Conclusions: Changing Organisations

Abstract

The study of organisational change is a narrow and rather technical specialism. In this concluding chapter, we want instead to focus briefly on issues concerned with changing organisations and, in particular, the relationship between theories and practices. That must begin with an attempt to reflect on what we can learn from the growth of large-scale enterprise and the development of organisational theories. How have ‘practitioners’ used theories and how and why have they changed? But more than this, questions need to be asked about the possibilities for new forms of oranisation. Whyte’s call in Organisation Man for the individual to fight a lonely battle against conformity was never going to get very far. Individuals already did and still do. But the capacity to change realities is partly dependent on the availability of alternative models of behaviour and structure. For the organisational participant in normal circumstances, such alternatives are inevitably restricted by their experience and the tendency to take what exists as natural, though constraining.