Organizational change as shifting conversations

Abstract

Abstract This article explores producing and managing change within conversationally constructed realities. Conversations are proposed as both the medium and product of reality construction within which change is a process of shifting conversations in the network of conversations that constitute organizations. In this context, change entails bringing new conversations into a sustained existence and the job of change managers is to create the conversational realities that produce effective action rather than to align organizations with some ` ̀ true' ' reality. What might be the implications for organizational change management if we took the idea of organizations as socially constructed realities seriously? Although some of the organization change literature adopts such a constructivist view (e.g. Czarnawaska, 1997; Tenkasi and Boland, 1993), most of it adopts a structural-functionalist view (Burrell and Morgan, 1979) in which the job of change agents is to align, fit, or adapt organizations, through interventions, to an objective reality that exists ` ̀ out there''. The efficacy of these interventions is seen both as a demonstration of a change agent's ability to accurately mirror reality, i.e. the world is as the agent knows it to be (Watzlawick, 1990), and the ability to apply the appropriate intervention(s) for that reality (Beer, 1980). Successful change, therefore, ultimately depends on the ability to accurately mirror or represent reality and to choose and implement interventions appropriate to that reality. But what if we consider organizations as socially constructed realities in which the reality we know is interpreted, constructed, enacted, and maintained through discourse (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Holzner, 1972; Searle, 1995; Watzlawick, 1984a; Weick, 1979). What if our knowledge and understanding of reality is not a mirror of some underlying ` ̀ true' ' reality, nor a reproduction of that reality? Rather, what if our knowledge of reality is itself a construction that is created in the process of making sense of things (Astley, 1985; Knorr-Cetina,