Introduction

In my view, there is today a considerable amount of outdated and unhelpful thinking about the world of organizations. Too many current approaches to organizational change are drawn from a world view that is no longer consonant with the early twenty-first century. Traditional notions of organizations and how to manage them may have suited more stable times, but they do not offer effective solutions to organizations coping with the fast-flowing uncertainties of the modern world. Monolithic bureaucracies with their vast economies of scale seemed appropriate to the industrialized world of the early twentieth century, but they struggled to survive with the transformations brought about by modern technologies and globalization trends. Toby Tetenbaum (1998) lists six major characteristics which, for her, encapsulate these changes.