Organization concepts (OCs) are 'more or less coherent, prescriptive visions on organizational design'. They are codified bodies of knowledge on organizing. Although OCs such as total quality management (TQM) and business process re-engineering (BPR) are widely discussed when they are popular among practitioners, such discussions to remain conceptual and there is little attention paid to how they are applied organizations. The question of what role such organization concepts play in actual change projects is studied by means of a truck manufacturer, which subsequently claimed use the OCs 'modern sociotechnology' and 'lean production'. Largely due to 'interpretive viability' (Ortmann, 1995), the outcomes of change projects under the of a particular OC vary widely. The possibility of decoupling the label from the content means that researchers should make a distinction between rhetorical and substantive adoption.
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Jos Benders (1999) studied this question.