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Abstract

This article proposes that our current terminology and conceptual language for organizational change make it difficult to address the range of changes confronting contemporary organizations.


Difficulties discussed include ambiguous and imprecise ways of talking about organizational change, changing organizational contexts that require new ways to think and talk about change, and dealing with implicit assumptions about change that may not be relevant in a world of continual change.


A matrix of change scenarios is presented and the term 'morphing' is introduced to describe continuous whole‐system change in hyperactive business environments.


Concepts, assumptions and metaphors associated with 'altered consciousness' and self‐organizing 'complex adaptive systems' are also discussed as alternative ways to think and talk about transformational change.


Implications discussed include the need to be specific and self‐reflective when thinking and talking about organizational change, and to rethink a possible over‐reliance on mechanistic, engineering or planned movement concepts, metaphors and word imagery.

Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article presents a conceptualization of organizational discourse as situated symbolic action that is then illustrated through an analysis of a meeting of senior managers during an organization development intervention. This perspective encourages a more holistic understanding of organizational contexts and offers an actionable framework to help make sense of workplace episodes and choose appropriate interventions. The ways in which action research was conceptualized and applied are also discussed.

This article presents a conceptualization of organizational discourse as situated symbolic action, drawing from the fields of speech act theory, rhetoric, ethnography of communication and social constructionism. This conceptualization is illustrated through analysis of an episode of negotiated order accessed through an organization development intervention; a meeting of senior managers of Systech, a major IT organization, to decide on a new business model. This perspective helps to respond to some of the key challenges facing the organizational discourse field in terms of developing more clearly specified conceptualizations of discourse suited to the organizational level of analysis, achieving a more holistic and discourse-sensitive understanding of empirical contexts by organizational researchers, and illustrating that organizational discourse analysis is not simply an intellectual luxury but can have pragmatic, relevant implications.

A Dynamic New Approach to Organizational ChangeDialogic Organization Development is a compelling alternative to the classical action research approach to planned change. Organizations are seen as fluid, socially constructed realities that are continuously created through conversations and images. Leaders and consultants can help foster change by encouraging disruptions to taken-for-granted ways of thinking and acting and the use of generative images to stimulate new organizational conversations and narratives. This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to Dialogic Organization Devel.