Epic and Tragic Tales

THE JOURNAL 10.1177/0021886303255557 Brown, Humphreys OF/ APPLIED EPIC ANDBEHAVIORAL TRAGIC TALES SCIENCEJune 2003

Epic and Tragic Tales Making Sense of Change

Andrew D. Brown Michael Humphreys Nottingham University

This interpretive study of change in a U.K.-based college focuses on the divergent understandings of senior managers and two distinct cohorts of their subordinates in a postmerger situation. The authors found that the senior managers told a narrative of epic change, whereas the two subordinate groups both authored recognizably tragic narratives. The research contribution this article makes is threefold. First, they argue that groups’ narrations of their working lives both are influenced by psychological processes (such as categorization, self-enhancement, and uncertainty reduction) and draw on broadly available cultural resources (for example, literary genres). Second, they contend that change in organizations is, at least in part, constituted by alterations in people’s understandings, encoded in narratives, and shared in conversations. Third, they suggest that group narratives are not merely exercises in sense making but may be hegemonic and have psychic prison effects. Keywords: narrative; sense making; change; intergroup relations

How do individuals and groups in organizations make sense of major change events and, in particular, mergers? In contrast to functionalist accounts of change that focus on observable actions (e.g., Lewin, 1951; Schein, 1985), we emphasize the socially constructed nature of organizations and the role of language in people’s constructions of what often are complex processes that unfold over lengthy periods of time (e.g., Heracleous & Barrett, 2001; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). The rationale for this article is to investigate how members of “one” organization interpreted a merger event, and its THE JOURNAL OF APPLIED BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE, Vol. 39 No. 2, June 2003 121-144 DOI: 10.1177/0021886303255557 © 2003 NTL Institute

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consequences for their working lives. Our article draws on two quite distinct sets of literatures. First, we make use of the burgeoning work on narrative (Czarniawska, 1997; Gabriel, 1999) and sense making (Weber & Manning, 2001; Weick, 1995) to explore how our respondents sought to understand what they considered to be processes of radical change. Second, we employ elements of social identity theory (SIT) (Tajfel, 1972) and self-categorization theory (SCT) (Hogg & Terry, 2001) in an effort to analyze how individuals in different groups within the merged organization arrived at their constructions of self and others, and why these led to conflict. Our research was conducted at a U.K.-based institution of further education (FE), Alpha, that had recently been formed from the merger of two small colleges, Beta and Gamma, which had lengthy histories of independent operation.1 From an early stage in the study, it became clear that the two merged cohorts of staff had somewhat different understandings of the merger event, of themselves, and of each other. Yet both groups agreed that the merger had been ill planned and poorly executed by an incompetent, uncaring, and careerist senior management team (SMT) that had jeopardized the future of the college. In contrast, members of the SMT understood the merger to have been largely successful, attributed this success to their own efforts, and expressed optimism regarding the future of Alpha. The SMT thus told a narrative of epic change (in which they cast themselves as adept managers seeking to overcome obstacles with enlightened policies) that was markedly different in structure and tone to the tragic narratives authored by their subordinates (who represented themselves as the victims of flawed strategies with potentially disastrous consequences). Our article is presented in four main sections. First, we provide a review of the literature on how people in organizations make sense of processes of change and the importance of SIT and SCT for understanding intergroup relations. Second, we give an account of our methods and an overview of our case study organization. This summary emphasizes that although our research was rigorously conducted, our account nevertheless is a reflexively accomplished rhetorical artifact. Third, we elaborate versions of the narratives told by the participants in each of the three groups that composed Alpha, focusing on their understandings of the college, themselves, and the other two groups. Finally, we provide an analysis of these processes of change and postmerger intergroup relations, before drawing some implications for future research and practice. MAKING SENSE OF CHANGE Mergers are complex change events in which different groups’ understandings of themselves and their organization often are metamorphosed. Moreover, mergers are The authors gratefully acknowledge the insightful comments of Inger Boyett, John Clarke, Mike Comer, Christine Coupland, Graeme Currie, Robert Greenhalgh, John Hajdar, Bryan Mills, Darryn Mitussis, Megan Scott, Anna Soulsby, Olga Suhomlinova, Qi Xu, and the two anonymous reviewers. Andrew D. Brown is a professor of organizational behavior at the Nottingham University Business School in the United Kingdom. His research interests focus on issues of narrative, identity, and identification. Michael Humphreys is a lecturer in organizational behavior at the Nottingham University Business School. His research centers on ethnographic approaches to understanding identity.

