4
Discourse and Dialogic Organization Development
Chapter 3 described how recent developments in philosophy and social science are changing our view of the world from something given, to be apprehended, to something constructed through social interaction. These new ways of thinking have obvious consequences for how one thinks about organizations and change. This chapter discusses how these changes are showing up in scholarly research on organizations and organizational change and their implications for Dialogic Organization Development. It begins with a brief history of the way in which an “interpretive orientation” emerged in management theory. Much of this work has come under the label of “discourse studies.” The following section addresses how scholars define words like discourse, text, and narrative—often in ways that mean something different from how those words are used in everyday conversation. Understanding these different meanings is useful to understanding the insights that academics are providing into how organizations are managed and changed. In the final section a series of discursive premises and their implications are provided for the Dialogic OD practitioner.
The Emergence of an Interpretive Orientation to Organizations and Change
The dominant way of thinking about organizations and organizational change in the first half of the twentieth century was as a machine, with an engineering emphasis on productivity, efficiency, and changes to fix or improve “the machine” (Marshak, 1993; Morgan, 2006). Around mid-century open systems theories such as Von Bertalanffy’s (1968) pioneering work in biological systems began to assume ascendancy. The shift to a biological model created a greater emphasis on adaptation, congruence, and alignment with external (and internal) factors and forces; an interest in effectiveness that included but was not limited to efficiency criteria and engineering change methods (e.g., Katz and Kahn, 1966; Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967; Thompson, 1967). Both machine and organic models and associated theories about organizations and organizational change are related to the “hard sciences” of physics, engineering, and biology and contribute to objectivist, positivist orientations to organization diagnosis, the need for change, and change methods.
In the latter part of the twentieth century an “interpretive” orientation, based on newer theories and approaches in the “soft sciences,” emerged to raise different questions about organizations and organizational change (e.g., Heracleous 2004). The interpretive orientation loosely includes constructionist and postmodern perspectives (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Bergquist, 1993; Hassard and Parker, 1993; Searle, 1995), ideas about social systems as systems of communications (Luhmann, 1989, 1995), the “soft” cognitive sciences such as cognitive psychology and linguistics (Altman, Bournois, and Boje, 2008; Fairhurst, 2007; Schön, 1993), culture studies (Alvesson, 2002; Martin, 2002), critical studies of power and politics (Alvesson, 1996; Clegg, 1989; Knights and Willmott, 1989), and organizational discourse studies (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000b; Grant et al., 2004). Importantly for this discussion, the interpretive orientation and much of discourse studies believe talk, text, and other modes of communication create social reality and do not simply represent it. Both also tend to view organizations as meaning-making or sense-making (Weick, 1995) systems where social reality emerges from dialogic processes and associated social and political interactions among various actors.
Whereas the engineering or biological models might place emphasis on such variables as strategy, structure, rewards, goals, reporting lines, or achieving greater congruence in a change effort, the interpretive orientation focuses on how the current organizational reality is socially constructed, maintained, and changed through such variables as culture, internal politics, and multiple forms of discourse (narratives, stories, conversations, metaphors, provocative questions, symbolic actions, etc.). For example, Austin and Bartunek (2003) identify four organizational change approaches that are attuned to four variables: participation, self-reflection by leaders, action research, and narrative/rhetorical. For these scholars, “Narrative interventions emphasize the roles of rhetoric and writing in generating organizational change. Organizational actors partially create their reality through the retrospective stories they tell about their experience and through future-oriented stories that they create as a pathway to action. Convergence of narratives by organization members drives collective sense making” (ibid., 31).
The traditional approach to change as a tangible, episodic, and discrete process has also been challenged by researchers who explore change as an inherently interpretive and discursive process (e.g., Barrett, Thomas, and Hocevar, 1995; Bushe and Marshak, 2009; Doolin, Grant, and Thomas, 2013; Heracleous and Marshak, 2004; Marshak and Grant, 2008; Oswick et al., 2010). Rather than regarding organizations as machinelike or like living organisms, these theorists construe organizations as more like an “on-going conversation” (Broekstra, 1998; Oswick and Marshak, 2012). When viewed in this way an organization is constituted in and through the ongoing discursive interactions of members and other stakeholders (Boden, 1994). The obvious implication is that if you want to change an organization you need to focus on aspects of discourse and discursive processes. Thus, for some scholars, changing organizations involves changing the narratives and conversations that prevail within them (Ford and Ford, 1995, 2008; Shaw, 2002).
