Sturdy & Grey (2003): Beneath and beyond organizational change management Flashcards
Key message:
The aim of this article is to begin to make the case for the construction and legitimacy of alternative voices to those that insist upon the inevitability and desirability of change management.
Everything Changes Except Change
Pro-innovation bias: Assumes that innovation is desirable or inevitable, regardless of the costs and consequences (Rogers, 1995)—‘new’ is always good, ‘old’ is bad.
The fact that change is seen as necessarily desirable is illustrated in the demonization and pathologizing inherent in the commonly used OCM phrase ‘irrational resistance to change’.
Of course, it can be (and usually is) argued that it is not so much that planned change is good, but that it is necessary in (i.e. determined by) the current period of ‘unprecedented’ competition and market change. Yet the two arguments are not distinct, for if change is necessary then it is also considered good when compared with the alternative of ‘no change’. Indeed, that alternative is rarely if ever voiced within OCM. Even contingency models of change management do not include a ‘no change’ option.
OCM has begun to posit that it is not that everything changes but that everything is change: people, organizations, ideas, etc. are abstractions or fixings of movement, temporary, identifiable ‘resting points’
Similarly stability is an unnoticed change. In this sense, being is change and change has no outside. This is not so much a bias for change as a totalitarianism of change.
‘Everything is change’ except, it seems, the ability to control it and the structure of power and inequality.
