In a world in which change is considered the only constant, changes in an organisation's strategy, structure, processes and/or technology are a prerequisite for success. A main reason why many organisational change efforts do not achieve the desired results is seen in the lack of understanding and acceptance of the change among those affected by the change. This is particularly true for planned change because the majority of the employees are not involved in the planning of the change. Although both academics and practitioners view communication as a key mechanism for increasing understanding and acceptance, the factors influencing the effectiveness of a communication programme do not appear to have received adequate research attention and insufficient guidance was available for practitioners on how to design an effective communication programme. This thesis, written from an interpretivist perspective, reports on case study research undertaken in three different change projects in one large organisation in the automotive industry in Germany. Two and a half years were spent in the field, with each case study lasting between six and nine months. The approach to the research was inductive and the data collected were basically qualitative. The research sought to explore recipients' perceptions of the communication activities used with the intention of increasing the understanding of the factors influencing the effectiveness of a communication programme. The findings can be grouped into recipients' perceptions of the effects of the communication activities used and the specific aspects of the communication activities responsible for these perceptions. The focus in the analysis was not on individual occurences but on the relationships between different effects and on the interdependencies between different communication activities. The relationships found between different effects and between different communication activities highlight the importance of a holistic approach to research on change communication and underline the complexity of designing a communication programme. Suggestions for practitioners on how to structure communication aims and on how to choose and design communication activities can be inferred from these findings.

This research evaluates the unorthodox proposition that organisational development proceeds through the Darwinian processes of variation, selection and inheritance acting upon a non-genetic replicating code. This new replicator represents the fundamental unit of cultural transmission and was termed by evolutionist, Richard Dawkins, as the meme. The memetic position re-introduces many often neglected, sometimes shunned, evolutionary arguments into social and organisational debate by providing a naturalistic and plausible hereditary element upon which socio-cultural adaptation operates. The popularity of the neologism 'meme' initially grew through rather ad-hoc non-scientific usage on the Internet. For some time, this geekish tendency has tarnished the idea of memetics and impeded serious academic investigation into the subject. A more rigorous philosophical treatment has been provided by Daniel Dennett who has argued that, while a science of memetic cladistics may be both desirable and feasible, it remains unlikely. On the other hand one of Dawkins' most famous critics, Mary Midgley, heralds dark forebodings that one-day memes may be given actual credence. The present study necessitated the adaptation of conventional genealogical and taxonomic methods, for novel application in confirming congruence between actual organisational phylogeny and hereditary traits. One specific requirement was to develop a means of identifying, capturing and codifying such traits as meme strips for phenetic analysis. In order to handle the computational complexity inherent in the phenetic reconstruction algorithms, proprietary software had to be produced. This was extensively tested upon meme strips generated through simulated evolution. Western Christian denominational families provided a source of empirical evidence and demonstrated that the methods could be successfully applied to real organisational forms. A theological phylogeny was reliably reconstructed thereby upholding the hypothesis of cultural descent with modification based on a memetic replication. Further support for the claim was made in conjunction with the rendering of a facilities management market landscape. More importantly however, the results coming from this research suggest that the potential for formulating a science of memetics may be significantly greater than in Dennett original consideration.

This is a reflexive hermeneutic study exploring the emotions of individuals during strategic and organisational change from an objectivist ontology and subjectivist epistemology. It explores individuals' emotions and individuals' variations from organisations' cultural expectations and cultural fit. It considers individuals' emotions collectively, and the psychology of emotions as a basis on which organisational change could be managed. It provides insight into the emotional complexity of organisational life during periods of change, the work derived feelings and emotions individuals struggle with on a daily basis, the feelings and emotions that influence and shape, and can in turn be influenced and shaped, by change events, and the stark management conditioning arising from the emotional devoid reality and manipulation of organisational expectations and mechanistically driven change programmes. This emotional insight belies the emotion arid legacy of process driven change solutions, and adds to the growing voice that seeks to usurp the emotionally sanitised picture of organisational life. It informs the debate that seeks to influence the transformation of managerial objectivism, change practise, and behaviour, so that emotions are recognised, welcomed, respected, supported and embraced in the workplace. The research environment is one of constant strategic and organisational change. Within this context, the early research "hunches", drawn from the author's intuition, and life history, that an individual's feelings and emotions, their nature of being, their self motivation, their relationships, and the nature of control, can be considered a reasonable way of looking at and interpreting how individuals interact in everyday life, and their personal response to change, are brought vividly to life and evolved.

