A comparative analysis of socio-ecological and socio-economic strategic change methodologies (Fred Emery, Henri Savall)

Strategy has become an increasingly important business discipline as the nature of organizational environments has transitioned from predictably competitive to dynamically uncertain and turbulent. In essence, the environment has become global in its influence on an organization as the free market has opened up the business world. We have come a long way theoretically from the early days of action research, but our practical understanding of the processes of strategy implementation and the more profound depths of strategic change can still largely be described in Lewinian terms of muddling through. That is to say, we have such little practical understanding of organization that we still rely on trying to change an organization in order to understand it. Further, our understanding of strategic change, the processes by which an organization is transformed and renewed, is so limited that strategic management scholars tend to conflate strategic change and strategy implementation.; Given that a post-industrial enterprise modeled as a system is open to a turbulent environment, it is imperative to adapt our research methods in order to understand this complex relational unit of analysis. This study adds to our knowledge of strategic change by comparing two approaches, the socio-ecological and socio-economic strategic change methodologies, in order to uncover and explore the pathways along which environmentally extracted information is incorporated into an organization. These pathways were found to correspond to the dimensions along which strategic organizational change proceeds.; Using Angyal's (1941) dimensional domain or manifold system model, this study found that for strategic change to occur, the action domain (progression) could not be separated from the domains of cooperation (transverse) and adaptation (vertical). After establishing a theoretical foundation by tracing the common socio-technical roots of each methodology, the study followed a creative mix of quantitative and qualitative research design to uncover case study evidence from two different industries to support this conclusion. Specifically, the socio-economic case study utilized pre and post treatment cost structure analyses to show efficiency gains related to greater cooperation in the individual-enterprise relational unit of analysis. In contrast, the socio-ecological case study used a factor analysis approach with corporate financial and textual data to assess the diffusion and adoption of a collectively developed industry-wide strategic plan for adaptation in a newly deregulated environment. As is apparent, the socio-economic and socio-ecological methodologies offer a splendid example of the equifinality of strategic change, as the two approaches share common socio-technical theoretical origins, but follow quite different pathways on Angyal's manifold to produce strategic change.; The greatest strength of the research design was that it presented a rational and useful basis of comparison to produce meaningful results when comparing different methodologies. Thus, a secondary contribution of this study was to demonstrate the feasibility of assessing the impacts of different methodologies for strategic change initiatives in turbulent environments. Finally, the socio-ecological and socio-economic approaches work on different dimensional domains than those based on the more common closed system perspective, thus a comparative study of the two methods offered valuable insight into open systems strategic change processes.; We have an abundance of eloquent theories to guide strategy formulation and a tremendous number of performance consulting approaches to assist implementation. However, a viable scientific basis for the practice of strategic change awaits a new foundation, a thorough theoretical and operational understanding of the processes of strategic change.