Discursive positioning and planned change in organizations

Abstract

This study uses discursive positioning theory to explore how planned change messages influence organizational members' identity and the way they experienced organizational change. Based on an in-depth case study of a home healthcare and hospice organization that engaged in a multiyear planned change process, our analysis suggests that workers experienced salient change messages as constituting unfavorable identities, which were associated with the experiences of violation, recitation, habituation, or reservation. Our study also explores the way discursive and material contexts enabled and constrained the governing board's change messages as they responded to external and internal audiences. We highlight the importance of viewing messaging as a process of information transfer as well as discursive construction, which has important implications for the way change agents approach issues of sense making, emotionality, resistance, and materiality during planned change processes. Keywords emotion, materiality, organizational communication, organizational discourse, planned change comunication, positioning theory Planned change research has given little attention to the way that employees make sense of messages about change and how their sense making subsequently positions them to act in the future (Bartunek et al., 2006). The dominant focus of planned change research has emphasized the importance of creating messages that enable a shared understanding

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