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The purpose of this paper is to explore whether there is a link between retrospective and prospective sensemaking by analyzing metaphors of past and potential future changes.

The article draws on interview data from employees, team managers and middle managers at an IT department of a Nordic bank.

The study found that organizational members' sensemaking of changes in the past were characterized by trivializing metaphors. In contrast, future-oriented sensemaking of potential changes were characterized by emotionally charged metaphors of uncertainty, war and the End, indicating that the organizational members anticipating a gloomier future.

These findings might be limited to the organizational context of an IT department of a bank with IT professionals having an urge for control and sharing a history of a financial sector changing dramatically the last decade.

This article contributes to the emerging field of future-oriented sensemaking by showing what characterize past and future-oriented sensemaking of changes at a bank. Further, the paper contributes with an empirical study unpacking how organizational members anticipate an undesired future which might not be grounded in retrospective sensemaking.

How organizations’ pasts are presented to the public is crucial, because this presentation shapes corporate reputations. Increasingly, various actors contribute to the public remembering of organizations with new information and communication technologies (ICTs). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as a global memory place, where the pasts of organizations are communicatively co-constructed by actors of a loosely connected community.

The authors analyze 1,459 edits of Wikipedia pages of ten organizations from various industries. Quantitative content analysis detects Wikipedia edits for their reputational relevance and reference to formal sources, such as corporate communication or newspapers. Furthermore, the authors investigate to which degree current corporate communication in form of 177 press releases has an influence on the remembering process in Wikipedia.

The analysis shows how the continuous construction of collective memories bridges past formal corporate communication, news media, and other sources with the present, exposing, and suppressing relevant information concerning corporate reputation for large audiences. The analysis of press releases shows that current frames provided by corporate communication finds only little resonance in the ongoing remembering processes in Wikipedia.

Conventional approaches toward remembering of organizations embrace an organization centric view, whereby corporate communication strategically leverages organizational pasts. This paper contributes to the understanding of the ongoing, networked, and collective co-construction of organizational pasts by various authors through ICTs.

The objective of this research is to analyze in a multidimensional perspective the individual responses to organizational change, specifically about the implementation of a new performance evaluation system, investigating some antecedents of the individual reactions to change.

Companies from the education industry were surveyed, and standardized questionnaires were applied. We obtained a sample size of 386 valid responses. The structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to assess the measurement model and test the hypotheses.

The results indicate positive reactions to the organizational change, without ambivalent responses. Employees' cognitive and behavioral reactions are influenced by the individuals' anticipation and past similar organizational change and do not depend on the perceived threat to social work life. The influence of group pressure and organizational readiness on cognitive and behavioral reactions differs in the direction that group pressure affects behaviors but not thoughts, and organizational readiness affects thoughts but not behaviors.

Limitations include the inadequate measures of individuals' emotional reaction, preventing this dimension from being tested.

This research provides theoretical contributions as the literature on organizational change lacks a multidimensional view on individuals' reactions to change. The main contribution of this study is to investigate how each of the individual and organizational antecedents of the employees' responses to the change influences the cognitive and behavioral reactions towards the change employing a multidimensional approach.

Following Bakhtin, organizational discourse scholars have examined ways in which organizational actors draw on and negotiate historical texts, weave them with contemporary ones, and transform them into future discourses. This paper examines how this practice occurs discursively as members in a high‐tech corporation conduct an organizational change.

This paper interprets discourse excerpts from meetings of a project team in the western US. Through participant‐observation and discourse analytic methods, the data gathered consists of field notes, over 33 hours' worth of team meeting conversation and five hours of interview data.

Through the use of represented voice, organizational members work out how an action or practice has sounded in the past as spoken by another member, and they articulate how proposed organizational changes might sound in the future. By making these inferences, members are able to discursively translate between a single situated utterance and organizational practices.

The analysis suggests that organizational change occurs when people temporarily stabilize the organization through the voicing of current practices (as references to what “usually happens” via what is “usually said”) and new practices (as references to what might be said in the future). It is when these practices are solidified and made real through these translations between identity, voice, and organizational practices that members are able to draw comparisons and transformations between “past” and “future” language, and thereby experience and achieve organizational change.

The paper furthers our knowledge of how organizational members discursively negotiate meanings during the process of organizational change through a specific discourse pattern.

