What might be the implications for organizational change management if we
took the idea of organizations as socially constructed realities seriously?
Although some of the organization change literature adopts such a
constructivist view (e.g. Czarnawaska, 1997; Tenkasi and Boland, 1993), most
of it adopts a structural-functionalist view (Burrell and Morgan, 1979) in which
the job of change agents is to align, fit, or adapt organizations, through
interventions, to an objective reality that exists ``out there''. The efficacy of
these interventions is seen both as a demonstration of a change agent's ability
to accurately mirror reality, i.e. the world is as the agent knows it to be
(Watzlawick, 1990), and the ability to apply the appropriate intervention(s) for
that reality (Beer, 1980). Successful change, therefore, ultimately depends on
the ability to accurately mirror or represent reality and to choose and
implement interventions appropriate to that reality.