Our intention in this article is to add to the different ways of looking at and working with change in organizations. We suggest a set of working propositions that move away from problem-solving or planning-based approaches to change, towards a method which focuses primarily on organizational members' emotions and relations, and on forces of uncertainty and defensiveness. We attempt both to highlight the dynamic nature of change, and to point towards some key issues, often avoided, for engaging with aspects of change. We then describe a participative research process we have employed to access and act on organizational members' emotional responses to change. In this instance, drawings were used with managers in six public service organizations as the catalyst to enable managers to bring out often paradoxical emotions, and to work with these as part of the process of the management of change. While our research is set in the context of enormous changes in U.K. public services, we feel that our methodology is applicable to any organizational setting which is characterized by uncertainty and defensiveness.

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The New Labour government came into power in May 1997 with an agenda to reform public services. The key strategy to achieve reform was the concept of modernization. Central to this is the rhetoric of renewal through collaboration, partnership and inclusion. Based upon the authors' research and consultancy activities, this article will explore the emergent modernization programme in policy terms, and also in terms of the organizational consequences for health, welfare and other public agencies.Our argument is that though it was brought in as an antidote to the 'excesses' of Thatcherism, the momentum of modernization is being maintained by recourse to centralist and managerialist strategies and prescriptions. We recognize that New Labour's approach is paradoxical because modernization at its heart espouses the principles of fairness, effectiveness and decentralization; yet it seeks to deliver these in ways which are sometimes experienced by public sector workers and users as disempowering and controlling.

Purpose -The purpose of the paper is to report on the results of an inquiry into the possible reasons why many public service managers and leaders across six European countries report a loss of personal agency and suggests a possible pedagogic response to this. Design/methodology/approach -The nature of agency is explored with reference to theory, and the methodology for the study -heuristic action inquiry -is outlined. The paper argues that spaces within postgraduate education are needed to facilitate managers' critical reflection and working with anxiety, and the article goes on to outline how public services leadership programmes can seek to achieve this. Findings -The paper suggests that programmes need to work both with the cognitive and affective domains, and to find ways of exploring within the curriculum how managers may begin more to see their roles as potentially key actors in the policy-making process rather than as passive recipients of policy imperatives received from above. The loss of agency experienced by public servants in several European countries suggests that MPA programmes and the like need to work with students' anxieties in a contained way. Originality/value -Some trends within contemporary public services that lie behind anxiety and loss of agency are identified, including high emphasis on performance targets, centrally driven change, financial stringency, loss of professional and organisation identities, a perpetuation of a "private is best" governmental ideology, and contradictory accountability structures.

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