In this quote, Burrell and Morgan draw attention to the interpretative infl uence of a particular “frame of reference” on theory. Such frames are often historical in that history, by its nature, churns out ever-changing sets of social “perspectives, issues and problems”. The history of research into organisational transformation has been subject to the vagaries of social conditions and in the following sections I will describe how changing social conditions have been refl ected in trends in transformation theory. But this

is not the full story. There have also been a number of discernable connective threads that run through the research on radical change.