Boundary activities and readiness for ... - Projekti-Instituutti

Theoretical background
time frame of at least a year. Instead of dealing with just one department or
unit, large-scale change often extends throughout the organization and its
subunits (Ledford & Mohrman, 1993). Large-scale change is contrasted
with smaller changes, described as incremental (Amis, Slack, & Hinings,
2004; Kindler, 1979) or evolutionary change (Gersick, 1991; Greenwood &
Hinings, 1996). Large-scale change is also characterized as discontinuous,
in contrast to continuous change (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997).
During the past decades, multiple schools of thought have examined
planned organizational change, each with their own perspective, focus and
assumptions. Much of the knowledge on planned organizational change
originates in the organization development (OD) movement that emerged
in the 1930s and expanded throughout the twentieth century. The OD
literature depicted how effective change took place gradually by small steps
and incremental adjustments (Dunphy & Stace, 1988). Still, in practice
change was seen to increasingly often take place through dramatic largescale
transformations that could not be interpreted with the traditional OD
lens (Bartunek & Ringuest, 1989; Dunphy & Stace, 1988; Porras & Silvers,
1991). In the late twentieth century, new streams of literature emerged,
discussing large-scale organizational change or organizational
transformation, sometimes referred to as OT in comparison to OD. Many
terms for such large-scale change have been presented, including radical
change (Amis et al., 2004; Huy, 2002; Stoddard & Jarvenpaa, 1995),
revolutionary change (Gersick, 1991), transformational change (Kindler,
1979; Nutt & Backoff, 1997), quantum change (Miller & Friesen, 1982),
second order change (Levy, 1986), significant change (Chrusciel, 2008) and
organizational transition (Marks, 2007). Organizational turnaround has
been used as a label for massive changes in organizations who are in crisis
and whose survival is on the line (e.g. Barker & Duhaime, 1997). Despite the
differences in terminology and focus, all these perspectives portray largescale
change efforts resulting in major changes in the core organizational
dimensions.
A related perspective is offered by researchers of strategic change, who
examine strategy formulation and implementation in organizations (Nutt &
Backoff, 1993). Similarly to studies on organizational change, research on
strategic change examines antecedents and consequents of change, as well
as the change process (Rajagopalan & Spreitzer, 1997). Strategy research
has also touched upon change-related topics with different terminology, for
example, by discussing strategic initiatives (Noda & Bower, 1996; Simons,
1991) and strategic issues (Diffenbach, 1982; Dutton, Ashford, O'Neill, &
Lawrence, 2001; Dutton & Duncan, 1987).
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