Merger as field transformation: nurses’ positioning and metaphoric journeys

Abstract

The integration perspective on culture that has its base in the intellectual tradition of functionalism seems to be institutionalized in the literature on healthcare mergers. In our analysis of a merger between two hospital departments, we approach culture from a different perspective, when we analyse the merger as a cultural practice developing in the intersection between Bourdieusian habitus field and capital. We believe this framework has the potential to bring deeper insights into the complexities of these processes. We show how the metaphors and stories told by the two groups of merging nurses are used as cultural resources in the nurses' battles to establish distinctive group identities and positions in the new setting. Our results demonstrate that the difficulties of the merger can be explained by the field's unsuccessful attempt at re-defining the capital that structures the work place, rather than in the commonplace explanations of cultural clashes or inflexible employee attitudes.

Organizational Identity Struggles and Reconstruction During Organizational Change: Narratives as symbolic, emotional and practical glue

“…The field is competitive in that individual hospitals compete for funding and prestige, for example, as nominations and prizes concerning the performance of care. Moreover, each hospital constitutes a local competitive space, in which departments and staff compete for positions, legitimacy and prestige won by capital in the shape of, for example, clinical knowledge or specialization (Ernst & Jensen, 2018a), which produces differentiation and identity among staff. This is exemplified in the results section.…”

“…We focus on hospitals as a particular kind of organization for OI constitution, where institutionalized professional logics dominate (Currie, Finn, & Martin, 2009;Forty, 1980;Wicks, 1998), and we show how OI is conditioned on these logics. Thus, whereas the majority of OI studies commonly focus on identity at the organizational level, 'who we are as an organization' (Alvesson et al, 2008), we identify the OI fault lines along that which has particular and differentiating value in the hospital field (Currie et al, 2009;Ernst & Jensen, 2018a). We thus respond to a call by Carlsen (2016, p. 124), who suggests that we should go beyond the question of OI as organizational integration, to a question of 'what is going on here that is potentially identity salient?'…”

Deadly sins and corporate acquisitions

“…As a result, our narrative approach adds important insights by focusing on decision-makers, and thus places the findings from this study alongside the results of narrative research on employees in the integration process (e.g. Ernst and Schleiter 2018). Taken together, our study provides a new narrative key for understanding corporate acquisitions through the metaphor of seemingly eternal human foibles recognized in classic literature.…”

“…Similarly, Riad (2005), elaborates how certain discourses can become dominating and raise resistance, and Riad (2011) explores contradictive elements in narratives of acquisition integration processes that highlight the ongoing and developing relation between metaphor and narrative. In a more recent study, Ernst and Schleiter (2018) elaborate how employees use metaphors to make sense of a merger. While demonstrating the potential in paying attention to narratives, these efforts mainly have focused on post-acquisition processes, and left open the application of narrative to enrich understanding of the overall acquisition process.…”

“…Corporate acquisitions offer a rich soil for organizational research, and this growing research has covered different process phases (Haspeslagh and Jemison 1991), and benefited from a variety of theoretical perspectives, methods, and concepts (Graebner et al 2017;Haleblian et al 2009). Interestingly, a growing body of research illuminates hidden aspects of acquisitions, including forced identity transformation (Ernst and Schleiter 2018) or experiences of injustice (Melkonian, Monin, and Noorderhaven 2011). Despite a growing stream of insights, research into acquisitions can be enriched with new voices.…”