Marshall Scott Poole - The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation

Figure 0.1 Handbook Authors Workshop August 14, 2019

Across the diverse chapters and essays of this handbook three basic questions consistently present themselves:

The handbook is organized into six major classes of models of organizational change and innovation, beginning with Van de Ven and Pooles ().

The first edition of this handbook had its beginnings in the 1980s and 1990s, a time of emerging research on organizational change and innovation. For us, the need for a handbook was triggered by the Minnesota Innovation Research Program (MIRP), which began in 1983 with the objective of developing a process theory of innovation in organizations and society. Fourteen research teams, involving more than thirty faculty and doctoral students at the University of Minnesota, conducted longitudinal studies that tracked a variety of new technologies, products, services, and programs as they developed from concept to implementation in their natural field settings (see Van de Ven, Angle, and Poole, ; 2008).

The MIRP studies highlighted the need for theories of change processes and for methodologies specifically adapted to developing and testing process theories of organizational change and innovation. Workshops to address these needs led to our book (Poole, Van de Ven, Dooley, and Holmes, ) on methods for studying processes of change in terms of the sequence of events that unfold as things emerge, develop, grow, and terminate over time.

When designing the 1st edition in 2000 we found an emerging group of scholars who were breaking the mold of traditional stage theories, and introducing new theories of change and development that were based on processes of evolution, dialectics, social movements, structuration theory, and complexity theory, among others. Since the first edition in 2004, we have been struck by the growth and variety of theories and research on organizational change and innovation. The literature is vast and spread across a number of disciplines. A number of useful and powerful theories have evolved, but they often developed in relative isolation.

Fortunately, we found leading scholars who have been advancing this cutting-edge research. We asked them to develop broad, theoretically driven reviews that encompass the best of previous research and break new ground on their subject. Each chapter reviews, assesses, and advances the state of knowledge in its area. The chapters advance our thinking by developing integrative theories, by establishing connections among theories from different fields and research traditions, and by introducing new lines of inquiry. In our work with these authors we have been constantly impressed by their ability to combine careful scholarship with creativity. We thank them for undertaking the difficult task of bringing order to the extensive range of theory and research they synthesized.