Exploring boundary building, bridging and breaching in organization change: challenges confronting inter-organizational contexts

Change and stability have historically been conceptualized as opposites in the organizational change literature. Thus, change is often framed as a managerial process that leads to a better, more stable future, and that change is essentially about moving from the status quo to a more desirable envisioned future.In this article, we focus not only on change within an organizational context, but also across organizations. We center our attention on the roles that boundaries play (structure), and how boundaries play out (agency), through change in an inter-organizational context. By reflecting on an on-going case study of change in the US Healthcare Sector, we explore the conditions and consequences of boundaries in effecting the interplay between change and stability.