Complexities of Organisational Change: The Case of the Eastern Cape Department of Education (ECDE)
Year: 2009
Type: dissertation
Abstract: For rational theories of organisational change, organisational dysfunctionalities \nare nothing more than the inadequacy of organisations to maximise on their goals \nor lack of co-ordination of different types of inputs and processes. Usually, such \nobservations are made in exclusion of the analysis of organisational realities and \nthe experiences that are part of their daily realities. This thesis explores the \nexperiences of organisational change in a single case of the provincial department \nof education, namely the Eastern Cape Department of Education (ECDE). Using \nthe qualitative and exploratory methods of interviews and document analysis, it \nasks how and why the department was perceived to be in a state of crisis in terms \nof service delivery, eight years after its initial transformation. To explore these \nquestions, the thesis looked at the interplay between context, organisational design \nand internal skills and capacities, as the triad of processes that influenced the \npatterns for organisational change in this context. \nBroadly, the findings revealed that issues of organisational efficiency and service \ndelivery cannot be debated and analysed outside of the political processes that \ninfluence them. The ECDE revealed that it was caught in endless politics of \nnetworks of coalition which influenced the pattern of service delivery. As a result \nthis thesis concluded that organisational change and service delivery debates have \nto extend beyond the rational inputs and outputs paradigms to look at the \ncomplexities of networks that were a coincidence of transitional politics. It \ntherefore proposes a focus on relational and network analysis of organisations to \nunravel their politics and pattern of influence on service delivery.
Author: Wendy Yolisa Ngoma
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2258252218