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This paper aims to examine the contribution that discourse analysis can make to understanding organizational change.

It identifies five key contributions. Discourse analytic approaches: reveal the important role of discourse in the social construction of organizational change; demonstrate how the meaning attached to organizational change initiatives comes about as a result of a discursive process of negotiation among key actors; show that the discourses of change should be regarded as intertextual; provide a valuable multi‐disciplinary perspective on change; and exhibit a capacity, to generate fresh insights into a wide variety of organizational change related issues.

To illustrate these contributions the paper examines the five empirical studies included in this special issue. It discusses the potential for future discursive studies of organizational change phenomena and the implications of this for the field of organizational change more generally.

Provides an introduction to the special issue on discourse and organizational change.

This chapter explores how “discourse,” as a process concerned with the production and consumption of talk and text, has been embraced within the field of organizational change and development (OCD). We present six ways of thinking about the role of discourse in OCD (namely: “discourse as component,” “discourse as process,” “discourse as analysis,” “discourse as method,” “discourse as mindset,” and “discourse as style”). Although the advent of dialogic OD has raised awareness of discourse, we demonstrate that it remains a marginal and under-utilized area of interest. We conclude by making a case for a more expansive role for discursive modes of analysis and engagement within OCD.

On the basis of research from Dutch bank an empirical framework, this report describes how discourses of organizational culture imply a perceived relationship to performance. The study includes an ethno-methodology of 25 in-depth interviews with two groups includes managers and employees from the Services Business Unit of a global Dutch bank. Results from managers reveal discourses of organizational culture provide a negative perceived relationship to performance. Results from employees show discourses of organizational culture provide a positive perceived relationship to performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the discursive practices employed in academic research on organizational creativity through a critical lens.

The literature on organizational creativity is reviewed from a discourse-theoretical perspective and three groupings of dominant discursive practices are identified. The theoretical and practical implications of the practices are discussed, and other potential aspects of creativity that appear to have been neglected or suppressed in the discourse are further examined.

The dominant discursive practices in the organizational creativity research contribute to the building of a simplified and one-sided picture of organizational creativity; a stripped-down and diluted version that is more easily achievable and manageable, and leads to positive outcomes. Failure to recognize its inherent complexities reduces the value of creativity as an organizational asset.

The findings contribute to the organizational creativity research in recognizing a range of dominant practices that appear to promote the dilution of the concept. Although the diluted and stripped-down version of organizational creativity suits the managerial agenda and complies with organizational discourse, it fails as an organizational asset, which should be about embracing the unconventional and risky, and taking advantage of change.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how discursive practices are involved in organizational change.

This research scrutinizes organizational change by combining discourse and practice approaches. A case study at a public university hospital is conducted with a narrative analysis method.

The key finding of this research is that discursive practices are involved in organizational change through discourse phronesis. Discourse phronesis is a socially and contextually developed phenomenon, and hence discursive practices are particular within context. The case study revealed four particular discursive practices as examples of discourse phronesis: field practices, mandate practices, priority practices and word practices.

The results of this research advance awareness of the concealed power within discursive practices and, more importantly, invite practitioners to pursue the intellectual virtue of discourse phronesis while implementing organizational change. Discourse phronesis may be utilized as a gateway to advance change goals and to translate various discourses and actions that otherwise might remain unexplained.

Although extensively studied, organizational change has not previously been directly approached through discourse phronesis, and by doing so this empirical research provides novelty value to both organizational change research and discourse analysis. By introducing the concept of discourse phronesis, this research offers scholars an alternative lens, the intellectual practicality lens, through which to approach organizational change and perhaps to develop new understandings of the great challenges that organizational change complexities usually generate.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the knowledge work discourse has been transformed from a celebration of those who create knowledge to one of leaden prescription to purposively separate the knowledge from the knower.

The approach takes the form of genealogical discourse analysis of the dominant and alternative knowledge work discourses.

From its earliest conceptions, knowledge work as a discourse was conceived as creating a new class of worker who was highly educated, motivated and financially aspirational. Through alignment with significant discourses from such fields of knowledge as economics, the law and technology, knowledge has become an organisational asset, to be secured by technology and protected by law even from those who created it. Discursive transformation shows that knowledge work and those who perform it – the knowledge workers – have become marginalised in the discourses until they have virtually disappeared altogether.

As a conceptual paper, the analysis does not address an empirical research frame. However, the paper illustrates how power is implicated in all aspects of the knowledge work discourse.

The paper identifies how power relations are implicit in organisational discourses of knowledge work. Knowledge is seen to be central to studies of organisations, economics and globalisation, yet human beings as creators of knowledge have been marginalised in the knowledge discourses.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a meta-model of organizational change that allows to look at change from different angles. This meta-model starts from the idea that there are different discourses about organizational change, each having their own merits but also their own limitations. Bringing these discourses together into an integrated systems model allows the authors to capture the essence of organizational change a lot better.

