ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to engage in a discussion of some of the theoretical perspectives relating to change, and in particular, to consider the contemporary debates that populate the literature on the nature of Organizational Change (OC). It identifies different patterns of change in organizations and discusses the different rates of occurrence of change and its focus. The chapter describes the critical perspective of change in organizations. Although change in organizations may be a constant, the nature of it is not always the same. Within the context of complexity theories, organizations are viewed as natural systems that do not necessarily follow the strategic plans of managers, and within such systems OC is viewed as emergent, unplanned and iterative. Processual theories of OC are based on the assumption that change occurs as a complex, dynamic, non-linear, temporal and emotional process. Implicit and often explicit in the OC literature is the notion that each theory of OC is an improvement on earlier theories.
