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The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the reasons and circumstances why strategic change initiatives based on new public management and managerialism go wrong. In particular, how such change initiatives are being justified, communicated, perceived, and implemented within organisational discourses and politics. It reveals personal and group interests behind ideologies, and what change management of this type is really about.

A strategic change initiative at a large Western‐European university (“International University” – IU) had been investigated between 2004 and 2005 based on qualitative empirical research. Data were gained primarily through semi‐structured in‐depths interviews with IU's senior managers. The findings were triangulated by referring to internal documents and academic literature.

The case study reveals a whole set of typical characteristics of managerialistic change management approach and how it is communicated. The paper provides insights into the narratives, organisational politics and ideology of change management processes. It draws the attention to the downsides of top‐down change management approaches, to ideologies and interests behind such initiatives as well as intended and unintended consequences.

Academics and practitioners might be motivated to concentrate (more) on the values, ideologies, and interests which are behind “rational” management recipes, to see management and organisational behaviour more differentiated and from a critical perspective.

Organisational change management is usually described on the basis of traditional strategy approaches and concentrates on “technical issues”. By drawing the attention to senior managers' perceptions and interests, and how they pursuit change management objectives on the basis of ideologies, it becomes clearer that allegedly “rational” and “objective” strategic solutions are contested terrain and objects of organisational politics.

There are several strands that cope with particular intangible resources, such as intangible assets, intellectual, human, and organisational capital, data and information, knowledge and capabilities. However, until now there have been no attempts to define and identify all intangible resources systematically in one framework. The purpose of this paper is to show how an exhaustive and exclusive categorial system of all intangible resources can be generated.

Following the idea of comparative analyses by grounded theory, it will be referred to relevant approaches which can be defined in academic literature. It is investigated how types of intangible resources, that share common attributes, can be grouped together, which categories emerge, and how these categories can be defined. This gradually leads to the creation of the whole categorial system based on empirical inductionism. At the same time, the categorial system is created based on logical deductionism. Having defined intangible resources as the objects of reasoning and by which leading principles will be looked at, the class of intangible resources will be broken down into categories or sub‐classes with the help of precisely formulated attributes.

Generation of a comprehensive, consistent, and complete categorial system of all possible types of intangible assets.

Solely a theoretical paper. Although empirical examples are provided it might be interesting to demonstrate the application of this categorial system.

With such a categorial system we are in the position to identify and locate the uncountable number of “real world” types of intangible resources more precisely and efficiently.

With such an attempt it may become clearer how to cope with different types of intangible resources, how to gather, create, use, share and develop them more appropriately.

The intent of this chapter is to discuss women managers as change agents in higher education. It focuses women’s increased access to senior academic management positions in Swedish higher education and investigates to what extent this increase is accompanied by changes to a masculine management norm.

The chapter draws on a study that involved qualitative interviews with 22 women in senior management positions in 10 Swedish higher education institutions.

The analysis highlights how women managers become agents of change by challenging a masculine management norm in a work setting where men have dominated management positions. The women challenged the masculine management norm by their mere presence as women but also by adopting a different management style. It also illustrates the multiple aspects of women’s potential to take on the role as change agent.

The results could benefit the development of gender equality strategies and the making of structural changes in organizations dominated by a masculine managerial norm.

The study is based on unique empirical material. The interviewees are women pioneers in the Swedish Higher Education Sector, contributing to the demographic feminization of senior academic management positions and the organizational restructuring.

This paper seeks to develop a mid-range theory of how change recipient sensemaking processes affect the realization of strategic flexibility during simultaneous change in professional service firms.

The research presented is based on an exploratory embedded case study adopting a qualitative interpretive methodology, conducted at a professional service organization. A sensemaking lens was adopted in order to study organizational change processes. Data was collected through semi-structured open-ended in-depth interviews, and analyzed using first and second order analysis, inspired by the methodology used by Corley and Gioia (2004).

We identified four determinants of change recipient sensemaking: professional identification, dominant organizational discourse, equivocality of expectations, and cross-understanding between thought worlds. Case findings indicate that cognitive and affective dimensions of change recipient sensemaking are strongly interwoven in their effect on realizing strategic flexibility.

We contribute to the competence-based strategic management literature by introducing the concept of change recipient sensemaking in understanding the realization of strategic flexibility; by identifying four major determinants in a context of simultaneous change in a professional service organization; and by highlighting the interwoven and mutually reinforcing cognitive and affective dimensions of professional’s process of constructing meaning.

