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Abstract:
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Most studies of mergers and acquisitions have a managerial tilt and are founded on short
visits to the companies investigated. This essay is based on a longitudinal study of a company
that experiences a series of international acquisitions, giving voice to a wide range of
organizational actors at different hierarchical levels, interviewed at different points of time
over a period of six years. The collected narrative interviews are viewed as retrospective
interpretations of change processes in the acquired company, made by organizational actors
as parts of the plots they are continually constructing and revising to make sense of the
course of organizational actions and events. Greimas’ actantial model is used to systematize
the different plots that can be seen as results of both individual and collective processes of
selection, hierarchization and sequencing of organizational actions and events. It is argued
that a narrative approach is well suited to clarify changing patterns of identification and
justification and to display different modes of storytelling. The narratological analyses
moreover illustrate that even central actors within an acquired company often have such
different work-views and world-views that it may be problematic or even counterproductive if
upper-level management introduces corporate storytelling through conscious efforts without
any negotiation of the different versions of stories told by the employees. |
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