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not discrete episodes with clear points of origin and obvious conclusions but are “ongoing, evolving, and cumulative” (Weick & Quinn, 1999, p. 375) sets of contextually and temporally bounded (Orlikowski, 1996; Pettigrew, 1985) linguistic processes (Ford & Ford, 1995). As language constructs our reality (Dandridge, Mitroff, & Joyce, 1980; Pondy & Mitroff, 1979), so change is a linguistic accomplishment that emerges from what often are fragmented and competing organizational discourses (Heracleous & Barrett, 2001). Although “change is pervasive and indivisible” (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002, p. 569), managers are institutionally empowered to direct these processes, that is, to introduce novel templates that redirect understandings (Morgan, 1997, pp. 263270). Such efforts to extend managerial hegemony are, we contend, merely punctuations in the flow of organizational life, and their impact will depend on how they are interpreted and reinterpreted by others in their efforts to make sense of unfolding processes of organizing. Sense making refers to those processes of interpretation and meaning production whereby people interpret phenomena and produce intersubjective accounts (e.g., Weick, 1995). It denotes those sets of sociocognitive processes by which people “structure the unknown” (Waterman, 1990, p. 41) into sensible, “sensable” events (Huber & Daft, 1987, p. 154) in their efforts “to comprehend, understand, explain, attribute, extrapolate, and predict” (Starbuck & Milliken, 1988, p. 51). From this perspective, organizational realities are enacted or socially constructed (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), grounded in identity construction (Dutton & Dukerich, 1991), and retrospectively construed through shared processes of social interchange and negotiation (Burrell & Morgan, 1979). Although much attention has focused on the sense making of policy makers (e.g., Janis, 1972) and newcomers during processes of socialization (e.g., Louis, 1980), people’s ability to sense make is most tested when they encounter events they consider to be extraordinary and implausible (A. D. Brown, 2000). Some of the most difficult and complex of these events occur during processes of radical change. We live in a perpetual state of transition, and our sense making is a constant effort to cope with experiences that are “unique and transient” (Weick, 1995, p. 171). As Fuentes (1990) notes, sense making is fundamentally concerned with “how to accept the diversity and mutation of the world . . . so that this changing world shall not become meaningless” (pp. 49-50). Large-scale organizational-change events, such as a merger, make acute cognitive and affective demands on employees. Research suggests that as processes of change unfold, managers affected by them take on different assumptions and orientations and that these alterations to the frame of reference through which they view events are analyzable into standard patterns (e.g., Quinn & Kimberly, 1984, p. 303; Starbuck, 1976). Isabella (1990), for example, has argued that interpretations of key change events unfold in four stages that she labels anticipation (speculation based on rumor), confirmation (understanding using conventional frames of reference), culmination (the production of new frames), and aftermath (the evaluation of outcomes). Although we may question many aspects of Isabella’s model, notably its rigid and deterministic phasing, her work does usefully problematize our need to better understand how people collectively make sense of what they construe as radical change.

