Organization Development

Change Management: The Road Ahead

RUNE TODNEM BY∗, BERNARD BURNES∗∗ & CLIFF OSWICK†

∗Staffordshire University Business School, UK, ∗∗Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, UK,

† Cass Business School, City University London, UK

Where We Are and Where We Are Going

Welcome to the 11th volume of Routledge’s Journal of Change Management (JCM). 2010, our 10th anniversary, was a great year for JCM as we continued to attract and publish high-quality contributions in the specific field of change management, and in the wider fields of organizational studies and behaviour. JCM is committed to publishing peer-reviewed, high-quality empirical and con- ceptual research, and to become the journal of choice in its field. JCM will clearly establish itself as the journal which spans the entire field of organizational change, ranging from mainstream and established viewpoints to innovative unorthodox, critical and challenging contributions. As such, it will be essential reading for all academics, students and practitioners of change management.

The inclusion of JCM in the ABS journal rankings during 2010 offers external corroboration and acknowledgement of the work we are undertaking as a commu- nity of scholars and the high-quality of articles published. This is the first step towards securing three ABS stars and inclusion in Thomson Reuters’ Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Our strategy for achieving these aims is both rig- orous and proactive – something that is reflected in a high rejection rate, timely decision-making process (the average turnaround from manuscript submission to receiving a decision was four weeks in 2010), and the impressive composition of our Editorial Board. In fact, we have been quite overwhelmed by the support provided by the leaders in our field, as well as that shown by up and coming aca- demic talent. This augurs well for the prospects for creating and establishing a world-leading academic journal.

Thank you to the Editorial Board members, reviewers, submitting authors, readers, subscribing libraries and the Routledge editorial and production team

Journal of Change Management

Vol. 11, No. 1, 1 – 6, March 2011

Correspondence Address: Rune Todnem By, Staffordshire University Business School, Brindley Building, Leek

Road, Stoke-on-Trent ST4 2DF, UK. Email: [email protected]

1469-7017 Print/1479-1811 Online/11/010001 – 6 # 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14697017.2011.548936

for your invaluable and continuous support. In particular, we are indebted to Christine Teelken (VU University, The Netherlands), Ingrid Nembhard (Yale Uni- versity, USA), Suzanne Benn (Macquarie University, Australia) and Ashley Brag- anza (Brunel Business School, UK) for their immense support as Associate Editors (2009 – 2011). In the remainder of this Editorial we would like to do two things. First, we offer some reflections upon the nature of the field of change management and the scope for future work. Second, and more specifically, we want to consider the role that we as a community of change management scholars might collec- tively play in moving the JCM agenda forwards.

Change Scholarship and the Future of Change Management

The roots of change management can be traced back to the pioneering work of the National Training Laboratories in the late 1940s and 1950s (Lewin, 1947). An enduring aspect of work on organization development and change management over the years has been a strong humanistic orientation (i.e. a concern for people and increasing human potential). That said, this strand of humanism has typically been subordinated in the pursuit of efficiency and profit maximization (Grieves, 2010). The marginalization of human needs is further reinforced in Brown and Harvey’s (2004, p. 5) assertion that ‘A change leader is a person in an organization responsible for changing existing patterns to obtain more effec- tive organizational performance’. This raises an important question: Should change management be primarily concerned with enhancing organizational performance?

Arguably, change practitioners (i.e. managers and consultants) are often immersed in the everyday life of organizations to an extent which makes it diffi- cult to see beyond organizational ends. However, as academics, we are perhaps better placed to step back from the hegemonic grasp of corporate interests and acknowledge our responsibility to the wider society. Hence, our role as scholars is not simply to educate the managers of tomorrow or to inform management prac- tice. It is to provide an independent and critical voice. To this end, and in keeping with the aims and scope of the JCM, we need to embrace a polemic stance (i.e. to problematize conventional wisdom and challenge orthodoxy) while striking a balance between a phenomenological orientation (i.e. doing research on change management) and an applied focus (i.e. doing research for change management).

For us, the future directions for change management research are closely aligned with the JCM agenda. We anticipate, and would encourage, work which engages with the core tenets and very nature of change management. In particular, this involves revisiting some fundamental questions, such as: Who manages change? For whom is change managed? What is changed? And, how is change managed? Let us elaborate briefly on these issues.

