Recent analyses of organizational change suggest a growing concern with the tempo of change, understood as the characteristic rate, rhythm, or pattern of work or activity. Episodic change is contrasted with continuous change on the basis of implied metaphors of organizing, analytic frameworks, ideal organizations, intervention theories, and roles for change agents. Episodic change follows the sequence unfreeze-transition-refreeze, whereas continuous change follows the sequence freeze-rebalance-unfreeze. Conceptualizations of inertia are seen to underlie the choice to view change as episodic or continuous.

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Organizational change and development

We use a dialectical perspective to provide a unique framework for understanding institutional change that more fully captures its totalistic, historical, and dynamic nature, as well as fundamentally resolves a theoretical dilemma of institutional theory: the relative swing between agency and embeddedness. In this framework institutional change is understood as an outcome of the dynamic interactions between two institutional by-products: institutional contradictions and human praxis. In particular, we depict praxis—agency embedded in a totality of multiple levels of interpenetrating, incompatible institutional arrangements (contradictions)—as an essential driving force of institutional change.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4134353.pdf

Institutional Contradictions, Praxis, and Institutional Change: A Dialectical Perspective

This essay examines the major conceptual issues concerning medicalization and social control, emphasizing studies published on the topic since 1980. Several issues are considered: the emergence, definition, contexts, process, degree, range, consequences, critiques, and future of medicalization and demedicalization. Also discussed are the relation of medicalization and social control, the effect of changes in the medical profession and organization on medicalization, and dilemmas and lacunae in medicalization research.

Medicalization and Social Control

The purpose of this study was to review the distinction between formative- and reflective-indicator measurement models, articulate a set of criteria for deciding whether measures are formative or reflective, illustrate some commonly researched constructs that have formative indicators, empirically test the effects of measurement model misspecification using a Monte Carlo simulation, and recommend new scale development procedures for latent constructs with formative indicators. Results of the Monte Carlo simulation indicated that measurement model misspecification can inflate unstandardized structural parameter estimates by as much as 400% or deflate them by as much as 80% and lead to Type I or Type II errors of inference, depending on whether the exogenous or the endogenous latent construct is misspecified. Implications of this research are discussed.

/pdf/the-problem-of-measurement-model-misspecification-in-ou8p7nc8z9.pdf

The Problem of Measurement Model Misspecification in Behavioral and Organizational Research and Some Recommended Solutions.

Organizational climates have been investigated separately at organization and subunit levels. This article tests a multilevel model of safety climate, covering both levels of analysis. Results indicate that organization-level and group-level climates are globally aligned, and the effect of organization climate on safety behavior is fully mediated by group climate level. However, the data also revealed meaningful group-level variation in a single organization, attributable to supervisory discretion in implementing formal procedures associated with competing demands like safety versus productivity. Variables that limit supervisory discretion (i.e., organization climate strength and procedural formalization) reduce both between-groups climate variation and within-group variability (i.e., increased group climate strength), although effect sizes were smaller than those associated with cross-level climate relationships. Implications for climate theory are discussed.

A multilevel model of safety climate: cross-level relationships between organization and group-level climates.

Arguing that current theories of organizational change fail to pay adequate attention to how organizations move from one stable state to another, a model is generated of the organizational transformation process. It is argued that to the degree that organizations are systems of exchange, they may be said to be transformed through a process by which the logics of action that parties bring to the exchange are aligned, misaligned, and realigned. Developing the concept of logic of action and drawing on cognitive dissonance theory, examination is made of how, in the face of a massive environmental shift (in this case, airline deregulation), changes at the institutional level were transformed into changes at the core level. The model is generated from an analysis of qualitative data on the impact of deregulation on labor and management's approach to employee emotional well-being in the airline industry.

The Organizational Transformation Process: The Micropolitics of Dissonance Reduction and the Allignment of Logics of Action

The research for this paper was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (DA 06995-030). Support was also provided by the R. Brinkley Smithers Institute for Alcohol-Related Workplace Studies and the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University. The authors wish to thank Steve Andrews, Edward Lawler, Valerie McKinney, Bryan Mundell, Ronald Seeber, Seymour Spilerman, Pamela Tolbert, and Harrison Trice for their comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Arguing that current theories of organizational change fail to pay adequate attention to how organizations move from one stable state to another, we generate a model of the organizational transformation process. We argue that to the degree that organizations are systems of exchange, they may be said to be transformed through a process by which the logics of action that parties bring to the exchange are aligned, misaligned, and realigned. Developing the concept of logic of action and drawing on cognitive dissonance theory, we examine how, in the face of a massive environmental shift (in this case, airline deregulation), changes at the institutional level were transformed into changes at the core level. The model is generated from an analysis of qualitative data on the impact of deregulation on labor and management's approach to employee emotional well-being in the airline industry.'

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2393939.pdf

The Organizational Transformation Process: The Micropolitics of Dissonance Reduction and the Alignment of Logics of Action

Using a sample of blue-collar workers and drawing from managerial control theory, we derived and tested an integrative model of employee drinking behavior focusing on four key sets of work-related ...

William J. Sonnenstuhl

Papers

The Organizational Transformation Process: The Micropolitics of Dissonance Reduction and the Allignment of Logics of Action

The Organizational Transformation Process: The Micropolitics of Dissonance Reduction and the Alignment of Logics of Action

Driven to Drink: Managerial Control, Work-Related Risk Factors, and Employee Problem Drinking

Job Stress and Blue Collar Work.

Strategies for Employee Assistance Programs: The Crucial Balance