Get help with access Institutional accessĪccess to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. It indicates that the stance they adopt has some unfortunate consequences for the precise assessment and practical management of particular organizational changes.
It posits that none of the four schools of thought take measures to empirically specify the notion of change, but rather advance their arguments from the terrain of a metaphysical stance.
The chapter investigates the way ‘change’ is addressed and evaluated in the organizational development (OD) tradition, the emergent change tradition, the strategic change tradition, and the critical management studies tradition. On the other, change is addressed as an abstracted fashion that can be theorized, categorized, evaluated, and acted upon without further specification. On the one hand, change is represented as an organizational imperative that increasingly appears to trump all other concerns. This chapter addresses one of the most pervasive symptoms of the metaphysical stance: the continuous reference to ‘change’ as an indisputable ontological premise.
