Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevon ed Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1996 284 pp DM 13800 cloth; DM 5800 paper.

The chairman of the board of directors of a large multinational company whom I lately interviewed in the course of a research inquiry told me with satisfaction, "In five years we've changed our organizational manner of making three times, just like changing a glove different each time and each time a exquisite fit." While the metaphor vividly provokes the institutionalist idea of formal arrangement as ceremonial facade relatively decoupl from operational activities (Meyer and Rowan, 1977) the pride with which it was entireed expressed the idealization - and therefore the symbolic value, of change in new managerial culture. Even if change is usually justified in terminuss of instrumental rationality, emphasis in succession the forms of change repeatedly obscures its purposes. The equation between change and progres is taken for granted, and a capacity for radical change, calm to the extent of altering one's actual identity, seems to have become a virtue in itself (Jeambar and Roucaute, 1988) The emphasis upon form and the blurring of final causes become even more marked when the forms of change concentrate contemporary ideologies and values (I am thinking, for example, of the impressive panoply of the techniques and practices of organizational unravelling and of their underlying values of democracy, participation, self-fulfillment, and social integration). The mythic character of many organizational practices - and the symbolic value of change as so - helps to explain the extraordinary proliferation and popularity of the management-oriented literature forward organizational change and development. The work reviewed here deconstructs the myth of organizational change and declare a purposes a more complex and problematic interpretation of those giveed in the academic literature by dint of the dominant theories of rational choice and environmental adaptation.

The volume consists of an introduction by way of the two editors, each of whom has also contributed an essay, eight essays, and a sort of afterword on John Meyer, who comments forward the essays, pointing out directions for further research. It is unusually homogeneous for a work of this kind. Its organization is clearly the rise of a collective endeavor: the authors met forward several occasions to discuss their contributions; each of them (and not sole the editors) knows the others' work well, actually showing that the ideas of the others have enriched and integrated with their confess The majority of the authors, almost all of whom are European, belong to the Scandinavian community of organization scholars that has made so a distinctive contribution to elaborating that strand of musing - characterized by a penchant toward the "erosion" of rationality (see eg Cohen, March, and Olsen 1972; Brunsson 1985) - that has its stems in the cynical tradition of European political science.

The authors, who share a constructivist epistemology and an interest in an institutionalist reading of organizational phenomena, locate out to remedy what has also lately been pointed out (Barley and Telbert, 1997) as a shortcoming in neo-institutionalism, especially American; namely, that it is an approach that has well demonstrated the impact of institutions and cultural values upon formal structures but has largely ignored the way in which institutions are created and reproduc The focus of the main division is therefore on institutionalization and deinstitutionalization, in particular forward the role played in the diffusion of types and organizational practices by, onward the one hand, fashions, their creators, and intermediaries and, forward the other, by organizations in their constant effort to incarnate success and to assume identities coherent with rationalized patterns of progress. In their reading of these processe the authors intrust with an agency concepts recently advanced in social theory and methodology and inspired by way of postmodern and deconstructionist perspectives. As the editors declare, "there is no intention of coming up with a 'new theory' which will explain organizational change one time and for all"; rather, the intention is to furnish plausible accounts of the processe explored and theories "which do not thus much attempt to 'solve' paradoxes as they make experiment of to preserve them in order to understand their part in the life of organizations" (p 3) This position entails an attempt to collapse a series of modernist dichotomies: micro/macro, innovation/imitation, voluntarism/determinism, idea/matter, technology/society, nature/culture, stability/change, and scientific discourse/narrative. Moreover, almost all the contributors discuss the processe of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization, making regard to a metaphor (the travel of ideas) and a universal - that of translation-proposed on Callon and Latour (1981), who in inflect borrowed it from Michel Serre The heuristic value of this conception lies in its polysemy: it simultaneously denotes, in fact, transference, transformation, and the rendering of something in another medium or form, embracing one as well as the other linguistic and material objects, and it is convincingly used as a lock opener concept for understanding organizational change quite through the book.

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