The Importance of Power in Managing Change and Change Management

Professor Bob Carter, Professor from the Faculty of Business and Law at De Montfort University gives his inaugural lecture.

Most works in social science are concerned directly or indirectly with managing change, particularly as studies of inertia and stasis prove less interesting. Works on the management of change tend to concentrate on organisations and they tend to theorise, or at least catalogue, best practice drawing on the perspectives of employers. Professor Bob Carter’s work is concerned with change but not in terms of drawing up formal steps and approaches, nor in relation to these organisational
perspectives.

In this lecture Professor Carter will use a variety of examples drawn from his research – including trade union mergers, workforce remodelling in schools and changing work organisation in the Civil Service – to both illustrate the importance of power in securing and resisting particular changes and to examine what the challenges of change tell us about the nature of organisations.

Bob Carter became Professor of Organisation Change Management in the Department of Human Resource Management in 2008, joining De Montfort from the University of Leicester where he was Reader in Sociology. He is the author (with H. Stevenson and R. Passy) of Industrial Relations in Education: Transforming the School Workforce, Routledge (2009), as well as two other books. His articles on trade union mergers, contemporary trade union strategies and new public sector management can be found in Work, Employment and Society, Capital & Class, Industrial Relations Journal as well as other internationally recognised journals. In 2009 he was elected membership of the Academy of Social Sciences.

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