A Critical, Discourse-Based Approach to Management Education, Organizational Change, and Resistance

By:
Dr Alan A. Jones
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The paper describes an innovative course called “Acquiring Professional Communicative Expertise”, offered in both online and face-to-face modes. Participants usually have managerial roles in organizations, often in areas like internal or external communication, public relations, or learning & development. Many are professionally qualified as doctors or lawyers, and some have MBAs. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach to discourse, drawing on recent work in social psychology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, sociology, management studies, organizational studies, human relations, and critical discourse analysis. It builds on concepts developed by Erving Goffman, James Paul Gee, Tony Watson, Norman Fairclough, John Seely Brown, Janet Holmes, John Weeks, and other experts. Topics discussed include the new work order (the ‘New Paradigm’), empowerment and disempowerment, conflicting management discourses, the role of discourse in organizational change, and the nature of resistance to change. We compare destructive resistance with productive resistance, and explore the discourse dimensions of reactions to institutional decision-making, communication of decisions, and participative decision-making. A key insight is that organizations are in a very real sense produced and maintained by talk and text.

Having investigated ways in which institutional and organizational contexts constrain and afford sense-making, the course gives participants text-analytic tools that allow them to identify interpretations, purposes and strategies in reports and other documents, i.e. to see below the surface meanings of such texts.


Keywords: Communication, Discourse, Strategy, Organizations, Professions
Stream: Communication
Presentation Type: 60 minute Workshop Presentation in English
Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Dr Alan A. Jones

Senior Lecturer, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University
Sydney, New South Wales, AUSTRALIA

Dr Alan Jones obtained a doctorate in descriptive linguistics from the Australian National University in 1994 based on fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Since 1999, he has worked across the disciplines at Macquarie University, collaborating with subject area specialists in physics, law and accounting, and contributing linguistic expertise to the development of enhanced curriculum materials in these subjects. He has had a number of jointly-authored publications based on the outcomes of these collaborations, and has co-authored a book with Samantha Sin: ‘Generic Skills in Accounting’ (2003). He has also published articles on text analysis and the role of ‘copying’ in learning. He teaches an undergraduate course in communication for academic and professional purposes and a postgraduate course in professional communicative expertise. He also offers regular workshops in research writing and writing for publication to academics and research students through Macquarie’s Centre for Professional Development. His chief research interest is in the language-content interface and the role of language in conceptual understanding, conceptual change and conceptual development in writing.

Ref: M06P0545