OPPapers.com

What Does Organizational Change Mean?

Available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
doi: 10.1006/mare.2001.0176
Management Accounting Research, 2001, 12, 403†435
What does organizational change mean?
Speculations on a taken for granted category
Paolo Quattrone* and Trevor Hopper†
Despite widespread research on why and how organizations change, what constitutes
change is often taken for granted. Its definition is avoided. Studies based on individuals’
rational choice imply that change flows from purposive actions in accordance with
an objective, external reality whereas contextualism argues that change results from
institutional pressures, isomorphisms and routines. But both depict change as the passage
of an entity, whether an organization or accounting practices, from one identifiable and
unique status to another. Despite their differences over whether reality is independent,
concrete and external, or socially constructed, both assume that actors (or researchers)
can identify a reality to trace the scale and direction of changes. This reflects modernist
beliefs that organizational space and time are unique and linear. The paper takes
issue with this and argues that ‘a-centred organizations’ and ‘drift’ should replace
conventional definitions of organizations and change. The arguments are inspired by the
arguments of the sociology of translation and constructivism, and insights from two case
studies of Enterprise Resource Planning system implementations in large multinational
organizations. The latter illustrate how defining change is problematic—as new systems
gave rise to multiple spaces and times within the organizations. The paper traces the
implications of this for control and accounting studies tout court.

c 2001 Academic Press
Key words: ERP; SAP; organizational change; drift; a-centred organization; order;
multinationals; sociology of translation; constructivism.
Address for correspondence: Paolo Quattrone, Departamento de Economía de la Empresa, Universidad...