IRRATIONALITY AND CONTRADICTION IN ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE: Transformation in the Corporate Form of a U.S. Steel Corporation, 1930-1987.

The article attempts to determine the effect of financial controls on long term incremental organizational changes, effects of environment on an organization and the conditions that transform the corporate form by analyzing the historical and interview data on one of the largest steel corporations in the United States. Recent organizational analysis focus on how environmental changes affect organizations. Several sociologists criticize this paradigm, claiming it is too narrowly defined, underestimates the effects of internal organizational variables on change, and neglects organizational control over the environment. Dialectical analysis recognizes disequilibrium in organizations and between organizations and their environment, and the irrational social action that emerges from organizational contradictions. The social world, within dialectical theory, is in a continuous state of becoming whereby one set of arrangements gives way to another. The dialectical model stresses active participation in the ongoing social construction of organizations that creates and resolves contradictions.