HRM And Organizational Change

Considering HR and organizational change: all’s well that ends well or much ado about nothing? Serendipity, defined as the “faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident” (American Heritage Dictionary, 2000), is a word first credited to the English author, Horace Walpole. In 1754, Walpole wrote that the term was taken from the old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip, and was part of the title of a Persian fairy tale, “The three princes of Serendip”, in which “. . . as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of”. This quality in life, the “stumbling on” opportune circumstance, receives little notice in the organizational change literature – but that does not mean that it is not a part of organizational experience. Serendipity is a singularly apt descriptor for the way we view the development of this special issue of JOCM. Jeanie met David Boje in 1992, at the OBTC conference in Calgary, Canada. In 1995, Yvonne finished her dissertation at the University of Nijmegen and traveled to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to study with Linda Smircich and Marta Cala´s. There she met Jeanie, a student in the organization studies doctoral program. At the 1999 Academy of Management meeting, David invited Jeanie to join the editorial board of JOCM and they discussed possibilities for a special issue of the journal. A year later, in 2000, Yvonne and Jeanie reconnected through the Gender and Diversity in Organizations Division when they both joined the executive committee. During that year’s presidential luncheon (which they did not attend), they discussed human resource management (HRM) and organizational change as a possible theme for a JOCM special issue. With David’s enthusiastic support, this issue was born. Why HRM and organizational change? We both believe that this relationship, ubiquitous in organizational life, could use significantly more attention. Much of the work on change involves identifying the means for implementing organizational change efforts while including human resources (HR) as an instrumental element of relevance to a firm’s success or failure in change programs. Or, alternatively, the change literature takes a processual approach in which HR are but one of many factors to be considered. In the HR literature, more recent work focuses on the strategic importance of HR, embracing a “human resource-based view of the firm”, that allegedly provides HR with enhanced status. However, while the implication is that HR is thus crucial to successful organizational change, this relationship has been under theorized, researched, and critiqued. We also hope to provide JOCM readers with an enhanced understanding of HRM beyond the naive and simplistic “human resources as assets” viewpoint. To us, each of these current approaches fails to explore explicitly and in any