In the NHS, as in private business, organizational evolution outperforms the ‘cult of change’: if only Andrew Lansley would let it

Abstract

New governments like new business executives, often reach for the lever labelled ‘radical restructuring’, in an effort to make an evident short-run attack on organizational problems. Starting from the ‘genetics’ of organizational change, as developed in a new book, Geoffrey M. Hodgson argues that in the NHS and schools as much as in private industry the evidence shows that serial, evolutionary transformations trump the ‘cult of change’