Ambiguity and ambivalence: Senior managers' accounts of organizational change in a restructured government department

Journal of Organizational Change Management

Volumn 21, Issue 6, 2008, Pages 686-700

  Randall, Julian ^a   Procter, Stephen ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN   (United Kingdom)

^b NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY BUSINESS SCHOOL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Change management; Employee attitudes; Organizational change; Senior managers; United Kingdom

Indexed keywords

EID: 54849424119     PISSN: 09534814     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1108/09534810810915727     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. Alvesson, M. (1995), Management of Knowledge-intensive Companies, De Gruyter, Berlin.
2. Alvesson, M. and Skoldberg, K. (2000), Reflexive Methodology, Sage, London.
3. Alvesson, M. and Sveningsson, S. (2003), "Good visions, bad micromanagement and ugly ambiguity: contradictions of (non)-leadership in a knowledge-intensive organization", Organization Studies, Vol. 24 No. 6, pp. 961-88.
4. Barley, S. and Kunda, G. (1992), "Design and devotion: surges of rational and normative ideologies of control in managerial discourse", Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 37, pp. 369-99.
5. Bhaskar, R. (1979), The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, Routledge, London.
6. Boje, D.M. (2001), Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communicational Research, Sage, London.
7. Buchanan, D. and Badham, R. (1999), Power, Politics and Organizational Change: Winning the Turf Game, Sage, London.
8. Casey, C. (1995), Work, Self and Society, Routledge, London.
9. Collins, D. (1998), Organizational Change: A Sociological Approach, Routledge, London.
10. Dawson, P. (1994), Organizational Change: A Processual Approach, Paul Chapman, London.
11. Erikson, A. and Hunt, J. (1997), "Reflections on conducting processual research on management and organizations", Scandinavian Journal of Management, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 331-5.
12. Gabriel, Y. (1999), "Beyond happy families: a critical re-evaluation of the control-resistance-identity triangle", Human Relations, Vol. 52 No. 2, pp. 179-203.
13. Isabella, L. (1990), "Evolving interpretations as a change unfolds: how managers construe key organizational events", Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 33 No. 1, pp. 7-41.
14. Louis, M.R. (1980a), "Surprise and sense making: what newcomers experience on entering unfamiliar organizational settings", Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 25, pp. 226-51.
15. Louis, M.R. (1980b), "Career transitions: varieties and commonalities", Academy of Management Review, Vol. 5, pp. 329-40.
16. McLoughlin, I., Badham, R. and Palmer, G. (2005), "Cultures of ambiguity: design, emergence and ambivalence in the introduction of normative control", Work, Employment and Society, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 67-89.
17. Martin, J. and Meyerson, G. (1988), "Organizational culture and the denial, channelling and acknowledgement of ambiguity", in Pondy, L., Boland, R. and Thomas, H. (Eds), Managing Ambiguity and Change, Wiley, New York, NY.
18. Nicholson, N. and West, M. (1988), Managerial Job Change: Men and Women in Transition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
19. Orlikovski, W. and Hofman, D. (1997), "An improvisational model for change management: the case of groupware technologies", Sloan Management Review, Winter, pp. 11-12.
20. Piderit, S. (2000), "Rethinking resistance and recognising ambivalence: a multidimensional view of attitudes towards and organizational change", Academy of Management Review, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 783-94.
21. Preece, D., Steven, G. and Steven, V. (1999), Work, Change and Competition: Managing for Bass, Routledge, London.
22. Robertson, M. and Swan, J. (2003), "Control - what control? Culture and ambiguity within a knowledge intensive firm", Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 40 No. 4, pp. 83-858.
23. Schein, E.H. (1985), Organizational Culture and Leadership, Jossey-Bass, New York, NY.
24. Strauss, A. and Corbin, J. (1998), Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
25. Watson, T. (1982), "Group ideologies and organizational change", Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 19, pp. 259-75.
26. Willmott, H. (1993), "Breaking the paradigm mentality", Organization Studies, Vol. 14 No. 5, pp. 681-719.
27. Badham, R. (2003), "Mudanças not removalists! Rethinking the management of organizational change", unpublished paper, Centre for Change Management, University of Wollongong, Wollongong.
28. Balogun, J., Gleadle, P., Hope-Hailey, V. and Willmott, H. (2005), "Managing change across boundaries: boundary-shaking practices", British Journal of Management, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 261-78.