Metastructuring moves: Synthesizing deliberate and emergent organizational change

Ethnographic studies of organizational change processes have illuminated the situated, emergent nature of change resulting from people's ongoing accommodation and improvisation in the course of their work. Structuration theory has proved useful in describing and explaining these processes, linking everyday action to the structures it reproduces and alters over time. Such studies have, however, omitted or failed to emphasize people's deliberate interventions to produce change, and the interaction between situated change processes and interveners' intentions and actions. In this paper I argue that this omission is partly encouraged by an inattention to social consciousness and deliberate intervention within structuration theory itself. I import a concept of metastructuring from the information systems literature to augment structurational approaches to change, and to help synthesize deliberate and emergent change theories. I then illustrate and refine the metastructuring perspective through a case study of an oil refinery's reliability improvement program. The case highlights interventions by diverse actors - metastructuring moves - that were consonant or dissonant. Emergent change processes in the context created by these interventions produced whole or fragmented structures. I conclude by exploring implications for structuration theory and for building upon it in research on social change processes.1