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Predicated on the narrative turn in the social sciences (W. Martin, 1986), our argument is that one useful way of conceptualizing how people make sense of change is as a process of narrativization (Bruner, 1990). A foundational assumption of the literature on which we draw is that humans are, either by nature (M. H. Brown, 1986, p. 73) or as a result of socialization processes (Goody & Watt, 1962-1963), predisposed to think in narrative form. Such views extend Burke’s (1968) definition of man as a symbol-using animal, with different authors referring to us variously as homo narrans (Fisher, 1984, p. 6), homo fabulans (Currie, 1998, p. 2), and “essentially a story-telling animal” (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 201). Taking their lead from these generic statements, a variety of scholars has argued that “the telling of stories is a way of making sense” (SalzerMorling, 1998, p. 116) and that “the performance of stories is a key part of members’ sensemaking” (Boje, 1995, p. 1000). In more specific terms, M. H. Brown and Kreps (1993) have commented on the role of stories in reducing “the equivocality (complexity, ambiguity, unpredictability) of organizational life” (p. 48), and J. Martin (1982) has discussed how narratives “can be used to predict future organizational behavior” (p. 287). Narratives not only “make the unexpected expectable” (Robinson, 1981, p. 60) and facilitate comprehension of causal relationships (Sutton & Kahn, 1987) but constitute “the ongoing reassessment of organizational life” (Wallemaq & Sims, 1998, p. 129). Groups in organizations often tend to evolve shared narratives that constitute their collective sense making (A. D. Brown, 1998). Such narratives not only provide members with an agreed understanding of their history but are constantly modified and updated, sometimes subtly and at other times profoundly, to account for recent and current occurrences. In their tone and form, these narratives draw on a finite range of cultural archetypes, basic story lines, made familiar to us through processes of societal-level socialization (McAdams, 1996). The plots associated with the “epic” and “tragic” literary genres in the West are some of the best known and most salient of these cultural resources (e.g., Frye, 1957; Jeffcutt, 1994). Group narratives also will be influenced and conditioned by the same sorts of psychological processes that underpin the construction of social identities and structure intergroup relations. A considerable amount of research has been conducted in this field (e.g., Alderfer & Smith, 1982), most notably under the labels SIT and SCT (e.g., Hogg & Terry, 2001; Tajfel, 1972), providing valuable insights into merger events. In general terms, SIT and SCT suggest that organizations and work groups provide definitions for participants in terms of the defining characteristics of these social categories. Such category memberships both describe and prescribe an individual’s attributes qua a member of that group. SCT, which builds on SIT, states that people represent the defining attributes of groups in the form of prototypes, which are fuzzy sets formed according to the principle of metacontrast (i.e., the maximization of the ratio of intergroup differences to intragroup differences) (Hogg & Terry, 2001). Social identity is maintained by three sociocognitive processes, categorization, self-enhancement, and uncertainty reduction. Categorization of the self and others into in-groups and outgroups produces, for example, group-distinctive stereotyping, ethnocentrism, and positive in-group attitudes (Hogg & Mullin, 1999). Self-enhancement refers to the tendency of people to make comparisons between their in-group and out-groups that


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favor the in-group. It is ego supportive, allowing people to think well of themselves (Abrams & Hogg, 1988). Uncertainty reduction is achieved by self-categorization, which reduces uncertainty through the allocation of oneself and others to apparently clear, highly focused, and consensually agreed in-groups and out-groups (Hogg, 2000). Although problems of intergroup relations based, for instance, on status and power differentials are “relatively common” in work organizations (e.g., Jost & Elsbach, 2001, p. 181), SIT and SCT theorists have argued that they most likely will be endemic in merger situations (e.g., Terry, 2001). As Van Knippenberg and Van Leeuwen (2001) note, “Mergers inevitably entail the confrontation of two social groups, the employees of the merged partners” (p. 251). What is more, both groups usually arrive with wellestablished norms, values, and working practices that can make disputes intractable and negotiations between them fraught. In the short term, premerger group boundaries often are made salient to group members who define themselves in terms of their preexisting social categories (in-groups), resulting in stereotyping and intergroup biases. Concomitantly, both groups also may experience a loss of psychological attachment to the new organization (Buono, Bowditch, & Lewis, 1985; Schweiger & Weber, 1989), resulting in dis-identification (Elsbach, 1999). Although measures are available to senior managers to reduce intergroup tensions (Brickson & Brewer, 2001), it also is possible that over time, competition between the groups in a merged entity may increase the cohesion of the premerger groups, helping to polarize further the perceived differences between them (Blake & Mouton, 1979).

