Worlds of Difference: How Actors in Organizations Use and Create Issues in Change Processes (2006)

An intriguing PhD dissertation about what makes changes within organizations so difficult. While the dissertation further develops the work with the Change Monitor, it also discusses the topic of change strategy. It covers much more than just the Change Monitor and offers interesting insights into things like fixed patterns and interactions within organizations that are undergoing change.

This book deals with the question of why change processes are often so complicated and what we can do about that. Large-scale survey research shows, among other things, that change managers and employees each tend to experience change processes very differently. Different groups within organizations have their own experience of change processes, and those experiences often conflict with each other. Seven in-depth case studies reveal why that is the case and what the consequences are. Various different qualitative research methods reveal a series of fixed, self-fulfilling patterns that characterize and complicate the process of working on change. The book concludes with suggestions for intervening in deadlocked change processes.