The Conspiracy of Organizational Change: A Complex Systems Perspective on School Reform

To better understand the difficulties involved with implementing radical change in organiza- tions, we apply constructs from organizational learning and network sociology to the problem of school reform, and operationalize those constructs in a computational, agent-based model. The model illustrates how intra-organizational and environmental factors interact during periods of incremental improvement to reduce the utilization of work activities necessary for more radical change. We experiment with the model to further understand how an organization