Narratives of Change: Discourse, Technology and Organization

Abstract

This article develops an understanding of organizational change predicated on the idea of organization as a performance or an effect, rather than a stable social structure. It uses the concept of ‘narratives of ordering’ to make sense of the processes that constitute organizations and the various mechanisms of ordering and organizing employed by organizational actors. It does so via a case study of change in a New Zealand hospital during a period of public sector reform. The ‘clinical leadership’ narrative introduced into the hospital at that time was simultaneously discursive in its appeal to economic notions of efficiency and enterprise, social in the development of new accountabilities and relationships within the organization, and material in its use of information technology. The contribution of the article lies in the theoretical approach used to analyse organizational change. This extends organizational discourse analysis by providing a more integrated treatment of change that accounts for the materiality of organizational relations.