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Based on themes the authors observed in workplace spirituality texts, the purpose of this paper is to highlight the historicity of these texts and induce a model to help them understand how this discourse of workplace spirituality came into being.

The authors perform intertextual analysis to show how authors draw upon concepts available in the broader discursive context, from which the authors produced a textscape of the workplace spirituality discourse to depict these layers of discursive interconnections.

The expressed novelty and recency of workplace spirituality as a form of management knowledge, the authors argue, is made ambiguous by its heavy borrowing from other discourses. The authors show how existent spiritual, organizational and societal-level discourses create the conditions of possibility for the discourse of workplace spirituality to emerge. Most of the authors within the corpus engaged the same theories in organizational studies that created the kind of workplaces they now seek to change.

The power of the workplace spirituality discourse to improve the state of workers and work and achieve the expressed desire for change may be diminished through the discursive practices of its authors.

The authors offer a visual “textscape” in which the findings are framed and hence operationalize this idea in a novel manner that contributes to the methods of discourse analysis. The findings also call for more critical reflection into whether workplace spirituality represents a solution to organizational problems when neither the workers nor work it constructs are particularly new.

The discourse of human resource management (HRM) is increasingly dominated by a normative, consensus‐oriented perspective on managing the employment relationship. This paper aims to explore the potential of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to provide new and different understandings of HRM and processes of organisational change, and which highlights the creative role of language in the shaping of organisation and management practice.

A case study analysis of managers' experiences of introducing change in a large catering firm is drawn upon to highlight the inherent tensions in people management, which stem from the need for employers to motivate and control labour in order to remain profitable. This is illustrated in a change programme aimed at increasing organisational efficiency and achieving a “results driven culture” that exhorted managers to think and behave as “entrepreneurs” and to “comply” with stringent new rules on managing their staff.

It is concluded that conflict and resistance is an inevitable feature of HRM‐based initiatives and that CDA offers a powerful lens for exploring this dynamic. Importantly, it provides a less restrictive view of management decision making than that found in conventional understandings of HRM, which tend to treat management as a more or less culturally unified body, and ignores the subjectivity of managers. In contrast, the empirical evidence presented here provides an example of how the deployment of CDA can provide rich insights into the dynamics of HRM‐based change rooted in a complex shifting network of alliances (and related discourses).

Focus is placed on how concepts, objects and subject positions are constituted through language and embedded in power relations.

This monograph contains abstracts from the 2005 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, 6‐7th September 2005

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.

This study shows how presumed “HR-trends,” such as the recent promotion of Employee Experience (EX) design, are never value-free ideas of a presumably objective “best practice”, but rather a vehicle for legitimizing HR in the organization, and investigate the implications.

This study is rooted in critical HRM studies. Our methodology is the critical discourse analysis (CDA) of online job postings concerning “EX-positions.”

EX is a new vehicle for HR's ongoing struggle for legitimacy. By repositioning HR managers as “EX-designers,” it promises to integrate the previously conflicting roles of HR as advocate of the individual employee and as strategic partner on the organizational level. Yet, it also raises the question of what is at stake for HR and might even decrease the organizational involvement of HR.

This study highlights the relevance of a critical HRM perspective for moving beyond disciplinary blind spots. It shows the value of CDA for gathering insights into the hidden assumptions underlying HRM theory and practice.

EX design has been put forward as a new best-practice HR trend, promoting the relevance of HR in the organization. This paper shows that this trend is associated with potential gains as well as with potential losses. Practitioners need to be aware of these risks in order to increase the likelihood for a positive impact when implementing EX design.

The authors show how HR trends, such as EX, are manifestations of HR's ongoing struggle for legitimacy. Specifically, the authors uncover the legitimization agenda underlying EX, its implications for HR roles and responsibilities and the knowledge claims associated with it.

The purpose of the article is to contribute to HRM‐performance research by focusing on how HR managers discursively construct performance in local government HRM.

The study is carried out in Finnish local government organizations, where HR managers of ten large and medium‐sized cities were interviewed. The study adopted a constructionist approach: performance is constructed through the talk of different stakeholders, in this case, HR managers. The analysis draws upon discourse analysis.

Performance in local government HRM is constructed through three predominant discourses: the service discourse, the process discourse, and the customer change discourse. The central finding of the study is the strong role of local residents, portrayed as external customers to HRM.

Typical to discourse analysis, the number of interviews is limited and the results cannot be generalized. Thirdly, according to the constructivist approach, researchers also discursively construct the phenomenon under study. Additionally, this article focuses on performance talk of HRM managers; other actors of HRM, e.g. top management teams, line managers, and HR experts, also discursively construct HRM‐performance through their talk.

In public organizations and also private sector service companies, the strong role of external customers in HRM and HRM‐performance should be considered, especially in HRM metrics.

Research revealed the central role of external customers in the discourse of local government HRM‐performance, and extends thus the scope of the performance concept in HRM studies.

By adopting a paradox lens, the purpose of this study is to explore paradoxes in relation to work organization, recruitment and competence development in growth-oriented companies.

The study is a qualitative content analysis based on research interviews of managers responsible for human resource management (HRM) in Finnish small and medium-sized growth enterprises (SMEs).

The results show four themes, namely, (1) individualized work, (2) cultural cohesiveness, (3) experimental organization and (4) personal closeness. These identified themes are interpreted as mutually enabling, active responses to the underlying paradoxes of individualism – community and stability – change.

The results contribute to research on tension and paradox in HRM by taking the still unexplored opportunity to apply paradox theory to HRM in SMEs.

Two research questions are asked in this paper: RQ1. How does line management involvement in PA work unfold in practice? RQ2. How does line management involvement contribute toward any divergence arising between intended and implemented PA work?

An in-depth case study from a multi-actor perspective based on interviews with HR managers, line managers and employees, and organizational documents.

The findings illustrate how line managers faced three types of complexities during implementation, i.e. dilemmas, understandings, and local adaptations. These jointly contributed to a divergence arising between the PA as intended and the PA as implemented. This divergence became associated with how line management involvement was restricted to the local context and the initial stages of the PA process, highlighting how HR practices can contain both devolved and non-devolved elements.

We respond to calls for more in-depth qualitative studies of how line managers are involved in HR work; this is done specifically by conceptualizing the complexities line managers face in practice when implementing HR practices. As such, we add to the understanding of HR practices as relational and social in nature. We also contribute to the processual understanding of HRM by highlighting how HR practices can contain both devolved and non-devolved elements. By stressing the limitations of binary conceptualizations of HR devolution, we add to the understanding of HR devolution as more complex and multifaceted than traditionally assumed.

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.