistemological realism in favour of constructivism/social constructionism.

In developing his alternative model of change, Robert will draw on ideas developed through a tradition of process philosophy that is little used nowadays offer insights into the changing nature of change. The metaphysics of change (the study of what is the reality of change is and whether this reality exists independently of perception) construes the world in terms of movement and transformation. It is contrasted with the dominant metaphysics of substance informing most theorists, which emphasises stability and order over movement and transformation.

Here Robert begins to indicate the content of his Claim 1 about putting forward a new ‘rhizomic’ model of change. Having shown that there is a problem with existing theories - they fail to capture the ever-changing nature of change - Robert starts to show how the ideas he will be drawing on in putting forward his model will addresss the changing nature of the phenomenon of change head-on. Implicitly Robert’s approach will solve the problem with existing theories - his Claim 2. He makes the very strong assertion that the philosophical tradition he will drawn on will ‘throw fresh light on the true nature of change’. This provocative statement signals to projected readers that Robert is claiming to be doing something new and important because he is getting at the truth, whereas existing theories have failed to do so.

You can...set out your contribution to filling the gap [in others’ work] and so position yourself as to where you are coming from. It is pointless writing if you don’t have a position. Either you agree with others and so you are developing it further or you are disagreeing and seeking to clarify something. All this should be set out in the introductory section.

In this paper an element of ‘debate’ in Western democracy is the value of point-counterpoint that has been handed down as the modus operandi since the time of the ancient Greeks. Contrast and differences (sometimes deliberately exaggerated) can help initially to locate the central thrust of the argument. We learn through ‘difference’ as much as we do through ‘similarities’. Adopting this theoretical posture alerts the readership at the outset.

This metaphysical ‘reversal’ has radical consequences for our understanding of the fundamental character of organization and change. It implies that what we experience as objective organizational reality is in fact aggregatively built up of interlocking acts of ‘arresting’, ‘locating’, ‘regularizing’ and ‘stabilizing’ arbitrary portions of an intrinsically fluxing and transforming ‘real’ into a coherent, liveable social world. In other words, organization, for process metaphysicians, is an essentially human accomplishment involving the deliberate ‘slowing down’ and fixing of reality. Taken in this light ‘organization’ and ‘change’ must be construed, not as complementary terms, but as intrinsically opposing tendencies which create the inevitable tensions and contradictions that are so vividly displayed in our living encounters with organizational reality. These opposing tendencies provide the necessary creative tensions for the natural process of organizational evolution and transformation to take place of their own volition. This means that an alternative conceptualization of the organizational change process must be formulated which takes into account the inherent dynamic complexities and intrinsic indeterminacy of organization transformational processes. Against the dominant evolutionary, contextualist, and punctuated equilibrium (Kanter, Stein and Jick, 1992; Miller and Friessen, 1980; Pettigrew, 1987; Tushman and Romanelli, 1985; Van de Ven and Poole, 1995) models of change, we offer a rhizomic model of the change process, in which the precarious, tentative and heterogeneous network-strengthening features of actor-alliances are accentuated. In place of the still-dominant bounded ‘systems’ view of social realities, it is argued here that, thinking in terms of the heterogeneous becoming of organizational transformation, the otherness of organizational outcomes and the immanent continuity of organizational traces, will enable us to develop an alternative set of conceptual lenses for understanding the inherently creative nature of change processes occurring in organizational renewal and transformation.

According to the metaphysics of change perspective, common experience of social reality entails selective interpretation as a series of fixed entities of which is actually continually in flux. The notion of organization implies action to fix and so slow down this inherent flux. Therefore the activity involved in sustaining a sense that an organization is a stable entity is in tension with the natural tendency for change continually to happen naturally. Accepting this view of a tension between organization and change means that an alternative process theory of organizational change must fully embrace the complexities of reality being continually in flux. In opposition to existing theories a ‘rhizomic’ model of the change process will be elaborated which foregrounds concepts of movement so as to understand the creative nature of organizational change.

