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  • Essay / Environmental Change and Organizational Adaptation

    Organizational adaptation and learning have been widely studied in the management literature. Personality theory of the firm views firms as adaptive learning systems in which many patterns unfold through standard work procedures. Nelson and Winter Season (1982) argue that organizations use "routines" that develop over time and change constantly, but gradually, to adapt to changing conditions: activities that appear to produce results tend to be incorporated in the form of new routines. Almost all of this research indicates that learning and versioning are slow, gradual procedures, and that new capabilities are difficult to create and harmful to modify; Some authors go so far as to suggest that existing capabilities can become “fundamental rigidities” that can prevent an organization from changing. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Greenwood and Hinings (1996) distinguish between radical and simultaneous organizational change by presenting the idea of ​​an archetypal model – a system of interpreting an organization shaped by ideas and values ​​that underlie: “A convergent change occurs within the parameters of an existing archetypal pattern. A revolutionary change, on the other hand, occurs in the organization's actions from one model used to another. They also distinguish between revolutionary and evolutionary change: the former occurs quickly and influences all parts of the organization while the latter is gradual. Similarly, Tushman and Romanelli (1985) distinguish between “convergence” – a technique of incremental change based on existing internal activities and strategic direction, and “reorientations” – simultaneous, discontinuous changes in the strategy, constructs and control systems of an organization. . Although recent research remains consistent on the notion of adaptation as a gradual process by which a company converges towards a reasonable "fit" with the environment and the actors of an organizational field make sense of and manage new phenomena, more and more researchers are studying business adaptation. in the event of significant environmental change. On a theoretical level, business change and adaptation have been widely studied and grouped together. Furthermore, they posit that "recreations are reorientations that also involve a discontinuous change in the firm's primary values ​​and beliefs", and they suggest a punctuated equilibrium model of organizational evolution, where periods of progress converge are punctuated by reorientations that set the direction of organizational evolution. next convergent period. The proposals in the two articles mentioned above have been modified and extended by different experts. We argue that further development of theory relating to organizational change and adaptation requires a finer understanding of different types of environmental change than we have today. Current taxonomies of environmental change are not sufficiently sensitive to the granularity of the partnership between environmental change and organizational change and, as we detail below, this theoretical limitation hinders our ability to realize the full potential of scientific research. A more careful description of different types of environmental changes will help us to.