Center or Periphery?: Identifying the Locus of Different Types of Divergent Organizational Change

This study examines the relationship between actors’ social position and the likelihood that they will initiate two different types of divergent organizational change in a field of activity, namely changes that diverge from the institutionalized model of organizations’ role division and changes that diverge from the institutionalized model of social groups’ role division. I explore this relationship using data from 93 change projects conducted by clinical managers at the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. My findings show social position to be a determinant of the type of divergent organizational change an actor might undertake. This result suggests that treating divergent organizational change as a uniform phenomenon might mask important idiosyncrasies associated with the different types of divergent organizational changes likely to be undertaken by actors with different profiles in terms of social position.