Managing Organizational Change: Negotiating Meaning and Power-Resistance Relations

Authors:
Robyn Thomas;Leisa D. Sargent;Cynthia Hardy
Affiliations:
Cardiff Business School, Cardiff CF10 3EU, United Kingdom;Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia;Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia
Venue:
Organization Science
Year:
2011

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Abstract

Theoretical developments in the analysis of organizations have recently turned to an “organizational becoming” perspective, which sees the social world as enacted in the microcontext of communicative interactions among individuals through which meaning is negotiated. According to this view, organizational change is endemic, natural, and ongoing; it occurs in everyday interactions as actors engage in the process of establishing new meanings for organizational activities. We adopt this approach to study how meanings were negotiated by senior and middle managers in a workshop held as part of a culture change program at a telecommunications company. Our study identifies two very different patterns in these negotiations, constituted by the particular communicative practices adopted by participants. We discuss the implications of these patterns for organizational change in relation to generative dialogue and power-resistance relations between senior and middle managers.