Private Bag: Speech by Secretary of the Interior,Richard Lamm—9/21/2030

Population and Environment -     

Organizational Change and the Importance of Embedded Assumptions*

‘Managing change’ appears a simple enough term. However, no common ontological assumption underlies either the notion of ‘managing’ or that of ‘change’. In this paper, we identify different assumptions about both what it means to manage and the nature of change outcomes. From these assumptions we derive six different images of managing organizational change: directing, navigating, caretaking, coaching, interpreting and nurturing. We show how each image is underpinned by different organization theories. We then take each image and show how the differing ontological assumptions about managing and change outcomes are associated with different research agendas. We illustrate this by focusing on three elements commonly associated with managing organizational change: vision, communication and resistance.     

Unemployment: an international perspective

Using standard OECD unemployment and national income account data, the rela-tionship between unemployment rates and the productivity-adjusted real wage rate is examined for six major countries, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, using bivariate regression analysis. In addition, pooled cross-section estimates of the same relationship are provided for the 24 traditional OECD countries covering the period 1971-1995. The object is to determine whether the observed statistically significant positive relationship between these variables found for the United States exists in other economies. The basic conclusion is that the inter-national experience in this regard is similar to that for the United States. The research underlying the analysis reported in this article has been supported by the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress of the United States and is reflected in Vedder and Gallaway (1998).