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Resistance to Organizational Change: The Reign and the Intellectual History


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1 Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
     

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In real life situations the unreliability of human communication and recollection can have serious social consequences. Businesses and organizations have to sometimes bear business cost due to such cumulative errors as well. In the context of academic scholarship however, varying perceptions and interpretations are regarded as the beginning of a new discourse around a concept or phenomenon. This new understanding is believed to gradually become the part of researcher's language, which later can impact the research orientation of the researcher. This process in most cases leads the researcher to contribute towards the evolution of a phenomenon’s understanding or towards its conceptual distortion. Furthermore, the concepts and understandings usually get distorted by presenting them in isolation from their possible alternate rationalizations. This conceptual paper takes into account the issues associated with attempts to ascribe meaning to organizational phenomena. Particular attention will be given to the idea of resistance to organizational change. The paper attempts to draw upon organizational studies scholarship to follow the story of resistance to change and look for the consistencies and inconsistencies in the reporting if any.

Keywords

Definition, Organizational Change, Resistance to Change.
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  • Resistance to Organizational Change: The Reign and the Intellectual History

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Authors

Saima Ijaz
Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

Abstract


In real life situations the unreliability of human communication and recollection can have serious social consequences. Businesses and organizations have to sometimes bear business cost due to such cumulative errors as well. In the context of academic scholarship however, varying perceptions and interpretations are regarded as the beginning of a new discourse around a concept or phenomenon. This new understanding is believed to gradually become the part of researcher's language, which later can impact the research orientation of the researcher. This process in most cases leads the researcher to contribute towards the evolution of a phenomenon’s understanding or towards its conceptual distortion. Furthermore, the concepts and understandings usually get distorted by presenting them in isolation from their possible alternate rationalizations. This conceptual paper takes into account the issues associated with attempts to ascribe meaning to organizational phenomena. Particular attention will be given to the idea of resistance to organizational change. The paper attempts to draw upon organizational studies scholarship to follow the story of resistance to change and look for the consistencies and inconsistencies in the reporting if any.

Keywords


Definition, Organizational Change, Resistance to Change.

References