Abstract
Change has always fascinated scholars across disciplines and numerous theories and models of organizational change and development have been published (Weick 1979; Van de Ven and Poole 1995). In management science, change has long been conceptualized as the opposite of stability (Adler et al. 2009; March 1991; Nelson and Winter 1982; March and Simon 1958). Only recently management theory conceptually overcame this dualism and established an understanding of duality of change and stability. In this thinking it is the interplay of change and stability that fosters critical developments in firms such as innovation, internationalization and strategic renewal (Moshe 2010).Understanding stability and change as the two sides of the same coin opens the door for a more contextualized investigation of change in firms (Cohen 2007). This allows for research into the complex and sometimes paradoxical relation between stability and change (Sutherland and Smith 2011; Van Gestel and Hillebrand 2011). ...