Elena DALPIAZ, Imperial College London: " E PLURIBUS UNUM: UNPACKING THE DYNAMICS OF NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF STRATEGIC CHANGE || Authors: E. Dalpiaz (Imperial College) and G. Di Stefano (Hec Paris)"

Location: TC.3.10
Date and Time: Tuesday, June 14^th, 2016; 16.00-19.00

Organizational narratives can favorably influence how stakeholders interpret a strategic change. This paper examines whether and how official organizational narratives evolve over time in terms of their content, structure, and polyphony. We use qualitative and quantitative methodologies to analyze the narratives produced by an Italian manufacturing company to document its successful strategic change over 30 years. Results show that, as the organization moved from planning to implementing to consolidating change, the strategy maker systematically constructed a nested and interconnected narrative corpus, which reflected different interpretations of change, leveraged different structural elements, and shifted polyphony from external sources of legitimacy to internal ones. We discuss the implications of our insights for research on strategy-as-practice, as well as continuity and change within organizations.

Elena Dalpiaz is an assistant professor of strategy at Imperial College Business School, London. Her research examines how meaning-making processes within organizations affect organizational and strategic change, as well as entrepreneurship. She is interested in particular in understanding how organizations use different types of cultural resources, such as narratives, institutional logics, and taken-for-granted social understandings to achieve various strategic outcomes.