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The planning or design schools of corporate strategy may be determined as functionalist in orientation, and as offering a limited perspective of the domain. The discovery approaches, resting on interpretative methods, offer improvement through a perception of strategic thinking as socially constructed reality, but are unable to overcome a priori conditions and false consciousness, and may therefore be classified as regulative.

The findings of this study point to issues of power and coercion being addressed through critical social theory. For intervention in business organisations, management science has used this as a foundation for the development of critical systems thinking, which, since its commencement in the early 1980s, has relied almost entirely on the theories of Habermas, and more particularly his theory of knowledge constitutive interests. Such approaches can be demonstrated as having a limited domain of application, with participatory action research, human inquiry, and diversity management offering a possible way forward.

This paper began by examining current approaches to managing organisational change. Typological and complementarist perspectives in contemporary systems thinking were then reviewed, and a classification of four ideal types of organisational change and four MOC approaches developed.From this, a systemic MOC framework is proposed, which, it is suggested, will help further research and practice in this area. Finally it is suggested that this framework needs further clarification and enrichment. For instance, relevant methods need to be examined critically in relation to the four types of organisational change, and the framework needs to be tested in practice, especially as how to operationalise it, so different parts of MOC approaches could be flexibly used in one intervention. These issues are currently being pursued as part of this ongoing research.