Toward a theory of revolutionary transformation: the impact of the socio-political paradigm shift triggered by the 25th January revolution on Egyptian organizations

Social revolutions are rare but momentous occurrences in modern world history. The occurrence of social revolutions in any society acts as a triggering force creating radical cultural, political and economic transformations as well as initiating new paradigm of power, practices and systems within this society (Elkersh, 2012; Ritchi, 2012; and Holbech, 2006) Egypt experienced a radical paradigm shift triggered by, the 25th of January revolution that completely altered the organization of the state, class structures, and prominent beliefs of the Egyptian society. After the rapid overthrow of the Mubarak regime, intensive waves of post-revolution protests have soon extended to include mainly all, state agencies and most of public and private sector's organizations (Howidi, 2012; Maqbol, 2013). Although, there are a large number of post revolution studies that discussed this phenomenon from social, economic and political perspective, none of them investigate the impact of this phenomenon on business organizations. This study introduces a new theory to explain the transformations that are expected to emerge in Egyptian organizations in the context of the turbulent social and political events of the 25th January Revolution 2011. This research adopted the qualitative approach of grounded theory to collect and analyze data in order to create a theory through inductive analysis of the data. Data was collected from 22 semi structured interviews; participant observations and documentary evidence were used to enhance the rigor of the study. A coding paradigm was constructed presenting the theoretical framework of the study. Overall, the results of this study demonstrate that causes, features and consequences of the drastic transformations that emerged in Egyptian organizations in the aftermath of the 25th January 2011 revolution, display high degree of similarity with causes, features and consequences of the general socio-political changes triggered by revolutions. Evidence from data analysis demonstrates that power in Egyptian organizations was forced downward to the bottom line employees. Protesting employees were able to initiate new patterns of power and introduce new work practices aligned with their needs and demands. The findings also revealed ten underlying causes that triggered employees anger and drove them to engage in violent protests in the work place, causing destructive consequences to both Egyptian organizations and to the Egyptian economy. Finally, the results of this study demonstrate that managers and employees were not able to manage effective changes in their organizations and to utilize positive outcomes from these changes.