An Introduction to Organizational Discourse
Organizational scholars who study discourse have drawn mainly from sociology, linguistics, philosophy, literary studies, anthropology, and communications studies (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000a; Grant et al., 2004). Despite emerging from a variety of disciplines, there are perhaps five concepts and three significant premises that help shape current research and thinking about organizational discourse.
Five Concepts
For purposes of this discussion, five concepts are critical to understanding a discursive orientation and its relationship to Dialogic OD: discourse, text, context, narrative, and conversation. These are summarized in Table 4.1.
In academic circles, a discourse is not people just talking to each other. Rather, a discourse is a set of interrelated “texts” that along with the related practices of text production, dissemination, and consumption brings an idea or way of thinking into being (Fairclough, 1992; Parker, 1992). So, for example, there is an organizational health discourse that includes all the books and articles, stories, metaphors, conferences, diagrams, and so forth that relate to the idea of organizations as something that can be healthy or not. People who use and contribute to this are called a “community of discourse.” Within that community, certain things make sense and others do not. Someone who wants to influence that community has to enter it through that discourse. Discourses play a central role in constituting social reality and in the resulting organizational actions and practices (Taylor et al., 1996). In most organizations (depending on how large they are) we are likely to find competing discourses about key things such as the purpose of the organization and where it should invest its resources. Some discourses will be “privileged,” meaning that it is acceptable to talk in those ways in the presence of those with power or authority, or that talking in those ways is considered appropriate and reasonable in that organization.
Table 4.1 Key Concepts in Organizational Discourse
Discourse |
A set of interrelated “texts” that, along with the related practices of text production, dissemination, and consumption, brings an idea or way of thinking into being |
Text |
Anything (words, symbols, pictures, gestures, etc.) that conveys content or thematic meaning |
Context |
The temporal, historical, cultural, and social settings in which texts are embedded. Every text is potentially a context for other texts. |
Narrative |
Written or verbal accounts with a focus on themes or issues that link a set of ideas or a series of events into a meaningful storyline |
Conversation |
The production, dissemination, and interpretation of strings of texts, which are linked together, both temporally and rhetorically, as part of interactions or transactions between two or more people |
What embeds, carries, and sustains a discourse are texts. This is how reality is socially constructed among large groups of people who do not necessarily interact face to face. In scholarly discourse, a text is not just writing. Robichaud, Giroux, and Taylor (2004) define texts as semiotic artifacts that come in a wide variety of forms, including written documents, speech acts, pictures, gestures, and symbols, and that convey content or narrative themes (Iedema, 2007; Taylor and Van Every, 1993). For example, a sliding glass door with a warning symbol nearby can become a contributing text related to the discourse on safety in the workplace.
Discourses do not exist independent of context. Discourses are influenced by temporal, historical, and social contexts. Any particular discourse is itself constituted by other discourses and their related texts (Broadfoot, Deetz, and Anderson, 2004; Keenoy and Oswick, 2004; Fairclough and Wodak, 1997). This means that the distinction between text and context is problematic, since the same text is simultaneously part of a particular or local discourse as well as an instance of a broader contextual discourse (Fairclough 1992). Among academics, there are controversies about how to define many of these terms precisely. Practically, the result is that how things come to mean what they do in any organization will unfold through a complex interplay of both socially and historically produced texts that are part of a continuous, iterative, and recursive process (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000b; Grant and Hardy, 2004). Discursive interactions among individuals and groups are located in the context of other macrolevel, “meta-,” or “grand” discourses that may exist within or outside of the organization (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000b). Moreover, “discourses are always connected to other discourses which were produced earlier, as well as those which are produced synchronically and subsequently” (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997, p. 277).
