Continuous Change in Educational Organizations

Abstract

This chapter elaborates on the conceptual and empirical bases of continuous change, a newly developing perspective of organizational change, and brings this new perspective of organizational change to the attention of change scholars and practitioners in educational organizations. Rather than conceptualizing change as a macro-level discrete set of actions, continuous change suggests that change is a micro-level process embedded in daily practices of organizational members. However, continuous change and planned change should not be considered as alternatives to each other in the practice of change, since the former represents the informal, unstructured, and emergent side, and the latter represents the formal, structured, and intentional side of change in organizational context. This chapter argues that the success of change largely depends on the artful interplay between continuous change and planned change rather than focusing on the superiority of one perspective over another.