Reconsidering Communication and the Discursive Politics of Organizational Change

With an interest in organizing discourses and attention to issues of power, I reconsider the relationship between communication and organizational change to better understand why change fails and what we can do about it. Specifically, I argue change fails because talk of change often suppresses, rather than celebrates, the emergence of conflicting organizational meanings. Embracing a constitutive perspective of communication and the notion that organizations are tension-filled, political sites of meaning-making talk, I argue that change fails when local articulations of alternative organizing discourses are unable to permeate mutually reinforcing understandings of organization. Meaningful change is thus enabled by creating open discursive spaces for organizational participants to constitute new organizing discourses. I provide the findings of a critically inspired, qualitative study of organizational change at a college of art and design to illustrate how embracing a constitutive-political perspective of communication can reveal how discourse alignment and conflict suppression during conversations contribute to failing change practices. This contribution provides a critically sensitive, discursive perspective of why change fails and extends an invitation for organizational scholars and practitioners to consider how conflictual conversations about a variety of possible organizational futures might better enable sustained organizational-change practices.