This model is designed based on a literature review of organizational theories, systems theories related to theories of organizational change and specific theories about organizational change.

The literature review resulted in a systems model of organizational change that is better able to grasp the complexity of change than linear models.

This model goes beyond the usual change models from the normative discourse and provides a multidimensional view on organizational change.

An effective management accounting information system (MAIS), as well as the accounting discourse related to it, can support, facilitate, enable, and constrain diverse business discourses. This paper aims to examine the discursive and organisational effects of an organisation accounting upon absent accounting artefacts, i.e. accounting without accounting. Situated within the discursive literature, this paper examines the construction of competing articulations of the organisation by focusing on what accounting does or does not do within an organisation. In particular, the paper acknowledges the fundamental importance of the accounting discourse in supporting, facilitating, enabling, and constraining competing organisational discourses, as it illustrates how the absence of accounting centralises power within the organisation.

From a rhetorical, discursive perspective, the authors develop an in-depth qualitative case study in a manufacturing organisation where MAIS has been abandoned for approximately two years. Interpretive research approaches, from a post-structural perspective, provided the base for the structure of the research. The authors studied how other organisational discourses (such as entrepreneurship and growth), which are traditionally constructed with reference to accounting and other artefacts, continued to be produced and sustained. The non-use and non-availability of management accounting information created a vacuum that needed to be filled. The lack of discursive counterpoints and counter-evidence provided by MAIS created a vacuum of information, allowing powerful, proxy discourses to prevail in the organisation, increasing risks to business management.

The absence of MAIS to support an accounting discourse requires that contingent discourses “fill in the discursive gap”. Despite appearances, they are no substitute for the accounting discourse. Thus, over time, the entrepreneurial, growth and partners' discourses lose credibility, without the corresponding use of management accounting information and its associated discourse.

There are at least two main contributions from the case study and the findings presented in this paper: first, they provide a new perspective for studying MAIS, as a specific organisational discourse among other discourses that shape people relationship within the organisation as an examination of accounting without accounting. Second, this discussion reinforces the relevance of accounting discourse for other organisational discourses, supporting, facilitating, enabling, and constraining them, by demonstrating the effects of its absence.

Organizational fields are shaped by both the relations that organizations forge and the language they express. The structure and discourse of organizational fields have been studied before, but seldom in combination. We offer a methodological approach that integrates relations and expressions into a comprehensive visualization.

By mapping networks and discourse as co-constitutive, the method illuminates the mechanisms active in organizational fields. We utilize social impact evaluation as an issue field shaped by the presence of an interstitial community, and compare this structure with simulated alternative field configurations.

The simulations reveal that variation in organizations’ openness to adopting concepts from adjacent meaning systems alters field configurations: differentiation manifests under conditions of low overall openness, whereas moderate receptivity produces hybridizations of discourses and sometimes the emergence of an interstitial community that bridges domains. If certain organizations are open while others remain focused on their original discourse, then we observe integration in the discursive domain of the invariant organizations.

The observations from the simulations are represented by visualizing organizational fields as topographies of meaning, onto which interorganizational relations are layered. This representation localizes organizations and their interactions in a cultural space while emphasizing how meanings of relationships and organizational expressions vary with different field configurations. By adding meaning to network data, the resulting maps open new perspectives for institutional research on the adaptation, translation, and diffusion of concepts.

The concept “flexibility” is ubiquitous as a rationale for organizational change. However, its broad application is accompanied by a general lack of definitional agreement or theoretical cohesion. The purpose of this paper is to propose the merits of an alternative approach – applying a discourse perspective to the use of flexibility as a rationale for organizational change.

This paper first illustrates the broad referencing of flexibility as a desired organizational characteristic. It then discusses the associated lack of theoretical coherence associated with the use of the concept “flexibility” before arguing the merits of a discourse perspective on flexibility as a rationale for organizational change.

This paper identifies a set of questions to frame a discourse perspective on the use of “flexibility” as a rationale for organizational change.

The questions derived in this paper provide a research agenda for an investigation of the use and effects of the concept “flexibility” in the context of organizational change.

The questions derived in this paper provide practice‐based insights into how the concept “flexibility” is and/or could be used in the context of organizational change.

“Flexibility” is a ubiquitous concept as a rationale for organizational change and its use is accompanied by a diversity of definitions and conceptual frameworks. The originality of this paper is that rather than seeking to provide yet another definition – or attempting a resolution of definitional differences – it argues the merits of a discourse perspective on the use and effect of the concept flexibility in the context of organizational change.