Perspectives on Change

What Academics, Consultants and Managers Really Think About Change

Bernard Burnes, Julian Randall, Bernard Burnes, Julian Randall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317398011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Despite the plethora of books on change, there appears is a notable gap in the field; rarely is the authentic and candid voice of change practitioners heard. Seldom are those most closely involved in the management of change given (or seek) the opportunity to write about their personal experiences and reflexiveness. Nor is this just a case of practicing managers not being given a voice, or feeling that they cannot be frank and open about what they do. How often do academics candidly state what they actually do when they are faced with managing change in their own institutions or when they are called on in a consultancy capacity? Similarly, it is rare for full-time consultants to be candid about what it is they actually do: instead they tend to have a well-honed sales pitch which lays out a logical change process directed at helping the client to achieve success. Yet, when academics, consultants and practicing managers are prepared to speak candidly about what they really do, a richer, messier but more illuminating picture of change emerges.

The aim of Perspectives on Change is to move beyond the 'do as I say' approach of most change books and to encourage academics, consultants and managers to say candidly what it is they really do and what they really think about change and how it should be managed. The Editors of this book, Burnes and Randall, have over 60 years of experience between them of studying and teaching change management, acting as consultants and actually managing change projects. They are, therefore, well aware of the differences and contradictions between what academics, consultants and managers say about change in public and what they say in private and do in practice.

Perspectives on Change will offer students and practitioners of change a unique opportunity to understand change in practice. In addition, it will also contribute to the Rigour-Relevance debate by giving a different and perhaps more realistic perspective on the nature of the gap between theory and practice.

Part I
An Academic Debate and Practice

Julian Randall and Bernard Burnes

Academics devoted to the subjects of business and management are keen to establish the credentials of their discipline in terms of its scientific foundations of valid and reliable knowledge which can, on occasion, be applied by others reading the results of their research. But there is an ongoing debate which indicates that they are not always convinced about the impact they have on the wider world of management practice. A recent fiftieth anniversary for the Journal of Management featured several articles which raised the questions of relevance and applicability of academic theories or whether that should even be a goal for those who are engaged with pure rather than applied science.

For example, there is a classic divide between science and ‘stories’. For some academics, the positivistic approach of measuring factors affecting work is preferable to the qualitative approach, which focuses on what people at work say about themselves to management researchers. The editorial suggests that:

We have become to some extent at least rather ‘insular’ and ‘narrow’ in our approach to theory, focusing on a particular theoretical tradition. . . We rhetorically position our work separate from other related approaches and do not sufficiently look across the fence even to what close colleagues are doing within management studies.

(Corbett et al, 2014: 13)

Certainly there have been times when the closely argued beliefs of academics can be lost on managers. Why can academics not speak in plain language about the things that matter to ordinary people at work? Why are the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of a topic so densely expressed that ordinary management practitioners can make little or nothing of what seems to them an arcane debate?

The authors suggest that the resolution of this dilemma may be found in process and agency. They suggest that:

Process refers to how we balance exploitation and exploration issues in our development and assessment of research. Meanwhile agency refers to what we do as authors, reviewers, editors, educators, and leaders and managers within educational institutions to promote plurality, while supporting the ever difficult and ever present trials of striking a balance between careerism and purity in the pursuit of research, and a balance between rigour and imagination in research.

(Corbett et al., 2014: 16)

We like to think that the academics who have contributed to this book have demonstrated an ability to bridge the divide between theory and practice in their work. Perhaps those of us involved in the management of change are fortunate that there is no other way of approaching the evidence about change events than the voices of the people who undergo it. As one PhD supervisor was once overheard telling his student, ‘Let these people have a voice.’ And without that voice, empirical data can be somewhat sterile and under-illustrated. But capturing the voices presents another challenge: How can we generalize from the data that we receive as researchers? This may make an interesting case study for those interested in the sector researched, but it may mean much less to those who attempt to manage themselves and others elsewhere in the diverse fields that management and organization studies encompass.