Narratives are one important focus of discursive phenomena, along with conversation, rhetoric, tropes such as metaphor, and symbolic and nonlinguistic modes of communication. Narratives are written or verbal accounts with a focus on themes or issues that link a set of ideas or a series of events (Boje, 2001; Czarniawska-Joerges, 1998; Gabriel, 2004). They are fundamental to the ways in which we think about ourselves and how we interact with one another: “Narrative constructs that relate consequences to antecedents through event sequences in context over time thus appear to be particularly relevant to understanding the unfolding of complex organizational change processes” (Buchanan and Dawson, 2007, 672). Narratives are like storylines that get used to produce accounts that make sense of events. For example, within the organization effectiveness discourse, one narrative is that a lack of organization-environment fit leads to underperforming organizations. So when a specific organization fails, a story or account that explains the failure as due to the organization not adapting to a shift in its environment is consistent with and reinforces an open-systems narrative. In politics and journalism, there is keen sensitivity to how narratives shape the meaning people make of events, and this is becoming increasingly true in managerial thinking. Narratives are constituted and supported via discursive interactions among organizational actors. Studies demonstrate that a key discursive practice in the construction and dissemination of narratives of change is conversation (e.g., Buchanan and Dawson, 2007; Ford and Ford, 1995).
A conversation is defined as the production, dissemination, and interpretation of strings of texts, which are linked together both temporally and rhetorically as part of interactions or transactions between two or more people (Ford and Ford, 1995; Robichaud, Giroux, and Taylor, 2004; Taylor et al., 1996). Conversations are especially important in understanding the role of discourse in organizations; consequential action is not the result of disconnected utterances or isolated texts, but is produced through ongoing dialogic interactions among actors that draw on broader discourses and produce narratives and ways of thinking that act as resources for action and for further conversations (Fairclough, 1992). Conversations exist in a recursive relationship in which existing discourses provide resources to actors who engage in conversations that in turn produce, reproduce, and transform those discourses (Robichaud, Giroux, and Taylor, 2004; Taylor et al., 1996). This means that a discursive approach to organizational dynamics is both processual and contextual, and a focus on conversation highlights the ongoing, often recursive and iterative processes through which change is enacted over time.
Core Premises
A discursive approach to organizations is more than a focus on organizational communication and the ways in which information is conveyed by organizational actors. Instead, it focuses on the ways in which discourse and discursive processes construct organizational reality, rather than simply reflecting it (Hardy, Lawrence, and Grant, 2005). Organizational discourse pays attention to how various actors draw on, reproduce, and transform discourses (narratives, texts, conversations, symbolic imagery, etc.), and as they do so how they create, convey, reinforce, and change ideas and ways of thinking that come to constitute their social world (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000a; Keenoy, Oswick, and Grant, 2000).
Second, while early discursive approaches to organizational research focused mainly on speech and writing, recent studies consider a broader range of modalities through which discourse is enacted (Fairhurst and Grant, 2010; Iedema, 2007; Kress, 2010). This displacement of talk and text as the sole or primary focus of discursive study “amounts to a profound reorientation” (Kress, 2010, p. 79) of understandings about what discourse is, how it is used to express, negotiate, and influence meaning, and how to approach its study and use in the context of change. In line with this perspective, when referring in this chapter to “discourse,” our comments are not limited to speech and writing but may refer to the many other modes of communication that contribute to meaning making, such as visual representations, gestures, symbols, and so on.
Third, discursive studies explain how prevailing ways of thinking, privileged narratives, and entrenched mindsets are created and reinforced via processes that involve the implicit negotiation of meaning among different organizational stakeholders with different views and interests. For the most part, the influence of discourse and discursive processes inside organizations is not noticed or talked about by organizational actors. In examining how such dominant meanings emerge, many discursive studies have adopted a “critical perspective” that focuses on how different groups use power and power processes to shape the social reality of organizations in ways that serve their interests (Fairclough, 1995; Hardy and Phillips, 2004; Mumby, 2004). These dominant discourses are seen to “rule in” certain ways of thinking and talking about a particular phenomenon that are deemed as acceptable, legitimate, and intelligible while “ruling out,” limiting, or otherwise restricting the way actors talk about things or conduct themselves (Hall, 2001, p. 72). Consequently, how power processes are involved in establishing or challenging prevailing discourses is an important variable for understanding organization dynamics and change (Hardy, Lawrence, and Grant 2005).
Discourse and Change: Insights and Implications
The field of Organizational Discourse Studies invites leaders and change agents to approach organizational change from an interpretive orientation and with an understanding that discourse in its many manifestations is central to the establishment, maintenance, and change of what is and what could be. This has real implications for organizational change practices. For example, if an organization is like a machine one might seek to conduct a diagnosis to determine what is broken and how to fix it. If it is like a living organism, one might perform a diagnosis to determine its stage of development, degree of wellness, and fitness for its environment, leading to prescriptions and remedies to promote its health, growth, and adaptability (e.g., McFillen et al., 2013). However, if an organization is like an ongoing conversation that continuously creates social reality for the participants, then there are only dialogic processes and no independent, objective reality or material object to diagnose. A discursive orientation consequently focuses on how conversations unfold, what narratives currently define the ways things are, and ways that might lead to new interactions and processes among different actors that will create new narratives that in turn enable new ways of thinking and acting to emerge.
