This framework of analysis offers the potential
to help provide theoretical and research-based
models and practices addressing how mindsets
and meanings get established or challenged
through discursive events involving power processes.
Several empirical studies have already
gone some way to achieving this. For example, a
study by Grant et al. (2006) of the implementation
of new technology at three organizations
demonstrates how key stakeholders (consultants,
management, employees and vendors) deployed
competing discourses. Consultants and vendors
depicted the changes along technologically determinist
lines suggesting that wholesale adoption
would lead to cost savings, enhanced efficiency
and more centralized management control.
Drawing on a combination of formal power,
critical resources, network links and legitimacy
these actors were initially able to deploy their
discourse with considerable success. This dominant
discourse was successfully challenged, however,
by employees who by virtue of their own
sources of power deployed a counter discourse that showed the new technology to be impractical
and inefficient.