---
title: "The punctuated-equilibrium 'trigger' findings the vault attributed to Tushman & Romanelli (1985) are verbatim the abstract of Romanelli & Tushman (1994), a distinct later empirical paper"
type: "claim"
status: "budding"
audit_status: "capture-verified (the Romanelli & Tushman 1994 full-text mirror was pdftotext-extracted and read directly this session; an independent publisher re-check of AMJ is access-blocked — the same-day cross-model audit recorded HBS/AOM pages returning 403 to automated fetch) | 2026-07-09 scheduled cross-model audit (auditor claude-fable-5; capture writer claude-sonnet-5): mirror independently re-extracted (27 pp., JSTOR masthead AMJ 37(5):1141–1166, authors Romanelli & Tushman in that order) — the three-finding abstract verbatim as recorded; Hypothesis 2 ('Small changes in individual domains of organizational activity will not accumulate incrementally to yield a fundamental transformation') and Hypothesis 5 (CEO succession) confirmed in the body, both building on cited '(Tushman & Romanelli, 1985)' theory. The misattribution finding is solid. The recommended correction to claim-tushman-romanelli-1985-reorientation-exogenous-trigger remains documented-but-unapplied per this note's commentary; that ruling stays with Cali."
source_url: "http://www.iot.ntnu.no/innovation/norsi-pims-courses/tushman/Romanelli%20&%20Tushman%20(1994).pdf"
source_author: "Elaine Romanelli, Michael L. Tushman"
source_date: "1994-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "Academy of Management Journal 37(5):1141–1166"
source_quote: "Supportive results showed that (1) a large majority of organizational transformations were accomplished via rapid and discontinuous change over most or all domains of organizational activity, (2) small changes in strategies, structures, and power distributions did not accumulate to produce fundamental transformations, and (3) major environmental changes and chief executive officer succession influenced transformations."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-do-the-primary-texts-of-gersick-1991-and.md, 2026-07-09"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-do-the-primary-texts-of-gersick-1991-and.md"
date_created: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["organizational-theory","punctuated-equilibrium","misattribution","source-discipline","tushman-romanelli","primary-source-verification"]
audits: ["2026-07-09 claude-fable-5"]
---


The vault's [[claim-tushman-romanelli-1985-reorientation-exogenous-trigger]] records three phrases as empirical findings of Tushman & Romanelli (1985): that small changes "did not accumulate to produce fundamental transformations," that transformations were "rapid and discontinuous change over most or all domains of organizational activity," and that "major environmental changes and chief executive officer succession influenced transformations."

Read directly this session against a full-text mirror, those three phrases are the verbatim abstract of a **different, later paper**: Elaine Romanelli and Michael L. Tushman (note the reversed author order), "Organizational Transformation as Punctuated Equilibrium: An Empirical Test," *Academy of Management Journal* 37(5):1141–1166 (1994) — an empirical test published nine years after the 1985 theoretical chapter it was filed under. The 1994 paper does build on and cite "(Tushman & Romanelli, 1985)" for its underlying theory (its Hypothesis 2 restates the non-accumulation argument; its discussion invokes CEO succession), so the *mechanism* the vault describes remains a fair characterization of the 1985 theoretical argument. But the specific quoted sentences the vault carries as evidence were produced by the 1994 empirical test, not written in 1985.

This is a load-bearing misattribution of the exact kind the sourcing floor exists to catch: a definition-shaped set of sentences reproduced with total fluency by search but pointing at the wrong paper — the failure pattern generalized in [[reflection-recurring-tool-summary-is-not-the-source]]. [[claim-tushman-romanelli-1985-reorientation-exogenous-trigger]] should be corrected to attribute these three quotes to Romanelli & Tushman (1994), or reframed as a joint claim assigning each quote to its actual source. The residual gap — direct confirmation of the 1985 chapter's own trigger theory — is routed to [[question-verify-organizational-punctuated-equilibrium-primaries]]. See also [[claim-gersick-1991-punctuated-equilibrium-deep-structure]] and [[moc-schema-change-and-restructuring]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is worse than "quote not yet verified" — it's a citation silently pointing at the wrong paper for nine years' distance. The 1994 abstract read cleanly, so the correction itself is solid; what stays open is only the 1985 chapter's own wording. I did not edit the 1985 note's audit flag, because a same-day cross-model audit re-affirmed it and lifting it is Cali's call — but the correction it needs is now documented and linked.
> — Seek