For the Dialogic OD practitioner, then, a discursive orientation to change means ignoring a great deal of established OD and change theory and advice (e.g., Cummings and Worley, 2009; Kotter, 1996) and applying methods that foster attention to the ways in which discursive processes, at multiple levels, in multiple forms, and in multiple ways, create organizational continuity and change. Organizational discourse studies provide an extensive research and theoretical base about organizational change that is supportive of many of the central tenets that help differentiate Dialogic OD from Diagnostic OD (Bushe and Marshak, 2009, 2014). It also provides insights and ideas about variables and processes that are important considerations in developing dialogic change approaches and practices. The following discussion, summarized in Table 4.2, draws on and further extends Grant and Marshak’s (2011) review of the scholarly literature addressing discourse and change.
Discourse Plays a Central Role in the Social Construction of Organizational Reality
Discourse does more than report on or reflect information; it is constructive and establishes, reinforces, and challenges how organizational actors interpret their organizational experiences. Therefore, as emphasized in Chapter 1 and throughout this book, changing the existing dominant discourse is one key route to transformational change.
Table 4.2 Insights about Discourse and Change
Discourse socially constructs organizational reality.
Multiple levels of linked discourses impact how actors think and act.
Discourses are multimodal and not limited to talk and text.
Narratives shape how people think and act and are conveyed through conversations.
Power and political processes determine which discourses shape accepted ways of thinking and acting.
There is a diversity of discourses latent in any situation.
Discourse and change continuously interact in iterative and recursive ways.
Change agents need to reflect on their own discourses.
The Dialogic OD practitioner who understands that language and multi-modal communications are constructive will also be more sensitive to a range of questions and concerns that might differ to some degree from more traditional OD thinking. Some examples include: How are day-to-day conversations reinforcing preferred ways of thinking established by historical, organizational, political, or other contexts? How might current discursive processes enable or limit organizational actions and change efforts, including through narratives, stories, metaphors, conversations, visual representations, symbols, and so on? What blend of stakeholders—in what settings, using what discursive methods—might lead to new conversations throughout the organization, which in turn will enable and reinforce new possibilities? This way of thinking contrasts with other organizational change approaches that emphasize changes in such tangible aspects as job design, structures, reward systems, and so on. Dialogic approaches do not deny the need to address such aspects, but emphasize the importance of the web of meanings that influences how they are brought into being. Without such considerations, it is difficult to significantly influence how actors make sense of and interpret change initiatives.
There Are Multiple Levels of Linked Discourses That Impact How Actors Think and Act
Discourses operate at multiple social and psychological levels simultaneously. The work of a number of scholars (e.g., Alvesson and Karreman, 2000b; Grant, Keenoy, and Oswick, 2001; Potter and Wetherell, 1987) suggests that change agents should think in terms of changing or influencing at least five levels of discourse: intrapersonal, personal, interpersonal and group, organizational, and sociocultural.
Intrapersonal-level discourses manifest in the form of internalized stories and introjected beliefs that influence how one sees oneself and interprets the world. Studies by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists demonstrate how verbal, written, or symbolic forms of discourse may evoke or result from mental processes such as scripts, schemata, and frames that are rooted in cognitively unconscious mental maps of cultural, social, and organizational experiences (Lord and Kernan, 1987; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Marshak et al., 2000). This level may be of particular interest to those involved in dialogic approaches to coaching, as discussed in Chapter 16.
Personal-level discourses include how individuals use language, stories, influence strategies, impression management, rhetorical methods, gestures, and so on to convey their needs, interests, ideas, and the like. Consideration of how individuals use these factors can offer a range of insights into the attitudes, affiliations, orientations, motives, and values of a given organizational stakeholder. For example, a number of studies have focused on the metaphors used by individuals in order to reveal their thinking and perception about organizations and organizational change and therefore what actions they may or may not consider (Marshak, 1996; Morgan, 2006; Oswick and Montgomery, 1999; Palmer and Dunford, 1996).
