The purpose of this paper is to reflect on theoretical approaches to organizations in order to theorize organizational change. As an example of organizational change it uses the policy change in the higher university system. Since the 1990s science organizations have experience significant change. On the one hand, ‘being excellent’ emerged with its roots in neo-liberal ideas of new-public management, competition between universities, rankings and the so-called brain-drain (Gläser, Lange 2008; Angermuller 2010; Bloch, Mittlerle, Peter 2016). On the other hand the idea of gender equality and gender mainstreaming rose and became a more and more dominant topic in science administration. Unlike the idea of excellence it however finds its roots in the feminist social movements of the 1980s and is thus leans more towards social equality (Blome et al. 2013). Yet as political demands, both topics – gender equality and excellence – have to be addressed by scientific organizations and put into organizational policies. Different organizational theories concentrate on how ‘the new’ comes into organizations and analyse how change affects and alters organizations and organizational members. Lewin (1947) and Kanter (1983) discuss organizational change as active intervention into organizations to change it towards a specific goal. Discourse analytical theories on the other hand emphasis that change is contingent and examine organization as embedded in power/knowledge-complexes that can change over time and that produce different identities and possibilities of subjectivication (Foucault 1975; Weber 1998).

Besides the different perspectives the mentioned theoretical approaches do not consider the – possibly subversive – logic of the subject when it comes to adapting change. The paper thus proposes a deconstructive practice theory approach to organizations: Theorist such as de Certau (1988) or Butler (1993) stress the possible withdrawing and ‘misinterpreting’ of invocations. In this perspective, organizational change is not a onetime and one-directional endeavor but a constant wafting between subjectivication and iteration.

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