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Michelle Lynn Kaarst-Brown: University of Richmond, Virginia, USA
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The author would like to extend her sincere thanks to Dr Patricia Bradshaw, Dr Ron Burke and Ian Rose for their insights and assistance. The author also thanks Roland Beauregard, her partner in this change project, and the organizational members who provided valuable confirmation of her findings and interpretations after the project ended.
Introduction
Power and politics have long been accepted as often detrimental elements of change processes. Sometimes consultants and change agents are co-opted by senior management, have restricted power, or may even have their own agenda. An element of the political arena that has received limited attention in both practitioner and research oriented literature, however, is the inadvertent symbolism associated with the presence of an external consultant or change agent. As researchers or practitioners, we have both ethical and practical reasons for wanting to know how our symbolism might influence the validity of our findings or the success of a project. A change project in which the author was involved is drawn on to illustrate one interpretation that integrates theory on organizational power, stages of change, and symbolism through a framework of five symbolic roles of the external consultant. The findings suggest that these symbolic roles may play a significant role in change projects.
Lewin (1951) provided a model of stages of change which is still widely referred to (Beer and Walton, 1987). In this model, awareness of the need for change is followed by stages of unfreezing, change and refreezing. According to Lewin's model of change, unfreezing destabilizes the status quo and provides an opportunity to introduce new norms and behaviors. Refreezing restabilizes the desired changes. Premature signaling of readiness to refreeze or restabilize may result in only partial completion of the needed changes. Managing the process through these stages is a challenge that has received much attention by researchers and practitioners alike; however, the symbolism inherent in the very presence of change agents at different stages has not been explored.
The past two decades have seen many of our largest organizations undertake massive change efforts. Some of these have involved external change agents or organizational development (OD) consultants. In general terms, OD is regarded as a planned, ongoing effort to change an...