Organizational Metamorphosis.

This paper reports briefly on an attempt to give operational definition to the notion of organizational metamorphosis.[1] An analytic procedure is outlined, and then time series data about ten business firms are analyzed to assess the explanatory efficacy of metamorphoses for their histories. Each firm's history is analyzed separately as if it were a single case study, but all ten firms are treated analogously as if the cases study had been replicated ten times. Metamorphosis models focus on structural changes which the model-builder judges to be dominant and critical. The history of an organization is divided into stages. Structural changes which occur within a given stage are deemphasized as having lesser importance; structural changes which take place between two consecutive stages are emphasized as having greater importance. Consequently, the historical development within a single stage in cast as a relatively smooth and continuous process, but the overall development pattern is marked by sharp and discrete transitions from one stage to the next. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]