Changing Change Management: Strategy, Power and Resistance

The literature on Change Management works from the premise that management possesses the power to achieve change and this is evident in that resistance is little more than a footnote in most textbooks. This assumption sits uneasily, however, with the high failure rate of Change Management interventions. This book seeks to explain this paradox by providing a critical ’relational’ approach towards Change Management. What would a book on Change Management look like that takes resistance seriously? This book attempts precisely this by exploring how resistance is as much a part of change as the strategies of those that seek to enact it. The findings are drawn from a qualitative study of organizational transformation in a Local Government Authority in the UK. Its detailed empirical insights enable readers to explore organizational change from many different perspectives considering issues such as the strategic use of metaphor and counter-metaphors; management and employee resistance; organizational politics and cynicism.

It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students interested in change management, organizational studies, human resource management, and critical management studies.

Darren McCabe is Professor of Organization Studies at Lancaster University Management School, UK. He is the author of Power at Work: How Employees Reproduce the Corporate Machine which was published by Routledge, 2007.