In this special issue of Tamara: The Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science, we invite contributions, that seek to go beyond attempts to rethink change within the paradigmatic confines that presupposes stability as an ultimate condition of reality and that therefore construe change in strictly exceptional terms. In this special issue we invite contributors radically, to ‘re-imagine’ change; to see change as inexorable, flux, process and movement and to then understand stability and organization in derivative terms. How would organizational change look if form, stability and fixity were exceptions rather than the natural state of things? Would social order, stability and organization then appear closer to the lived experiences of the ordinary individual who increasingly feel trapped by the demands imposed on them by the modern society of organizations? It is hoped that through this alternative 're-imagining' of change, we might come to develop a more accurate, useful, subtle and enriching understanding of that which currently perplexes us. This call for a re-imagined understanding of change is inspired by the work of C Wright-Mills and his call for the exercise of the ‘sociological imagination’.

Writing decades ago, Wright-Mills argued that the sociological academy had made itself aloof from the day-to-day concerns of the population. The academy, he argued, had ceased talking to the concerns and ambitions of everyday people. The subjects of sociological inquiry, therefore, had become objects as sociology became academic – in the everyday, pejorative sense of the term. Thus Wright-Mills noted:

‘Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling they are often quite correct: what everyday men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their power are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighbourhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.’

To escape the traps and perils of this confining domesticity, Wright-Mills proposed a more imaginative form of analysis; a sociology dedicated to allowing ordinary men and women access to the tools and understandings they would require to link their private troubles with larger public issues.

In making this call to ‘re-imagine’ change, we invite contributions from those who would be something other than spectators of change. We invite those who recognise and would loose both the traps and the trappings, which bind our current understanding of the challenge of change to share their thoughts. We call on academics to be more intellectuals than academic. We call on practitioners, trades unionists, artists, activists, journalists; we call upon all those who would ‘re-imagine’ their lives and our futures, so that we might move between private orbits and public concerns to come to a new appreciation of organization and change.