A ‘Rhizomic’ Model of Organizational Change and Transformation: Perspective from a Metaphysics of Change
| Author | Robert Chia |
| Published date | 01 September 1999 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.00128 |
| Date | 01 September 1999 |
Introduction
It has become almost a truism to assert that we
live in an age of unprecedented change and trans-
formation, in which the rapidity and irreversibil-
ity of such changes are said to be fundamentally
affecting every aspect of modern life. It has also
become a major preoccupation amongst manage-
ment and organizational theorists alike to point out
that organizations are increasingly finding them-
selves under constant pressure to creatively adapt
and respond to such changes in order to remain
profitably viable and/or morally and ethically
attractive to a widening spectrum of organiza-
tional stakeholders (Kanter, Stein and Jick, 1992;
Kilmann, 1989; Nadler, 1998). It is argued that,
amidst this bewildering array of socio-political
and economic pressures brought about by the
increasing complexification of economic and
social transactions, the relentless advances of
technology, changing cultural attitudes, and shift-
ing ideological and political affiliations, captains
of industry and public policy-makers, amongst
others, are finding themselves more and more
inundated with conflicting and often apparently
incommensurable decisional imperatives, which
none the less demand some sort of coherent stra-
tegic response.
Nowhere is this concern for the changing
organizational environment and its effects more
emphatically made than in the current literature
on the management of change, renewal and trans-
formation (Beckhard and Harris, 1987; Pettigrew
and Whipp, 1991; Quinn and Cameron, 1989;
Tichy, 1983). There is also a growing realization
that our current theories of change are not
sufficiently ‘process-based’ to adequately capture
the dynamics of change. This has led the American
Academy of Management (AOM) recently to call
for papers that specifically address the issue of
change from a processual perspective. ‘Learning
British Journal of Management, Vol. 10, 209–227 (1999)
A ‘Rhizomic’ Model of Organizational
Change and Transformation:
Perspective from a
Metaphysics of Change1
Robert Chia
Essex Management Centre, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK
We are not good at thinking movement. Our instinctive skills favour the fixed and the
static, the separate and the self-contained. Taxonomies, hierarchies, systems and struc-
tures represent the instinctive vocabulary of institutionalized thought in its determined
subordinating of flux, movement, change and transformation. Our dominant models of
change in general and organizational change in particular are, therefore, paradoxically
couched in the language of stasis and equilibrium. This paper seeks to offer an alter-
native model of change which, it is claimed, affords a better understanding of the inher-
ent dynamic complexities and intrinsic indeterminacy of organization transformational
processes.
© 1999 British Academy of Management
1An earlier version of this paper was first presented at
the Annual British Academy of Management Confer-
ence, Nottingham University, September 1998. I thank
the two anonymous referees for their constructive
comments, which have helped to strengthen the argu-
ments made in this paper.
to think temporally and processually’ they main-
tain ‘are increasingly important skills for scholars
and practitioners’ alike (AOM call for papers,
July 1998).
Yet, despite this heightened awareness, the
dominant approach to the analysis of change con-
tinues to view the latter as something ‘excep-
tional’ rather than as a sine qua non of all living
systems, including especially social systems. There
has been little attempt to understand the nature
of change on its own terms and to treat stability,
order and organization as exceptional states. This
is because, for most of us, our deeply ingrained
habits of thought surreptitiously work to elevate
notions of order, stability, discreteness, simple
location, identity and permanence over disorder,
flux, interpenetration, dispersal, difference and
change. Our understanding of the social world
is thereby conceptualized through the overly
dominant static categories that obscure a logic of
observational ordering based on the represen-
tationalist principles of division, location, isolation,
classification and the elevation of self-identity.
The widespread use of typologies, hierarchies,
systems and structures as well as other forms of
taxonomic classification in the analysis of organ-
izational reality, for example, is one striking
instance of this pervasive tendency in academic
theorizing (see for instance, Kanter, Stein and
Jick, 1992; Kilmann, 1983; Tushman and Romanelli,
1985; Van de Ven and Poole, 1995; Wilson, 1992).
Typologies, taxonomies and classification schemas
are convenient but essentially reductionistic
methods for abstracting, fixing and labelling what
is an intrinsically changing, fluxing and transform-
ing social reality. Whilst they may serve as con-
venient handles for identifying the different types
of organizational change processes observed, they
do not get at the heart of the phenomenon of
change itself.
This paper draws on a relatively forgotten
tradition of process philosophers to throw fresh
light on to the true nature of change, and to ex-
plore genuinely alternative approaches to the
understanding of organizational change, renewal
and transformation. It pits a metaphysics of change,
in which primacy is accorded to movement, change
and transformation, against the still-dominant
Parmenidean-inspired metaphysics of substance
which elevates stability, permanence and order. A
metaphysics of change acknowledges the exist-
ence of an external fluxing reality, but denies our
ability to accurately represent such a reality using
established symbols, concepts and categories pre-
cisely because reality is ever-changing and hence
resistant to description in terms of fixed cat-
egories. All representational attempts, according
to this view, are forms of human abstraction em-
anating from our will to order. Representations
do not simply correspond to reality. Rather they
are simplifying devices which enable us to deal
with what would otherwise be an intractable
reality indifferent to our causes. Such a meta-
physical position, therefore, accepts ontological
realism, but rejects epistemological realism in
favour of constructivism/social constructionism.2
This metaphysical ‘reversal’ has radical con-
sequences for our understanding of the funda-
mental character of organization and change. It
implies that what we experience as objective
organizational reality is in fact aggregatively built
up of interlocking acts of ‘arresting’, ‘locating’,
‘regularizing’ and ‘stabilizing’ arbitrary portions
of an intrinsically fluxing and transforming ‘real’
into a coherent, liveable social world. In other
words, organization, for process metaphysicians,
is an essentially human accomplishment involving
the deliberate ‘slowing down’ and fixing of reality.
Taken in this light ‘organization’ and ‘change’
must be construed, not as complementary terms,
but as intrinsically opposing tendencies which
create the inevitable tensions and contradictions
that are so vividly displayed in our living en-
counters with organizational reality. These oppos-
ing tendencies provide the necessary creative
tensions for the natural process of organizational
evolution and transformation to take place of
their own volition. This means that an alternative
conceptualization of the organizational change
process must be formulated which takes into
account the inherent dynamic complexities and
intrinsic indeterminacy of organization transforma-
tional processes. Against the dominant evolution-
ary, contextualist, and punctuated equilibrium
(Kanter, Stein and Jick, 1992; Miller and Friessen,
1980; Pettigrew, 1987; Tushman and Romanelli,
1985; Van de Ven and Poole, 1995) models of
change, we offer a rhizomic model of the change
210 R. Chia
2This position is described in a previous paper as
‘becoming-realism’, in contrast to the dominant posi-
tion of ‘being-realism’ adopted by much of the liter-
ature on management and organization studies. For a
more comprehensive argument, see Chia (1995, 1996).
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