Explaining Organizational Change through Generative Mechanisms

Our thinking and methods for understanding organizational change should uncover the multiple processes and the different actors and factors that interact to influence the development of the organization. They should account for its initiation and emergence, its decline, transformation or even termination, along with how it progresses from a lower simpler state, to a higher more complex state. Yet these issues remain largely unanswered, as much research on organisational development and change is comparative static in nature dominated by assumptions that privilege stability over dynamics, and incremental change over discontinuous change. While much progress has been made in developing process accounts of change and innovation, in this paper I discuss the concept of generative mechanisms. I suggest identifying and individuating how these deeper processes or mechanisms attain their causal power helps us better understand the process of change.