Organizational change in a public housing foundation: The crucial importance of discourse analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how strategic vision of change is communicated by managers and how this affects the discourse behavior of service engineers. The case study describes the consequence of variations in professional discourse of managers and employees (mostly engineers) working together in a public housing foundation. The data suggest that interaction between different professionals using different discourses can be a source of misunderstanding. As a consequence behavior of the professional seems to impede cooperation. It is recommended that future research regarding change management should incorporate linguistic discourse analysis. Investigating social interaction processes in change programs could be done comprehensively paying attention to differences in professional cultures in cross-functional cooperation. A managerial implication of our study is that understanding differences in professional discourses reflected in communication is a constant point of attention in facilitating processes of organizational change. We argue that change programs contain both objective and subjective dimensions, of which the linguistic dimensions might give reasons for better understanding the difficulties in implementing change in new ways.