1st Edition
Agency, Change and Learning Accounts of Internal Change Agents
Despite the plethora of books on change, there appears a notable gap in the field; rarely is the authentic and candid voice of change agents heard. How often do academics or practitioners candidly state what they actually do when they are faced with managing change in their own organisations or when they are called on in a consultancy capacity? In this new book, the editors bring together a diverse group of contributors who have worked as Internal Change Agents in organizations to divulge what they really do and think about change.
The authors draw on their own research work involving change agents and their change interventions and include current reflections on the post-Covid world of work, and the change required for achieving change interventions successfully. Each contribution offers perspectives from real change programmes, in both the public and private sector, offering a unique opportunity to move beyond theory and understand change in practice.
The book offers valuable insights for academics and students of organisational change and behaviour, leadership and organisational development.
Introduction: Agency, change and learning: The role of the internal change agent
Julian Randall and Bernard Burnes
Part 1: Change agents and emergent identity: the wilful actor at work.
Julian Randall and Bernard Burnes
Chapter 1. Working as a change agent: change and development with a coaching approach
Sarah Smith
Chapter 2. Psychotherapists as Internal Change Agents
Linda MacLeod
Chapter 3. Discovering Agency as a Change Practitioner
Elaine Mottram
Chapter 4. Developing your practice model
Tricia Boyle
Part 2: Competing and collaborating logics: The academic practitioner divide.
Julian Randall and Bernard Burnes
Chapter 5. Agency Attention in Performance-led Organisational Change
Tom Pfefferkorn
Chapter 6. Change through a social system lens
Helen Mackenzie
Chapter 7. Training and development in policing
Richard Harding
Chapter 8. Wilful actor and modular individual: Change agency in a University Business School
Umit Bititchi
Part 3: Reflexivity, learning and the internal conversation: The work of the modular individual.
Julian Randall and Bernard Burnes
Chapter 9. Partnership renewal: the work of the internal change agent
James Storrie
Chapter 10. The Role and Function of the Change Agent in Practice: Reflections on a path well-trodden
Tracey Reddings
Chapter 11. The Modular Individual
Ron Skea
Biography
Julian Randall is an Honorary Professor at Edinburgh Business School, Heriot Watt University.
Bernard Burnes is Professor Emeritus of Organisational Change at Stirling Management School.