The spread of technology usage and the increasing popularity of network technology have formed a basis for alternative working systems as virtual teams and teleworking in the working environment. However, social relations have weakened in these working systems and loneliness has become a common emotion in the workplace. Hence, the concept of loneliness has attracted significant interest in recent years. Yet, despite this interest, research examining loneliness in the workplace is limited in the literature. This study aims to investigate the role of workplace loneliness on intrinsic motivation and the effect of intrinsic motivation on employee well-being through the moderating role of organizational nostalgia.

Data were collected from 380 respondents working in different sectors. The hypotheses were tested by using structural equation modeling and PROCESS macro for SPSS.

Results empirically showed that workplace loneliness negatively relates to intrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation positively relates to employee well-being, intrinsic motivation mediates the link between workplace loneliness and employee well-being and organizational nostalgia moderates the link between workplace loneliness and intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, organizational nostalgia also moderates the indirect effect of workplace loneliness on employee well-being through intrinsic motivation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study contributes to the existing literature on workplace loneliness by investigating underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions for loneliness in the workplace.

The purpose of this study is to look at organizational stories shared among academic librarians who work at the reference desk, and create a typology of the stories based on the knowledge transferred in these. Previous research suggests that stories are the main way in which organizations communicate common values, organizational rules and promote organizational learning. The main question researched here will be: what kind of knowledge is transferred through the stories shared among librarians? This is an important consideration since the meaning carried through the story can shape the employee’s perception of the organization.

This research employed long interviews using a semi-structured questionnaire based on the works of Yiannis Gabriel (2000) as a guide. A total of 20 reference librarians working at four different academic institutions in the southern USA participated in this study.

The analysis of the data reveals a typology of organizational stories shared. The main topics covered by the stories all deal with cultural knowledge exchanges, while also serve as coping mechanisms and present important organizational culture aspects. The stories shared also reflect negative aspects related to the lack of proper communication within the organizations, with the presence of rumors among the narratives shared.

These findings can serve as a first step for the development of healthier organizational cultures in libraries and may have implications for training and development, change management, motivation and collective memory.

Organisations implement changes either to address real business imperatives or to follow trends in their industries. But frequent changes in an organisation often lead to employee change fatigue and change cynicism. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of the change logic of appropriateness and the logic of consequences on change fatigue and change cynicism and the impact of change fatigue and change cynicism on change success.

To carry out this study, the authors collected data on a sample of 320 participants from diverse organisations, and they used structural equation modelling (SEM) techniques to test our hypotheses depicted in the research model.

The authors found that the change logic of consequences reduces both change fatigue and change cynicism, whereas the change logic of appropriateness increases change fatigue. The authors also found that change fatigue does not have any direct effect on change success, although it maintains an indirect negative effect on change success through change cynicism.

Along with other practical implications, the authors recommend that change managers help employees understand any logic of consequences that sustain their change initiatives. Additionally, change managers should work to prevent change fatigue from turning into change cynicism, which is the real precursor of reduced change success.

This study is among the first to show that employees experience change fatigue and change cynicism differently, depending on the reason underlying the change. It is also among the first to show that change fatigue does not affect change success directly but does so through the interplay of change cynicism.

How do organizations manage multiple logics in response to institutional complexity? In this paper, we explore how intraorganizational problems related to multiple logics may be addressed via the mechanism of institutional bricolage – where actors inside an organization act as “bricoleurs” to creatively combine elements from different logics into newly designed artifacts. An illustrative case study of a global brewery group’s development of such an artifact – a Responsible Drinking Guide Book – is outlined. We argue that intraorganizational institutional bricolage first requires the problematization of organizational identity followed by a social process involving efforts to renegotiate the organization’s identity in relation to the logics being integrated. We show that in response to growing pressures to be more “responsible,” a group of organizational actors creatively tinkered with and combined elements from social responsibility and market logics by drawing upon extant organizational resources from different times and spaces in an effort to reconstitute their collective organizational identity.

How do organizations manage multiple logics in response to institutional complexity? In this paper, we explore how intraorganizational problems related to multiple logics may be addressed via the mechanism of institutional bricolage – where actors inside an organization act as “bricoleurs” to creatively combine elements from different logics into newly designed artifacts. An illustrative case study of a global brewery group’s development of such an artifact – a Responsible Drinking Guide Book – is outlined. We argue that intraorganizational institutional bricolage first requires the problematization of organizational identity followed by a social process involving efforts to renegotiate the organization’s identity in relation to the logics being integrated. We show that in response to growing pressures to be more “responsible,” a group of organizational actors creatively tinkered with and combined elements from social responsibility and market logics by drawing upon extant organizational resources from different times and spaces in an effort to reconstitute their collective organizational identity.