Organisational Change
Index
Lecture 1. Introduction to the course .............................................................................................. 3
→ Article 1: (1) Tsoukas, H. & Chia, R. (2002). On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking
Organizational Change. Organization Science, 13(5), p. 567-582.............................................. 3
Lecture 2. Emergent change through many small steps ................................................................. 5
→ Articles 2 – 3: (2) Plowman, D., Baker, L., Beck, T., Kulkarni, M., Solansky, S., & Travis, D.
(2007). Radical Change Accidentally: The Emergence and Amplification of Small Change.
Academy of Management Journal, 50, 515–543. ....................................................................... 5
(3) Gehman, J., Trevino, L. & Garud, R. (2013). Values work: A process study of the
emergence of organizational values practices. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1): 84-
112.............................................................................................................................................. 5
Lecture 3. Different voices in the change process .......................................................................... 8
→ Articles 4 – 5: (4) Buchanan, D. & Dawson, P. (2007). Discourse and Audience:
Organizational Change as Multi-Story Process. Journal of Management Studies, 44(5), 669-
686.............................................................................................................................................. 8
(5) Thomas, R., Sargent, L. & Hardy, C. (2011). Managing organizational change: Negotiated
meaning and power-resistance relations. Organization Science, 22(1), 22-41. .......................... 8
Lecture 4. Upward influencing and Issue selling........................................................................... 11
→ Articles 6 – 7: (6) Dutton, J. E., Ashford, S. J., O'Neill, R. M., & Lawrence, K. A. (2001).
Moves that matter: issue selling and organizational change. Academy of Management Journal,
44(4), 716-736. ......................................................................................................................... 11
(7) Lauche, K. (2019) Insider activists pursuing an agenda for change: Selling the need for
collaboration. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 64, 121–140. ................................ 11
Lecture 5. Promoting sustainability ............................................................................................... 14
→ Articles 8 – 9: (8) Howard-Grenville, J. A. (2007). Developing issue-selling effectiveness
over time: Issue selling as resourcing. Organization Science, 18(4): 560–577......................... 14
(9) Wickert, C. & de Bakker, F.G.A. (2018). Pitching for social change: Towards a relational
approach for selling and buying social issues. Academy of Management Discoveries. 4(1), 50-
73. ............................................................................................................................................ 14
Lecture 6. Bottom-up change ....................................................................................................... 17
→ Articles 10 – 11: (10) DiBenigno, J. (2019) Rapid relationality: How peripheral experts build
a foundation for influence with line managers. Administrative Science Quarterly ..................... 17
(11) Meyerson, D.E. & Scully, M. (1995). Tempered radicalism and the politics of ambivalence
and change. Organization Science, 6 (5): 585-600. ................................................................. 17
Lecture 7. Workshop: Probing the future – acting today ............................................................... 20
→ Article 12: (12) Augustine, G., Soderstrom, S. , Milner, D. & Weber, K. (2019) Constructing
a distant future: imaginaries in geoengineering. Academy of Management Journal, 62(6), 1930-
1960.......................................................................................................................................... 20
Lecture 8. Tutorial to present and discuss assignment 1 .............................................................. 21
Lecture 9. New perspective on resistance .................................................................................... 23
→ Articles 13: (13) Ford, J. D., Ford, L. W., & D'Amelio, A. (2008). Resistance to change: the
rest of the story. Academy of Management Review, 33(2), 362-377. ....................................... 23
Lecture 10. Organizational politics and infrapolitics ...................................................................... 26
→ Articles 14 – 16: (14) Courpasson, D., Dany, F., & Clegg, S. (2012). Resisters at work:
Generating productive resistance in the workplace, Organization Science, 23(3), 801-819. .... 26
, (15) Ybema, S. & Horvers, M. (2017). Resistance through compliance: The strategic and
subversive potential of frontstage and backstage resistance. Organization Studies, 38(9),
1233-1251. ............................................................................................................................... 26
(16) Courpasson, D. (2017). Beyond the hidden/public resistance divide: How bloggers
defeated a big company. Organization Studies, 38(9), 1277-1302. .......................................... 26
Lecture 11. (Em)Power(ment) through digital technology ............................................................. 30
→ Articles 17 – 18: (17) Mazmanian, M., Orlikowski, W.J., Yates, J. (2013). The autonomy
paradox: The implications of mobile email devices for knowledge professionals. Organization
Science, 24 (5)1337–1357........................................................................................................ 30
(18) Leonardi, P. M. (2011). When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance,
constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies. MIS Quarterly, 35, 147–167.
................................................................................................................................................. 30
Lecture 12.1 Guest lecture Menno Bol ......................................................................................... 34
Lecture 12.2 Consultants’ involvement in organizational change ................................................. 35
→ Article 19: (19) Fincham, R. (1999). The consultant-client relationship: critical perspectives
on the management of organizational change. Journal of Management Studies (36)3, 335-351.