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This thesis investigates whether management behaviour impairs major changes in corporate processes. The focused areas were new complex product development process and business process re-engineering in post-privatisation companies. Several surveys were carried out in Brazil, North America, and Europe involving companies either that deal with new complex product development or companies that have experienced a privatisation process. An aircraft manufacturer company, located in Brazil, was selected as the case study company. The author selected top 10 preconditions to succeed in a Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) endeavour and observed their evolution in the case study company. The most important contribution of this thesis is related to the identification of a pattern in the case study company to deal with major changes in corporate process. The investigations at the case study company indicated that if the top ten BPR pre-conditions to succeed evolve, it is likely to have success in the BPR activities. The achieved results are compared with an extensive literature review, which covers topics such as cultural change, management behaviour, business process re-engineering, new product development, integrated product development, concurrent engineering, privatisation process, and organisational changes.

Recent decades have seen a sustained growth of interest from academics and practicing managers in structural change in the contemporary workplace. Some of this attention has been directed at the implementation of initiatives of planned organizational change, often involving newer information and communications technologies, and often conceived and labelled by managers as projects. Most empirical studies of projects of organizational change have been concerned with the promotion of universal guides to management success and, by implication, to organizational prosperity. The bias towards generalized prescriptions for performance and management ‘best practice’ has been accompanied by a relative shortage of context-bound studies intended to reveal the reality of the nature and role of the project concept in relation to organizational change. The purpose of this study is to contribute to understanding of what change project management processes are adopted and, further, how they are determined by the characteristics of an organization. In pursuit of this broad aim the research takes a grounded, theory-generating approach. The foundation of the research design is a series of case studies of projects of change in four UK organizations in contrasting sectors. The main source of data is unstructured audio-taped interviews with ‘change drivers’ - those managers responsible for the conception and implementation of the projects. The constant comparative method of qualitative analysis is used to compare and contrast instances of expressions of managerial action or intent which arise from managers’ attention to contextual considerations. Data reduction is carried out in three stages, each representing a progressively higher level of theoretical abstraction. The findings of the research are expressed as an integrated theory and a series of propositions, generalized within the boundaries of the study, relating management process to context via a set of intermediate variables representing the extent to which the change drivers feel in control of the change. The conclusions may be summarized in three statements. First, drivers of projects of organizational change apply a general repertoire of six common management processes, each of which is employed to a greater or lesser extent at any time. Second, the extent of enaction of each process element may be considered as an expression of the change drivers’ possession or pursuit of personal control over the change. Third, feelings of personal control are partly determined by managers’ attention to selected issues which arise from key characteristics of the organization and its sector.

This study aims at exploring ways to better manage organisational development and change in practice. For project managers like myself it is important to gain a solid understanding about the drivers or inhibitors in these developments and change processes. I was particularly interested in those development and change processes aimed at the achievement or maintenance of competitive advantage within an industry. One way of achieving or maintaining competitive advantage may be based on serving the customer’s strategic needs through innovation (Chapman et. al., 2003). Various process models propose how service innovation projects in general should be managed. However, large and mature organisations in particular may encounter difficulties in their implementation (Dougherty and Hardy, 1996). From a practitioner’s point of view, this is an especially dire situation as service innovations, particularly those driven by strategic intent, are under great pressure from decision-makers to succeed. Along these lines Dougherty (1996) suggests a shift of focus, to a focus on the fact that innovation activities have inherent ‘tensions’. She defines ‘tensions’ as challenges that have to be dealt with during an innovation project. Drawing on the evidence of three sequential projects conducted at DHL Express, the parcel branch of Deutsche Post, I tried to investigate the nature of service innovations and their inherent tensions. By longitudinally tracking the activities and their inherent tension’s life cycle in an exploratory case study, I tried to get a better understanding of how tensions appear in innovation projects, as well as the dynamics of these tensions. The evidence of this first case study was used to theorise about an optimised sequence of activities, as well as first propositions about how tensions might be managed. The first set of propositions derived from the exploratory case was then given a trial in a second longitudinal case study. The activities of the first logistics service innovation project included a major ‘information engineering’ component. According to Davenport (1993) ‘information engineering’ deals with description of an already conceptualised process in informational terms, such that a system can be rapidly and rigorously constructed to support the new process design. Hence, the set of activities proposed in this study include the capability to include an information system component as a service innovation deliverable; a capability long recognised to be essential for exhorting positive influences on the operation of logistics systems (Kent, 1996). This research was conducted in the context of a number of unusual opportunities. First and foremost, both case studies had similar stakeholders and objectives. Secondly, all stakeholders contributing to the first case study were willing and able to collaboratively contribute to improvements in the management of activities and their inherent tensions. Finally, all inquiry participants then implemented those propositions into the following case study for inspection. Based on the evidence of the second case study, I show how managing activities and tensions with congenerous dedication exploited all four tensions to improve the probability of innovation projects to deliver.

