Change Management

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,0 (A), Grenoble Ecole de Management (Economics and International Management), course: Change Management, language: English, abstract: This section discusses the scientific and structural approach on which this case study is based.1.1 Scientific ApproachSeveral researchers have noted that all social scientists approach their subject via explicit orimplicit assumptions about the nature of the social world and the way in which it may beinvestigated. For example, Burrell et al. (1979: 1) argued that “all theories of organization arebased upon a philosophy of science and a theory of society”.Burrel et al. (1979) developed a useful framework that can help to clarify these fundamentalassumptions. The authors identified two extreme positions that they termed “Germanidealism” and “sociological positivism”. The framework explains the two extremes along fourdimensions (see Table 1). [...] The ontological assumptions concern the essence of the phenomena under investigation. Thenominalist position revolves around the assumption that the social world is made up of namesand labels that are used to structure reality. On the other hand, realism postulates that thesocial world is made up of hard, tangible structures (Burrel et al. 1979: 1-4).5The epistemological assumptions concern the grounds of knowledge. The anti-positivist viewsthe social world as essentially relativistic. On the other hand, the positivist position seeks toexplain what happens in the social world by searching for regularities and causal relationshipsbetween its constituent elements (Burrel et al. 1979: 1-5).A third set of assumptions concern human nature. The voluntarism position maintains thatman is completely autonomous and free-willed. At the other extreme, the determinist positionviews man as being completely determined by the environment (Burrel et al. 1979: 2-6). [...]