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This special issue explores the holding together of organizations in times and spaces that, due to concerns related to climate change, technological advancements, and geopolitical developments among others, may be called disruptive. These are times marked by instability, uncertainty, and rapid change. With this special issue, a discussion around the meaning of community in these disruptive times and spaces is facilitated, and the articles together bring forward four themes. First, the articles provide insights into how change processes are possible to plan and facilitate but not to control entirely, and that community, therefore, can be both a process for accomplishing the change and a result of the change. Second, the articles highlight the centrality of affect to how change processes unfold, and how important it is, therefore, to acknowledge affect and learn to work with it during a change process. Third, the articles are a reminder about the ethical issues related to change processes, which is particularly sensitive when aiming at organizing for community. Fourth, the importance of including materiality as a crucial actor in organizing for community is brought forward. Together, the articles expand the exploration of organizing around a common object of concern to non-profit organizing efforts.

This leading article seeks to Make a Difference (MAD) by examining five key trajectories in Journal of Change Management: Reframing Leadership and Organizational Practice (JCM), focusing on transformation, emotions in organizational change, resistance and readiness, identity, and leadership. It interprets how these themes have influenced our understanding of organizational change and leadership over the past 25 years.

This article explores how the changes brought about by flexible offices affect managerial work, focusing on middle managers. Our study of three organizations that have adopted flexible offices reveals that middle managers face increased responsibilities and additional activities after such adoption, highlighting an intensification of their work. Combining the practice perspective with the theoretical lens of place and its concepts of trajectory and throwntogetherness, we put forward a definition of managerial work as situated ordering that is an ongoing sociomaterial accomplishment. We identify four new managerial practices required in flexible offices to achieve situated ordering, namely materializing new homes, sustaining closeness, reproducing alignment and keeping performance under control. Taken together, these practices reveal how managerial work changes when its place is altered, elucidating why such alterations create more work for managers. In doing so, our study addresses why and how place matters for managerial work.

Purpose Given that digital meetings are common, it is concerning that we still largely lack knowledge of how digital meetings are sociomaterially performed in assemblages of humans and technologies. This article advances our understanding of how digital work meetings unfold in practice. In particular, we zoom in on the practice of chairing, which makes meetings different from other interactions at work. The study therefore more broadly contributes to advancing our understanding of what kind of sociomaterial work is done in digitalized workplaces. Design/methodology/approach To this end, we mobilize a sociomaterial practice lens to surface the ongoing accomplishment of work meetings. To come close to the enactment of the practice of chairing, we adopted a digital micro-ethnographic approach and focused on series of digital meetings in the support units of a global organization. Findings We show that verbal, visual and affective work is performed when chairing digital meetings. These three types of work are done simultaneously and constitute the premises for each other. We also identify six characteristics of chairing in digital meetings: sociomaterial stiffness, dilution, glitches, blindness, conformity and amplification. In addition, we show that observing the "micro" enables us to study the unfolding of practice and the doing of digital meetings in their own right, thereby producing a different kind of understanding of digitalized workplaces. Originality/value The approach mobilized enables us to go beyond understanding new digitalized work practices merely in light of traditional work practices and provides one way of instead understanding them on their own terms.

This special issue features some new studies that are referred to by the editorial team as 'second generation' research in the field of leadership-as-practice (L-A-P). Consistent with this journal's title, Journal of Change Management: Reframing Leadership and Organizational Practice, this issue focuses on those sociomaterial practical accomplishments and turning points that change trajectories within the flow of practice, thus producing leadership. In this second generation of L-A-P studies, writers would begin to establish the boundary conditions that explicitly define the field's interpretation of leadership, especially its concentration on collective change agency. This essay as well as the accompanying four papers, through the exploration of un- and under-explored areas, thus intend to contribute to further L-A-P theoretical development and application. In particular, the special issue begins to resolve where and when leadership within the flow of practice actually occurs, how it integrates with but also differentiates from other plural leadership traditions, which kinds of applied practices can enhance applications in organizational learning and development, and lastly how agency can be mobilized through the interconnection between current and dispersed chains of activity over time and across space.MAD statementThis article serves to introduce the accompanying Special Issue intending to Make A Difference (MAD) in launching a second generation of L-A-P research that further contributes to help scholars and practitioners make the transition from leadership as an individual property to leadership as a practice. In so doing, it positions leadership as no longer dependent upon individuals but as a process of collective change agency. Thus, social change would not be contingent on receiving marching orders from others; it would be mobilized from the contested sociomaterial interactions among the voices involved.

Hybrid work has become a common working model in recent years. However, working in the continuum of physical presence and virtual proximity increases complexity, calling for a systems thinking approach to unfold the complexities and mutual interrelations within organizations working hybrid. Applying the Hybrid Star, an organizational design model, based on a systems thinking logic, this chapter explores how a systems thinking approach, exemplified through the Hybrid Star, can unfold the complexities of hybrid work. The Hybrid Star has six interrelated dimensions (strategy, structure, technology, process, rewards, and people), where this chapter focuses on multiple levels (individual, group, leadership, and workplace level), discussing ethics, meetings, management, and workplace management related to a hybrid work context. Through existing research, the chapter demonstrates how a systems thinking approach can unfold a more holistic and nuanced understanding of structures, facilitating opportunities and challenges within the “system” working hybrid. Furthermore, the Hybrid Star guides the direction of actions by pointing toward misalignments. This calls for future research, aiming to explore hybrid work through a systems thinking lens, using methods that comply with this working model. © 2025 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

We aim to generate new knowledge about the responses of organizational members facing ambiguous change initiatives (i.e. initiatives not only featuring unclear outcomes after being launched, but also unclear goals, resources and interventions before being launched). Ambiguous change initiatives have often been studied throughout industries where ad hoc decisions abound, whereas such initiatives have seldom been studied within centralized and bureaucratic organizations where ex ante routines and procedures instead abound. This abundance of routines and procedures can make ambiguous change initiatives particularly difficult to implement. Utilizing rich qualitative data from a municipal care unit in Sweden where managers launched an ambiguous change initiative depending on bottom-up implementation efforts, we find that few employees were fully ready for or fully resistant to the initiative; instead, most of them responded by dynamically wavering between readying and resisting. Wavering employees ascribed ambivalent meanings to what they regarded as a highly agreeable – yet also a loosely formulated and, in terms of routines and procedures, potentially inconceivable – initiative. Our findings advance extant change management literature by highlighting how wavering moves beyond a traditional readiness-or-resistance dichotomy, and by foregrounding how ambiguous change initiatives can become especially significant sources of wavering within centralized and bureaucratic organizations.