Interpersonal and group-level discourses are constituted through direct interactions among organizational actors or stakeholders. Interpersonal and group-level discursive interactions impact the actions and behavior of individuals within a localized organizational context. The context might be a department or a specific group of actors such as a team, and it might center on issues such as conflict, negotiation, roles, and norms (Hamilton, 1997; O’Connor and Adams, 1999; Preget, 2013).
Organizational-level discourses inform the dominant thinking, organizational practices, and collective social perspectives within an organization, and address topics such as mission, strategy, values, and policy (Anderson-Gough, Grey, and Robson, 2000; Phillips, Lawrence, and Hardy, 2004; Robichaud, Giroux, and Taylor, 2004). Successful organization-wide change requires new organization-level discourses to emerge to persuade stakeholders of the value and purpose of the change (Barrett, Thomas, and Hocevar 1995; Fiss and Zajac 2006).
Sociocultural-level discourses are recognized and espoused at the broader societal level and across institutional domains (Grant and Nyberg, 2014). As such they might address “more or less standard ways of referring to/constituting a certain type of phenomenon” (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000b, p. 1133). These include taken-for-granted premises such as the purpose of business, government, and society and what is reasonable of organizations to expect of employees, as well as industry-focused discourses on things like “business reengineering,” “the market,” “sustainability,” and “social responsibility.”
As pointed out in the earlier discussion of context, the texts within any discourse are linked to and informed by other discourses and texts that operate at different levels. This intertextuality means it may be important to understand and address the interrelationship of discourses at multiple levels in order to successfully encourage or enact organizational change (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000b; O’Connor, 2000). For example, Grant and Nyberg (2014) and Wright, Nyberg, and Grant (2012) examined the emerging sociocultural discourse of “climate change,” showing how it permeates and becomes integral to other discourses operating at various other levels within the organization.
For Dialogic OD practitioners there are a number of strategic implications if stability and change are a function of multilevel, discursive phenomena. First is the need to better understand how different levels of discursive phenomena influence and reinforce each other and thereby create a web of reinforcing narratives, stories, visuals, cultural artifacts, and conversations that helps enable or impede change. This means that change agents may need to influence the discourses, narratives, and conversations at different levels to support a specific change effort. For example, it might be quite difficult for a divisional manager advocating new ways of doing things at the interpersonal and group level to institute change if the organizational narratives, conversations, and symbolic messages from corporate headquarters reinforce the prevailing ways of doing things.
Strategically it is also possible that changing discourses at one level may influence discourses at other levels, thereby providing change agents with alternative pathways, depending on their resources, access, and opportunities. The Dialogic OD practitioner might start interacting at any level or location in the organization and then attempt to encourage new conversations and narratives to spread to other parts of the organization without concern for a preplanned, top-down approach (e.g., Ray and Goppelt, 2013; see Chapter 17). One example of this would be seeking to influence corporate discourses by changing conversations among local managers rather than trying to start at headquarters and work one’s way down.
Discourses Are Multimodal and Not Limited to Talk and Text
Just as discourse is multilevel, it is also multimodal. A number of studies (e.g., Cooren et al., 2011; Iedema, 2007; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001) have shown modes of discourse to be embodied in a wide variety of visual representations (e.g., graphs, maps, pictures, videos, font type), cultural artifacts (e.g., architecture, dress codes, technology), and other forms of meaning making (e.g., financial models, spatial location, gestures) that are used in the realization of social goals and purposes (Floris, Grant, and Cutcher, 2013; Gordon and Grant, 2006; Stigliani and Ravasi, 2012).
Different modes of discourse have different sets of characteristics that determine how they configure the world and create meaning. According to Kress (2010), each mode is influenced by the “affordances,” that is, the potentials and limitations that arise out of the relationship between an actor and the tool being used. For example, affordances of speech include rhythm, pace, volume, intonation, accent, silence; affordances of writing include permanence, blank space, punctuation marks, bolding, font (type, size, color). Other nonlinguistic modes can include material objects (with affordances like hardness, size, placement, shape, color) and gestures, whose affordances include their ephemeral (temporary, imprecise) nature, and the fact that they generally carry less weight than writing, among other modes (see Gordon and Grant, 2006; Floris, Grant, and Cutcher, 2013).
