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The purpose of this paper is to explore, how organization theoretically diverse research on OCR is actually grounded, since insights into the organization theoretical foundations of OCR are completely lacking.

A selection of 85 articles on organizational change was made, published in top tier journals in 2010. The authors conducted a reference analysis based on 18 prominent organization theories and their main contributing authors.

The findings show firstly a very strong theoretical selectivity, focusing on cognitive, learning, and neo-institutional theories. Other theories are almost fully neglected. Secondly, this analysis suggests that current OCR struggles hard with transforming the cognitive frames of topical OT into fruitful accesses to the own object. The resulting theory application appears as a dissatisfying escape strategy, performed to cover theoretical antagonisms and to avoid a deeper confrontation with the underlying assumptions of OCR.

The authors are fully aware that the depth of their analysis is worth broadening. A more comparable scope in the amount of the theories, journals, articles, and of the covered time span would help to substantiate their results.

Pragmatic change approaches rely strongly on organizational change research. If OCR itself is not topical in terms of using available theoretical knowledge, pragmatic approaches fail to stand on solid ground. The paper therefore provides a background for the link between failing empirical change projects and the usage of available scientific knowledge.

An analysis of the organization theoretical topicality of organizational change research is completely missing. The paper therefore not only contributes to the discovery of a blind spot in organizational studies, it possibly helps to explore the reasons for the high percentage of failing change projects.

Interdisciplinary research allows us to broaden our sights and expand our theories. Yet, such research surfaces a number of challenges. We highlight three issues – superficiality, lack of focus, and consilience - and discuss how they can be addressed in interdisciplinary research. In particular, we focus on the implications for interdisciplinary work with paradox scholarship. We explore how these issues can be navigated as scholars bring together different epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies within interdisciplinary research, and illustrate our key points by drawing on extant work in paradox theory and on examples from this double volume. Our paper contributes to paradox scholarship, and to organizational theory more broadly, by offering practices about how to implement interdisciplinary research while also advancing our understanding about available research methods.

The process approach to multi-level organizational behavior is based on the assumption that multi-level organizational behavior is processual in nature. This article defines group and organizational processes and their representation as process frameworks. Both functional and inclusional classes of levels exist, each of which has at least five categories of levels. All ten categories are special cases of process frameworks. This article provides examples of each category level, which it uses to illustrate new models of organizational work, extended models of interdependence, a new typology of theories based on their levels of processes, and a new tool for survey research called knobby analyses. After explaining the basic idea of knobby analysis, the article briefly describes the processual theory of the organizational hologram, the use of linear programming, and causal-chain analysis to provide multi-level explanations of employee opinion data. These ideas are embodied in conducting a strategic organizational diagnosis, which is the first stage of organizational design. Organizational design encompasses multiple stages, each of which itself involves multiple, multi-level phenomena and analyses. The basic point is that the processual nature of multi-level organizational phenomena gives more hope for improvements in theory building and their application if one uses the process approach rather than a variable approach.

Scanning both the academic and popular business literature of the last 40 years puzzles the alert reader. The variety of prescriptions of how to be successful (effective, performing, etc.) 1 Organizational performance, organizational success and organizational effectiveness will be used interchangeably throughout this paper.1 in business is hardly comprehensible: “Being close to the customer,” Total Quality Management, corporate social responsibility, shareholder value maximization, efficient consumer response, management reward systems or employee involvement programs are but a few of the slogans introduced as means to increase organizational effectiveness. Management scholars have made little effort to integrate the various performance-enhancing strategies or to assess them in an orderly manner.

This study classifies organizational strategies by the importance each strategy attaches to different constituencies in the firm’s environment. A number of researchers divide an organization’s environment into various constituency groups and argue that these groups constitute – as providers and recipients of resources – the basis for organizational survival and well-being. Some theoretical schools argue for the foremost importance of responsiveness to certain constituencies while stakeholder theory calls for a – situation-contingent – balance in these responsiveness levels. Given that maximum responsiveness levels to different groups may be limited by an organization’s resource endowment or even counterbalanced, the need exists for a concurrent assessment of these competing claims by jointly evaluating the effect of the respective behaviors towards constituencies on performance. Thus, this study investigates the competing merits of implementing alternative business philosophies (e.g. balanced versus focused responsiveness to constituencies). Such a concurrent assessment provides a “critical test” of multiple, opposing theories rather than testing the merits of one theory (Carlsmith, Ellsworth & Aronson, 1976).

In the high tolerance level applied for this study (be among the top 80% of the industry) only a handful of organizations managed to sustain such a balanced strategy over the whole observation period. Continuously monitoring stakeholder demands and crafting suitable responsiveness strategies must therefore be a focus of successful business strategies. While such behavior may not be a sufficient explanation for organizational success, it certainly is a necessary one.

