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Explaining how and why organizations change has been a central and enduring quest of scholars in management and many other disciplines. The processes or sequences of events that unfold in these changes--such as transitions in individuals' jobs and careers, group formation and development, and organizational innovation, growth, reorganization, and decline--have been very difficult to explain, let alone manage. To understand how organizations change, management scholars have borrowed many concepts, metaphors, and theories from other disciplines, ranging from child development to evolutionary biology. These concepts include punctuated equilibrium, stages of growth, processes of decay and death, population ecology, functional models of change and development, and chaos theory. This variation has created a theoretical pluralism that has uncovered novel ways to explain some organizational change and developmental processes. However, the diversity of theories and concepts borrowed from different disciplines often encourages compartmentalization of perspectives that do not enrich each other and produce isolated lines of research (Gioia & Pitre, 1990). As Poggie (1965: 284) said, "A way of seeing is a way of not seeing."
It is the interplay between different perspectives that helps one gain a more comprehensive understanding of organizational life, because any one theoretical perspective invariably offers only a partial account of a complex phenomenon. Moreover, the juxtaposition of different theoretical perspectives brings into focus contrasting worldviews of social change and development. Working out the relationships between such seemingly divergent views provides opportunities to develop new theory that has stronger and broader explanatory power than the initial perspectives.
Some integration is thus desirable, but it must preserve the distinctiveness of alternative theories of organizational change and development. We contend that such integration is possible if different perspectives are viewed as providing alternative pictures of the same organizational processes without nullifying each other. This can be achieved by identifying the viewpoints from which each theory applies and the circumstances when these theories are interrelated. This approach preserves the authenticity of distinct theories, and at the same time advances theory building, because it highlights circumstances when interplays among the theories may provide stronger and broader explanatory power of organizational change and development processes (Van de Ven & Poole, 1988; Poole & Van de Ven, 1989).
We apply this approach in three parts of this article. On...