Drift During A Flux
Drift during a flux within an organization.
Most of the work of implementing the new designs and enabling the new business models will come naturally as the organization and its work units “get on with business.” However, there is always the opportunity for divergence, and contingencies always arise while the organization is still in flux. In the early part of this transition phase, you will have to maintain a disciplined, well-organized process so that the transition doesn’t “drift.”
Organizational flux describes the state of the internal and external pressures experienced by the organization and the relationship this fluidity has with the changes that the organizational behavior reveals over time. This is part of organizational theory seeking to explain how organizations change, emerge and disappear over time. The organizations are always in a state of flux: it has a large number of fields, forces operating on these fields of relationships and interactions among individuals. It has properties of equilibrium states and disequilibrium motions.
The analytical apparatus similar to physics as applied to organizational systems. A central debate in organizational theory concerns how organizations evolve. There are two diametrically opposing viewpoints. Adaptation theories predict that change occurs as fluid organizations adjust to meet shifting environmental demands, while selection theories predict that change occurs through the differential selection and replacement of inert organizations as environmental demands vary over time. Using a punctuated equilibrium framework to examine organizations’ responses to discontinuous industry-level change. This framework recognizes that the histories of many industries are occasionally punctuated by dramatic exogenous shocks, such as radical technological innovation, social
and political turmoil, major changes in government regulation, and economic crashes. There is a central thesis that states, it is that such environmental punctuations dramatically reduce pressures and rewards for organizational inertia and thereby alter both organizations’ propensities for change and their survival chances the following change.
Finally, it is argued for the development of more temporally sensitive theories of organizational action.
Organizational fields undergo upheavals. Shifting industry boundaries, new network forms, emerging sectors, and volatile ecosystems have become the stuff of everyday organizational life. Curiously, profound changes of this sort receive scant attention in organization theory and research. Researchers acknowledge field-wide flux, emergence, convergence, and collapse, but sidestep direct investigations of the causes and dynamic processes, leaving these efforts to political scientists and institutional economists.
This is organizations can experience drift during a flux.
About the Author
Dr. Jeff Evans
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