| Summary: | For rational theories of organisational change, organisational dysfunctionalities
are nothing more than the inadequacy of organisations to maximise on their goals
or lack of co-ordination of different types of inputs and processes. Usually, such
observations are made in exclusion of the analysis of organisational realities and
the experiences that are part of their daily realities. This thesis explores the
experiences of organisational change in a single case of the provincial department
of education, namely the Eastern Cape Department of Education (ECDE). Using
the qualitative and exploratory methods of interviews and document analysis, it
asks how and why the department was perceived to be in a state of crisis in terms
of service delivery, eight years after its initial transformation. To explore these
questions, the thesis looked at the interplay between context, organisational design
and internal skills and capacities, as the triad of processes that influenced the
patterns for organisational change in this context.
Broadly, the findings revealed that issues of organisational efficiency and service
delivery cannot be debated and analysed outside of the political processes that
influence them. The ECDE revealed that it was caught in endless politics of
networks of coalition which influenced the pattern of service delivery. As a result
this thesis concluded that organisational change and service delivery debates have
to extend beyond the rational inputs and outputs paradigms to look at the
complexities of networks that were a coincidence of transitional politics. It
therefore proposes a focus on relational and network analysis of organisations to
unravel their politics and pattern of influence on service delivery.
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