The Strengths and Limitations of a Rational, Strategic Approach to Organisational Change

The Strengths and Limitations of a Rational, Strategic Approach to Organisational Change

Introduction

Following the brief introduction of a model-ideal conceptualisation of

Organisational Goal-Directed-Activity, and the definition within the

perspective defined by this model of such terms like 'rational

(organisational) action system', 'strategy', and 'organisational

change', the first part of this essay presents a non-evaluative

summary of a selection of distinct approaches to organisational

change. Various approaches to strategy are similarly addressed in an

attempt to register and explore some of the links that have been

identified by a number of authors between positions on strategy

reviewed and corresponding approaches to organisational change.

The second part, bypassing the rather common practice of partitioning

the set of organisational change approaches into largely

non-overlapping rational and nonrational, strategic and nonstrategic,

subsets, identifies a number of distinct Rational and/or Strategic

Modes, associates them with the approaches to organisational change

reviewed in the first part, and attempts an integrated appraisal of

the distinctive strengths and limitations such diverse Modes confer to

the approaches to change that invoke and utilise them.

1. A Model-Ideal Conceptualisation of Organisational

Goal-Directed-Activity, Rationality, Strategicality, and

Organisational Change

When planned and goal-directed, fully rational organisational action,

like any other ideal form of goal-directed-action, relies on activity

generated by the decomposition of a goal-structure, a term that has

been defin...

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