Traditionally, the management of change has been something which has been undertaken by managers and consultants with employees and subordinates posi- tioned as the recipients of change. In effect, managers and consultants have been largely portrayed as having agency (i.e. as change agents and change leaders), while workers are depicted as relatively agentless (Grieves, 2010). In this regard, the change literature is perhaps guilty of conflating ‘change

2 R.T. By et al.

management’ with ‘change managers’ and overemphasizing actors over acts. A parallel problem existed within the literature on leadership which for many years focused on leadership as an activity undertaken by leaders (as actors). However, the idea that leadership is something that only leaders do was under- mined by the emergence of the notion of ‘distributed leadership’ (Gronn, 2002) which drew attention to the fact that leadership is also a pervasive, everyday activity undertaken by groups of stakeholders. In a similar vein, we could reframe change management as a micro-situated, everyday, distributed practice rather than perpetuating the dominant perspective which treats it as a strategic tool deployed by key actors in the corporate hierarchy.

Beyond challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about the role of agents, we believe that future research might reinterpret the application of change manage- ment in a more expansive and less constrained way. There is no obvious reason why the focal point of change management should be limited to organizations. For example, we could instead think in terms of change activity within a variety of social settings (i.e. changing communities rather than just changing organizations). The implication here is that researchers broaden their horizons to encompass processes of social change rather than concentrating on organiz- ational change. More proactively, we might even consider the extent to which ‘community organizers’ and ‘social activists’ are as much agents of change as management consultants. The extensive uptake of ‘appreciative inquiry’ (Cooperrider et al., 2008), as a change approach which is not constrained by tra- ditional organizational boundaries and which meaningfully engages with personal value systems and processes of collective social change, illustrates how change management research could be re-oriented in the future. Other recent approaches to change – such as ‘open space’ (Owen, 2008) and ‘world café’ (Brown and Issacs, 2005) – also encourage us to reconceptualize the nature of change manage- ment over the coming decade.

Finally, another developing line of inquiry is concerned with addressing the limitations of change management. This research is progressing in two ways. First, there is a growing body of work which questions whether it is possible to meaningfully ‘manage’ change at all (Hughes, 2006). The ability to manage and control change is disputed on the basis of the inherent complexity of organiz- ations and the self-organizing properties of systems (Stacey, 2001; Shaw, 2002). Second, change initiatives have tended to adopt a problem-centred approach and focus on changing tangible processes. Bushe and Marshak (2009) refer to this as ‘diagnostic change’ and they contrast it with emerging patterns of practice which they term ‘dialogic change’. Dialogic changes centre on the processes of social construction and systems of meaning-making with a view to changing mindsets rather than changing more concrete phenomena (e.g. behaviour, procedures or structures). The real-time social negotiation of meaning associated with dialogic change offers a significant challenge to the manageability of processes of change management insofar as it involves ‘coordinating’ and ‘facilitating’ change conversations in the moment and on a largely improvised and unscripted basis rather than engaging in more established forms of planned change. These developments, and the disjunctures in change management that they reveal, clearly undermine conventional wisdom and established practices, but they also

Change Management: The Road Ahead 3

signal the opportunities for fresh avenues of innovative and critical research that exist within the field.

Creating a Community of Scholars

There is a well-known 19th-century poem by John Godfrey Saxe which tells the story of six blind men who go to see what an elephant is like. The poem is based on an old Indian legend and tells how each blind man touched a different part of the elephant. One man touched the side and declared that an elephant was very like a wall, another touched a tusk and stated that an elephant was very like a spear, and so on. All six described the elephant in different ways, depending on which part they had touched, and all declared that their description was the correct one. Obviously, none of their descriptions is totally wrong per se, but neither are they totally correct – they describe only one part of an elephant.

To anyone who has studied the field of organizational change, this poem has a certain familiarity. As Stickland (1998, p. 14) remarked:

. . . the problem with studying change is that it parades across many subject domains

under numerous guises, such as transformation, development, metamorphosis, trans-

mutation, evolution, regeneration, innovation, revolution and transition to name but

a few.

Like the blind men attempting to describe an elephant, we tend to look at change from our own perspective, which is shaped by our disciplinary background and experience. Psychologists, sociologists, economists, accountants, engineers and so on can see change from very different viewpoints. This does not mean that they are wrong, but it does mean that their description is incomplete. Only by sharing and debating our views of change can we begin to build a more compre- hensive picture. The blind men were hindered by a lack of sight; we have three different obstacles in the way of our understanding change.