METHOD Research Context

Alpha was a medium-sized, general-purpose FE institution, 1 of 480 such colleges in the United Kingdom that receive annually, in total, nearly £8 billion in government funding (see Learning and Skills Council, http://www.lsc.gov.uk/). In the United Kingdom, 4 million students are educated and trained each year in FE. Some commentators have suggested that FE is uncomfortably located between the school and higher education sectors: Its very diversity makes it difficult to pin down. . . . The curriculum spans not only study and qualifications which are uniquely offered in colleges, but also those offered in parallel in school and in higher education. . . . The comprehensiveness of the sector is its great strength and its Achilles heel. (Lumby, 2001, p. 2)

Since 1993, all U.K. FE institutions have been self-governing (“incorporated”) and, increasingly, in competition with each other for students, funds, and staff. Whereas some have thrived, 40% have experienced financial difficulties (Baty, 2000) arising from a 21% reduction in funding per student over a 7-year period (Smithers & Robinson, 2000, p. 9). In addition, government pressure to provide a huge range of programs has led commentators to discern a “longer term crisis of positioning and identity” in

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the sector (Green & Lucas, 1999, p. 227). Alpha was, in many ways, typical of those colleges that have experienced problems coping with the demands of “diversity, complexity and plurality” (Hyland & Merrill, 2003). Over a 9-year period since incorporation, it had been led by five different principals, been subject to three critical government inspections, experienced five phases of voluntary and compulsory redundancy, and suffered the sector’s longest ever strike of academic staff. In November 1999, the Further Education Funding Council2 imposed an acting principal on the college to deal with a mounting financial crisis. The new head initiated negotiations for a merger between two existing institutions, Beta College and Gamma College, which led to the creation of Alpha in its current form. The acting principal had departed in December 2000, and in January 2001, a new principal took charge of the merged institution. Alpha was now led by a 4-member executive (consisting of the principal, 2 vice principals, and the director of finance), within a 10-member SMT, which had broad strategic and operational responsibilities. To this team reported a cadre of individuals called “program managers” with both teaching and administrative duties. Responsible to them were full-time academic faculty members, designated “lecturers” who taught up to 27 hours per week as well as carrying out a range of administrative duties. The college also relied on a pool of part-time “lecturers” and a cohort of full-time support staff in the library, student services, and general administration, including finance and personnel. In May 2002, the SMT instituted a phase of restructuring and redundancy under the title “curriculum review.” The rationale for this “review” was a perceived need, on the part of the SMT, to reduce the annual salary budget by £1 million. Members of the SMT argued that the move to reduce expenditure was a rational business measure taken in the best long-term interests of the college. Most other staff, however, suggested that the need to save money was a consequence of the SMT’s poor grasp of operational problems and failure to deal adequately with strategic issues. These staff made sense of the redundancies by drawing on notions of Alpha’s identity that emphasized the importance of effective teaching and the inability of successive management teams to facilitate its realization. Research Design

This research was conducted from an interpretive perspective and employed an ethnographic approach to fieldwork, data collection, and data analysis (Bryman, 1988; Denzin & Lincoln, 1998; Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995). The research site was selected by the second author as a particularly interesting example of an institution that “had not developed a clear identity or sense of purpose” (Lumby, 2001, p. vi). Fieldwork was carried out between January 2002 and January 2003, during which time the second author spent an average of 2 days per week in the college. Data were collected via three intersecting strategies, namely semistructured interviews, participant observation, and documentary analysis. The researcher interacted with staff members at all levels of Alpha’s hierarchy including the SMT, program managers, lecturers, and administrative and support staff such as librarians, student services, and canteen workers.


