Strategic Management

Organizational discontinuity: Evolutionary, revolutionary and re-evolutionary change
Paper presented at the 25th Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism “Signs of the future: Management, messianism, catastrophe” 1-4 July 2007, Ljubljana, Slovenia by Dr. Jürgen Deeg University of Hagen, Germany Faculty of Economics and Business Administration Chair of Business Administration, Leadership and Organization Profilstr. 8, 58084 Hagen e-mail: [e-mail] Abstract: Facing an age of tremendous change and transformation, the ability to cope with such radically, i.e. discontinuous changing contexts is now a key variable for organizational success, performance and growth. Consequently organizational discontinuity is not only a major challenge in present organizational practices, but also a “true test” for organization science. While it is highly questionable whether organization science has read the signs of the future in this respect, the paper pursues a critical study of the organizational change discourse and provides an integrated view of organizational discontinuity as the epitome of future change processes. As the changing nature of change towards more discontinuity requires new ideas and visions for the analysis and explanation of this different kind of organizational change, the paper tries to integrate the opposite paradigms of determinism and voluntarism in organizational change discussion with a paralogic method. By combining continuous and discontinuous aspects of change and focussing on change and stability, an integrated perspective of organizational discontinuity is outlined. Viewed in such a perspective, organizational discontinuity is an intermittent interplay of order and disorder, which can be explained by evolutionary and revolutionary theories of change linked together in a model of “constructive destruction”. Furthermore a “re-evolutionary” perspective is presented, conceptualizing the delicate interaction between evolutionary

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