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Change implementation presents a major challenge to managers. However, theoretical and empirical works waiver between the change management action and the management of the change/initial conditions. These opposing views reflect the theoretical instability, which characterizes work on organizational change. Faced with this theoretical mosaic, the question of knowing what the change capacity is, is fundamental. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for change capacity and to identify its dimensions and components.

To deal with this stake, the author conducted a single case study and observed an organization that had acquired the status of a company with change capacity. The Renault SA group makes for an interesting case. Renault, a 100‐year‐old company, is considered to be capable of undergoing change, of following its environment and even of shaping its own environment.

The study leads to the identification of three dimensions of the change capacity. These are the context, process and learning dimensions. The context dimension consists of resources that facilitate the change process. The process dimension incorporates principles of implementing change. Finally, the learning dimension tackles the introspective capacity of the organization.

If the literature on change capacity focuses more on the outcome of the capability than on the capability itself, the study has enabled the proposing of a framework for change capacity and to identify its dimensions and components. This framework is interesting in two respects. First, it shows that change capacity is as much linked to its management as it is dependent on the initial conditions. Second, it provides direction towards a strategic management of change.

To examine three dimensions of organisational change capacity (OCC) which have been proposed sequentially in the following order: OCC for change will affect process capacity for change and develop context capacity for change. Specifically, this study explores the moderating effects of coercive pressure.

To test the proposed hypotheses, this study conducted survey among middle-level leaders of the 11 top universities (autonomous higher education institutions – AHEIs) in Indonesia. This study used a sample of 92 respondents, deans 21 and vice deans 71 of 11 top Indonesian universities. To test data processing using the SmartPLS 3.0 tool.

The findings indicate that learning capacity for change is the starting point of OCC, and it influences process capacity and context capacity for change. Coercive pressure strengthens the relationship between learning capacity and context capacity for change. Further, context capacity for change determines organisational performance.

This study empirically examines the OCC construction mechanism as follows: learning capacity for change influences process capacity for change and then has an effect on the OCC for change, which ultimately affects organisational performance.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a novel measure of access to credit suited to estimate the relative change in credit reserves.

A debt possibility frontier is estimated using data envelopment analysis and the Malmquist index is calculated. The Malmquist index is redubbed the Debt Development index and decomposed into “change in debt capacity” and “change in debt capacity utilization”. Bootstrapping is applied for statistical inference. The method is applied to an unbalanced panel of 92,000 Danish farm accounts from 1996 to 2009.

The paper finds that credit capacity roughly doubled for Danish farmers over the period, and that utilization of credit capacity generally was proportional to capacity change, utilization being higher for dairy and pig farms, than for crop farms.

Changes in credit reserves may have important implications for risk management practice, investment and technology adoption and related policy issues. The method is limited by the possibility of strategic behavior of lenders during credit cycle busts. In credit cycle booms, the method gives a good basis for the estimates of change in credit reserves.

In a period of increasing credit reserves, risk management institutions are unlikely to develop. Like agricultural policy, access to credit may crowd out market-based risk management.

The study represents a novel application and interpretation of a well-known method.

This paper aims to present a case study-based approach to identify resource-poor communities with limited abilities to cope with the adverse effects of climate change. The study area is the Nkonkobe Local Municipality, in the Eastern Cape which is one of South Africa’s provinces ranked as being extremely vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change because of high incidences of poverty and limited access to public services such as water and education. Although adaptive capacity and vulnerability assessments help to guide policy formulation and implementation by identifying communities with low coping capacities, policy implementers often find it difficult to fully exploit the utility of these assessments because of difficulties in identifying vulnerable communities. The paper attempts to bridge this gap by providing a user-friendly, replicable, practically implementable and adaptable methodology that can be used to cost-effectively and timeously identify vulnerable communities with low coping capacities.

A geostatistical approach was used to assess and evaluate adaptive capacities of resource-poor communities in the Nkonkobe Local Municipality. The geospatial component of this approach consisted of a multi-step Geographical Information Systems (GIS) based technique that was improvised to map adaptive capacities of different communities. The statistical component used demographic indicators comprising literacy levels, income levels, population age profiles and access to water to run automated summation and ranking of indicator scores in ArcGIS 10.2 to produce maps that show spatial locations of communities with varying levels of adaptive capacities on a scale ranging from low, medium to high.

The analysis identified 14 villages with low adaptive capacities from a total of 180 villages in the Nkonkobe Local Municipality. This finding is important because it suggests that our methodology can be effectively used to objectively identify communities that are vulnerable to climate change.

The paper presents a tool that could be used for targeting assistance to climate change vulnerable communities. The methodology proposed is of general applicability in guiding public policy interventions aimed at reaching, protecting and uplifting socio-economically disadvantaged populations in both rural and urban settings.

The approach’s ability to identify vulnerable communities is useful because it aids the identification of resource-poor communities that deserve priority consideration when planning adaptation action plans to deliver support and assistance to those least capable of effectively coping with the adverse effects of climate change induced vulnerabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on challenges faced by longitudinal quantitative analyses of school improvement processes and offers a systematic literature review of current papers that use longitudinal analyses. In this context, the authors assessed designs and methods that are used to analyze the relation between school improvement processes and student outcomes. Based on this the authors point out to what extent the papers consider different aspects of the complex nature of school improvement (e.g. multilevel structure, indirect and nonlinear effects, reciprocity). The choice of study designs and methods of analysis substantially determines which aspects of this complexity are taken into account.

The authors searched in four international high-impact journals and in ERIC for articles reporting longitudinal school improvement studies. The database of the review consisted of a total of 428 journal articles. In total, 13 of the 428 papers met the selection criteria and were analyzed in detail.