Different modes and their affordances are suited to doing different meaning-making work. For example, most previous research into rhetoric during reorganizations highlights the use of logic (Hellgren et al., 2002; Vaara and Tienari 2002), which is spelled out most clearly in written and verbal modes. However, for appeals to emotion or authority other modes like imagery, music, and spatial location can also play a significant role (Floris, Grant, and Cutcher, 2013). This suggests that an emphasis on writing and speech to the exclusion of other modes may overstate the dominance of logic in meaning making during situations of organizational change (Marshak, 2006).
Furthermore, different communities (organizational units, groups, professions, types of workers, etc.) have modal preferences, and what matters most in one community may not matter in another. For example, in one organization the names and photos of staff members who died at work were inserted into graphs of workplace incidents. While the statistics depicted by the original graphs were used by market analysts to evaluate the company’s operations, the name and photo of a dead colleague made workplace safety a personal matter for all company staff. This suggests that actors need to consider and incorporate the discursive modes that most clearly shape meaning in the community that they seek to influence (Kress, 2010). In some settings graphs and numbers may be most influential; in others a verbally expressed “case for change”; and in still others symbolic imagery may be most influential.
As with multilevel considerations, different modes of discourse contribute to the web of narratives, symbolic themes, conversations, and resulting mindsets that enable or limit what is possible to think and do in an organization. Consequently, Dialogic OD practitioners benefit from being sensitive to which modes of discourse are most influential in the communities they are trying to influence. They might also employ a diversity of modalities depending on the topic and communities involved; for example, using analogic methods such as dramatic enactments, musical interludes, drawing group pictures, or constructing group sculptures (Heracleous and Jacobs, 2011). Dialogic OD practitioners might also be sensitive to covert symbolic messages expressed by such modalities as word imagery, gestures, music, and visual representations that may signal subconscious issues or concerns (Marshak, 2006).
Narratives and Story Lines That Shape How People Think and Act Are Constructed and Conveyed through Conversations
The significance of conversations and narratives for effecting organizational change is considerable, for they convey the prevailing or intended rationales supporting change or stability. As Marshak and Grant (2008, p. 14) have noted, “changing consciousness or mindsets or social agreements—for example about the role of women in organizations, or about hierarchical structures, or even about how change happens in organizations—would therefore require challenging or changing the prevailing narratives, stories, and so on that are endorsed by those presently and/or historically in power and authority.” Others have shown how stories are a way of managing change, particularly culture change, and how change is often constituted by changes in the narratives that participants author (Brown and Humphreys, 2003; Kaye 1995; Meyer, 1995; Chapter 16). Narrative and stories have been used as dialogic inquiry tools by which to understand individual and organizational norms and values and as a means to help people make sense of change. They have also been used to enable people to envision potential future realities derived from proposed strategic change (Barry and Elmes, 1997; Dunford and Jones, 2000; Rhodes and Brown, 2005).
Central to a discursive orientation is how conversations socially construct reality and frame experience rather than simply convey objective information. Consequently, how to influence conversations—whether through ad hoc or orchestrated methods—becomes a central aspect of Dialogic OD. This means that Dialogic OD practitioners should pay attention to how prevailing narratives are reinforced in day-to-day conversations throughout the organization (Gergen, 2009; Gergen, Gergen, and Barrett, 2004; Thatchenkery and Upadhyaya, 1996). They might also encourage the emergence of new narratives by seeking to alter those conversations using the methods in this book—for example, by creating safe containers for more open discussions, inviting a broader range of voices and communication modalities into the conversations, changing the types of questions asked, introducing new generative metaphors or images, altering how conversations unfold, and so on (Marshak, 2013).
Power and Political Processes Determine the Prevailing Discourses That Shape the Accepted Ways of Thinking and Acting
The ways in which power dynamics shape the prevailing or privileged discourses is a central concern of organizational discourse theory. Organizations are political sites where particular discourses are formulated and articulated by particular organizational actors in ways that shape and influence the attitudes and behavior of other organizational members (Mumby 2004).
A helpful framework to assist in understanding the relationship of power and discourse is provided by Hardy and Phillips:
Power and discourse are mutually constitutive: the power dynamics that characterize a particular context determine, at least partially, how and why certain actors are able to influence the processes of textual production and consumption that result in new texts that transform, modify or reinforce discourses. In other words, discourse shapes relations of power while relations of power shape who influences discourse over time and in what way. (2004, p. 299)
Hardy and Phillips (ibid., 306–307) argue that the ability of a particular group to produce and disseminate influential discourses will be impacted by its ability to draw on formal power, critical resources, network links, and support of other people who by virtue of their number or position validate its dissemination and extend its reach.
