The Role of Political Language Forms and Language Coherence in the Organizational Change Process

Abstract

This paper views organizational change from a linguistic perspective. Concepts are taken from the theory of speech acts, the theory of political language forms, and the theory of language coherence and applied to two case studies of companies undergoing major organizational change. Two criteria for coherent language use during organizational change are developed and illustrated empirically using two contrasting cases (which are re-interpreted from the extant literature). These cases are modelled sequentially in their own terms, one case forming five stages, the other forming four stages. The first case involves AT&T (Schlesinger et al. 1987), which satisfies the two criteria of coherent language use. The second case, involving Chrysler (Moritz and Seaman 1981), does not satisfy these two criteria.

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