Van de Ven, A.H. and Poole, M.S. (1995). Explaining development and change in organizations.

1. life cycle
2. teleology
3. dialectics
4. evolution

These four theories represent different sequences of change events that are driven by different conceptual motors and operate at different organizational levels.

'Motors' refers to the drivers or forces that instigate and propel change within a theoretical framework. These 'motors' are the underlying mechanisms that cause development or transformation.

The progression (i.e., the order and sequence) of events in an organizational entity's existence over time.

One type of event, is an empirical observation of difference in form, quality, or state over time in an organizational entity.

The entity may be an individual's job, a work group, an organizational strategy, a program, a product, or the overall organization.

Deveiopment is a change process (i.e., a progression of change events that unfold during the duration of an entity's existence—from the initiation or onset of the entity to its end or termination)

An explanation of how and why an organizational entity changes and develops

The Life Cycle Theory is a perspective that sees organizations akin to living organisms that go through different stages of development:

1. Birth: The organization is created, and its objective and operations are defined.

2. Growth: The organization begins to develop, often rapidly, attracting more resources and opportunities.

3. Maturity: The organization has established its place in the market and operates fully and efficiently, with growth rates typically starting to slow down.

4. Decline: If not adapted or reinvigorated, the organization starts to lose its market relevance, competitiveness or efficiency. Performance declines and resources may become scarce.

5. Death: If decline isn't halted or reversed, the organization may eventually cease operations.

• developmentalism (Nisbet, 1970)
• biogenesis (Featherman. 1988)
• ontogenesis (Baltes, Dittman-Kohli, & Dixon, 1986)
• a number of stage theories of child development (Piaget, 1975)
• human development (Levinson, 1978)
• moral development (Kohlberg, 1969)
• organizational development (Kimberly & Miles, 1980)
• group decision-making stages (Bales & Strodtbeck, 1951)
• new venture development (Burgelman & Sayles, 1986

Change is imminent: the developing entity has within it an underlying form, logic, program, or code that regulates the process of change and moves the entity from a given point of departure toward a subsequent end that is prefigured in the present state.

Unitary sequence: (it follows a single sequence of stages or phases), which is cumulative (characteristics acquired in earlier stages are retained in later stages) and conjunctive (the stages are related such that they derive from a common underlying process).

In terms of institutional rules or programs that require developmental activities to progress in a prescribed sequence. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates a sequence of steps that all firms must follow to develop and commercialize a new drug or biomedical product.

Other life-cycle theories rely on logical or natural sequences in the development of organizational entities.

This perspective holds that change is driven by a purpose or an end goal. Organizations are seen as purposeful and adaptive, moving towards a desired state, and changes are made to reach that state.

• functionalism (Merton, 1968)
• decision making (March & Simon, 1958)
• epigenesis (Etzioni, 1963)
• voluntarism (Parsons, 1951)
• social construction (Berger & Luckmann, 1966)
• adaptive leaming (March & Olsen, 1976)
• most models of strategic planning and goal setting (Chakravarthy & Lorange, 1991)

A repetitive sequence of goal formulation, implementation, evaluation, and modification of goals based on what was learned or intended by the entity.

Because the entity, consisting of an individual or group, has the freedom to enact whatever goals it likes.

Teleology does not prescribe a necessary sequence of events or specify which trajectory development of the organizational entity will follow. However, this theory implies a standard for judging change: development is something that moves the entity toward its final state.

The prerequisites for attaining the goal or end state:

• the functions that must be fulfilled
• the accomplishments that must be achieved
• the components that must be built or obtained for the end state to be realized

These prerequisites can be used to assess if an entity is developing; that is, it is growing more complex or more integrated, or it is filling a necessary set of functions.

The purposiveness of the actor or unit.

The organization's environment and resources constrain what it can accomplish.

This does not mean it stays in permanent equilibrium. Goals are socially reconstructed and enacted based on past actions (Weick, 1979). Influences in the external environment or within the entity itself may create instabilities that push it toward a new developmental path.

Proponents of such theories can at best list a set of possible paths and then rely on norms of decision rationality or action rationality (Brunsson, 1982) to prescribe certain paths.

This theory suggests that change occurs through conflict or contradiction between opposing entities. Change is a result of ongoing tension, conflict, and resolution between different forces or ideas.

The organizational entity exists in a pluralistic world of colliding events, forces, or contradictory values that compete with each other for domination and control.

Dialectical theory begins with the Hegelian assumption.

Stability and change are explained by reference to the balance of power between opposing entities.

Struggles and accommodations that maintain the status quo between oppositions produce stability.

Change occurs when these opposing values, forces, or events gain sufficient power to confront and engage the status quo.

The relative power of an antithesis may mobilize an organizational entity to a sufficient degree to challenge the current thesis or state of affairs and set the stage for producing a synthesis.

