Contextualizing Organizational Change

Abstract

Contextualizing organizational change is a complex, intricate and relatively under-researched area. This chapter explores other theories and approaches to organizational change in health care, again raising issues of contextualization and appropriate fit for a public health care system. It examines notions of context and discusses how context, actors and change processes interact. It also examines seminal research on organizational context, providing insight into the development of understandings of context. The chapter explores the distinct characteristics of public health care systems, and goes on to examine research on the process of contextualization of organizational change in health care. It synthesizes themes relating to the concept of enacted context. The research describes in the chapter has provided evidence that context is not merely the backcloth to action. Nor are the individual elements of context simply external influences impacting unidirectionally on the change process.