Organisational Change Stories and Management Research: Facts or Fiction

Organisational change stories are often constructed around a linear series of ‘successful’ events that serve to show the company in a positive light to any interested external party. These stories of company success sanitize complex change processes and offer data for change experts to formulate neat linear prescriptions on how to best manage change. This article criticizes this position and argues that change is a far more dynamic political process consisting of competing histories and ongoing multiple change narratives which may vie for dominance in seeking to be the change story. A central aim is to identify and unpack narratives of change in order to highlight a number of theoretical and methodological implications for management research. It is argued that post-hoc rationalized stories should not be used as a knowledge base for prescriptive lessons or theoretical developments, nor should research data simply be presented as a single authentic story of change. The need to study change overtime and to accommodate multiple stories that may be reshaped, replaced and modified raise critical issues of data collection and data analysis, as well as important questions on the place of the conventional case study as a conveyor of research findings. As such, the article calls for the more widespread use of the concept of ‘competing histories’ and ‘multiple change narratives’ in longitudinal studies that seek to explain processes of organisational change.