Organisational Change as Shifting Conversation Narratives and Stories

Organizational change as shifting conversation, narratives and stories In his (1999) paper on Organizational change as shifting conversations, Jeffrey Ford examines the implications of a social constructionist view of reality for organizational change agents. Following Watzlawick (1990) and Bohm (1996), Ford distinguishes between first-order, presented realities that “refer to the physically demonstrable and publicly discernible characteristics, qualities, or attributes of a thing, event, or situation” (1999, p. 481) and the second-order, represented realities that “are created whenever we attribute, attach, or give meaning, significance or value to a first-order reality” (1999, p. 482). In particular, Ford (1999, p. 483) draws on Bohm (1996) concept of dialogue as a means to distinguish between the two realities through the revelation of assumptions and their consequences. Central to Ford’s argument in this paper (and also developed elsewhere in Ford and Ford, 1995; Ford et al., 2002) is the notion of conversation, which can range from a single speech acts [sic], e.g. “do it”, to an extensive network of speech acts which constitute arguments (Reike and Sillars, 1984), narratives (Fisher, 1987), and other forms of discourse (Boje, 1991; Thachankary, 1992). Conversations may be monologues or dialogue and . . . may also include different people over time (Ford, 1999, p. 484). He argues that both first- and second-order realities are passed on through implicit conversational backgrounds, and that conversations are both the process and product of reality construction, providing “the very texture of organizations” (Ford, 1999, p. 485). Building on this metaphor, he goes on to suggest that conversations are also the target of organizational change, for change agents may “bring about alterations in the existing tapestry of linguistic characterizations” (Ford, 1999, p. 486) in five ways: through redefining “a change”, conversational shifts, conversational management, conversational responsibility, and reviewing resistance. Change redefinition, the first of the five, involves a recognition that organizational change is neither monolithic nor independent of the conversations in which it is embedded and unfolds, and that organizational change conversations also affect the constitution of individual identities within the organization. Second, conversational shifts, which are central to the theme for this special issue, are pivotal in changing the organization or organizational processes. Ford proposes that while such shifts occur at different rates, the extent to which a language change occurs may serve as an indicator of the extent to which a change has been institutionalized (Barrett et al., 1995). He goes on to distinguish shifts in focus from reactive to proactive conversations, from monologues to generative dialogues, and from commitment to certainty to commitment to discovery as