Organizational Change as an Orchestrated Social Movement: Recruitment to a Quality Initiative

Abstract

Understandings of organizational change, like organizations themselves, are informed by assumptions of rationality, authority, and functional integration (Meyer and Rowan 1977). The focus is on formal adoption of new procedures and their subsequent implementation. New rules are promulgated, organizational units or formal roles are created, and incentive systems are modified. The process may be messy and contested in practice – organization members may resist and strategies backfire – but these are problems to be sorted out through redoubled authoritative intervention. Many efforts at organizational change are better understood as social movements. In these contexts, a logic of mobilization replaces a logic of authority. Activists seek to recruit adherents and broadcast success. Normative appeals to individual or collective benefits substitute for material resources. The guiding principle is not that leaders will enforce change, but that unmanaged positive feedback can permit new behaviors to diffuse and become self-sustaining. © Cambridge University Press 2005.