Acknowledgements

This book is the result of research carried out over the 8-year period from 1975 to 1983. I am extremely grateful to all the people in Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) who have helped me over that period gather, sort, analyse, and write up this material.

ICI is a very complex set of businesses linked together in the UK in divisional organisations with quite different organisational histories and cultures. However, even with all this cultural diversity ICI has had elements of a common company culture which at various times could be described by adjectives such as technological, stable, conservative, caring, intellectual, and in certain of its spheres of operation – open to the outside world. For all its inevitable hierarchical tendencies ICI can also be described as being made up of a series of loosely linked networks of people who have coalesced around their interests in operating at a certain level in each division, for example, division chairman or works manager, and across the company in functions such as engineering and personnel.

The process of how I gained the quality of access to ICI which was necessary to build up the picture in this book is itself a complex and fascinating story, but without doubt the open and intellectual side of ICI's character helped in gaining access and so did the understanding of its networks of formal and informal association. The mixed role that I have played in the company as a researcher, consultant, and trainer may also have helped me to gain access to people and appreciate situations and dilemmas in a wider fashion than if I had defined my role just as a researcher, or a consultant, or a trainer. Effective, or merely adequate research on any sphere of life has surely to be a mutual process where the need to balance involvement and distance, is a critical part of the process, (Pettigrew, 1983b).

Paul Miles¹, then of Agricultural Division, first suggested that I might consider carrying out a study of the use of organisation development expertise in his division. Prompted by the suggestion that a comparative study across several divisions might be more instructive, Miles, Simon Dow, and Tom James set up the necessary access to Agricultural, Plastics, and Petrochemicals Divisions, and Stewart Dudley opened the gate into Millbank and the organisation development work which had been going on from the base of the then Central Personnel Department. ICI supplied a research grant for 2 years to carry out this initial work, and Dr Dennis Bumstead joined me at the London Business School in September 1975 as a full-time researcher.

However, the research reported here is more than just an analysis of the differential impact in various organisation contexts of organisation development (OD) activities on organisational change, it also seeks to ask some much broader questions about the patterns of continuity and change in ICI over the period 1960–83; and the role of very senior line managers in creating change. The changes in the character and objectives of this research which occurred after 1977 are a recognition of the useful though always limited role that internal and external specialist OD resources have played in formulating and implementing organisational change in ICI. By the late 1970s there was an open statement of company policy in ICI that line managers were to be the vanguard of the significant changes which occurred from 1979 onwards. I am extremely grateful to the main board directors, division chairmen and directors, senior managers, internal and external consultants, and senior shop stewards who allowed me to interview them and provided documentary evidence of some of the strategic change processes going on in the company over the period 1960–83. Particular thanks are due to Stewart Dudley and Tom James for their consistent help and practical advice throughout the period 1975–83, and to John Harvey-Jones for helping to create the space and climate where this research work could be done.

I gained access to Mond Division relatively late in the day of this study, and just as well because the Mond story of change is a critical one within recent ICI experience. Nicholas Mann, Mark Warwick, Dylan Jones, and Sandy Marshall were a great help in enabling me to appreciate the complexities and significance of the Mond work.

Present members of the Petrochemicals and Plastics Division board, and indeed a number of senior managers and senior shop stewards at Wilton may rightly ask “what’s happened to the story of the merging of Petrochemicals and Plastics Divisions and to the analysis of the major changes on the huge manufacturing site at Wilton since 1979?” My answer to that question is that those processes of managing change are too important and interesting to have squeezed them into what is already a long book, and the analysis of the implementation of the Petrochemicals and Plastics Division merger and the Wilton changes since 1979 will appear in subsequent publications. Nevertheless I would like to acknowledge here the support for this research given so far by a number of people in Petrochemicals and Plastics Division.

Although I have carried out the research largely without continuing financial research support and research assistance, a number of individuals and organisations have helped me throughout the period 1975–83. ICI's initial financial support allowed me to recruit Dr Dennis Bumstead to work on the research, and between late 1975 and late 1977 he successfully carried out a lot of the interviewing and analysis for the studies of the impact of OD in Agricultural and Petrochemicals Divisions, and in Central Personnel Department in Millbank. Some indication of Dennis's skills and effectiveness in this project are evident from the fact that with the end of his research contract he went on to work as an external consultant in organisation development and change for parts of ICI.

Dr Cynthia Hardy, now of McGill University, helped with bibliographic searches for the literature on organisational change and development, and Anne Murray and Dr Lauck Parke were of great assistance in generating and sorting material on the UK and world chemical industries. I am also very grateful to Mike Hyde, the editor of Chemical Insight, and Stuart Wamsley of W. Greenwell & Co. for making available their extensive knowledge of the UK, European, and world chemical industries.

The award by the Social Science Research Council of a personal research grant for the calendar year 1981 was of enormous value in releasing me from my responsibilities at the University of Warwick to allow me to collect more data in ICI during the period of great changes in 1981, and to begin the long process of thinking, sorting, and writing the research. The period during 1981 that I spent at the Harvard Business School was of great value in allowing me to share and test my ideas with Professors Chris Argyris, Michael Beer, Paul Lawrence, and Robert Miles, and I hope they will accept my thanks here without taking on any of the responsibilities for the ideas in this book.

Anyone who has spent time at the School of Industrial and Business Studies, University of Warwick will know that the heart of the place is Jeanette Whitmore. Jeanette has spent early mornings, evenings, and weekends – probably many more than she would have liked – typing and retyping drafts of this book. Her conscientiousness and cheerfulness have made the preparation of this book that much easier, and I cannot thank her enough.

My wife Ethna again was merely indispensable. Her unfailing willingness to create space for me to write in amongst all the other pressures of family life, plus her ironic jibes that I would never complete this book, was all I needed in the way of competitive spur to finish it. This book is as much hers as mine, and I dedicate it to her for this and all the other things we've shared together.

¹ Throughout this volume all personal names mentioned are pseudonyms. The only exceptions to this are the ICI company chairmen, who are national figures in the UK context and therefore impossible to disguise.