Beneath and Beyond Organizational Change Management: Exploring Alternatives

Abstract

This essay introduces contributions to a special issue exploring alternative accounts of organizational change management (OCM). It begins with identifying why such alternatives are needed by pointing to core assumptions within OCM, including a practical and ontological prochange bias, managerialism and universalism. The alternatives to OCM are then framed in terms of the constructionism associated with various forms of discourse analysis. It is argued that the contributions show, both theoretically and empirically, the limitations of OCM as conventionally understood.