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A total of 75 semistructured formal interviews was conducted as “situated narratives” (Silverman, 1993, p. 108) or “conversations with purpose” (Burgess, 1984, p. 102), aiming at what Mason (2002) refers to as the “construction or reconstruction of knowledge rather than the excavation of it” (p. 63). Eight key informants were interviewed twice and were engaged in regular informal conversation by the second author throughout the 12-month data collection period in order that “ideas and themes that emerge[d] in the early interviews [could] be pursued in greater detail” (Rubin & Rubin, 1995, p. 28). Formal interviews, lasting an average of 63 minutes, were recorded onto cassette and fully transcribed verbatim onto disc and into hard copy. A single interview represented around 10,000 words of transcript data, making a total interview data set of approximately 750,000 words. The researchers were granted access to all Alpha sites and attended SMT meetings, formal staff meetings (which also were taped wherever possible), and staff development sessions. Much interesting information was also gained from “hang[ing] around” and “soak[ing] up relevant data” (Mason, 2002, p. 90) in the college and its multiple sites, creating opportunities for “informal interviews” during everyday contacts, such as coffee breaks and corridor encounters. Participant observations were recorded in handwritten field notes and later transcribed onto disc and into hard copy, representing a further 30,000 words of data. Our analysis also was informed by the study of Alpha documentation, including prospectuses, magazines, newsletters, Internet pages, published articles, and official working documents, such as committee minutes, letters, memoranda, and newspaper and magazine reports referring to the college. These documents provided “a rich vein of analytic topics, as well as a valuable source of information” (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995, p. 142), which helped contextualize and refine observations developed from the participant observations and interviews. Data Analysis

Our primary data were subject to a form of grounded theory analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) by the researchers in an inductive search for categories, patterns, and themes. Initially, all taped interviews were listened to and all transcripts, field notes, and documentary evidence were read twice in order that we became “thoroughly familiar with the data before commencing any kind of analysis” (King, 1994, p. 25). At this stage, “similarities, dissimilarities and recurrent words and themes were noted” (Beech, 2000, p. 213). Coding continued with the identification of patterns by “volume or significance” (Beech, 2000, p. 213), and this generated a set of categories from open in vivo codes (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Early categories emerging here from “actual terms used by participants” (Saunders, Lewis, & Thornhill, 2003, p. 381) included, among many others, change, rescue, betrayal, deterioration, hopelessness, them and us, conflict, and loss. Our analysis continued with processes of axial and selective coding, searching for relationships between the emergent categories of data in what King (1994) has described as a process of “immersion” that involves “analytical reflection and intuitive crystallization of meaning” (p. 27). Gradually, by applying Blaikie’s (2000) “abductive research strategy” (p. 25), moving back and forth between our data,

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categories, codes, themes, experience, and social science concepts, we began to generate what Coffey and Atkinson (1996) refer to as the “ideas [to] guide our exploration and interpretation of the social world” (p. 156) of our research site. During this process, our analysis was enriched by an empathetic identification and interaction between the second author and research participants. Sarason (1996, pp. 31-33) has noted the potential methodological difficulties faced by university researchers in school cultures. In this context, the second author’s 27 years of experience in the FE sector as lecturer, teacher trainer, staff developer, and curriculum evaluator were particularly valuable, as an extract from his field diary indicates: “A good day today, two interviews and a staff development session—I often feel more at home here than I do in the university” (March 7, 2002). The reflexive strength of this relationship was exemplified by our submission of several draft analyses to a range of Alpha personnel, including three senior managers and six other staff. The resultant dialogue enhanced the mutual trust between researcher and researched, enabling us to “transform each other’s ideas through continuing interaction” (Humphreys, Brown, & Hatch, 2003, p. 22). Our incorporation of their comments in our final draft illustrates how our interpretation is “a co-production” (Mason, 2002, p. 63) informed by Geertz’s (1973) view that “what we call our data are really our own construction of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to” (p. 9). In our attempts to create the “type of knowledge that accepts and expose[s] the mechanics of its own production” (Rhodes, 2001, p. 32), it is important to note that the narratives were not related to us in their entirety by any one member of the groups. Rather, the data we collected yielded narrative “fragments” that we have pieced together into more-or-less coherent stories. For example, both tragedy and heroism emerged as categories within our primary data: “I have a picture of education as it could be. . . . As it is now is a result of political mistakes, folly, the culture of managerialism. . . . It’s a tragedy” (program manager). And “I got an absolute hero’s reception. . . . I shall never forget that kind of atmosphere” (ex-principal). However, our constructions should be regarded as an authorial strategy that highlight the “fact” that “interpretation is an art, it is not formulaic or mechanical” (Denzin, 1998, p. 317). Our argument is that all representational means are complexes of rhetorical devices designed to persuade a readership that the authors have “I-witnessed” events and can be relied on to give a reasonable account of what actually happened (Geertz, 1988). The following sections provide an account of the sense-making narratives of three groups as they relate to the recent history of Alpha. The SMT “heroic” story, “The Rescue,” is followed by two “tragic” tales—the Beta story, “Hopelessness,” and the Gamma story, “Betrayal.”

