Discursive practices in organizational change

The purpose of this research is to increase understanding of discursive practices in organizational change. By approaching organizational change as a social construction, this dissertation examines how discursive practices are involved in organizational change through a qualitative case study. Current organizational literature demonstrates a discursive turn in which negotiation, interactive meaning creation and tension exploitation through discursive struggles characterize the execution of organizational change. Compared to earlier decades, when change was treated rather mechanistically as a process to be executed in controllable phases, the discursive approach is more capable of examining the social aspects of organizational change in practice. Despite the recent tendency to study change within organizations through the lenses of social constructionism and social constructivism, few scholars have approached discourse directly through practice in the context of organizational change. This study examines aspects that are often taken for granted, such as talk. Discursive practices in organizational change are analysed with a case study method through the practice lens, which views practice as a combination of change practices, change praxis and change practitioners. The narrative analysis of this research in the context of a public university hospital indicates that discursive practices play a role in organizational change through discourse phronesis, the context-dependent practical wisdom of talk, and more specifically through the discursive practices that apply discourse phronesis. Four examples of discursive practices were identified in the case study: field practices, mandate practices, priority practices and word practices. In addition, the agency of the strategy text in translating change was analysed, with the conclusion that while a strategy text is material in nature, it is also a discursive practice which reflects collective identities and their power positions during and as the result of organizational change. The study also suggests that permanent tensions in an organization can be harnessed for the benefit of change through discourse. The dynamic contradiction between permanent tensions and change in an organization is termed the renewal paradox.