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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on TueThe organizational transformation literature traditionally has focused on the processes by which organizations become politically more conservative. Recent changes in the Brazilian Catholic church, however, provide the opportunity for examining the conditions under which organizational transformation can take a politically radical direction. I argue that the church's radicalization can be understood only by examining the interaction of the organizational value set and elite response to environmental changes. Opportunity for organizational transformation is created by environmental changes, but the form that transformation takes is constrained by the value-defined terms of legitimate discourse. This interplay of opportunity and constraint explains both the transformation of the Brazilian church and the direction of that transformation. To develop this argument, I present a historical analysis of the process of change in Brazil and then reinforce the conclusions from this case study with a comparative analysis of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia.

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