Affiliations: Social Psychology Department, London School of
Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. Tel.: +44 20 7955 7996; Fax:
+44 20 7955 7565; E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: This paper explores, from a narrative perspective, the
organizational change process resulting from a string of take-overs within a
tire manufacturing company in Spain. It elaborates on the effects of these
changes in the way people reconstruct the organization and their role as its
employees through the stories they share. These stories compose a collectively reproduced narrative that
guides, and therefore constrains, employees' historical recollections. They are
the vehicle through which people reproduce and challenge their cultural order
in the organization through their (re)production and generation within that
order. It is by way of narratives and the space they create that people are
able to make sense of a changing situation using both their personal
experiences and the symbols their cultural environment provides. Storytelling
becomes then the constant process of reformulation that opens a space for the
development of individual awareness and competence within the cultural
constraints that the organization imposes on its members. These findings imply that we should take the discursive elements
that both constrain our descriptions and our explanations of organizational
change process seriously, and if possible provide opportunities for more or
less intentional (re)interpretations of those processes when planning
organizational interventions.
Keywords: organizational change, narratives, stories, cultural (re)production, individual competence