Projecting Backward and Forward on Processes of Organizational Change and Innovation

This essay discusses how views of organizational change and innovation have traditionally focused on planned episodic change that focuses on rational, strategic, top-down and consensus-directed interventions following teleological or regulatory process models. Future scholarship seems to be focusing more on unplanned continuous organizational changes that emphasize experiential, emergent, bottom-up, pluralistic social movements following dialectical and evolutionary models of change. While planned-episodic and unplanned-continuous change may appear to be opposing views of organizational change, they are entangled in one-another, and provide a rich agenda of future scholarship on processes of organizational change and innovation.

Mindfully performed organisational routines: reconciling the stability and change duality view

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a process model on how mindfully performed organisational routines can simultaneously enable organisational stability and organisational change. Design/methodology/approach Via conceptual analysis, the authors develop several propositions and a process model integrating the theory of mindfulness and performative aspects of organisational routines with organisational stability and change. To do so, the authors review the literature on organisational routines, mindfulness, stability, inertia and change. Findings First, the authors demonstrate that, based on levels of mindfulness employed, performative aspects of organisational routines can be categorised as mindless, mindful and collectively mindful (meta-routines). Second, in the process model, the authors position the mindless performance of routines as enabling organisational stability, mediated through inertial pressure and disabling change, mediated through constrained change capacities. Finally, the authors state that engaging routines with mindfulness at an individual (mindful routines) or collective (meta-routines) level reduces inertia and facilitates change. Such simultaneous engagement leads to either sustaining stability when required or implementing continuous organisational change. Research limitations/implications The framework uses continuous, versus episodic, change; future research can consider the model’s workability with episodic change. Future research can also seek to empirically validate the model. The authors hope that this model informs research in organisational change and provides guidance on addressing organisational inertia. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to categorise the performative aspects of organisational routine based on the extent of mindfulness employed and propose that mindfulness-based practice of routines stimulates either inertia-induced or inertia-free stability and continuous change.

Time and Temporality of Change Processes

Theories of organizational change tend to consider episodic and continuous change to be ontologically incompatible. We discuss how their assumed incompatibility stems from different conceptions of time. The main contribution of this chapter is to demonstrate how, by taking an event-based view, the two types of change may be integrated with one another. Continuous change takes place in the present as events in the making, whereas episodic change is marked by events in the past or as projected upon the future. This endogenous view of time as events “from within” enables the ontological gap between episodic and continuous change to be bridged. It enables us to understand how actors evoke previous episodic changes or project future episodic changes while pursuing continuous change in the on-going present. Also, in this view, continuous and episodic change become seen as two intertwined dimensions of interplay along what we call an immanent temporal trajectory.

The Performative “Picture”

This chapter reflects on the previous handbook chapters and considers how our conceptualization of change influences how it is explained, understood, or prescribed. It explores the contrast between the synoptic (or entitative) image of change, which conceives of change as happening to organizations (or parts thereof), and the performative (or enactivist) image, which looks at change from within: how the organization responds to exogenous and endogenous stimuli. By focusing on agency, the performative “picture” conceives of stability as an accomplishment. Even when stability is deliberately perturbed through episodic-cum-planned change, the latter always retains emergence—becomingness. From a performative perspective, when planned-cum-episodic change is initiated, what is worth exploring is how the rationale for change emerges, how it is articulated and connected with diverse narratives of change that may have been available, how diverse agents intra-act, and how possibilities emerge.

Adaptive Performance

COVID-19 has prompted an urgent need for organisations to adapt to continuously changing circumstances. Given the unpredictable challenges, a traditional, tightly planned approach to managing episodic change is likely to be suboptimal. Based on the need to manage continuous change and ensure workplaces are prepared for further unexpected events, it is argued that developing employees' adaptive performance is a better approach. Drawing on the literature identified in Park and Park's recent review of adaptive performance and its antecedents, the authors conduct a parallel review of the managerial implications of these findings. Findings are organised into sections related to employee selection, training, work design, leader behaviour, and organisational climate. Each practical recommendation is reviewed in terms of its feasibility of implementation and likely effectiveness.

Accounting and professional work in established NPM settings

PurposeThe paper problematizes previous research on accountingisation, where the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work is understood in relation to a professional/economic dichotomy and a model of episodic change. The purpose of this paper is to investigate everyday professional work in established new public management (NPM) settings, and proposes a new conceptual framework to analyze the role of accounting therein. The aim is to enable future investigations into how, when and where a situated “bottom line” emerges, by conceptualizing professional work as a process of calculation.Design/methodology/approachQualitative data from case studies of two tertiary level geriatric organizations using observations of 33 employees and four interviews. Data related to patient discharge, and the management of the discharge processes, were analyzed.FindingsFew visible trade-offs between distinctly professional or economic considerations were observed. Rather, the qualification of patients’ status and evaluation of their dischargeability centered on debates over treatment time. Time therefore operated as a situated “bottom line,” to which various other concerns were emergently linked in a process of calculation. Professional practitioners seldom explicitly evoke accounting concepts and technologies, but these were implicated in the ongoing translation of each patient into something temporarily stable, calculable and thus actionable for the professionals involved in their care. The study’s findings have implications for the conceptual understanding of professional work in established NPM settings.Research limitations/implicationsCase study research is context-specific and the role of accounting in professional work will vary due to the professional groups and accounting technologies involved.Practical implicationsThe study’s findings have implications for how to influence professional behavior through interventions in the existing landscape of accounting technologies. The possibility to change behavior through the introduction or removal of individual accounting technologies is questioned.Originality/valueTo date, research on the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work has assumed a professional/economic dichotomy and studied episodic change linked to accounting-oriented reforms. This paper analyses the role of accounting as an on-going process with emergent boundaries between professional and economic considerations.