ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the politics of change in organizations in order to clarify the broad organizational conditions and potential impact of strategic learning. The discussions are linked to the issues I have raised in previous chapters and are particularly related towards understanding processes that both contribute to and question the establishment that organizing creates. There is already a very considerable literature covering planned change, which conceptualizes change in relation to an event, as the solution of problems, or as the implementation of a strategic process. The focus of this chapter is in a different area. My starting point in thinking about change is a continuation and development of previous writing, where I have reflected that change ‘happens in connection with others, through friendships and collaboration, it happens as a result of uncertainty and risk, through organizational politics, and it happens for reasons I cannot fathom’ (Vince, 1996: 88). Change is seen as an ongoing process with unpredictable outcomes (Orlikowski and Hofman, 1997) and the management of change is bound up with the internal dynamics of organizing, with ‘interests, values, power dependencies and capacity for action’ (Greenwood and Hinings, 1996: 1023), as well as with the potency of the emotions and fantasies that shape organization.
