Cycles of Organizational Change Author(s): Henry Mintzberg and Frances Westley Source: Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 13, Special Issue: Fundamental Themes in Strategy Process Research (Winter, 1992), pp. 39-59 Published by: Wiley Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2486365 . Accessed: 18/11/2013 04:29 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected] . Wiley and John Wiley & Sons are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Strategic Management Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 93.180.40.141 on Mon, 18 Nov 2013 04:29:41 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 13, 39-59 (1992) CYCLESOF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE HENRYMINTZBERG and FRANCESWESTLEY Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Much of the theory and research about change in organizations, by being presented free of rich context, creates a certain amount of confusion in the literature. This paper seeks to help remedy that situation by developing a comprehensive framework of change by organizations, built on various cycles: concentric to represent the contents and levels of change, circumferential to represent the means and processes of change, tangential to represent the episodes and stages of change, and spiraling to represent the sequences and patterns of change. This framework is fleshed out in conclusion by developing three models of change experienced by major world religions, labeled enclaving, cloning, and uprooting. Imagine watching a marksman in a shooting gallery, firing at popping-up cardboard ducks and moving bullseyes of various kinds. You can easily, understand the logic of the process (if not necessarily its purpose). Now pretend that a role of paper has been placed behind the target area, to unroll along its length as the targets move so that a hole is left as a record of each shot. Instead of watching the marksman, now you only get to see the traces on the paper. Would you be able to reconstruct the nature of the behavior as well as its context from these traces? We believe that much of the published theory and research about organizational change more closely resembles the latter evidence than the former. Trace elements are assembled into explanations, which leave most of the behavior in question unexplained. Whole processes-even ones hardly more complex than that marksman in the shooting gallery-get reduced to some disconnected dimension, for example, some isolated content of change (