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The purpose of this paper is to explore the merger of two large State departments and the cultural change program orchestrated by the Human Resources (HR) department. This study reveals the instrumental role played by some managers who accelerated the cultural change process through utilising formal and informal agencies of change in their management roles.

The paper explores a two‐year investigation of a major State organisation trying to reshape the culture and values of the organisation after a politically determined merger. This paper reviews the context for this change process, the associated concepts from the literature, and adapts Gidden's Structuration Theory to provide a model of manager action during the change process that may also be used to explore subsequent change practices.

The findings from the sequenced phases of data collection provide new evidence from a strategic HR perspective of the multiple ways managers act to embed a culture change for the emerging organisation.

The subsequent discussion centres on the diverse roles played by managers in the new disjointed and often dysfunctional culture to develop unified cultural change with their staff, with the change process being modelled in terms of Structuration Theory.

The paper uses the findings from an empirical study to indicate the agencies of change that managers can employ during organisational change processes. By doing so it provides both a pragmatic model for managers of change and through the typology of manager agencies of change makes an addition to the existing theoretical frameworks of change management.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of preferences when small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are confronted with the practical problems associated with implementing frequent and large-scale changes to their working policies and practices. This paper aims to alleviate some of the concerns as claimed in positioning and change agency theory by introducing “preferential role positioning” to organizational change.

This study uses a qualitative case study approach and change agency and positioning theories to find out the extent to which staff and management experienced the practical difficulties and challenges and what resolution actions they took. Eighty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2004/2005 and 2011 with the staff and management of four SMEs in the UK. An interpretative analysis was conducted on the case data in the tradition of Husserl and Schutz. In the first set, participants were asked to elucidate the difficulties faced in their roles and how these were experienced whilst the second focused on impacts and strategies. Three independent researchers reviewed and interpreted the qualitative data and helped with the coding and thematization.

This paper's main results are based on the data's three stages showing how SME members chose to deal with the practical difficulties namely “new structures and procedures” (stage 1); “new ways of communicating” (stage 2) and “new collaborations” (stage 3). The combination of the stages' aspects led to the emergence of “preferential role positioning” as the study's theoretical contribution to the gap on preferences in organizational change research.

The eighty-five interviews from UK-based SMEs constrained the sample size thereby limiting the number of questionnaire categories asked. The findings and their analysis cannot be generalized to non-SMEs that seek to address similar difficulties.

Managers need to be aware of the adverse impacts of using draconian, top-down disciplinary and punishment measures/structures as a way to implement change. Other practical lessons include the fact that managers should contextualize people's anxieties, dissatisfaction, resistance and disengagement as a platform from which social knowledge can be generated with all change agents in order to resolve implementation challenges in the longer term. Staff developed the ability to deal with some practical issues such as navigating through the new departmental structures, new working procedures and new ways of talking with management and with each other to implement change more successfully.

The social value of the findings demonstrates that preferences can be imported from other social science disciplines into Organizational Studies to show the value of what people can contribute and how they choose to do so (i.e. via what discourse, using what types of interactions and capabilities to do so). In addition, the results show that management need to consider employees in their plans as they try to implement change firstly to facilitate greater interaction and success, secondly to minimize implementation difficulties and thirdly as a recognition that there are multiple change agents and multiple role-enacting positions in developing sociological knowledge that can be of value.

This study's three-stage approach has shown that a successful implementation and management of change in SMEs should also include a bottom-up recognition of the difficulties, adversities, conflicts and tensions and a resolution to deal with the structural and communicative constraints via dialogue and “preferential role positioning”.