Episodic Organizational Change and Social Drama - Liminality and Conflict in the Change Process

This conceptual paper draws upon Victor Turner's understanding of social change as social drama. It develops an interpretive framework for episodic organizational change as a period of liminal transition that is triggered and driven by conflict. Emphasizing the liminal quality inherent in change processes, the social drama is used to generate a conceptual frame to investigate the opportunities and threats in liminal transitions, the various ways to re-establish social order in organizations and the associated role of leaders in liminal times. Promoting conflict's productive nature for organizational change, the social drama is further used to provide a frame to investigate how social reality in organizations is challenged, developed, crafted, transformed and finally re-constituted through conflict. The article argues that the social drama perspective has the capacity to further reflexive thinking about change processes in organizations. MAD statement This article makes a difference as it promotes an understanding of episodes of change in organizations as liminal and conflictual transitions. It complements and challenges the well-known by emphasizing that change periods create liminal conditions that temporarily suspend established organizational structures. Highlighting the liminal condition of the organizational change requires a different understanding of how change is enacted and the role of leaders in the change process. Furthermore, conflict has a productive role in organizational change. It is a motor of change and a generative force for the dynamics of the change process and the reflexive headwork emerging between the opposing forces.