Strategy and change stories at work - Translating ideal official stories into real case stories
Change managementStrategy implementationStorytellingGenreLanguageManagement of enterprisesFöretagsledningManagementBusiness and Economics
When referring to the same event, people can have different assumptions. What is interesting to see is why these assumptions are different, why do people have different stories? Some of the reasons could be different levels of expectation, different communication channels or even different cultural backgrounds. We have analysed all these by having a case study within a company that has recently gone through a change management/strategy implementation process.The research reviewed in this paper originates in two different worlds. One world is a research world where stories come from textbooks and articles. These stories could be named as observed stories since we do not directly participate in it. The other world is a workplace, an organization where we took interviews about what was happening in that organization (constructed stories). MacLeod and Davidson (2007) argue that storytelling is a key distinguishing point between observed and constructed stories. Stories should be viewed as artefacts to be studied in the organizational setting. However, we disagree and want to show that stories can come from different sources. The researcher is an observer who can assess the story and teller?s intended meaning. What the literature brings is an official, ideal story on strategy and change. On the other hand, when observing a company that is going through a change process/strategy implementation, a new story is created, the real case story. The translation of the ideal story into a real case story comes with creating a bridge between the two concepts. We did not approach change management from the perspective of how to implement it but we took the implementation as a starting point in order to determine how people feel about it. The purpose of the thesis was to investigate how official ideal stories are translated into real case stories. We did that by answering the following two research questions:1. How does the literature talk about strategy and change??2. How do different people talk about strategy and change in real case study?Organizations are not static entities; different processes are constantly constructed and reconstructed through language, interaction. Language is a tool to construct different realities and we wanted to use these tools to understand how people perceive and talk about those realities. Therefore, we chose to reveal ideal official reality constructed by researchers and reality constructed by people in organization trough storytelling.