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CfP on Organizational Change Failure (Human Relations)

  • 1.  CfP on Organizational Change Failure (Human Relations)

    Posted 08-22-2018 22:58

    Dear ODC Division Members

     

    We invite papers for our special issue on "Organizational Change Failure: Framing the Process of Failing" to be published in Human Relations. Please read the full call for papers at http://www.tavinstitute.org/humanrelations/special_issues/ChangeFailure.html

     

    Despite what we know about how organizations and its members respond to change, organizations continue to spend an inordinate amount of time confronting failure and attempting to learn from failing in order to continue growing. Notwithstanding this attention, failure still conjures vivid images of losing and despair and has come to represent the antithesis of what change is supposed to represent. To "feel like a failure" is a damning incarnation of this phenomenon, and indicates the connection between achievement and personal identity. Consequently, while it is widely acknowledged that some degree of failure in organizations is pervasive, and ultimately, unavoidable, critical scholarly attention continues to focus on common questions and themes related to managing and surviving failure, or questioning the implications of failing, especially in the context of organizational change. After all, given its consequences, although organizational research has long been concerned with the features of and mechanisms for how organizations change, it is equally well-acknowledged that large scale organizational changes tend to fail or to lead to less than ideal outcomes.

     

    For this special issue, we seek papers that help expand our understanding of the processes that underlie organizational change failure. In the context of this forum, organizational change failure encompasses an organization's deterioration or the deviation from goals that are expected and desired from organizational change. As organizational changes of increasing frequency and severity become the norm, improving our understanding of failure factors and their underlying relationships similarly becomes increasingly important. Our interest is not a discussion of the bright or dark side of change failure but about explaining the different processes for how organization's fail to change.

     

    The goal of the special issue is to enhance knowledge and advance theory regarding the mechanisms that underpin the emergence of organizational change failure.

     

    Submissions are due on 1 December 2018.

     

    Best

    Gavin Schwarz

    Dave Bouckenooghe

    Maria Vakola

     

     



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    Gavin Schwarz
    University of New South Wales
    Sydney Australia

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