Encompassing Stability and Novelty in Organization Studies: An Events-based Approach

Abstract

The stability versus novelty relationship remains a conundrum in organization studies, partly owing to conventional views of time and temporality. In this article, we address organization as a stability-novelty intertwinement through the lens of organizational events. The advantage of an events-based approach is that stability and novelty are expressed as parts of the same acts, and not different acts, which tends to be the assumption among mainstream theories of organization change. The events-based approach developed for this article shows how the organization may be defined as a structure of past and anticipated events, defined and redefined on an ongoing basis. From a case study of the development of a competency management tool in a bank, we show how the intertwinement between stability and novelty is articulated through events throughout the project and how every event is both an act of stability and an act of change.