We begin this section with an author of change who is prepared to challenge many of the assumptions of traditional management of change narratives. The title of David Buchanan’s chapter leaves no doubt about his own experience of the popular beliefs about change: ‘I Couldn’t Disagree More: Eight Things about Organizational Change that We Know for Sure but Which Are Probably Wrong’. He challenges the claims that change is on the increase, that the distinction between leaders and managers is a useful one, that we need transformational leaders, that a change manager is needed to make change happen, that bureaucracy is dead, or that best practice is the best guide for implementing change successfully. He does believe that change agents should be aware of and work with the politics of change. The work of change, he suggests, is always contentious and getting involved in the dynamics of the organizations is something that is frequently underestimated or disregarded.

Our second contributors are David Boje and Tonya Henderson, whose writing on antenarrative are well-known in the field of the management of change and management generally. The assumptions that people have about themselves, their jobs, their work, and their organizations are all part of the context in which the researchers become immersed. But those stories and accounts reveal the narratives which underlie the perceptions of individuals about themselves and the roles that they have had to play. Significantly, David has chosen to devote his time to those suffering from the after effects of military action in which those narratives become crucial for finding resolution and healing. And he explains how his work has developed from theory into practice.

Thus far, then, the researcher engages in the accounts of others in a process which our next chapter writers, Nic Beech and Rob McIntosh, describe as dialogic. By this they mean that key events are processually linked in organizational narratives in what they describe as anchor points and that these anchor points are created, interpreted, manipulated, and retold over time, because these are the processes by which change (and not changing) are justified. For the change agent, there is a similar interaction that occurs which they refer to as ‘dialogic encounters’. They conclude with an Enquiry Action Framework which focuses on ‘questioning and understanding the context, content and process of change . . . as well as developing a repertoire of alternative ways of enacting change’.

Our remaining chapters include accounts of actual change encounters which their authors had with individuals and groups researched during change events. For Patrick Dawson, 30 years of research into change events has reinforced his view of processual change and recognising that stories are ‘powerful vehicles during times of change (in terms of sensemaking and sensegiving for individuals and groups), and they can be used to support change, to resist change, and to engage multiple stakeholders in opportunities for new pathways to change innovations or to curtailing change initiatives’. He illustrates this with accounts of individuals encountered over his research career and explores their responses to change events.

Stephen Procter and Julian Randall reflect on a 20-year journey in HM Customs and Excise, including their final merger with Inland Revenue in 2005, which illustrates how change agents are not always as adept at managing change as they would like to believe and the lessons that follow from that. But they also offer an example of a mixed group of doctors and counsellors working with the survivors of childhood sexual abuse whose meetings became a vehicle for sharing insights into effective caring of their patients and appreciation of the benefits that different approaches can bring to their patients.

Finally, Richard Badham unfolds the account of his work in Cokemaking Oz where his work provided him with contact with several memorable individuals with whom he shared a close, personal, and frank exchange which probably less experienced change agents might avoid. As he says ‘involvements and relationships in the field involve a whole range of bargains, favours, trade-offs and ethical dilemmas, as the researcher strives to obtain access, data, time and resources, and those observed seek insight, relief, advice, and even material, reputational, or career enhancement’. Change affects the researcher and should be welcomed for that.

None of these contributors sound as if they have lived in an ivory tower. Indeed the benefit of exploring the issues surfaced during change events offers a direct route into the basic assumptions that individuals have and which may be shared within a working group. Failure to engage with your research subjects as a researcher means engagement in failure—the same applies to all change agents.

Returning to the debate ‘Has management studies lost its way?’ there is a view that the requirement to research and write in a predictive way has blunted the topic’s ability to attract groundbreaking work. Alvesson and Sandberg suggest that:

A researcher identity engineered to only produce similar-looking journal articles for a limited group of sub-specialists is counterproductive to the ideal of interesting and influential studies, in which assumption-challenging is a key characteristic.

(Alvesson and Sandberg, 2013: 148)

We hope you will agree that these chapters satisfy the authors’ aspirations for challenging accounts of change written by academics who have been immersed in their work to monitor what organizations generate among their people during imposed change at work.

References

Alvesson, Matts and Jorgen Sandberg (2013) ‘Has management studies lost its way? Ideas for more imaginative and innovative research’, Journal of Management Studies, 50 (1), 128–52.