First, all elephants have very similar characteristics – if you can describe one, you can describe them all. This is not the same with change, which comes in many shapes, sizes and guises. Second, the blind men shared a common language. All knew what a wall was, a spear was, etc., and were consistent in their use and understanding of the words. However, those of us seeking to understand change share neither a common language nor a consistency of use. For example, one person’s transformational change may be another person’s evolutionary change, and one person may use the word metamorphosis to describe a range of change outcomes and different words, such as piecemeal, gradual, incremental and evol- utionary, to describe the same event. Last but not least, all the blind men were in the same place and could converse together. This is not the same with the change community. We operate in different geographical locations, different disciplinary spheres, we go to different conferences and, crucially, we publish in different journals.

There are many very good general journals which publish articles on change, such as the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Management Studies and Human Relations. However, none of these general journals provides

4 R.T. By et al.

a dedicated space for exploring, debating and developing the study of change. That is not their purpose. There are also a small number of journals which focus mainly on change, like the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science (JABS) and the Journal of Organizational Change Management (JOCM). Both are very good journals. However, they tend to look at change from particular perspectives. JABS, for example, is published by the NTL Institute and, as the journal’s name implies, focuses on applied behavioural science. In many respects, it can be seen as the standard-bearer for Organization Development (OD). By contrast, JOCM declares that its purpose is the exploration of philosophies, including critical theory, post- modernism and poststructuralism, as they apply to change and development. Given the disciplinary perspectives of JABS and JOCM, by and large, articles in them tend to be written and read by different groups of scholars using different language and seeing the world in different ways – like the blind men, they focus on different parts of the elephant.

The strength of change journals such as these is that they provide a forum for a community of scholars with a specific orientation to join together to explore their interests and to develop a common language for doing so. The weakness is that they become one of many islands in the sea of change which are isolated from each other. This is why when we look at the field of change we do not see a single community of scholars and practitioners attempting to understand and develop the study and practice of change. Instead, we see a sea populated with islands, atolls, reefs and a lot of individuals madly paddling boats between them who are frustrated by the fact that no one seems to speak the same language or see the world in the same way.

The revitalization of the JCM offers a unique opportunity to create a home for the change community as a whole which transcends disciplinary barriers. A glance at the Editorial Board shows it comprises leading scholars from across the field. Similarly, if one considers the articles which have appeared over the last couple of years, it can be seen that they come from a wide range of disciplines and inter- ests. The challenge for all of us involved in the JCM – the Editor, the Editorial Board, contributors and readers – is to seize the opportunity to engage with each other. Like all communities, if the change community is to prosper, we need a community centre where we can meet, discuss, debate and develop our common interests. The JCM offers such a place; we would be foolish to ignore the offer.

References

Brown, D.R. and Harvey, D. (2004) An Experiential Approach to Organization Development (Upper Saddle

River, NJ: Prentice Hall).

Brown, J. and Issacs, D. (2005) World Café: Shaping our Futures through Conversations that Matter

(San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler).

Bushe, G.R. and Marshak, R.J. (2009) Revisioning organization development: diagnostic and dialogic premises

and patterns of practice, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 45(3), pp. 348–368.

Cooperrider, D.L., Whitney, D. and Stavros, J.M. (2008) Appreciative Inquiry Handbook (Brunswick, OH:

Crown).

Grieves, J. (2010) Organizational Change:Themes and Issues (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Gronn, P. (2002) Distributed leadership as a unit of analysis, Leadership Quarterly, 13(4), pp. 423–451.

Change Management: The Road Ahead 5

Hughes, M. (2006) Change Management: A Critical Perspective (London: CIPD).

Lewin, K. (1947) Frontiers in group dynamics, Human Relations, 1(2), pp. 143–153.

Owen, H. (2008) Open Space Technology (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler).

Shaw, P. (2002) Changing Conversations in Organizations: A Complexity Approach to Change (London:

Routledge).

Stacey, R.D. (2001) Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations (London: Routledge).

Stickland, F. (1998) The Dynamics of Change: Insights into Organisational Transition from the Natural World

(London: Routledge).

6 R.T. By et al.

Copyright of Journal of Change Management is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or

emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.

However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.