Understanding Organizational Fitness

The focus if this book has two dimensions: theoretical and empirical. The theoretical dimension isconcerned with the fitness of an organization to satisfactorily address processes of transformationalchange. Such fitness it will be argued can be expressed in terms of the coherence (degree ofintegration) and pathology (condition of ill health) of the organization being explored. Inattempting to assess organizational fitness a model that comes out of the field of knowledgecybernetics will be used and developed further as a strategic organizational map and appliedempirically. The empirical dimension centers on the specific situation of the banking industry inChina as it is passing through transformational change. There is a great need for organizations thereto guide their own changes in a way that enables them to improve themselves in a changing environment. A methodology that can assistorganizations in the change process is organization development an approach often used within a human resource developmentcontext but it has some problems with dealing with such dramatic change. In this theory a new approach will be explored anddeveloped to assess the fitness of an organization to pass through transformational change processes. The theory undertaken hasenabled the theoretical approach adopted to be defined and the design of the empirical work to emerge from reflections on the initialwork undertaken. In particular our interests in this book are to (1) explain theory that is able to assess the fitness of organizations to passthrough transformational change and (2) demonstrate how the theory can be applied as a measuring instrument to a detailed case studyexploring the Chinese State banking system.