EPIC AND TRAGIC TALES SMT: The Rescue

SMT members pointed out that Alpha had been labeled a “failing college” after a government-sponsored inspection in April 2000:


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Senior management has failed to keep students’retention and achievement under review. . . . The college’s financial management is weak. . . . Its financial position is poor. . . . There are serious deficiencies in the college company accounts. (Further Education Funding Council Inspection Report for Alpha College, April 2000)

The SMT did not disagree with the report’s findings: “I read that report, and I thought it was a fair reflection of what I found when I got here” (principal). Their response, they said, was to produce a strategic plan for the college, which aimed “to ensure that weaknesses are effectively dealt with in our commitment to the pursuit of excellence through continuous quality improvement” (strategic plan, 2001). The principal described the plan as “very much a rescue operation.” In taking a new “commercially aware attitude” (faculty director), the SMT acknowledged that “the college is a business” (faculty director). They recognized that for the college to survive, they had to make difficult decisions, one of which was to embed the merger between Beta and Gamma, which, although it had caused “a huge amount of resentment and overt hostility” (principal), “was necessary for the viability of both organizations” (director, organizational development). They accepted that their implementation of the recent curriculum review might be perceived as “ruthless” (principal) but were adamant that they were working for the long-term good of the whole college: Ten percent downsizing of our staff in the establishment . . . a difficult decision to make . . . but balanced against the 400 and odd staff that are left, if we have to lose some for the benefit of the majority then that’s life I’m afraid. (Vice principal)

The SMT recognized that these “efficiency savings” (principal) would involve difficult decisions: If you look at the college as being an octopus and one of the limbs [is] not performing I’d lop it off because of the problems that can be incurred in trying to continue running an inefficient area. (Director of construction)

The SMT said that they felt pressured, both by the demands of the funding and inspection bodies (“they are our masters; we need to convince them” [vice principal]) and by their internal management roles: I really feel as though I never have a day off. . . . When you’re talking about redundancies and things it’s difficult to unwind and forget about it. Weekends go very quickly. (Vice principal)

The team said that they were the “guardians of the college” (faculty director) with a “huge responsibility to stop it going off the rails again” (finance director). They described themselves as committed wholeheartedly to a fight for survival and overtly sought combative qualities in new staff: When we appointed a new director we had a very open policy of telling [candidates] exactly what the problems were; there was no point hiding the issues. . . . We had people who withdrew . . . didn’t want the battle. (Vice principal)

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They said that they saw themselves as champions of their own staff, constantly having to “rally round the troops to try and motivate them [but] quite happy to use shock tactics” (director of construction). All members of the SMT expressed solidarity with each other: “We are a team and our loyalty is to the college” (faculty director). They argued that their work was instrumental in the revival of Alpha’s fortunes: The college is beginning to recover financially. . . . Its reputation is improving. (Director of marketing) There is a great deal of recognition by people who know the college, about how quickly it is moving forward. (Principal)

Overall, the SMT said that their staff had been somewhat unhelpful in achieving the mission of the college, especially after the merger, when it was perceived that there had been a, lack of awareness within the college about what was happening in further education. . . . People not understanding funding issues, not understanding modern curriculum, so there was no sharing of good practice. (Principal)

The problem, they maintained, was so acute that they had hired a team of external consultants to “bring expertise and put solutions in place, start to manage the staff in a way that directs their priorities a bit more sensibly” (director of finance). They expressed certainty that their strategy of using external consultants had contributed to this change of fortune: We’ve actually outsourced the control of our management information system and this has enabled us to get a clearer picture of where we are. (Vice principal) Knowing that the figures we are talking about are right . . . provides justification for our decisions. . . . What we are aiming for is everybody working in the same way with the same values to get the same results; this way we will have our “failing college” label removed. (Principal)

