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‘Our iceberg is melting’: Story, metaphor and the management of organisational change

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 17; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14759551.2011.622908

1477-2760

Stefanie Reissner, Victoria Pagan, Craig R. Smith,

Management and Organizational Studies

Abstract This article offers two contrasting readings of the business novel Our iceberg is melting: Changing and succeeding under any conditions (J. Kotter and H. Rathgeber. 2005. Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan), which was written to advocate Kotter's approach to organisational change management. The orthodox reading draws on the modernist paradigm which assumes that organisational change can be actively managed. This reading analyses how the structure, themes, tropes and metaphoric representations employed in the book reinforce its underlying message. It assumes that readers will accept this message and adopt the advocated change management approach. The alternative reading is more critical. It questions the idealistic representations of characters' roles and behaviours, and demonstrates how organisational actors may subvert the book's story and metaphoric representations to resist change. This article demonstrates through the two readings that story and metaphor as tools to facilitate organisational change open up space for differing interpretations, which may not match the authors' intent. It concludes that story and metaphor can reinforce a book's underlying message, but that their ambiguity and interpretative flexibility always allow for unintended, dissenting and potentially subversive interpretations. Keywords: allegorybusiness novelmetaphororganisational changestory Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the guest editors, the three anonymous reviewers and colleagues from the HRM/OS subject group at Newcastle University Business School for their help in developing this paper. Notes Story is 'an account of imaginary or real people and events' (The Concise Oxford English Dictionary Citation2010). Metaphor is 'a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable' (The Concise Oxford English Dictionary Citation2010). Fable is 'short story, typically with animal characters, conveying a moral' (The Concise Oxford English Dictionary Citation2010). The workshop programme Leading bold changeTM , which accompanies the fable, builds on these mechanisms to enable managers to design and implement organisational change in a constructive manner (see http://www.leadingboldchange.co.uk). Even though we refer to scholars of Critical Management Studies (CMS) in this section, our use of the term 'critical' is not directly related to CMS or critical theory. By critical, we mean refusing to take the fable's message at face value, questioning its assumptions and exposing possible alternative meanings (cf. Parker and Thomas Citation2011). We would like to remind readers that colony refers to 'a community of animals … living close together' (The Concise Oxford English Dictionary Citation2010).