Episodic Organizational Change and Social Drama – Liminality and Conflict in the Change Process

ABSTRACT

This conceptual paper draws upon Victor Turner’s understanding of social change as social drama. It develops an interpretive framework for episodic organizational change as a period of liminal transition that is triggered and driven by conflict. Emphasizing the liminal quality inherent in change processes, the social drama is used to generate a conceptual frame to investigate the opportunities and threats in liminal transitions, the various ways to re-establish social order in organizations and the associated role of leaders in liminal times. Promoting conflict’s productive nature for organizational change, the social drama is further used to provide a frame to investigate how social reality in organizations is challenged, developed, crafted, transformed and finally re-constituted through conflict. The article argues that the social drama perspective has the capacity to further reflexive thinking about change processes in organizations.

MAD statement

This article makes a difference as it promotes an understanding of episodes of change in organizations as liminal and conflictual transitions. It complements and challenges the well-known by emphasizing that change periods create liminal conditions that temporarily suspend established organizational structures. Highlighting the liminal condition of the organizational change requires a different understanding of how change is enacted and the role of leaders in the change process. Furthermore, conflict has a productive role in organizational change. It is a motor of change and a generative force for the dynamics of the change process and the reflexive headwork emerging between the opposing forces.

KEYWORDS:

• Social drama
• episodic organizational change
• conflict
• liminality
• social change

Acknowledgements

We want to express our gratitude to the editor, Rune Todnem By, and to the two anonymous reviewers. Their support and valuable comments contributed to enhancing the quality of the article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ingo Winkler

Ingo Winkler studies how organizational members create and experience their organizational world and how their activities correspond to the social and cultural settings inside and outside the organization. In doing so, he relates his research to a critical understanding of studying organization and management, particularly addressing multiple aspects around identity formation and re-formation, organizational change, managerial control, resistance, emotions, and the meaning of work.

Mette Lund Kristensen

Mette Lund Kristensen studies the effects and implications of managerial interventions for the individual and for the complex social and relational processes in organizations. This includes an interest in disciplining and structuring mechanisms that constitute the organizational reality, and which are (re)produced and enforced in the interplays between agents and with structure. Adopting a critical perspective, her research accounts for the tensions and counterfactuals in management interventions and questions the underlying taken for granted assumptions.