The SMT also noted a persistent “them-and-us attitude” (faculty director) between Beta and Gamma staff and recognized that there was much work to be done in harmonizing job titles, terms, and conditions between the two cohorts: There are two different cultures. . . . Perhaps we’ve been too conservative and too cautious. . . . We’ve not hit the mixer and said, “Right we will do this or scrap that.” (Vice principal)

Some members of the SMT saw lecturing staff as organizationally incompetent with “no systematic approach to control. . . . Teachers don’t make good managers” (finance director). Others expressed sympathetic identification with their staff, particularly in relation to the 2002 redundancies: “I have lost friends; my role in protecting my staff is being undermined” (faculty director). Most SMT members claimed to believe that their actions were in danger of being subverted by a failure of staff to recognize that the college was in the business of education, arguing that part of their func-


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tion was to “convince” their subordinates and make them more “realistic” (vice principal). The SMT said that their staff also had unrealistic self-perceptions and that considerable effort had been put into getting “people to understand that in fact they were not where they thought they were within quality or teaching and learning terms” (principal). All SMT members said that they were optimistic about the future prospects of the college. The principal, for example, claimed that “we’ve moved a long way in a year,” and the finance director said, “We are in the ascendancy now. . . . We’ve put in enough effort in the last 12 months.” Beta: Hopelessness

Most ex-Beta staff expressed dissatisfaction with what they perceived as a deterioration in working conditions and their feelings of resignation in the face of a downward spiral of student quality: We do as we are told, taking on more students, increasing our achievement and retention figures, but we still get the feeling that we are making no progress at all. . . . We are resigned to the fact that it is us the “foot soldiers” that will bear the brunt of this. (Personnel administrator)

A few staff acknowledged that they were part of a “blame culture [where] everything that happened is always everybody else’s fault” (lecturer, business studies). All recognized that the recent round of redundancies had created particularly acute feelings of anxiety: We come back to work after the summer break to be presented with a list of the missing, people who have left; there is no ritual, no chance to say good-bye or grieve. (Lecturer, graphics)

Staff said that they were “running to stand still” (program manager) and that the college had been “hamstrung” (lecturer, science) by the constraints placed on it by external bodies: We are in a no-win situation created by the “failing college” categorization. We need the equivalent of the cancellation of Third World debt if we are ever to improve our position. (Quality coordinator)

However, the ex-Beta staff maintained that they were proud of their achievements as teachers, arguing that “I like teaching. . . . I like my job. . . . It’s the only thing that keeps me going” (lecturer, hairdressing). They expressed resentment that the SMT had hired external consultants to improve performance: “We’re good at our jobs; we don’t need consultants to borrow our watches to tell us the time” (lecturer, languages). Their self-esteem, they said, was derived almost entirely from their relationships with students and colleagues and from their own performances as teachers in lecture rooms, laboratories, salons, and workshops: “I stay because I like the teaching and I like my colleagues” (program manager, teacher education). Younger members of the staff were particularly enthusiastic about their interactions with students: I have such a passion for what I do. . . . I mean people come on my courses because I’m teaching the courses and it sounds really big headed because I like what I do and I care about the students. And

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I’ve had so many of them in tears because I want them to get through. I want them to pass. (Lecturer, beauty therapy)

However, older ex-Beta lecturers in the main were more qualified in their assessments of the satisfaction they said that they derived from their jobs and often expressed nostalgia for a more deferential age: I’m happy enough really; I like teaching, but when student teachers come in I say to them, “Look, you are going to get verbal abuse.” That’s today’s society, isn’t it? (Lecturer, carpentry and joinery)

