p.567 Change, we argue, is the reweaving of actors' webs of beliefs and habits of action to accommodate new experiences obtained through interactions... Organization aims at stemming change but, in the process of doing so, it is generated by it.

p.567 What really exists is not things made but things in the making... William James (1909/1996, p.263-264)

p.567 The future is not given... Ilya Prigogine (2000, p. 36-37)

p.567 Several calls have recently been made to reorient both organization science and management practice to embrace change more openly and consistently... This is easier said than done.

p.568 "When theorists graft mechanisms for improvisation onto concepts that basically are built to explain order," notes Weick (1998), the result is "a caricature of improvisation that ignores nuances..." (p. 551).

p.568 to properly understand organizational change one must allow for emergence and surprise, meaning that one must take into account the possibility of organizational change having ramifications and implications beyond those initially imagined or planned. [JLJ - the very necessary reason for scenario construction - we must be ready to adapt or reorganize in the face of the unexpected]

p.568 Insofar as routines are performed by human agents, they contain the seeds of change... Change is always potentially there if we only care to look for it.

p.569 It is now realized, across the scientific fields, that we are lacking the vocabulary to meaningfully talk about change as if change mattered - that is... to acknowledge its centrality in the constitution of socio-economic life (North 1996, Prigogine 1989, Stacey 1996, Sztompka 1993).

p.569 Dissatisfied with traditional approaches to organizational change, Orlikowski (1996) has conceptualized the latter as ongoing improvisation... Orlikowski (1996) sees it as "grounded in the ongoing practices of organizational actors, and [emerging] out of their (tacit and not so tacit) accommodations to and experiments with the everyday contingencies, breakdowns, exceptions, opportunities, and unintended consequences that they encounter" (p. 65).

p.571 in perception we are responsive to difference, to change... The undifferentiated is imperceptible.

p.572 in action, we are less interested in things themselves than in the use we can make of them.

p.572 in practice... statements about stability and change should be labelled by reference to some descriptive proposition, so that the logical type to which "what changes" and "what stays stable" belong, should be clear

p.573 The organization is both a given structure... and an emerging pattern

p.574-575 humans have the intrinsic ability to interact with their own thoughts and, therefore, to draw new distinctions, imagine new things, and employ metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery... the new comes about as a result of the recursive application of descriptions... we humans operate in the cognitive domain, namely a domain within which we interact with our own descriptions (e.g., thoughts) as if they were independent entities... Such interactions give rise to further descriptions with which we subsequently interact in an endlessly recursive manner... New descriptions... are the result of the intrinsically human ability to be reflexive - to reflect on one's behavior as an observer.

p.576 Organizations are in a state of perpetual becoming because situated action within them is inherently creative (Tenkasi and Boland 1993): Established categories and practices are potentially on the verge of turning into something different for new experiences to be accommodated.

p.576 As economic historian North (1996) remarks: "Economic change is a ubiquitous, ongoing, incremental process that is a consequence of the choices individual actors and entrepreneurs of organizations make every day" (p. 346).

p.576 Orlikowski shows organizational change to be "an ongoing improvisation enacted by organizational actors trying to make sense of and act coherently in the world" (Orlikowski 1996, p. 65).

p.576 The degree to which improvisation is empirically manifested is a function of the degree to which organizational members are involved in interaction - interactions with themselves and with others (individuals and objects).

p.577 as Boden (1994) remarks, "organizations are taken to be locally organized and interactionally achieved contexts of decision making and of enduring institutional momentum" (p.1). Human agency, that is, the actions and inactions of social actors, is "always and at every moment confronted with specific conditions and choices" (p. 13); emphasis in the original). Those conditions are not just given, but are locally made relevant (or irrelevant) by actors.

p.577 In Boden's words: (1994) "What looks - from the outside - like behavior controlled by rules and norms is actually a delicate and dynamic series of interactionally located adjustments to a continual unfolding and working out of 'just what' is going on and being made to go on, which is to say, the organization of action" (p. 42).

p.577 The organization (i.e., a pattern) emerges as situated accommodations become heedfully interrelated in time.

p.578 There is a world out there that causes the organization to respond, but the pattern of response depends on an organization's self-understanding - the historically created assumptions and interpretations of itself and its environment... an organization's response to an exgenously generated pressure over time is complex, multilayered, and evolving, rather than simple, fixed, and episodic... Ongoing change and improvisation is a fundamental feature of all change programs... Change programs are made to work and, insofar as this happens, they are locally adapted, improvised, and elaborated by human agents; institutionalized categories are imaginatively extended when put into action.

p.579 change in organizations occurs without necessarily intentional managerial action as a result of individuals trying to accommodate new experiences and realize new possibilities.

p.580 change initiatives, either locally or centrally undertaken, remain "improvisations" or plans, without becoming institutionalized.

p.580 It is because the human mind is not like a computer that human experiences are cognitively significant, and the accommodation of new experiences is a practically important task (Reed 1996, Tenkasi and Boland 1993, Varela et al. 1991).

p.580 Microscopic change takes place by adaptation, variations, restless expansion, and opportunistic conquests. Microscopic change reflects the actual becoming of things (Chia 1999).

p.580 capturing and making sense of the cognitive, political, and cultural dynamics of such a process of organizational becoming is extremely important (Pettigrew 1992). For this to happen we need to see organizations both as quasi-stable structures (i.e., set of institutionalized categories) and as sites of human action in which, through the ongoing agency of organizational members, organization emerges.