Conversations about change-related issues among organizational members and stakeholders with differing interests will include the meanings attached to those issues being negotiated, reinforced, and privileged by actors drawing on their various power resources. Assuming some social agreement or common ground results from these tacit discursive negotiations, a dominant narrative emerges that will influence how a change is conceived, understood, and should be implemented.
These discursive practices have the potential to render significant political effects that result in the differential distribution of advantage among individuals and organizations (Mumby and Clair, 1997). It is because of these potential political effects that some change agents and facilitators explicitly worry about and attempt to create conditions of relative power equalization in their programs and processes.
Given that power and political processes influence what become the dominant or established discourses that reinforce mindsets and messages of stability or change, Dialogic OD practitioners need to be sensitive to the ways in which power and discursive processes interact and shape any given change effort. Presumably a Dialogic OD practitioner would seek to address or alter those processes in some way to enable new voices, ideas, conversations, and narratives to emerge (Marshak and Grant, 2008). One key consideration might be to understand who are the most influential actors regarding an intended change and how their story lines and conversations can be engaged to allow new ideas and possibilities to emerge and be enacted. Related to this, Dialogic OD practitioners must understand their own role as part of the system instead of as an observer of the system. A Dialogic OD practitioner needs to cultivate skills and exercise actions for creating settings in which diverse actors with different interests and power bases can productively communicate, and in which there is as much power equalization among discussants as possible in order to foster the kinds of open and creative engagements that generate new ideas and possibilities. Discursively oriented facilitators benefit from knowing methods to create space for previously marginalized modalities and discourses to emerge in the conversation in order to advance and support new possibilities.
There Is a Diversity of Discourses Latent in Any Situation
What any particular group believes is “reality,” “truth,” or “the ways things are” is at least partially a social construct that is created, conveyed, and reinforced through discourse. There are likely to be multiple realities in any given situation (Boje, 1995). Different stakeholders or strata or silos of an organization will likely develop their own discourses about a particular issue through narratives that define the way things are as they see and experience them. The extent to which an individual’s or group’s particular narrative comes to dominate the meaning attached to an issue is linked to power, as discussed above.
While there is a tendency, especially among those advocating a particular outcome, to regard different discourses expressed by a diversity of actors and interests as detrimental to an intended change initiative, two strands of literature suggest that such diversity of opinion can work to the benefit of dialogic change processes and outcomes. First, soliciting additional discourses can be used to help Dialogic OD practitioners and involved actors identify the reasons a change effort is failing to gain traction (Ford, Ford, and D’Amelio, 2008; Rhodes and Brown, 2005; see Chapters 14 and 15 for more on embracing what first appears as resistance). Second, some commentators have suggested that dominant discourses define, constrain, and impose closure on organizations (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1998; Gabriel, 2000). Thus when leaders of change efforts identify, acknowledge, and sponsor a diversity of participants along with the diversity of discourses they represent, there is increased opportunity for innovative and transformational change to emerge (Boje, 2001; Gabriel, 2000; Rhodes, 2001).
Those leading or facilitating dialogic change might also purposefully employ a range of discursive practices and modalities such as narrative, storytelling, and group drawings or sculptures in ways that intentionally draw out a diversity of voices to alter conversations and drive organizational change (Ford and Ford, 1995; Heracleous and Jacobs, 2011; Marshak and Grant, 2008).
Discourse and Change Continuously Interact in Iterative and Recursive Ways
Discourses are used to maintain and further the interests of particular groups or individuals and are continually drawn upon in order to make sense of events. Accordingly, discourses are produced, disseminated, and used in continuous, iterative, and recursive processes (Grant and Hardy, 2004; Robichaud, Giroux, and Taylor, 2004; Taylor et al., 1996). Furthermore, the conversations, narratives, symbols, and other discursive modalities associated with a particular discourse do not simply appear from nowhere, imbued with a particular meaning. Over a period of time and through negotiation, power, and various discursive processes, the meanings that they convey, along with the socially constructed realities, agreements, and mindsets that they construct, emerge and are continually altered (Grant and Hardy, 2004; Mumby, 2004).
