SUPPORTING AND CONTESTING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE: A DISCURSIVE STUDY ON CONTRADICTORY VISIONS OF A CHANGE

Organizations are transforming their traditional office settings to hot-desking office due to pressure to reduce costs and modernize their working practices and external images. Although organizational change has been acknowledged as an interactional accomplishment involving discursive activities, prior studies on spatial change have failed to address the discursive processes of such changes.

The objective of this study is to examine the dynamics of spoken interaction when supporting and contesting organizational change. More specifically, the study focuses on analyzing how people within an organization evaluate an ongoing change and how they rhetorically produce their support or resistance to the change. Drawing on empirical data from a study of a change program which was strategically central to a public service organization in Finland, the study applies the theoretical and methodological approach of discursive psychology in the analysis. The empirical material consists of audio recordings from a series of workshops running over a three-week period, from nine program group meetings and from 36 individual interviews.

The analyses focus on the discursive and rhetorical construction of organizational change and identifies attitudes of support and resistance as rhetorical stances taken by the members of the organization while speaking about spatial change. Supporting stances relate to the current societal trends and the ability of an organization to react to its environment, whereas resistant stances emphasize the abandonment of grass-roots work practices and the communality of an organization. The study demonstrates how groups of employees construct opposite visions and consequences of change, and support and contest their own visions of change such that they do not speak about the same change. Similarly, the visions of real work in a renewed organization are produced differently in the words of employees and responsible managers. Furthermore, the study explains how the different groups of employees produce a polarizing organization by contrasting current employees and future employees, change-oriented and stability-oriented employees and new and old versions of the organization.

As the main contribution to understanding organizational change, the study highlights attitudes as rhetorical stances when exploring organizational change, following the idea of rhetorical social psychology. Instead of treating resistance as a negative inner attitude and studying ways to overcome such attitudes, this study suggests that resistant talk is a focal part of any discussion about change. Accordingly, it should be integrated in research settings as well as in the development work of an organization.