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PS 095
When History Repeats Itself. The Role of Communication in Changing Organizational Structure
A. Rosenberg
1
1
University of Tartu, Institute of Social Studies, Tartu, Estonia
Structural changes are quite common in all organizations – it’s an organization’s way to adjust to changing environment and changing expectations. In‑
tra-organizational processes of this kind aim at getting from point A to point B smoothly. The experience of the studied state organization (with nearly 300
employees) shows that although there is a substantial body of shared understandings of desired ways of carrying out an organizational structure reform,
people’s retrospective representations of how things unfolded, differ significantly from these shared notions of“how things should have been done”. The in‑
terest of the paper lies in the role of communication within the complex of organisational practices of structural change: redistributing tasks, redistributing
employees between departments, recruiting, relocating people and compiling regulative documents. The study is driven by a social practice approach,
especially byTheodore Schatzki’s view. Practices are considered to be non-individual phenomena, meaning that the organization of a practice is not the sum
of what employees in an organization have or think, but rather how they have incorporated the elements of practices as entities in their varying practice
performances (Schatzki 2005 p. 480). Practices have two basic components – actions and structure (Schatzki 2006 p. 1864). The structure is formed of un‑
derstandings of how to do things, rules and teleo-affective structures (Schatzki 2005 p. 471). Those components are held persistent and they form practice
memories of the organization (Schatzki 2006 p. 1868). This gives an opportunity to make sense of the named components of the communication practice
to understand why the same pitfalls appear throughout the changes. The study uses two sets of in-depth interviews in a state organization: 10 conducted
after the 2011 reform and 27 in 2014. The sample consisted of employees with varying professional profiles and their work had been directly affected by
the reforms. Conclusions: Communication activities are a part of all practices that constitute the complex of structural change – recruiting, relocating etc.
There are also unifying acts of communication between those practices that interweave them together into the complex of structural change. This can, and
should, be addressed as a separate practice of communication, the goal of which is to bind other practices.This practice is present whether activities of com‑
munication are planned and reasoned beforehand or not, but the success of change implementation depends on how these activities support or obstruct
the interweaving process. References: 1. Schatzki, T. R. (2005), "Peripheral Vision: The Sites of Organizations", Organization Studies, Vol. 26, pp. 465–484. 2.
Schatzki, T.R. (2006),“On Organizations as they Happen”, Organization Studies, Vol. 27, pp. 1863–1873.