Relative importance of stakeholders: analysing speech acts in a layoff

Abstract

SummaryGrounded in a participant observation study of a ski resort, this paper explores the (re)production of legitimate discourses through speech acts pertaining to an organizational event, a layoff. Manager's justifications and employees' reactions and critiques put sanctioned discourses into play. And while the stated organizational values include shareholder, customer, and employee concerns, the relative importance of these stakeholders is only made clear through the conversation of the speech acts and their reception. The shape of the conversation, in locution, illocution and perlocution, shifts the relations between managers and the employees and creates longer term consequences for the organization. This focus on language use serves as a micro-foundation for the study of legitimation processes and its consequences within organizations.

How Does the State Restore Order During Crisis? Lessons From the U.K.’s Response to the “Riots” of August 2011

“…They analyzed the trajectory of speech acts within a senior team meeting regarding choices in organization design, particularly the illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions, to shed light on a strategic decision and the role of speech acts in reaching that decision. Furthermore, Guild (2002) employed speech act theory within a discursive analytical approach in the context of an employee layoff process at a ski resort. The study revealed the relative importance of different stakeholders to management as apparent via management’s illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts, which were shown to be in contrast to stated organizational values.…”

Communicating Organizational Change Reactions

“…Regardless of the general societal justification or critique of the use of downsizing, the article presumes that the organizational change strategy necessarily has to be legitimized within the organization by management as well as by the remaining employees in order to ensure the continuous efficiency of the company (Guild, 2002;Suchman, 1995). While there seems to be an increasing number of scholars interested in management's attempt to warrant the use of downsizing, it is far less described how these attempts are received and interpreted by survivors, as well as which consequences their interpretations and subsequent sensemaking have on the overall organization.…”