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Organizational change is a risky endeavour. Most change initiatives fall short on their goals and produce high opportunity and process costs, which at times outweigh the content benefits of organizational change. This paper seeks to develop a framework, offering a theoretical toolbox to analyze context‐dependent barriers and enablers of organizational change. Starting from an organizational identity perspective, it aims to link contingency‐based approaches, such as environmental scan, SWOT and stakeholder analysis, with insights from organizational behaviour research, such as knowledge sharing and leadership.

The framework is informed by long‐lasting field research into organizational change in an international policing environment. The theories in the framework are selected from the perspective of field validity in two ways; they were chosen because the topics covered by these theories emerged as relevant during the field research and therefore it can be expected they have applicability to the field. The authors' insights and suggestions are summarised in 13 propositions throughout the text.

The analysis provides a clear warning that organizational change is more risky and multifaceted than change initiators typically assume. It is stressed that the external environment and the internal dynamics of organizations co‐determine the meaning of managerial practices. This implies that cure‐all recipes to organizational change are bound to fail.

This paper makes an ambitious attempt to cross disciplinary boundaries in the field of organizational change research to contribute to a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of change processes by integrating perspectives that focus on the internal context and the external environment of organizations.

This paper aims to take stock and to increase understanding of the opportunities and threats for policing in ten European countries in the Political, Economic, Social, Technological and Legal (PESTL) environment.

This study is part of the large EU‐funded COMPOSITE project into organisational change. A PESTL analysis was executed to produce the environmental scan that will serve as a platform for further research into change management within the police. The findings are based on structured interviews with police officers of 17 different police forces and knowledgeable externals in ten European countries. The sampling strategy was optimized for representativeness under the binding capacity constraints defined by the COMPOSITE research budget.

European police forces face a long list of environmental changes that can be grouped in the five PESTL clusters with a common denominator. There is also quite some overlap as to both the importance and nature of the key PESTL trends across the ten countries, suggesting convergence in Europe.

A study of this magnitude has not been seen before in Europe, which brings new insights to the target population of police forces across Europe. Moreover, policing is an interesting field to study from the perspective of organisational change, featuring a high incidence of change in combination with a wide variety of change challenges, such as those related to identity and leadership.

The key to success and failure in change projects may lie not in groundbreaking events or heroic gestures but in the many seemingly meaningless acts and events that occur throughout all change projects. In order to gain a better understanding of factors leading to success in change projects, the purpose of this paper is to examine insider accounts of successful and unsuccessful change projects in a non‐business public context, namely the German police.

The research can be located in the exploratory, inductive research tradition and consistent with that we used in‐depth semi‐structured interviews to elicit the views of 92 high potential future managers as to what constitutes a(n) (un)successful project, and what factors lead to (un)successful project outcomes.

The qualitative approach adopted allows for the tracing of a range social behavioural issues identified by members of the organization as criteria to evaluate the success of projects – commitment of peers and superiors, satisfaction of members with the outcome. Identifying factors leading to project success, participants identified the following – clear communication of both positive and potentially negative outcomes, commitment of leaders, and changes in work conditions resulting from the project.

Social and behavioural aspects of change projects, which are often relegated to a secondary position behind managerial and technical aspects, should be taken into account more often in (research on) change management projects.

The findings are based on research that explicitly integrates the mundane aspects, the daily mistakes and the routine obstacles facing those involved in change projects and suggests the value of incorporating such issues in (research on) change management projects given the spread of projects from a traditional engineering context to a variety of different contexts including, increasingly, non‐profit and governmental organizations.