The organizational change management field is comparatively new. It has really only been in existence for the last 50 years or so. This excerpt from an academic article I wrote discusses the origins of the field.
There is an enormous amount of academic literature and an enormous amount of practitioner literature on the topic of change, where the most popular books sell in millions (over six million copies of In Search of Excellence; 
two million copies of Reengineering the Corporation), which indicates the widespread acceptance 
of the need for change. This orthodoxy has roots in the social developments of the last forty years.
The post-war era was one of relative stability until the 1960s, when there was social upheaval (protests against the Vietnam war, the student revolts of May 1968, the women’s movement), technological upheaval (the development of computers and transistors, the space race), and economic upheaval (the oil embargo of 1973, the “Japanese juggernaut” built on high quality products and high productivity). The scale of the resulting changes may or may not be fundamentally different to anything that had happened before, but they were important, and they created an impression that major change was happening and needed to be addressed.
The growing importance and economic power of Germany and Japan, together with the (relative) decline in the US and British economies seemed to indicate that there was a need to overhaul radically the traditional American and British ways of doing business. The emergence of Thatcherism and Reaganism, which called for a new enterprise culture and a much-reduced role for the state, was also a significant factor in creating a climate where change was seen as a sine qua non of future prosperity. The attrition rate of companies is huge; only 16 of the largest 100 US companies at the beginning of the 1900s still survived at the end of the 20th century, a fact which certainly implies that change is crucial to survival.
