fetish of change, The

Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science, 2003 by Grey, Christopher

MANAGING CHANGE: SOME INANITIES AND INIQUITIES

The most striking thing about change management is that it almost always fails. Despite (or, who knows, because of) the reams of worthy academic treatises, the unending stream of self-congratulatory 'I did it my way' blather from pensioned-off executives and the veritable textual diarrhoea of self-serving guru handbooks, change remains a mystery. And I do not think that the answer is just around the corner: rather, change management rests upon the conceit that it is possible systematically to control social and organisational relations, a conceit shared by the social sciences in general (Maclntyre, 1981). I will return shortly to this point.

Change management a failure? Is this just wild generalisation from an 'armchair critic'? Crosby (1989) - a leading advocate of TQM - claims that 90% of such projects fail to meet their targets, whilst Stewart (1993) gives a failure figure of 50-70% for BPR. New techniques are announced with a great fanfare and presented as the unproblematic solution to previous problems, but disillusion soon sets in. Some of this is bound up with the marketing activities of consultants and gurus. But there is more to it than that. Managers responsible for particular change programmes are likely, for career and identity reasons, to describe them as successful. Yet, the everyday experience of people in organisations is that one change programme gives way to another in a perennially failing operation: nirvana is always just on its way.

In this context, the massive prescriptive literature of organisational change takes on an interesting aspect. On the one hand, it must always be pointing to the failure of change management (else why the need for this new book?), whilst on the other hand never admitting the illusory nature of successful change management (else why the need for any new book?). Much of the conflict stems here from the search for a formula or methodology which promises success in a wide variety of settings. For change management is predicated upon the substitutability of, or generalizability from, what has (supposedly) worked in one situation to another.

We can see here the social practice which underlies the observation made earlier about the way in which organisations adopting homogenous 'solutions' to problems in the name of competitive advantage must inevitably end up without such an advantage. For this is not just an anomaly, but an inevitable feature of change management. It is most evident in relation to the very common change management methodology of 'benchmarking'.

Benchmarking aims to measure and match an organisation's existing products and procedures with those of competitors and, in particular, those of organisations perceived to be field leaders. It is part of a process which institutional theorists have described as 'mimetic isomorphism' (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991) or, as we might more straightforwardly say, copying. Benchmarking, as a general preparation for the deployment of particular change management techniques in the name of 'best practice', is expressive of the underlying search for generalizability which characterises change management discourses.