Modelling Organizational Change in the International Olympic Committee

Abstract

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has grown from a nineteenth-century amateur-based gentlemen's club to a multi-national, non-governmental, professionally run sport organization in the twenty-first. Commercial development and subsequent high integration with webs of outside organizations wrought change to sport and to the IOC, especially under the impacts of environmental disturbances. The research is based on historical documents of the organization and secondary sources of data. These data were examined first in the context of Laughlin's (1991) model of organizational change. Although this model reveals succinctly the way in which change can be represented historically, it does have limitations, so we subject Laughlin's model to a critical post-modern framework as adopted by Skinner, Stewart, and Edwards (1999). In the end, organizational change is a complex phenomenon that filters through the organization with differing ramifications.