Organizational Discourse and New OD Practices
Change concepts. In the broadest sense, discursive
practices and interactions bring certain
concepts about change into being, such that they
become the established way of thinking about
change efforts (e.g. the need to first ‘unfreeze’
before ‘moving’). As part of this process,
discursive practices ‘rule in’ certain ways of
thinking and talking about organizational change
while also ‘ruling out’ other ways (Hall, 2001,
p. 72). This can lead to outdated or constraining
views of what change itself is and how it might be
achieved. An example of this would be the
difference between viewing change as a way to
fix problems rather than as a way to cultivate new
and affirming possibilities. To try to address this
problem, some studies of organizational discourse
have sought to move beyond conventional
conceptions of change by proposing new language
and metaphors that encourage alternative
ways of thinking about the change process. For
example, Marshak (2002) discusses change as
‘morphing’ while Sturdy and Grey (2003) consider
change as a form of stability.