Storying Organizational Change: A Story of a Storyteller

The thesis tells a story of change from the perspective of the change agent as storyteller. It explores the importance of change agents being credible and listened to storytellers of change and the impact on change when change agents fail to deliver a story that is acceptable to the audience and enactors of change. The research adopts a storytelling approach to analysis and review and draws on the storytelling literature and the literature of change agents and change leaders. However, in exploring the literature on storytelling, the researcher takes issue with writers who tend to ‘close-down’ and constrain stories to frameworks that undermine the organic and evolutionary nature of stories in situ. Consequently, the exploration and analysis of the data draws from a variety of ideas, models and perspectives to enable an interpretation to emerge, and sense-making based upon grounded theory, moving to abductive analysis. This shying away from induction to abductive analysis arises from the researcher’s reconsidered perspectives, developed over time and intellectual positions, aided by the methodological data analysis. These characteristics enabled enrichment of the research through the processes of revisiting data, defamiliarization of the data from its original focus, and alternative casing of the stories that emerged.

The empirical research was conducted 25 years ago and the presentation of the story demonstrates testament to the value and importance of secondary analysis of qualitative data. The data has already yielded a previous research analysis which was reviewed successfully and addressed the role and impact of senior management on change initiatives. Again, the revisiting of the researcher to empirical data collected during an era when organizations were ‘hooked’ on Total Quality Management, the focus of the original research, shows both the endurance of areas of organizational interest, in this case, organizational change, and the resilience of the data to enable fresh analysis and contemporary discussion and interpretation. As such, the thesis calls in to question the tendency for research institutions to propose to discard data after a relatively short period of time.