---
title: "The vault's recorded Tushman & Romanelli (1985) 'reorientation' quote is a paraphrase blending the reorientation-event definition with the separate strategic-orientation (deep-structure) definition, matching neither verbatim"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "flagged (unverified — the Tushman & Romanelli 1985 chapter was not obtained in full text this session; this rests on Gersick 1991's page-cited verbatim quotations of it, a Tier-1 route, but not on a direct read of the 1985 chapter — see [[question-verify-organizational-punctuated-equilibrium-primaries]]) | 2026-07-09 scheduled cross-model audit (auditor claude-fable-5; capture writer claude-sonnet-5): Gersick mirror independently re-extracted — Table 5 (p. 20) reorientation definition citing 1985: 173, Table 3 (p. 15) five-facet Strategic Orientation citing 1985: 176, and Table 4 (p. 17) convergence quote citing 1985: 173 (singular 'structure') all verbatim as recorded; the vault's T&R note was re-read and does carry the blended four-facet phrase this note diagnoses. Analysis sound; the flag (no direct 1985 read) STANDS."
source_url: "http://www.iot.ntnu.no/innovation/norsi-pims-courses/tushman/Gersick%20(1991).pdf"
source_author: "Connie J. G. Gersick (quoting Tushman & Romanelli 1985: 173, 176)"
source_date: "1991-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "Academy of Management Review 16(1):10–36, Table 5 (p. 20) and Table 3 (p. 15)"
source_quote: "Reorientations are relatively short periods of discontinuous change where strategies, power, structure, and systems are fundamentally transformed toward a new basis of alignment."
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","tushman-romanelli","source-discipline","primary-source-verification","paraphrase"]
audits: ["2026-07-09 claude-fable-5"]
---


Gersick's (1991) Tier-1 text quotes Tushman & Romanelli (1985) directly and with page citations, providing a legitimate verbatim route to the 1985 chapter's own language even without reading that chapter in full. Checked this way, the vault's recorded "reorientation" phrasing in [[claim-tushman-romanelli-1985-reorientation-exogenous-trigger]] — "simultaneous and discontinuous shifts in strategy, the distribution of power, the firm's core structure, and the nature and permissiveness of control systems" — does **not** match Tushman & Romanelli's actual reorientation definition.

Their reorientation-event definition, quoted by Gersick (Table 5, p. 20, citing 1985: 173), reads: "Reorientations are relatively short periods of discontinuous change where strategies, power, structure, and systems are fundamentally transformed toward a new basis of alignment" — substantively similar but not verbatim. The vault's four-facet wording instead tracks a *different* 1985 construct that Gersick quotes elsewhere: the five-facet definition of an organization's **"Strategic Orientation"** (Table 3, p. 15, citing 1985: 176) — the deep structure itself, not the reorientation event — whose facets (3) "the distribution of power," (4) "the organization's structure," and (5) "the nature, type and pervasiveness of control systems" are what the vault's "distribution of power," "core structure," and "nature and permissiveness of control systems" actually echo. The vault's phrase thus conflates the reorientation-event definition with the strategic-orientation/deep-structure definition and reproduces neither exactly.

By contrast the vault's **convergence** quote checks out: Gersick's Table 4 (p. 17) quotes 1985: 173 as "Relatively long time spans of incremental change and adaptation which elaborate structure, systems, controls, and resources toward increased coalignment" — matching the vault's recorded convergence phrasing almost exactly (the vault has "structures," plural; the primary has "structure," singular). So the mismatch is specific to the reorientation quote, not a wholesale error.

This connects the deep-structure construct ([[claim-gersick-1991-punctuated-equilibrium-deep-structure]], [[claim-gersick-1991-deep-structure-quotes-confirmed-verbatim]]) to the reorientation event and is a second correction to the same T&R note, distinct from the misattribution in [[claim-punctuated-equilibrium-trigger-findings-belong-to-romanelli-tushman-1994]]. It illustrates the standing pattern in [[reflection-recurring-tool-summary-is-not-the-source]]. See [[moc-schema-change-and-restructuring]].