................................................................................................................................................. 35
Lecture 13.1. Pursuing change with help from the outside ........................................................... 37
→ Article 20: (20) Alvesson, M., Kärreman, D., Sturdy, A. & Handley, K. (2009). Unpacking the
client(s): Constructions, positions and client-consultant dynamics. Scandinavian Journal of
Management, 25(3), p. 253-263. .............................................................................................. 37
Lecture 13.2 Tutorial on assignment 3 ......................................................................................... 37
Lecture 14. Q&A for exam & practice exam questions ................................................................. 39
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,Lecture 1. Introduction to the course
→ Article 1: (1) Tsoukas, H. & Chia, R. (2002). On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change.
Organization Science, 13(5), p. 567-582.
Philosophy of the course – mission statement
Making change a positive story
Stay away from apocalypse, tell stories about saving nature or the earth, avoid waste, retain
something fur future generations. Foster hope to strengthen people’s sense of agency.
Rebecca Solnit: “Part of the work we need to do is to imagine not only the devastation of climate
change, but also the benefits of making a transition from fossil fuel.”
Linking social change to organizational change. Research on how people pursue sustainability
and connect to others through a common narrative. Small people, peripheral actors can make a
difference – you can outwit more powerful actors. Narrative matters – change is a matter of
sensemaking, interpretation.
Positive organizational scholarship. Understand social change within and across organisations. Focus
on change processes that increase, enable and foster beneficial outcomes. Positive deviance. Hope
as a generative dynamic. Different application areas: sustainability, social justice, diversity.
Paper Tsoukas & Chia: On organizational becoming: rethinking organizational change
Traditional approaches assume that stability is the norm and that organizational change is exceptional
rather than natural. Current state > Transition state > Required future state. Tsoukas & Chia propose
to rethink change as ongoing process as ‘reversal of ontological priorities’.
(A1) In this paper, we set out to offer an account of organizational change on its own terms – to treat
change as the normal condition of organizational life. The central question we address is as follows:
What must organization(s) be like if change is constitutive of reality? In this view, organization is
a secondary accomplishment, in a double sense. Firstly, organization is the attempt to order the
intrinsic flux of human action. Secondly, organization is a pattern that is constituted, shaped and
emerging from change.
(A1) What would be the benefits of organizational change? First, it would enable researchers to
obtain a more complete understanding of the micro-processes of change at work. Second, as well as
not knowing a lot about the micro processes of change, we do not know enough about how change is
actually accomplished. Third, change programs that are informed by the view that gives priority to
stability and treats change as an epiphenomenon do not often produce change.
(A1) We need to stop giving ontological priority to organization, thereby making change an exceptional
effect, produced only under specific circumstances by certain people (change agents). We should
rather start from the premise that change is pervasive and indivisible.
Organizational becoming: create complete understanding of micro-processes of change at work.
How is change actually accomplished instead of looking at a ‘post-mortem dissection’. Change
programs need to be made to work. (A1) Organizing implies generalizing; it is the process of
subsuming particulars under generic categories.
Change = organizational becoming ‘the reweaving of actors’ webs of beliefs and habits of action as a
result of new experiences obtained through interactions – ongoing improvisation. (A1) Synoptic
accounts view change as an accomplished event whose key features and variations, and causal
antecedents and consequences, need to be explored and described. There is a paradox: a
conceptual framework for making sense of change cannot deal with change per se, except by
conceiving of it as a series of immobility’s; it makes sense of change by denying change.
Organizing = the attempt to order the intrinsic flux of human action, to channel it toward certain ends,
to give it particular shape, through generalizing and institutionalizing particular meaning and rules (and
sets the framework for further organizing, it is recursive).
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, Different ways of looking at change. Traditional literature look at change as a synoptic accounts =
looking afterwards, not to the process in between, change is an accomplished event, uses stage
models, do not capture the distinguishing feature of change, works with concepts that are based in
immobility’s, denying change. On the other hand the performative accounts = how actors do and
been done, human agency, opening the black box and look what is happening during the
change/transitioning, turn attention away from the practical matters toward reflection.
Understanding change: there is a core understanding based on institutionalized meaning and there
are less prototypical cases, slight reconstructions of the core concepts, creates change.
Tsoukas & Chia: Planned change is also emergent change. Planned change is not episodic, just
another response to exogenous change. Change programmes triggers ongoing change and are
integrated in the ongoing/emergent change, made to work. Managerial intentionality: “managers need
to clear their vision to see what is going on and at the same time help fashion and coherent and
desirable pattern out of what is going on; they need to perceive.”. A change program is only a new
discursive template to make certain things possible, new interpretative codes/concepts.
Time and temporality: 2 concepts
- Choronos: Greek mythological figure, represents quantifiable, measurable time, ‘clock time’, linear
progression;
- Kairos: youngest son of Zeus, represents internally experienced time (flow), temporality, loosing
track of time; or ‘the right moment for something’.
Change process
- Planned change: unfreeze > change > refreeze
- Current situation > messy road > desired situation
Illusion of manageability
- Illusion of linearity: change comes in neat stages and occurs in order. One step forward, two steps
back;
- Illusion of predictability: change is predictable and processes are template for action. Numerous
unanticipated, unexpected events;
- Illusion of control: managers are fully in control of change process. Forces outside control of
manager.
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