Narrating organizational change: an applied psycholinguistic perspective on organizational identity

According to the traditional mainstream perspective in organizational research, organizations are conceptualized as environments basically oriented toward the production of goods and services and/or to the implementation of the skills mastered by their operators. However, according to a narrative approach to organizations, workplaces – as well as organizations in general – could be conceived of as discursive constructions, that is, as social spaces where a thick network of narrations and discourses are informally produced and “packaged,” thus shaping and featuring the most authentic dimension of organizational identity. Therefore, in order to capture the actual ethos of an organizational context, researchers should be ready to disentangle the network of collective narrations and discourses which is shaped through and by the shared and/or contested/negotiated practices of accounting. In line with such premises, the paper analyzes a corpus of empirical evidence, collected within the organizational context through focus group discussions, in an attempt to show how discursive and narrative cues actually work as yeast for the self, even within a critical moment of transition, such as organizational change, which challenged cohesion and stability of both organizational and individual identities.