cameron and green making-sense-of-change-management

Organizational changeMorgan identifies eight organizational metaphors:• machines;• organisms;• brains;• cultures;• political systems;• psychic prisons;• flux and transformation;• instruments of domination.We have selected four of Morgan’s organizational metaphors to explorethe range of assumptions that exists about how organizational changeworks. These are the four that we see in use most often by managers,writers and consultants, and that appear to us to provide the most usefulinsights into the process of organizational change. These are:• organizations as machines;• organizations as political systems;• organizations as organisms;• organizations as flux and transformation.Descriptions of these different organizational metaphors appear below.See also Table 3.1, which sets out how change might be approached usingthe four different metaphors. In reality most organizations use combinationsof approaches to tackle organizational change, but it is useful to pullthe metaphors apart to see the difference in the activities resulting fromdifferent ways of thinking.99