Organizational improvisation and change: two syntheses and a filled gap

Change has become one of the most studied topics in management research. Although literally hundreds of research initiatives on this theme are carried out annually, there are still important questions in this area that have been left unanswered. There are two, logically possible, modes of change that have yet to be identified and there are at least two tensions that go unresolved: the punctuated versus incremental change and the emergent versus deliberate change tensions. Drawing on a “grounded theory” research on organizational improvisation, we argue that this phenomenon contributes toward filling one of the gaps in a taxonomy of organizational change modes and toward a synthesis between the poles of the two tensions mentioned above.