Journal of Change Management

Dynamic Approaches to Context and Change: Moving the Theoretical and Methodological Goalposts

Call for Papers for a Special Issue on

Dynamic Approaches to Context and Change: Moving the Theoretical and Methodological Goalposts

With this special issue, Journal of Change Management invites submissions that seek to advance research on context and change – especially how the context-action-change relationship can be operationalized, studied and theorized in ways that take this relationship’s dynamic and processual nature into account. 

Context is a central concept within social science in general, in qualitative organization and management scholarship in particular, and context has been recognized as essential part of change research: the significance of a systematic and nuanced approach to context for understanding and engaging in successful change is well-established within several research fields. In fact, change is contextual and ‘the local context’ has long been seen to provide answers to how and why change unfolds as it does (Dopson et al., 2008; Pettigrew, 1990; Sminia & De Rond, 2012). Moreover, research increasingly recognizes that ‘context’ is an analytical framing researchers construct as part of the research process (Köhler et al., 2023; Murdoch et al., 2023; Nguyen & Tull, 2022; Meier & Dopson 2019; 2021) and that context is linked to the quality and boundary conditions of research (Pratt, 2009; Busse et al., 2017; Dopson & Meier, 2019). 

The use of context differs across disciplines but is always accompanied by assumptions, whether these are articulated or not. This, in turn, allows researchers to “open up the ways that [they] conceive of context” (Pomerantz 1998, p. 131-132). However, ‘context’ is still mainly referred to in spatial terms, e.g., as an empirical setting (Köhler et al., 2021), a research site (Köhler et al., 2023), or a location/organization/country (Busse et al., 2017). One aspect of this ‘context problem’ resides in the way context is defined and theorized (Meier & Dopson, 2019; Fitzgerald, 2019). In most research, context is either overlooked or the terms is used in very general terms as a taken-for-granted and stable background for the phenomenon studied, creating a ‘black box’ effect. This lack makes us, as change researchers, particularly ill-equipped to study the dynamic and complex ways in which context and change co-constitute each other over time. Simply put, although research increasingly recognize that our ability to understand, plan, organize, lead, and research change depends on an approach to context as dynamic and developing over time, we have not yet developed sufficient theorization and methodology for adopting this approach to change research in practice.

With this special issue we seek to advance contextual studies of organizational change processes by focusing on context – how we understand, define, operationalize, study and theorize context in change research. To do this, we need to shift our focus away from what context is to why it matters how we understand and work with context in our research.

Our call for papers is deliberately open and we welcome submissions from a broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches as long as they expand the scholarly conversation around how the context-action-change relationship can be operationalized, studied and theorized in ways that take this relationship’s dynamic, processual and enacted characteristics into account. 

Our ambition with this call for papers is to further theorization of and methods to study context in change research on at least (but not limited to) three overall areas:

1. Context: the concept of context and its role in change research; how different definitions of context allow for theorizing in various ways; how well-established and new methods may be employed in the study of contexts as dynamic; how different theorizations of context relate to a researcher’s position, approaches and methods; how to study and write about context in process- or practice-based research

2. Actions in context: how collective enactments of context may be achieved, perhaps mediated by technology, and how they unfold over time; how actors understand, enact and work with particular and sometimes conflicting notions of context; how contextualization processes and their role in change research can be studied and theorized

3. Change: how different theoretical approaches to change take context into account; how the nature of change or aspects of temporality (e.g. change as sudden or slow) matters for how we can study and theorize context, how the dynamic and co-constitutive relationship between change and context can be studied in different designs, with different methods, and how this impacts our theorization

   We hope the call for papers will inspire scholars from across disciplines and traditions. 

    

   References

   Busse, C., Kach, A. P., & Wagner, S. M. (2017). Boundary Conditions: What They Are, How to Explore Them, Why We Need Them, and When to Consider Them. Organizational Research Methods, 20(4), 574-609. doi.org/10.1177/1094428116641191

   Dopson, S., Fitzgerald, L., & Ferlie, E. (2008). Understanding Change and Innovation in Healthcare Settings: Reconceptualizing the Active Role of Context. Journal of Change Management, 8(3-4), 213. 10.1080/14697010802133577

   Fitzgerald, L. (2019). Enacted Context. In Meier, N. and Dopson, S. (eds), Context in Action and How to Study It: Illustrations from Health Care. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

   Köhler, T., Rumyantseva, M., & Welch, C. (2023). Qualitative Restudies: Research Designs for Retheorizing. Organizational Research Methods, 10.1177/10944281231216323

   Köhler, T., Smith, A., & Bhakoo, V. (2021). Templates in Qualitative Research Methods: Origins, Limitations, and New Directions. Organizational Research Methods, 25(2), 183. 10.1177/10944281211060710

   Nguyen, D. C., & Tull, J. (2022). Context and contextualization: The extended case method in qualitative international business research. Journal of World Business, 57(5)10.1016/j.jwb.2022.101348

   Meier, N. & Dopson, S (eds) (2019). Context in Action and How to Study It: Illustrations from Health Care. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

   Meier, N., & Dopson, S. (2021). What is Context? Methodological Reflections on the Relationship Between Context, Actors, and Change. In R. Kislov, D. Burns, B. E. Mørk & K. Montgomery (Eds.), Managing Healthcare Organisations in Challenging Policy Contexts (pp. 1–22). Springer International Publishing. 10.1007/978-3-030-81093-1_1

   Murdoch, J., Paparini, S., Papoutsi, C., James, H., Greenhalgh, T., & Shaw, S. E. (2023). Mobilising context as complex and dynamic in evaluations of complex health interventions. BMC Health Services Research, 23(1)10.1186/s12913-023-10354-5

   Pettigrew, A. M. (1990). Longitudinal Field Research on Change: Theory and Practice. Organization Science, 1(3), 267–292. 10.1287/orsc.1.3.267

   Pomerantz, A. (1998). Multiple Interpretations of Context: How Are They Useful? Research on Language & Social Interaction, 31(1), 123. 10.1207/s15327973rlsi3101_8

   Pratt, M. G. (2009). From the Editors: For the Lack of a Boilerplate: Tips on Writing Up (and Reviewing) Qualitative Research. Academy of Management Journal, 52(5), 856–862. 10.5465/amj.2009.44632557

   Sminia, H., & De Rond, M. (2012). Context and Action in the Transformation of Strategy Scholarship. Journal of Management Studies, 49(7), 1329–1349. 10.1111/j.1467-6486.2012.01059.x