Corbett, Andrew, Joep Cornellisen, Andrew Delios and Bill Harley (2014) ‘Variety, novelty and perceptions of scholarship in research on management and organization: An appeal for ambidextrous scholarship’, Journal of Management Studies, 51 (1), 3–18.

1 I Couldn't Disagree More

Eight Things about Organizational Change that We Know for Sure but Which are Probably Wrong

David A. Buchanan

I am Emeritus Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Cranfield University School of Management and Visiting Professor at Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University. I work freelance as a consultant, presenter, and author, specializing in change management and organization politics. I have a doctorate in organizational behaviour from Edinburgh University, I was director of Loughborough University Business School from 1992 to 1995, I have held visiting posts in Australian and Canadian management schools, and I work regularly in Australia. I am author/co-author of over two dozen books, including the bestselling Organizational Behaviour (with Andrzej Huczynski; eighth edition 2013). I have also co-authored several books on change management, including Take The Lead and The Expertise of the Change Agent (with David Boddy), The Sustainability and Spread of Organizational Change (with Louise Fitzgerald and Diane Ketley), and Power, Politics and Organizational Change: Winning the Turf Game (with Richard Badham). I have also written numerous book chapters and articles on organizational behaviour and change and research methods.

Most of my experience of organizational change is based on my work and observations as a field researcher. However, I also have some direct experience of change management from various senior roles in higher education. It has often been observed that change is a paradoxical process. From my experience, two paradoxes stand out. The first concerns the tension between rationality and creativity. Practical advice, from both management consultants and academics, often seeks to codify and simplify the change process; ‘Follow these steps to success.’ That generic advice has to be translated into action that ‘fits’ the context—presenting problems, past history, local cultural norms, available resources, stakeholder views, and so on. That translation process is a creative one, based on locally informed managerial judgement. The creative dimension of the change design and implementation process is often overlooked or considered unimportant. The second concerns the tension between rationality and politics. Organizations are political systems, and change is a politicized process. The change agent, manager, or leader who is not able and willing to play the organization politics game will fail, sooner or later, and probably sooner—because most if not all other stakeholders are playing that game, too, to protect or advance their own interests. The politics of the change process seems also to be a ‘missing ingredient’ in much of the practical commentary in this area, and training and development in change leadership often avoids the development of political skill.

Recent research has concerned managing change in extreme (post-crisis) contexts, the changing roles of middle management in acute health care (funded by the UK National Institute for Health Research, Health Services & Delivery Research Programme), the prospects for transformational change in acute hospitals, and medical change leadership capabilities.

Everyone Knows that 'Change is the New Normal'

Everyone knows that progress is inevitable, that resistance to change is a natural human response, that the pace of change is increasing, that bureaucracy is rigid and bad, and so on. Welcome to contemporary conventional wisdom concerning organizational change. However, from experience as a researcher who has observed many organizational change programmes (and who has some successful, but not necessarily painless, personal experience in the area), conventional wisdom is mostly wrong. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to take eight ‘obvious’ claims about the nature of change and to suggest that these are misguided. This is not an academic sniping exercise. Management beliefs and assumptions about the nature of the world in general, and about people and organizational change in particular, have implications for management decisions and actions. Driving change is one area where, if you get it wrong, you can cause a lot of individual and corporate damage.

The following conventional wisdoms have been culled from conversations with managers and management consultants, comments from national politicians, articles by journalists, and from academic publications. (Government ministers in the UK appear to inhabit a unique fantasy world with regard to their understanding of the nature, pace, and implications of change in the departments for which they are responsible.) The choice of targets is inevitably based on personal bias and judgement; however, with regard to each of these eight issues, sustaining an unshaken belief in conventional wisdom means consistently ignoring the research evidence.

The Pace is Picking Up

That this is an age of change is an expression heard frequently today. Never before in the history of mankind have so many and so frequent changes occurred. These changes that we see taking place all about us are in that great cultural accumulation which is man’s social heritage. It has already been shown that these cultural changes were in earlier times rather infrequent, but that in modern times they have been occurring faster and faster until today mankind is almost bewildered in his effort to keep adjusted to these ever increasing social changes. This rapidity of social change may be due to the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Introduction
• Part I An Academic Debate and Practice
• Part II Consultancy Cares: The Travails of the Change Agent
• Part III Managers as Consultants
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index