Understanding Corporate Life-Cycles

This paper considers the nature of the dominant corporate paradigm, its change, failures or successes, and its relationship with the homeostatic organization. There is a popular way of understanding the dynamics of organizational change and that is through the pre-configured sequence of stages in a corporate life-cycle. Through there are a number of competing models for this kind of analysis. In all of them, the sequence of stages is defined by that which configures the life-cycle deterministically. However, there is little discussion given for how these models of organizations shift between stages, and none appear to dominate in the literature. A major criticism of these models is that they do not represent complex organizational processes of change. Therefore, this paper represents an alternative model, called “the paradigm life-cycle”, which is connected to the homeostatic processes that maintain an organization, and which is, in principle, capable of generating corporate life-cycles under conditions of complexity.