Managerial Frames and Institutional Discourses of Change: Employee Appropriation and Resistance

This paper proposes that the notions of frame and frame appropriation are useful tools for the study of control in organizations, as well as for the analysis of the connection between micro-level discursive activities and wider discourses that enable and constrain such activities. To date, most studies of framing and of wider discourses have proceeded independently of each other. An empirical study of bank employees' accounts of their responses to two different changes introduced by management indicates that employees frame their responses in part according to their individual capabilities and experiences; that employee frames show an alignment with managerial frames and institutional discourses that are unified and reified; and that employee frames exhibit both alignment and misalignment with managerial frames that are open to contestation. The study also indicates that institutional discourses can both constrain and enable employee resistance to managerial frames.

[1]  M. Alvesson,et al.  Taking the Linguistic Turn in Organizational Research , 2000 .

[2]  James R. DiSanza.  Shared Meaning as a Sales Inducement Strategy: Bank Teller Responses to Frames, Reinforcements, and Quotas , 1993 .

[3]  E. Schein.  Kurt Lewin's change theory in the field and in the classroom: Notes toward a model of managed learning , 1996 .

[4]  D. Snow,et al.  Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment , 2000 .

[5]  J. Sillince,et al.  ‘A Rounded Picture is What We Need’: Rhetorical Strategies, Arguments, and the Negotiation of Change in a UK Hospital Trust , 2004 .

[6]  Cynthia Hardy,et al.  No Joking Matter: Discursive Struggle in the Canadian Refugee System , 1999 .

[7]  David Grant,et al.  Introduction: Struggles with Organizational Discourse , 2004 .

[8]  D. Snow,et al.  Frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation. , 1986 .

[9]  Bill Doolin,et al.  Enterprise Discourse, Professional Identity and the Organizational Control of Hospital Clinicians , 2002 .

[10]  Erving Goffman,et al.  Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. , 1979 .

[11]  Ian Palmer,et al.  Reframing and organizational action: the unexplored link , 1996 .

[12]  Emmanuel Okechukwu Ogbonna,et al.  Employee responses to culture change efforts , 1998 .

[13]  Loizos Heracleous,et al.  Organizational Change as Discourse: Communicative Actions and Deep Structures in the Context of Information Technology Implementation , 2001 .

[14]  Daniel D. Martin.  From Appearance Tales to Oppression Tales , 2002 .

[15]  M. Alvesson,et al.  Identity regulation as organizational control: Producing the appropriate individual , 2002 .

[16]  David Knights,et al.  When "Life Is but a Dream": Obliterating Politics Through Business Process Reengineering? , 1998 .

[17]  Robert Chia,et al.  On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change , 2002, Organ. Sci..

[18]  Phillip K. Tompkins,et al.  Coming to terms with organizational identification and commitment , 1987 .

[19]  M. Janssens,et al.  Deconstructing Difference: The Rhetoric of Human Resource Managers’ Diversity Discourses , 2004 .

[20]  W W Oswald.  Creating a service culture. , 1998, Healthcare executive.

[21]  George Cheney,et al.  Communication and Unobtrusive Control in Contemporary Organizations , 1985 .

[22]  Andrew Sturdy,et al.  Customer Care in a Consumer Society: Smiling and Sometimes Meaning it? , 1998 .

[23]  Cynthia Hardy,et al.  Scaling up and Bearing Down in Discourse Analysis: Questions Regarding Textual Agencies and Their Context , 2004 .

[24]  R. Coombs,et al.  Culture, Control and Competition; Towards a Conceptual Framework for the Study of Information Technology in Organizations , 1992 .

[25]  J. Barker.  Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive Control in Self-Managing Teams , 1993 .

[26]  E. Goffman.  Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience , 1974 .

[27]  Pamela Jordan.  Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques , 1994 .

[28]  C. Hardy,et al.  Discourse and Institutions , 2004 .

[29]  T. V. Dijk.  The Study of Discourse , 1997 .

[30]  Barbara Czarniawska,et al.  Weick, Karl E. , 1998 .

[31]  K. Weick.  FROM SENSEMAKING IN ORGANIZATIONS , 2021, The New Economic Sociology.

[32]  Mickey Zemon,et al.  The art of framing: Managing the language of leadership , 1997 .

[33]  J. Pfeffer,et al.  Who gets power — and how they hold on to it: A strategic-contingency model of power , 1977 .