In dialectical theory, a synthesis is usually produced through a process that begins with a thesis (a proposition or an established state), which inevitably encounters an antithesis (a contradiction or challenge to the thesis). The conflict between the thesis and antithesis generates a tension or a crisis, which pushes the need for resolution. The resolution of this conflict is a synthesis, also called a new state, that emerges from the interplay of the thesis and antithesis. The synthesis not only resolves the contradictions but also transcends them, incorporating elements of both the thesis and antithesis. Importantly, the synthesis then becomes the new thesis for the next cycle, starting the process again. In terms of organizational growth, this means the organization continually develops and evolves through a series of such dialectical sequences.

There is no assurance.

Sometimes an opposition group mobilizes sufficient power to simply overthrow and replace the status quo. Thus, also, many organizations persist by maintaining sufficient power to suppress and prevent the mobilization of opposition groups.

A win-win solution

Often a win-lose outcome of a conflict engagement

In terms of organizational change, maintenance of the status quo represents stability, but its replacement with either the antithesis or the synthesis represents a change, for the better or worse.

This theory views organizational change as the result of selection processes. Evolutionary change happens gradually over time through a sequence of variation, selection, and retention.

We use evolution in a more restrictive sense to focus on cumulative changes in structural forms of populations of organizational entities across communities, industries, or society at large.

Variations, the creations of novel forms of organizations, are often viewed to emerge by blind or random chance; they just happen.

Selection of organization occurs principally through the competition for scarce resources, and the environment selects entities that best fit the resource base of an environmental niche.

Retention involves forces (including inertia and persistence) that perpetuate and maintain certain organizational forms. Retention serves to counteract the self-reinforcing loop between variations and selection.

Variations stimulated the selection of new organizational forms, but retention maintained previous forms and practices.

Traits are inherited through intergenerational processes.

Traits are acquired within a generation through leaming and imitation

Dialectic

Evolution

Lifecycle

Teleology

1. Single entity
2. Multiple entities

Whether the change in question focuses on the development of a single organizational entity or on the interactions between two or more entities.

1. Prescribed
2. Constructive

A prescribed mode of change channels the development of entities in a prespecified direction, typically of maintaining and incrementally adapting their forms in a stable, predictable way.

First order change

A constructive mode of change generates unprecedented, novel forms that, in retrospect, often are discontinuous and unpredictable departures from the past.

Second order change

A life-cycle model depicts the process of change in an entity as progressing through a necessary sequence of stages. An institutional, natural, or logical program prescribes the specific contents of these stages.

Prescribed

During the life cycle, the immanent form is realized by steps, and although some steps may seem like a radical morphogenic change, there is an underlying continuity due to the immanent form, logic, program, or code that drives development.

Single entity

Life-cycle theory explains development as a function of potentials immanent within the entity.

A teleological model views development as a cycle of goal formulation, implementation, evaluation, and modification of goals based on what was learned by the entity. This sequence emerges through the purposeful social construction among individuals within the entity.

Constructive

Because goals can be changed at the will of the entity and because the prerequisites may be attained in many ways, teleological theories project a situation that is in principle unpredictable and may result in discontinuity.

Single entity

Teleological theories, too, require only a single entity's goals to explain development.

In dialectical models of development, conflicts emerge between entities espousing opposing thesis and antithesis that collide to produce a synthesis, which in time becomes the thesis for the next cycle of a dialectical progression. Confrontation and conflict between opposing entities generate this dialectical cycle.

Constructive

The sequence by which the thesis and antithesis confront and engage each other in a conflict struggle is highly uncertain. The result is a synthesis that breaks the current frame and represents second-order change.

Multiple entities

Dialectical theories require at least two entities to fill the roles of thesis and antithesis.

An evolutionary model of development consists of a repetitive sequence of variation, selection, and retention events among entities in a designated population. Competition for scarce environmental resources between entities inhabiting a population generates this evolutionary cycle.

Prescribed

Statistical cumulation of small individual events to gradually change the nature of the larger population

Multiple entities

Evolutionary forces are defined in terms of the impact they have on populations and have no meaning at the level of the individual entity

(a) the internal development of a single organizational entity by examining its historical processes of change, adaptation, and replication

(b) the relationships between numerous entities to understand ecological processes of competition, cooperation, conflict, and other forms of interaction.

These dimensions classify organizational changes by their consequences or outcomes, rather than by their starting or process conditions.

One advantage of the typology is that it is possible to identify the moto(s) of a change process before it has concluded.

1. First, because the organizational context of development and change extends over space and time in any specific case, it is possible for more than one motor to come into play.
2. A second reason for the complexity of specific organizational change and development theories is the inherent incompleteness of any single motor.

Each ideal type theory describes a generative mechanism or motor of change. Combinations of these motors create, in effect, hybrid change theories.

These "single-motor theories" apply to cases when only one of the four change motors is in operation.

Dual-motor theories because they represent cases when only two of the four change motors are in operation in a given organizational change process.

Tri-motor theories, when three of the four change motors operate interdependently.

Represents the most complex situation when all four generating mechanisms operate interdependently in a given situation.

When no motor is operating.

1. First, it offers a parsimonious explanation of a wide variety of organizational development and change theories.
2. Second, the framework also can serve as a heuristic for critique and reformulation.
3. Third, the framework points out previously unexplored explanations of organizational change and development.
4. Finally, the framework provides a foundation for empirical research.