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