The analyzed papers use a wide range of designs and methodological approaches. They support the assumption that sophisticated quantitative longitudinal designs and methods can be applied effectively in school improvement research. However, considering the complexity of school improvement is accompanied by high demands on designs and methods. Due to this none of the papers met the standards applied in this review completely.

In particular, further research is needed to consider a long period of observation, reciprocal indirect and nonlinear processes in a multilevel structure. Moreover, research is required for a better and unambiguous theoretical foundation and empirical validation of the number of and intervals between measurement points.

If more consideration is given to the complex nature of school improvement in future studies, the broader knowledge base will allow a better understanding of the dynamic relation of school improvement and student learning. It would thus be possible to make more appropriate recommendations for the support of school improvement practice.

The original contribution of the paper is to show which aspects of the complexity of school improvement processes – and to what extent – are currently addressed in designs and methods of analysis applied in quantitative longitudinal studies that investigate the relation between schools’ capacity to managing change and student outcomes. Additionally the authors aim at deriving need for further research and giving guidelines how designs and methods in further studies can reflect the complexity appropriately. It is highly important to consider all aspects of this complexity to describe and understand the dynamic relation of school improvement processes and student outcomes.

This paper aims to provide more knowledge on antecedent conditions of organizational capacity for change by examining the mediating role of employee trust in relationship between transformational leadership (TL) and two components of organizational change capacity (OCC) (innovative culture and capable champions) in Chinese firms.

Survey data were collected from 269 participants at 65 Chinese firms. Structural equation modeling was used to test hypotheses in the proposed research model.

The research findings indicate that within the Chinese context, TL and two dimensions of employee trust in leadership (cognition-based trust and affect-based trust) are positively related to innovative culture and capable champions. Moreover, the two dimensions of employee trust act as the mediating roles between TL and components of OCC.

The results and benchmarks in this paper are appropriate for a particular context of Chinese firms. Future research should examine other contexts to provide a clearer picture of the relationship between the constructs.

The study highlights the importance of practicing TL style to build employee trust in leadership aimed at fostering innovative culture and capable champions.

The paper has provided theoretical and managerial initiatives in the field of organizational behavior and change management that can clarify the relationship between TL, employee trust and OCC. These initiatives might help firms to identify a right pathway for promoting OCC and adapting more quickly and effectively to the change of business environment.

The purpose of this paper is to outline how collective capacity building is supporting system‐wide reform in one country. It seeks to outline the way in which professional learning communities within, between and across schools are creating an infrastructure for improving professional practice and raising standards.

The paper is both descriptive and analytical. It draws on the international literature pertaining to system‐wide reform and the empirical evidence concerning professional learning.

The paper highlights some of the challenges in building the collective capacity for change throughout an entire system and reflects on progress to date. The paper concludes by arguing that despite the compelling case for collective capacity building, the real test is to make it happen.

The professional learning communities (PLC) programme in Wales is gathering evidence about impact but as the programme is just completing its first year of implementation these findings are not yet available.

This paper adds to prior analyses and discussion of collective capacity building by providing a system‐wide perspective.

Spatial planning is globally identified as an effective strategy for providing climate change adaptation needs. However, there is a dearth of literature on how spatial planning relates to climate change control in Ghana, particularly at the local level. Hence, this paper aims to investigate whether spatial planning plays a significant role in the control of climate change and the adaptive capacities at the local level.

The authors adopt a mixed-method approach, where both qualitative and quantitative data were obtained using an interview guide and survey, respectively. The authors analyze the data using a qualitative content analysis method and descriptive statistics.

The results show that spatial planning plays an important role in climate change adaptation, though in a limited way. The physical planning department at the municipal level has varying amounts of capacities across various determinants, but there are opportunities for improving the capacity of the department.

The authors provide empirical evidence to support the need to prioritize spatial planning as a strategy for dealing with the impacts of climate change and the building of capacities at the national and community levels for improved adaptive capacity.

A framework is offered that predicts when public organizations are susceptible to change. Many researchers interested in change focus on leadership. Such an approach overlooks structural factors that inhibit change and what leaders seeking to realize change can realistically hope to accomplish. The framework identifies organizational capacity, responsiveness, and constituencies as key structural factors that govern change feasibility. Capacity, responsiveness, and constituencies are knitted together in the framework to identify types of public organizations that are ready for change and those apt to resist change. Types of change are considered that range from strategic repositioning to transformation. Also discussed are guidelines for leaders seeking to strategically reposition or to transform a public organization. To realize a transformation requires a new kind of leader, called a Mutualist. The skills required by Mutualist leadership and Mutualist leaders are identified and compared to those identified in the transformational leadership literature. Research questions are formulated and a research program proposed to deal with research issues identified by the framework.

The purpose of this paper is to present a decisions support tool that can be applied in initial stages of design, for evaluating the investment feasibility of changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing design concepts, based on future demand predictions and their uncertainties. A quantitative model is proposed, which evaluates the discounted value of capital and operating costs of changeable manufacturing design concepts, based on essential characteristics regarding their type and extent of changeability.

Quantitative empirical modeling is applied, where model conceptualization, validation, and implementation are central elements, using two Danish manufacturing companies as cases.

The applicability of the model is demonstrated in the two case companies, highlighting differences in type, extent, and level of feasible changeability, as a result of differences in product and production characteristics.

Further studies of changeability implementation should be conducted across industrial fields in order to generalize findings.

There is currently limited support for the conceptual design phase of changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing, where critical decisions regarding type, extent, and level of changeability must be made, regardless of high degrees of uncertainty about future demand scenarios.

This paper expands previous research on design for changeability and reconfigurability, by explicitly considering changeability as a capability that can be enabled in various ways for various purposes in different industrial contexts. The proposed model and the case implementations provide important knowledge on the transition toward changeability in industry.