Transforming the legal profession: an interview study of change managers in law

A lively debate progresses about change to the professions, including law, especially change in the form of managerialism. ‘Managerialism’ covers the methods and beliefs of managers within organisations, used to actively influence, evaluate, and ‘market’ professional work. But what about when that managerialism is change itself? How do we understand managerialism-as-change? This paper reports on an interview study with change managers, or ‘transformation leaders’ in the legal profession. Transformation leaders offer rich insights into the dynamics of professional change because they are incontrovertibly change agents. They are also themselves a form of managerial change as a new cadre of managers within the professions; managers with ‘hybrid’ identities whose legitimacy in professional settings is not assured. The findings presented include: the change leaders’ identities; the types of change being introduced; the constraints on and affordances for change in legal practices; and how change leaders secure, and sometimes struggle to secure, the authority needed to implement change. The concluding discussion highlights the study's contributions to our understanding of professional change and managerialism in the legal context – both what changes are being pursued and how they are materialising through certain ‘managerial’ goals, strategies, and the interactions of those with mixed identities and status.

Achieving Transformational Change in the School Library Program

Much of our professional conversations revolve around the concept of change—changing the way books are organized in a library or changing policy on checkouts and fines. These changes are exciting and oftentimes come with quick recognition and praise. But when we discuss changes in the way we collaborate with teachers or the way the school library program situates itself in the daily life of a school, frustrations mount, and our desire for silver-bullet solutions becomes evident. Differentiating the types of change we seek may help us understand how to frame our expectations and set our professional goals.

Change That Concludes

Organizational change ends things while it creates new openings. This conclusive aspect of change tends to be underappreciated by both change agents and academics. We integrate streams of literature to answer four questions. First, we ask where and when conclusive change happens in organizations: what are its representative contexts? Then we ask what conclusive change is: what other types of change are there and how do conclusions fit in? Our third question is why conclusive change remains underappreciated. Bringing insight together from the three previous questions, we conclude the paper by asking how change agents should approach conclusive change.

Time and Temporality of Change Processes

Theories of organizational change tend to consider episodic and continuous change to be ontologically incompatible. We discuss how their assumed incompatibility stems from different conceptions of time. The main contribution of this chapter is to demonstrate how, by taking an event-based view, the two types of change may be integrated with one another. Continuous change takes place in the present as events in the making, whereas episodic change is marked by events in the past or as projected upon the future. This endogenous view of time as events “from within” enables the ontological gap between episodic and continuous change to be bridged. It enables us to understand how actors evoke previous episodic changes or project future episodic changes while pursuing continuous change in the on-going present. Also, in this view, continuous and episodic change become seen as two intertwined dimensions of interplay along what we call an immanent temporal trajectory.

External Enablers of Entrepreneurship: A Review and Agenda for Accumulation of Strategically Actionable Knowledge

The enabling influence of environmental changes—be they technological, regulatory, demographic, sociocultural, or otherwise—on emerging ventures receives a growing interest from researchers and practitioners. To support knowledge accumulation in this important area, we systematically review and integrate research that is dispersed across disciplines, nominal types of change, and theoretical approaches. Under a unified terminology within a cross-level (environment to agent), process-aware framework, we examine what has been done and learnt. On this basis, we develop an agenda for further, future accumulation of knowledge about the strategic and serendipitous influence of environmental changes throughout and beyond the venture creation process.

FROM DEAD END TO CENTRAL CITY OF THE WORLD: (RE)LOCATING ROME ON RUSKIN'S MAP OF EUROPE

The habit of observing and recording carefully, in words and in drawing, the works of God in nature and of man in art made travel essential to the process of continual rediscovery which characterizes the work of John Ruskin, causing him to repeatedly redraw his map of Europe. In 1840–1, the young man's Evangelical upbringing and antipathy for the classical inhibited his response to Rome, which remained peripheral to the monumental volumes of the mid-century. Shifting religious views and studies of ancient myth prepared the way for two revelatory visits to Rome in the early 1870s. In Oxford lectures, Ruskin read in Botticelli's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel syntheses of oppositions between schools of art, between the natural and the spiritual, Greek and Christian cultures, Catholic faith and Reforming energies. He also came to feel the ‘power of the place’ in holy places of early Christianity and in continuities of peasant life. Rome is therefore relocated as ‘the central city of the world’, but modern realities menaced this vision. What had been an impoverished backwater was undergoing massive redevelopment and industrialization as the capital of a newly unified state with international ambitions. From these changes, commented on in his monthly pamphlet, Fors Clavigera, Ruskin extracted severe lessons for Victorian Britain. This article is about the ways in which the two types of change interact.

Can Personality Traits Change, and How? A Review of Personality Development Literature

This chapter introduces the change perspective of personality, through an integrative review of research evidence in supportive of this perspective. It presents what has been found, primarily in the personality and social psychology disciplines, as to personality change during adulthood. It also discusses what types of change is usually observed, as well as several theories and frameworks that offer insight on why personality change would occur. In general, this chapter offers a theoretical and empirical foundation about personality change in the general life domain, before progressing to the chapters focusing specifically on personality change at work.

Morphogenesis of Emerging Settlements: Mapping Incremental Urbanism

Informal urbanism has become a widespread form of urbanisation, particularly in the context of the global South. While there is an emerging body of knowledge focusing on the morphologies of informal settlements, the incremental transformations of emerging settlements have remained underexplored. Drawing on a case study of an emerging settlement in Nigeria, we map the emergence and incremental transformation of access networks and buildings. This is an exploratory study focusing on the morphogenesis of emerging settlements to explore how the incremental production of space works. We adopt urban mapping and typology as key methods. Following the analysis of emerging access networks, this paper identifies three primary types of change, namely add, alter, and remove, and further develops a typology of emerging junctions by specifying four types of T, Y, X, and Mixed shape junctions. The incremental transformations of buildings primarily incorporate practices of addition and removal, among others. We also identify three forms of relation between the emerging access networks and buildings: access network first, building first, and co-production. We argue that moving towards developing adaptive design interventions relies on a sophisticated understanding of the process of morphogenesis in emerging settlements.

Change Management Serving Knowledge Management and Organizational Development

Changes are considered a challenge to organizations. Seventy percent of organizational initiatives are not completed. Various Change Management approaches have been developed over the years, yet organizations continue to find changes difficult to implement. This applies to all types of change, but the challenge of change is critical in human resources disciplines, specifically those dealing with Knowledge Management and Organizational Development. This chapter connects changes in these two fields and links them to leadership. It examines theories and implementation models of Change Management, starting with classic approaches, through to new models developed in recent years. Based on this examination, a practical approach drawing on components of the reviewed models is proposed. The suggested approach takes into particular consideration the demands of change in Knowledge Management and Organizational Development.