What can Systemic Thinking Contribute to the Understanding of an Organization in a Process of Growth and Change ‪?‬

INTRODUCTION

This chapter will take the reader to the starting point of this paper which is determined by the question as to which motivation led to choosing the topic of this MBA assignment and in which area of management studies the topic can be located. Furthermore, this chapter will seek to delineate the research area and try to describe which boundaries confine the subject.

Change management is a contemporary subject in management and business studies. There is a vast body of literature on the management of change encompassing numerous recipes and prescriptions on how to turn around organizations, how to induce change, and how to organize, streamline, re-engineer, re-structure organizations. Some of the material is written in an easy-to-read, easy-to-implement fashion. Some of the concepts in the light of academic scrutiny turn out to be business fads(3) . Others, on in-depth study are revealed to be paraphrased ideas from the 1920s and 1930s(4) . And even the more serious accounts of change and managerial intervention - the critique also finds ample evidence beyond 'airport literature'(5) - sometimes are based on over-simplified accounts which retrospectively explain implementing a nouvelle management practice as a veni, vidi, vici: rational, well-planned, coherent managerial action(6) . Finally, to take issue with the distribution of business success recipes, management recipes are often disseminated into the business community through business consultants, "merchants of meaning and beautiful words"(7) . Within the business community there is ample suspicion that consultants arbitrarily come up with new cures to well-known evils every other year - and nothing ever changes.
[...]
_____
3 Pascale (1990:18pp)
4 See e.g. Mumford (1996:46pp) on Mary Parker Follett's ideas.
5 I am indebted to an unknown author for this phrase.
6 Marchington (1995:52pp)
7 Czarniawska-Joerges, quoted from: Björkegren (1994:101)