Provides warranting for making the shift towards a new model by using theoretical ideas from the metaphysics of change to conceive organization as a human accomplishment to slow down reality which is always naturally in flux. Brief reference is made to the evidence of common experience about the tensions and contradictions of change which are consistent with the conception of change he’s putting forward. He refers to several of the existing change process theorists to make explicit that he is positioning himself in opposition to them in offering his alternative rhizomic model. He justifies doing so on the evidence of the metaphysics of change implying that his alternative rhizomic model recognises that reality is continually in flux, which their theories fail to do. Thus he introduces the basis for Claim 2 about his model offering a better understanding than existing models by explaining why it will do so, while introducing some more ideas embodied in the alternative model - Claim 1 - to be elaborated in the rest of the paper.

You have to look at what your competitors are offering, their strengths and weaknesses and you need to think what is wrong with it...You have to know their arguments better than they do and read in detail what they claim and what lies behind the claim and what do they not say? What they don’t say can often be a basis of attack as their assumptions can be questionable. Sometimes they don’t say something because they don’t know the philosophical base. All knowledge claims come from philosophy. You need to dig at the foundations and expose the shakiness of the foundations and argument.

A key idea is Popper’s idea of ‘falsification’ and his emphasis on the importance of ‘disconfirming’ a knowledge claim as opposed to ‘verifying’ such a claim suggest that in writing a paper, one should always look at the implicit assumptions that knowledge claims are based upon and then to show how such assumptions can be challenged and perhaps reversed.

Such a radical departure from the familiar modes of organizational theorizing implies that the very strategies and priorities involved in the ‘management of change’ must be critically reassessed. If we follow the logic of this alternative metaphysics of change to its logical conclusion, it would imply that the management of change must, accordingly, entail, not the deliberate change oriented form of external intervention so much preferred by conventional organizational change theorists and practitioners, but the alternative relaxing of the artificially-imposed (that is, culturally-inspired) structures of relations; the loosening up of organization. Such a relaxing strategy will allow the intrinsic change forces, always kept in check by the restrictive bonds of organization, to express themselves naturally and creatively. According to this understanding, therefore, change occurs naturally and of its own volition once the invisible hand of cultural intervention is removed. Such a metaphysical orientation eschews the control-oriented strategies preferred in conventional approaches to managing change. It is this radical contrast to such popular theories of organizational change and its consequences for the strategies adopted, which are examined in some detail in this paper.

Practical implications of the rhizomic model of change constrast sharply with those flowing from the currently dominant theories. Accepting the metaphysics of change perspective means that change should be managed by relaxing the conventional organizing activity that slows it down. Change should be encouraged to happen as it naturally will, rather than inhibiting change through interventions to control it. The rest of the paper will elaborate on this contrast between the rhizomic model and existing change theories and their practical implications.

Adds further warranting for Claim 2 about Robert’s alternative model offering a better understanding than existing models. He does this by pointing to the practical implications of his alternative approach. He adopts a strongly normative stance, first asserting we must reassess conventional theories. Second, he advocates an alternative practice that follows from his alternative approach: that managing change must operate by relaxing constraints on change and allowing it to happen naturally and creatively, rather than by the conventional reliance on external intervention. Pointing to the practical implications of his alternative model adds evidence warranting that the topic is significant and so worth publishing. Robert finishes the introduction section with a linking sentence indicating that in the remaining sections he’s going to explore the contrast between his approach and its consequences for practical change strategies (implicitly to free up change to happen by moving away from external intervention that slows it down) and the conventional approaches.

Being in management academia, it seems to me always important to try to make the connection between new insights derived from research to help management practitioners deal with their day-to-day predicaments and dilemmas. Perhaps this is because, as an ex-practitioner myself, I am acutely aware that the world of ideas must make a genuine attempt to improve the effectiveness and performance of significant individuals in the wealth-creating process and in so doing make the world a better place for all. It is easy to be cynical, more difficult to be constructively critical.

It is important to remind the reader what the basic argument is at the end of the introduction , and equally importantly to emphasise the practical implications for thinking about how to management change.