This paper focuses on the transition management and reviews some criticisms and questions about the sustainable transition. While some of the earlier criticism have inspired theory development, the underlying epistemological issues deserve more attention. It demonstrates how some of the criticisms on transition management and its underlying complexity paradigm are based on a deconstructive understanding of complexity, which questions to what extent complex systems can be influenced into a desired direction. The criticism of transition management needs to know the following points：(1) transition management itself presupposes inherent deconstructive power, which hitherto has been insufficiently specified; (2) transition management at the same time also has an explicit ambition to ‘go beyond’ deconstruction. It elaborates a reconstructive approach as an epistemological grounding for transition studies on three grounds: firstly, a research focus beyond ‘is’ versus ‘ought’ towards ‘can be’; secondly, interpretative research and reflexivity; and finally, a phronesis understanding of sustainability.