Purpose – One of the critical issues for change management, particularly in relation to the implementation of new technologies, is the existence of prior knowledge and established mental models which may hinder change efforts. Understanding unlearning and how it might assist during...

Purpose – In recent years it has been argued that the widespread adoption of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) presages the “end” of bureaucracy and its replacement by new and more flexible organisational forms. The purpose of this paper is to question contemporary...

Purpose – Appropriation of information communication technology (ICT) drags tools and actors into a sociotechnical process. ICT, practices, and organizations are strongly modified. Only an interplay approach can reveal the complexity of relations between technology and work practices. The...

Offers a response to a discussion of the language of change, which appeared in an earlier issue of JOCM (Vol. 14, 2001 ). While applauding any attempt to develop an appreciation of the fluidity of the processes and politics of organizational change offers a critical response to the account of...

The organizational change that is happening when firms are undergaing a CEO succession is difficult to apprehend and analyze. Further it is not related to any kind of linear approach. Rather, in most cases, the CEO succession is complex, dynamic and is embedded in a context and a situation that...

Purpose – Consulting work aims to bring about changes in organizational performance. In OD‐consulting practices, changes are to be sought through conversational settings created for these purposes. The purpose of this paper is to take a discursive approach to change work and ask how...

Jung’s discussion of archetypes and the psychodynamics of mirroring is applied to the results of a ten‐year longitudinal case study. Empirical evidence of such psychodynamics and insights into how these psychodynamics are related to the management of change are presented. Directions for...

Purpose – This paper seeks to explore and explain the dramatic organizational changes that took place over a relatively short time period in the five largest global professional networks, or GPNs – a group of organizations that were originally global accounting firms and traditionally...

Purpose – This paper seeks to utilize the concept of testicularity put forward by Flannigan‐Saint‐Aubin to explain a shift in the hegemonic masculinities in two organizations which were unusual in being successful in realizing their aims for improvement. Design/methodology/approach – The...

Purpose – The key to success and failure in change projects may lie not in groundbreaking events or heroic gestures but in the many seemingly meaningless acts and events that occur throughout all change projects. In order to gain a better understanding of factors leading to success in change...