This study examines the association between the use of a package of contemporary and a package of traditional management accounting practices with organizational change and organizational performance.

Data were collected based on a mail survey distributed to a sample of 740 public sector organizations.

The findings indicate that while the prevalence of traditional practices is still dominant, such practices were not associated with organizational change or performance. Rather, those organizations that use contemporary management accounting practices to a greater extent experienced greater change and stronger performance.

The findings suggest that contemporary management accounting practices can assist public sector practitioners in improving performance and promoting organizational change.

The study provides an empirical insight into the use and effectiveness of management accounting practices in the public sector. The study provides the first empirical analysis of the effect of using a package of management accounting practices in the public sector.

This chapter outlines current and emerging approaches in change communication from both scholarly and practice perspectives, and what this means for organisations and practitioners, including practical implications for education. A literature review is conducted using the Kemmis and McTaggart framework for studying practice based on individual-social, objective-subjective dichotomies leading to an integrated reflexive-dialectical approach. Five roles are suggested for the practitioner in leading and influencing change, namely that of a Communication Architect, a Story-enabler, an Empathiser, an Engager and a Community Builder. These roles go beyond the traditional informative role, to practitioners co-constructing communication with stakeholders during change. With new ways of thinking about change management, there is the possibility for new methods of educating practitioners beyond the traditional qualification or professional certification. These would require greater collaboration between scholars and practitioners in creating vehicles for continuous learning.

This study employs the concept of emotional ambivalence, in an exploration of the complex emotions experienced by organizational members during organizational change.

The study entailed 37 in-depth interviews conducted in two English housing associations. The interview transcripts, as well as organizational documents and research fieldnotes were subject to thematic and narrative analysis.

The emotions experienced by organizational members during organizational change are inherently ambivalent.

Results show that engaging with organizational members who experience ambivalent emotions in response to change offers an important resource which can be utilized by change managers.

In public management research, the focus in the public value debate has been on public administration organizations’ broader societal outcomes. Public value describes how public administrations form a vital part of the social context in which people develop and grow. However, there has not yet been an analysis of how public administration contributes to happiness in society.

In this study, we empirically analyze the relationship between people’s happiness and the public value of public administration. Our approach is based on a unique Swiss survey dataset comprising 870 individuals.

We find a positive relationship between public administration’s public value and happiness. We also find preliminary evidence with a moderation analysis that the relationship between a value-creating public administration sector and self-reported happiness is stronger for public administration employees.

While correlation studies cannot claim causal explanations and common method bias may additionally limit any research in social science, we took a number of measures to mitigate related problem. We tested our model in two samples and took both several procedural techniques and a survey design minimizing common method bias.

The paper discusses implications for public sector performance measurement for public management and practitioners.

This study calls for a more positive view on the multiple functions public administration performs for society. After an era of critical voices, our study helps reclaim public administration as a positive force for society at large in times of grand challenges, such as climate crisis, demographics and digitization.

This study has highlighted the importance between public administration’s public value and happiness in Swiss public service organizations. The study also showed that an employment in the public administration contributes to the happiness of individuals and beyond to society.

The purpose of this research is to test the moderating role of dispositional resistance in achieving sustainable organisational change.

Four studies were conducted in the period 2005‐2007. Each study included the participation of individuals experiencing ongoing organisational changes at the time, and was repeated with an independent sample in order to strengthen the meaning of the findings.

The studies confirmed the assumed positive relationship between benefit of change and commitment to change. Furthermore, two studies confirmed the assumed negative relationship between extent of change and commitment to change, while the other two studies, in contrast to the hypothesis presented, found a positive relationship. Despite the assumptions, with the exception of one study it was not possible to show moderating effects of resistance to change.

The study casts doubt about resistance to change defined as a disposition and its stability across different contexts. In explaining these results, the authors draw on Lewin's work on resistance to change.

The paper argues that the importance of dispositional resistance is that it predisposes individuals to view change in a particular way, either negatively or positively. However, the level of resistance towards a specific change event will be influenced by other factors, noticeably the organizational context and the way the change is managed. Consequently, the importance of dispositional resistance lies in its ability to influence an organization's readiness for change and to identify the level of resistance it might expect to meet, and thus the approach to change it needs to adopt.