Selznick’s theory of organizations offers a starting point to understand how organizations cohere as social actors. Each organization has a specific character that reflects its commitments to particular constituencies and that embodies certain values. Selznick’s theory explained how character evolves in relation to the formal structure of the organization, stamping an organization with a personality that guides its leaders’ future decision-making and deliberation. This paper traces Selznick’s development of this theory and suggests that his theory is useful for contemporary scholars who are interested in understanding how organizations relate and respond to and potentially shape their environments.

This paper aims to examine the usefulness of organizational change theory for management practice.

The authors present an exploratory, empirical study of managers who were taught organizational change theory as part of a postgraduate degree. Building on the study findings, they analyse managers' subsequent experiences of organizational change; of how they use change theory in practice and the impact on their practice of their earlier formal study.

The paper finds that the complexities of managing change in practice reflect distinctive organizational environments and cultures. The skills and knowledge which managers found most useful were those that enabled them to “make sense” of the organizational change they subsequently experienced. The main impact of their earlier studies was to prompt informative, discursive and reflective approaches to change management.

The paper discusses the implications for future teaching of organizational change and the development of organizational change theory.

The qualitative findings of the study add to, and help to explain, earlier research findings on the questions of how managers' experience change, how they use organizational change theory and its impact on their practice.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a new analysis and understanding of the notion of deinstitutionalization. Deinstitutionalization of taken-for-granted practices as a natural consequence of ever-increasing entropy seems to directly contradict the major institutional thesis, namely, that over time isomorphic forces increase and, as a result, possibilities for deinstitutionalization decrease culminating in the impossibility of abandoning in highly institutionalized fields.

This paper is conceptual in nature. Oliver’s 1992 paper on deinstitutionalization is taken as a key text on the subject and as a starting point for building an alternative theory of deinstitutionalization. More broadly, institutional theory and organizational literature on diffusion/adoption are reviewed and synthesized.

The authors argue that possibilities for deinstitutionalization have been overestimated in institutional literature and offer a revisited account of deinstitutionalization vs institutional isomorphism and institutionalized vs highly diffusing-but-not-institutionalized practices. A freedom for choice between alternative practices exists during the pre-institutional stage but not when the field is already institutionalized. In contrast, institutionalized, taken-for-granted practices are immutable to any sort of functional and political pressures and they use to persist even when no technical value remains, thus deinstitutionalization on the basis of a functional dissatisfaction seems to be a paradox.

By revisiting the nature and patterns of deinstitutionalization, the paper offers a better conceptual classification and understanding of how organizations adopt, maintain and abandon organizational ideas and practices. An important task of this paper is to reduce the scope of application of deinstitutionalization theory to make it more focused and self-consistent. There is, however, still not enough volume of studies on institutional factors of practices’ abandonment in institutional literature. The authors, therefore, acknowledge that more studies are needed to further improve both the former deinstitutionalization theory and the framework.

The authors offer a solution to this theoretical inconsistency by distinguishing between truly institutionalized practices and currently popular practices (highly diffused but non-institutionalized). It is only the latter that are subject to the norms of progress that allow abandoning and replacing existing organizational activities. Deinstitutionalization theory is, thus can be applied to popular practices that are subject to reevaluation, abandonment and replacement with new optimal practices while institutions are immutable to these norms of progress. Institutions are immutable to deinstitutionalization and the deinstitutionalization of optimal practices is subject to the logic of isomorphic convergence in organizational fields. Finally, the authors revisit a traditional two-stage institutional diffusion model to explain the possibility and likelihood of abandonment during different stages of institutionalization.

This conceptual paper aims to develop a multi-level mental health management framework for project management practitioners (PMPs) in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) project organizations through organizational design theories to extend current knowledge on mental health by revealing organizational, project and external environmental factors contributing to mental health management in AEC project organizations.

A systematic literature review was adopted to propose a theoretical model that integrated five organizational design theories: institutional theory, agency theory, resources-based theory (RBT), contingency theory and complexity theory.

The model reveals permanent organization, project organization and external environment factors for mental health management in AEC project organizations. It further proposed hypothetical interrelationships between elements of permanent organization, project organization, external environment and mental health management indicators to unravel the resultant effects of the interactions on mental health of PMPs.

This research contributes to the body of knowledge by developing a multi-level mental health management framework that identify and shows how combination permanent organization, project organization and external environment elements impact mental health of PMPs in AEC project organizations. It offers a model that offers guidance to practitioners on permanent organization and project organization management practices that can be implemented to improve mental health.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.