ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 briefly introduced the organizational process school, associated with such major authors as Pettigrew, Hinings and Greenwood and Van de Ven, which became prominent in the 1980s and 1990s. It typically examines processes of strategic change (and inertia) over time within organizations. One explanation for the rise of the process school is that it addressed and commented on the major economic and public policy phenomena in this period, leading to major shocks and discontinuous change in the private and public sectors alike in many countries, and certainly in the UK with the Thatcher shock. The process school has certainly been applied to the study of strategic change processes in public as well as private organizations. This chapter first of all outlines and discusses key texts and authors of the process school (6.1), followed by a review of some applications to the study of public service organizations (6.2). Its links with the institutionalist school of analysis are then explored (6.3). The chapter draws out the wider contribution of the process school to the strategy field more broadly in a critical review (6.4), to finally outline a prospective research agenda (6.5).
