Synopsis
Managing Organizational Change, by Palmer/Dunford/Akin, provides managers with an awareness of the issues involved in managing change, moving them beyond "one-best way" approaches and providing them with access to multiple perspectives that they can draw upon in order to enhance their success in producing organizational change. These multiple perspectives provide a theme for the text as well as a framework for the way each chapter outlines different options open to managers in helping them to identify, in a reflective way, the actions and choices open to them. The authors favor using multiple perspectives to ensure that change managers are not trapped by a "one-best way" of approaching change which limits their options for action.
Changing organizations is as messy as it is exhilarating, as frustrating as it is satisfying, as muddling-through and creative a process as it is a rational one. This book recognizes these tensions for those involved in managing organizational change. Rather than pretend that they do not exist it confronts them head on, identifying why they are there, how they can be managed and the limits they create for what the manager of organizational change can achieve.