Management Scholarship and Organisational Change

"Miriam Green’s critical study of how a theory of change got changed in research on change is respectful scholarship par excellence. This book makes a humbling and compelling case for the philosophical primacy of returning to original texts." — Dr Wim Vandekerckhove, Reader in Business Ethics, University of Greenwich, Editor-in-Chief, Philosophy of Management

"This is a scrupulous, comprehensive and fair-minded account of how a complex, rich theory of change came to be misinterpreted by researchers, teachers and practitioners alike. Numerous failed organisational ‘change programmes’ and ‘transformation strategies’ testify to the human and material costs and the importance of the intellectual failures Miriam Green so compellingly deconstructs." — Nigel Laurie, Managing Partner, London Facilitators and former Visiting Professor of Philosophy of Management, Royal Holloway School of Management, UK

"With this book, Miriam Green has accomplished a vital as well as crucial contribution to both academic and practitioner literature in the field of the management of organisational change by representing a holistic approach and interpretation of the main work of Burns and Stalker’s The Management of Innovation. Green shows us how unilateral former representations of Burns and Stalker have been in terms of objectivist, structuralist and positivist interpretations in contrast to Burns and Stalker’s original concerns for pluralist, inclusive, and subjective approaches. In other words, Green highlights how the neglect of political, practical, individual and subjective factors facing managers has generally been neglected in scholarly readings of The Management of Innovation. With Green’s book, the human factor has been returned in representing Burns and Stalker’s vital work, changing its image to an inclusive, sustainable, and dialectical contribution to the business management literature for academia as well as for practitioners." — Dr Linne Marie Lauesen, Project Manager and Business Analyst, Vand og Affald, Denmark

"This book is a must-read for every management scholar who wants to get a profound insight in a critical and thoughtful approach to change management, innovation and construction of knowledge within management science. It is important to go deeper than objectivist and realist accounts of management science and scrutinize the origins of management in organizational processes. Indeed, this book demonstrates scholarship at the highest and finest level of research." — Jacob Dahl Rendtorff, Institut for Samfundsvidenskab og Erhverv, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

"...in a highly captivating and original manner that on the one hand seems to have been derived, methodologically, from textual analysis and phenomenology; but that on the other hand is firmly based on Green’s own considerable knowledge of the literature. On top of this, Green explicitly discusses the effects of power and politics on organizational change, which can foster our understanding of change initiatives beyond mainstream conceptions of change. She brings some of the ‘forgotten’ arguments that Burns and Stalker (1961) put forward into the fore again. Her analysis is accompanied by a well-developed discussion of the nature of management studies and the influence and dominance of particular paradigms in the social sciences in general – an issue that is all too easily neglected when the ‘quality’ of research outputs in socalled ‘top’ journals is discussed these days."--Ivo De Loo,

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