Förändringens Vingslag

Sammanfattning: This hermeneutic case study examines how and why an insurance company’s output has been affected by a CEO-succession. The authors pay specific attention to three activities; changes in personnel and organization structure, handling of media and change in customer focus. It is shown that the CEO was able to influence the company’s activities and this discretion was primarily created through her relational capacity. In spite of this discretion, she was limited by the boundaries of the organization. The concept of holarcic context is introduced as the arena where these boundaries are constructed and changed. The authors argue that the CEO-succession gave the organization a new holarcic context where partly new problems, solutions and actors were constructed. These constructions have affected the chains of events initiated in the organization. The manager cannot fully control these chains of events but she can influence them. Moreover, it was shown that the chains of events had different impacts on different constructions of the organization.