Ravalier PhD Theis.pdf - Anglia Ruskin Research Online

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Chapter IV: Organisations & Organisational
Change
While Chapter II was a critical discussion of some of the
psychosocial stress literature and Chapter III looked at the costs of stress
as well as how it is managed within organisations, the current chapter will
examine organisations and organisational change. Therefore to begin
with a discussion of the typologies of organisations is critiqued against the
concept of the learning organisation. These sections are a necessity
because they allow a further understanding of the organisation taking part
in the presented research, as well as some of the barriers and facilitators
to developing and implementing organisational initiatives. Finally soft
systems and hard systems methods of change are analysed in order to
ascertain to possibility of change within an organisation as conceptualised
by Handy and others, as well as potential areas of employee resistance to
this change and methods to overcome some of this resistance.
1) Defining Organisations
Organisations as we know and conceive them presently are
relatively recent in the history of mankind, and even in the late nineteenth
century there were few organisations of any size or importance, and no
labour unions, no trade associations and few large businesses, non-profit
organisations or government agencies (Daft, 2010). Organisations are
hard to see and, other than the tangible outsources of organisations such
as tall buildings and employees, whole organisations are vague and
abstract to many and may be located in more than one geographic area.
However, we are touched by organisations every day and have been so
ever since birth, e.g. via hospitals and schools (Daft, 2010).
1a) Types of Organisation
A number of classifications of the types of organisation have been
developed. These classifications are useful because they provide broad
overviews of the sort of variation that exist between organisations (Brown,
1998). One of the most well-known typologies was conceptualised by