Abstract:
There are a growing number of rich, qualitative studies investigating patterns in the
development of strategic change. These reveal that it is not possible to understand the
incremental and emergent nature of strategic change in organisations without
recognising the impact of micro organisational political and social processes. However,
few studies set out to explore in depth the implementation of a particular strategic
change initiative to examine how these micro processes affect the way the
implementation develops through time. This thesis uses a longitudinal real-time case
study of a planned strategic change implementation to do this. It examines how
facilitating and obstructing processes developed during the implementation, and how
these interacting processes affected the way the implementation progressed, from the
perspective of middle managers as change recipients.
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The findings show that during intended change implementation, the planned
interventions put in place by senior managers as they intentionally try to carry out
change also lead to the development of emergent facilitating and obstructing
processes. A sensemaking perspective is adopted to show how these emergent change
elements arise from recipient interpretations of the planned change interventions. A
theory of mediation is proposed to account for the findings. However, the
contribution of the research is not to do with the identification of the centrality of
sensemaking processes during change. It is an empirical study which draws on existing
theories on sensemaking to show how recipient sensemaking contributes to both
intended and unintended change outcomes, thereby providing fresh insights into how
and why change implementation becomes an emergent and incremental process.
The thesis has four main parts to it. The first part deals with the research background
and methodology; the second part the research site context and, the ethnographic stories
of change; the third part the findings and theory development; and the last chapter the
theoretical and practical implications of the research findings.