This thesis illustrates that given the necessary resource and a structured Business Growth Framework, Small and Medium Enterprises can lay the foundation for sustained growth. The author investigated the essence of Small and Medium Enterprises, conducted a literature review in SME growth, and asserted the importance of the application of structure to business processes in achieving sustainable business growth. The author introduced the SME business process structure deficit, assessed its implications on business growth, and elaborated that the business process structure deficit can be addressed through the methodical application of six internationally accepted UK initiatives already available in the SME domain. The thesis establishes the characteristics of Business Growth for SMEs, leading to the development of a Business Growth Framework, based upon a defined set of business processes. This framework supports business growth. The framework provides diagnostic assessment of business process performance, process specific improvements embracing better practice through the innovative application of, for example DTI publications, and internal Benchmarking linking, if desired, to the UK Benchmarking Index. The resulting Business Growth Framework, along with the Business Growth Framework Implementation Methodology have evolved during this research and are the key tools for sustained business growth developed by the author and discussed in this thesis. The benefits of close integration of financial and manufacturing systems, like ERP, with Business Processes is discussed. The author demonstrated that Business Growth could successfully occur amongst Small and Medium Enterprises if approached through a structured methodology. Intentionally no new and complex business models have been proposed. The research showed that there is sufficient literature available in this area already.

The view that individuals and organisations create or enact their social worlds through shared frames of reference, on-going interlocking routines and patterns of action is increasingly underpinning academic research and offering practitioners new insights. At the same time, now commonplace strategy consultancy services are rooted in the rhetoric, if not the practice, of rational, technical analysis. This research explores the influence of management consultants in helping managers to create as well as discover the environment they experience and to develop and realise a strategic direction for their organisations. Grounded in four diverse case studies, the research offers a richer, inextricably contextual and essentially social conception of consultants’ strategy interventions. Consultants’ work is conceived as simultaneously embedded or set within, yet seeking to achieve a separation from, existing organisational frames of reference, commitments and routines. By creating and maintaining some degree of separation, consultants facilitate a distinct enactment or experience of the world, and so influence the strategic thinking and subsequent actions of managers. Efforts to achieve separation are met by pressures to conform, and the ideas generated merge into the wider organisational enactment. The research points to complex processes of reciprocal influence, positioning and resistance between consultants and members of the organisation which shape the nature and course of an intervention. It also sheds light on the ripple effect interventions have through an organisation, on how new strategies are diffused and fused within existing patterns of thought and action, and the process of strategic change and transformation. The theoretical framework developed, comprising the concept of embedded enactment and two overarching dimensions of separation and absorption, provides a new way of understanding and explaining consultants’ strategy interventions. The case studies themselves describe some subtleties and nuances of interventions and offer opportunities for consultants and managers to reflect on personal experiences.

One cannot change the system within which one operates without changing oneself in the process (Revans. 1980). Starting my Action Learning journey with myself, and my life as interpreted through Transactional Analysis, was thus a deliberate and essential part of my research methodology. Using a morality tale of my life so far as a chronological and descriptive thread, I chart the progress of my self and my practice in leading the sustainability initiative for a large group of engineers operating throughout the UK. This change initiative required an exploration of change itself, of my part in the process and the development of appropriate internal client-facing skills very different from those employed in an earlier life, when I managed a consultancy practice based on personal expertise. As a Consultant, I occupied a unique role for the organisation, being of it, but not within it. My thesis describes the complex learning and challenges of my practice, and allows me to stand back from my work and take a more dispassionate view, through the morality tale, and the use of metaphors and other exploratory devices. My practice centres on the people side of the people, places and pounds sustainability triangle; in particular, the way people behave and are treated in the workplace and the role of games playing and unhealthy relationships on quality of life. Some of the technical aspects of sustainability, as they relate to the construction and development industry, are described. My thesis has three main themes: me and my personal change; the global drive for sustainability which drives the changes in organisations and the ways in which these changes have operated, sometimes in concert, sometimes in opposition, to move me further towards my objectives of organisational sustainability and self-actualisation.