Facing Up to the Constancy of Organizational Change: Further Insights and Approaches to Solutions

The game goes on. The pressure on organizations for continuous change, in order to adapt to shifts in market structure, to deregulation or legal initiatives and to quickly grasp evolving opportunities has not reduced on the contrary, it has increased with progressing globalization and competition. Specifically, current challenges range from managing mergers and acquisitions, downsizing and 'rightsizing', to business re-engineering, or developing and implementing new technologies. As sales markets are getting tougher, companies keep decreasing the product life cycles which necessitates faster innovation. 'Change' has become a buzzword in the daily press; it seems to be omnipresent in the minds of consultants and other practitioners. Unfortunately, the results from costly change efforts fall too often behind expectations. For social scientists, therefore, it remains a pertinent task to invest in research that helps to gain a better understanding of change processes and of factors that contribute to successful change and innovation. This special issue faces up to this challenge by providing empirical and theoretical contributions that address two subject areas of the multifaceted change arena: corporate restructurings such as merger and acquisition; downsizing or redundancies; and changing and innovating the way business is done.