• Discuss how identity provides a foundation for strategy and how it influences opportunities for organizations to achieve competitive advantage
• Discuss how strategic processes may influence the construction of a new organizational identity and the organizational commitment to identity
• Relate theories on strategy and identity to each other, and apply them in order to analyze issues of relevance to strategy, identity and organizational processes
• Explain the dynamics of different processes of change and how they relate to continuity
• Critically reflect on implications of the theories of organizing change for strategy and identity
• Account for how theories in both courses can be used to understand the dynamics of organizational change and continuity and implications for managing and working in organizations
• Explain the roles of narrative, action and commitment to organizing change, strategy and organizational identity
• Explain how analytical and philosophical foundations connect to theories and methodologies for studying organizational change.

Change is a key word in business and management, and enables discussion of, for example, topics such as radical versus incremental change, disruption and the use of history (continuity) in processes of change. The overall aim of the course is to introduce the students to the dynamics of change in organizations. It illustrates how change is both a process of initiating and planning overall change and it is the gradual, day-to-day activities of changing. The course introduces the notion of organizational continuity to explain different types of change. Continuity is embedded in history, tradition, habit, routines, etc, and is here treated as a dynamic component of change, rather than its counterpart. The course takes a micro-level perspective of change, which means that it teaches how change is initiated, sustained and managed in inter-actions – sense-making processes among actors in the organization. Change will only take hold if it rooted in inter-actions and commitment to the actual narrative of change. Therefore, the course views organizing as the process of applying various means to create commitment among people towards organizational change narrative. Narrative is closely linked to strategy and identity, which are taught in the parallel Strategy and Identity Course. The course also explains how various types of framing of change processes influence the outcome of change.

Overlap with Strategy and Identity
This course overlaps with Strategy and Identity (SI) in several ways.  Both courses focus on theories and conceptual frameworks that elaborate the processes underpinning strategy, identity and organizing hereby stressing the active role of organizational actors. While SI focuses on how actors set the direction for the trajectory of the organization, OC focuses on the various mechanisms in maintaining and transforming organizations. Taken together the two courses will explain how strategies and identities are open to change and how organizing processes serve to hold them together. Finally, both courses will draw upon abductive methods as the foundation for the joint shared student projects.

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Boje, David. M. (1991) The storytelling organization: A study of story performance in an office-supply firm. Administrative Science Quarterly 36(1):106–126.

Hernes, Tor, Edda Hendrup and Birgitte Schäffner (2015) Sensing the momentum. A process view of change in a multinational corporation. Journal of Change Management 15(2):117–141

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