Purpose – The adaptation perspective dominates the issue of organizational change and assumes that organizational inertia increases organizational mortality. This assumption is inadequate to analyze organizational change in risky activities. The purpose of this paper is to underline the...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to make the case, firstly, that democratic leadership, referred to as “leaderful practice,” should be the fundamental form of leadership that characterizes participatory organizational change. The parties affected by change are those engaged who seek to...

Serves as an introduction to the special issue on organizational longevity published in the Journal of Organizational Change Management. The issues of researching and writing about organizational longevity are described and the content of the special issue is related to a theoretical perspective...

Discusses the process of imitation using the vocabulary of translation, taking as an example the temporary organization Stockholm – Cultural Capital of Europe 1998. Describes the process of change in an organizational order that can be characterized as (con)temporary. The description reveals...

Just what is the “self”, the core identity of an organization whose longevity we might want to study? What is it that persists, that has the longevity we are trying to explain? This essay is a reflection on the answers to these questions.

Complementing prior research by Staw et al. (“Threat‐rigidity effects in organizational behavior: a multilevel analysis”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 26 No. 4, 1981, pp. 501‐24), the authors develop a new conceptual model of organizational change, “autogenic crisis”. The...

Brings together some of the empirical findings from a series of action research projects undertaken in a number of engineering companies. Systems concepts were employed with engineers to assist organisational change. The key driver for each programme of change was the implementation of a new...

Looks at a specific variant of systems thinking, called critical systems thinking, which is an approach that was developed in the UK during the 1980s. In particular, consideration is given to “rule‐bound” systems – scenarios where the possibilities for change have been found to be...

New reforms in the public sector mean that many organisations are attempting to cope with turbulent environments. Traditional models of change have been found to be too static and unable to change the “whole system”. Explores processes for changing the whole system for public sector...