Revisiting “Resistance to Change”: Recognizing the Tenuous Nature of a Taken-for-Granted Construct

Abstract

The title of Coch and French’s influential article “Overcoming Resistance to Change” gave the term “resistance” a negative meaning and connotation that has been subsequently fostered by ongoing scholarship and practice regarding organizational change. In this article, we describe the understanding of resistance originally developed by Kurt Lewin, which had very different connotations for the term, and how Lewin's understanding was lost after his death. By reflecting on two publications by one of the authors that were based on an interpretive approach to organizational change and that did not need the term resistance, we show it is possible to interpret change agent initiatives and change recipient responses without using that label. Thus, we demonstrate how taking a revisionist history approach to a particular taken-for-granted construct salient to organizational change research can show how tenuous that construct actually is.