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The Performative “Picture”

This chapter reflects on the previous handbook chapters and considers how our conceptualization of change influences how it is explained, understood, or prescribed. It explores the contrast between the synoptic (or entitative) image of change, which conceives of change as happening to organizations (or parts thereof), and the performative (or enactivist) image, which looks at change from within: how the organization responds to exogenous and endogenous stimuli. By focusing on agency, the performative “picture” conceives of stability as an accomplishment. Even when stability is deliberately perturbed through episodic-cum-planned change, the latter always retains emergence—becomingness. From a performative perspective, when planned-cum-episodic change is initiated, what is worth exploring is how the rationale for change emerges, how it is articulated and connected with diverse narratives of change that may have been available, how diverse agents intra-act, and how possibilities emerge.