
The Change Management research group, chaired by the Professor of Change Management, Jacco van Uden, of The Hague University of Applied Sciences is responsible for the Learning to impact work package of the ACT project.
The Change Management Research Group is dedicated to rethinking and reshaping strategies of transition (change management understood as ‘the management of change’). The research group also has an ‘activist’ agenda in the sense that it questions and challenges dominant or mainstream understandings of management itself (change management understood as ‘changing management’).
During the four years of the project, Jacco van Uden will travel along with the partners in the project, actively engaging in the conversation, delivering a programme of capacity building, conducting a form of action research.
Rather then looking for a one-size-fits-all impact strategy, we acknowledge and appreciate
the variety of the local. The capacity building that is crucial to the action-research part of
this proposal is rooted in the experience that learning from differences provides a more solid base for action than imposing disembodied, generic and therefore meaningless guidelines.
In other words, we want to feed on local experiences as much as we want to contribute to them.
“We do this by placing known management themes in a new light. ”The Change Management Research Group
Jacco van Uden studied Business Administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he specialised in change management. After graduating, he worked at Nyenrode Business University (Center for Organisational Learning and Change) for two years, after which he conducted doctoral research at the University of Humanistic Studies. His thesis ‘Organisation and Complexity’ focused on how organisational science can benefit from complexity theory. At the end of 2011, Jacco became a project leader/senior researcher at The Hague University of Applied Sciences for the KITE120 project (Entrepreneurship and Innovation research group). He has been the head of the Change Management research group since 1 February 2013.