Consequently, discourse-based studies of change emphasize the importance of ongoing feedback loops and iterations. This contrasts with many objectivist, positivist studies, which focus on change efforts as if they are constructed linearly, at a fixed point in time. Vaara (2002) provides a good example of recursivity and iteration by showing how meanings and discourses attached to change are not fixed or determined, but are changed by key actors as they reflect upon, interpret, and react to the change itself.
A Dialogic OD practitioner might best view the change process as ongoing, iterative, and recursive rather than as an episodic, linear journey from a current state to some future state as discussed in Chapters 6 and 7. Consequently, the practitioner may need to know how to join an existing conversation, help shift it in new directions, and encourage new conversations to emerge over time (Ray and Goppelt, 2013; Shaw, 2002; Chapters 9 and 17). Discourse and change interact in recursive ways, and past and present conversations become resources for future conversations. This in turn has implications for how one thinks about and approaches “discursive interventions.” In other words, practitioners need to be mindful that there is no specific or discrete beginning, middle, or end to an organizational change initiative. Instead there are simply ongoing discursive interactions that continuously reinforce prevailing narratives and mindsets or become opportunities for the introduction of different voices, images, ideas, and processes that may generate new possibilities and actions. See Chapter 7 for a deeper discussion of these processes.
Change Agents Need to Reflect on Their Own Discourses
Changing the discourse in organizations involves changing the conversations, narratives, texts, and modes of communication that create, sustain, and provide the enabling content and contexts for the way things are. This suggests that change agents need to be sensitive to discourses and preferred modalities that are different from their own, and respond to or even draw upon these differences in ways that benefit the change process, as appropriate. Furthermore, change agents need to be alert to their own discursive biases and blind spots. For example, Ford and his colleagues discuss how change agents promulgate discourses that marginalize those who may “resist” their desired change, while ignoring their own contributing actions (Ford, Ford, and D’Amelio, 2008).
Change agent reflexivity extends to appreciating that discourses are coconstructed by those who author and introduce them and by all those who engage with them, including the change agents (Doolin, Grant, and Thomas, 2013). Dialogic OD practitioners have a responsibility to constantly reflect upon and if necessary adjust their discursive practices in response to the effects upon those engaged in the change process. Here notions of argumentation, rhetoric, issue selling, and other linguistic and semiotic devices related to dramaturgy, impression management, and influencing tactics come into play (Dutton et al., 2001; Fairhurst, 2007; Harvey, 2001).
At the same time, given the mutually constitutive relationship between power and discourse, there is also a need for Dialogic OD practitioners to reflect upon the power relationship between themselves and those they are working with, as well as the power relationships and political processes underlying the situations they address and the methods they employ. This should be seen as an ethical if not a practical imperative (Marshak and Grant, 2008). Many change agents have an advocate’s orientation and may be inclined toward explicitly or implicitly promoting their favored discourse, discursive process, or modality rather than being reflexive about how they think about and approach a change situation. An absence of reflexivity could lead a Dialogic OD practitioner to ignore or misinterpret important information coming from others guided by different narratives or preferences for different discursive modalities and processes. Consequently, it enhances the effectiveness of Dialogic OD practitioners to maintain a stance of self-reflection and personal awareness in order to stay open to such possibilities and challenges. Otherwise they will always be limited by the bounds of their own preferred narratives, discursive modalities, and processes about organizations and change.
Summary
We hope this discussion demonstrates the contribution of a discursive approach to the theory and practice of Dialogic OD. It suggests that a number of critical constructs, especially conceptualizing an organization as an ongoing conversation that constructs social reality, determine how organizational stability and change are created and thereby influence change processes and outcomes.
Multiple levels and modalities of discourse, the construction of change-related narratives involving power and political processes, and how those narratives are communicated and enacted through conversations are fundamentally important in a dialogically oriented change approach. It is also important to pay attention to the useful engagement of diverse or latent voices and alternative discourses to encourage the emergence of new narratives and ways of thinking and acting. The recursive, iterative, and ongoing nature of discourse that leads to alterations over time is significant for understanding the nature of organizational change itself, and suggests the validity of approaches that differ from the traditional unfreeze-movement-refreeze approach to planned change. Finally, the role of the Dialogic OD practitioner in cocreating discursive realities and the importance of practicing a self-reflective stance become a central aspect of dialogic theory, practice, and ethics.
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