Overall, ex-Beta staff said that they felt unsupported in their “efforts to provide a good educational environment for our students” (lecturer, key skills). Those staff who had worked at the college during the previous decade described themselves as “very battle hardened in terms of being able to cope with change, being able to take more work on, lose staff, have budgets cut” (lecturer, marketing). Staff voiced anger that over the past few years so many teaching and support staff had been made redundant, resigned, or taken ill-health retirement: It’s like premature ageing. All my contemporaries have gone; I feel like I’m 90. . . . There’s just a few old soldiers and we support one another by being cynical. (Program manager)

Ex-Beta staff articulated feelings of alienation from their senior managers, whom they described as “uncaring and unresponsive” (personnel administrator), and said that they were “different” to their new postmerger ex-Gamma colleagues whom they characterized as “cushion stuffers and egg-painters” (lecturer, information technology). Ex-Beta staff maintained that they inhabited the “real” world of FE, whereas their ex-Gamma colleagues had been “feather bedded” (lecturer, electrical installation), and described them as “airy fairy, we’ve always had to manage on a tight budget whereas Gamma have always had lots of money thrown at them” (work-based experience coordinator). They interpreted the merger as an inappropriate management strategy that equated to putting together two children—one from a dysfunctional family [Beta] who doesn’t trust anybody, and one child from a loving family [Gamma] who’s always had what they needed and are open and friendly—and telling them to play together nicely. (Lecturer, English for speakers of other languages)

They said that they had been victimized over a period of years and were now highly suspicious: “I don’t trust anybody at the moment” (head of library). They also expressed incredulity at some recent management actions, for example: The principal ordered a book from the library and insisted we got it for her. It only cost £9.99. . . . But the irony of it was that the book was called How to Turn Around a Failing Company. It was about how to stop a company going into bankruptcy and insolvency. (Library assistant)

Ex-Beta staff suggested that the college should be focusing on “its prime functions of teaching and learning” (lecturer, health studies) and were pessimistic about their


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futures, claiming that they continued to suffer from a management that was and had “always been just totally inept and incompetent” (lecturer in teacher education). Gamma: Betrayal

Ex-Gamma staff said that the merger had been forced on them: “We were very much an unwilling bride in a shotgun wedding” (lecturer, computing). They described their situation as one in which they had been “brought into a more hierarchical system, where you have to be accountable for everything” (lecturer, staff development): We are now faced with a bureaucracy that doesn’t seem to have a clue. A new administrative burden is being placed on tutors, without consultation, without explanation. But there is no consequence—if you fill the forms in nothing happens, if you don’t fill the forms in nothing happens—you know, nobody notices, nobody cares, so it’s like Kafka. (Lecturer, media studies)

Ex-Gamma staff voiced a “sense of betrayal; we feel like we’ve been not merged but absorbed by somebody that thinks you are some kind of tick or a whining irritant” (lecturer, art and design). They expressed feelings of having been used “to get the college [Beta] out of its colossal debt” (lecturer, computing) but now said that they were “perceived on the management side as just sulky and wanting it back the way it was” (lecturer, office studies). Their view was that they had been misunderstood by both the SMT and ex-Beta staff and suggested that other groups thought that “we just do like flower arranging and knitting, church halls and stuff and really haven’t a clue what goes on” (community center, coordinator). Alpha was described by them as a slow-moving, uncaring organization characterized by “bureaucracy to no purpose” (lecturer, languages). They contrasted this with their previous experiences in which “there was a sense of community, a sense of working together, working to the same ends and having a shared vision” (lecturer, graphics). They also expressed a sense of loss arising from the merger: We always felt a very close-knit organization, you know, it worked and it was successful because people pulled together; people put extra into it because they cared a lot, and people supported each other, people actually knew each other, and that sort of infrastructure has been dismantled and nothing much of any value has been put in place. (Program manager, art and design)

They defined themselves as having a strong sense of vocation and as having created a mutually supportive environment that “worked on cooperation, and taking care of each other” (lecturer, English). Their view was that Alpha College had adopted the exBeta ethos, which they described as “very masculine, very aggressive [with] macho posturing and just poor management” (program manager, new media). Ex-Gamma staff said that the SMT were self-serving bureaucrats with little inclination for, or experience of, their type of community education. They described their senior managers in uncompromisingly negative terms as engaged in “knee-jerk reactions” (community center manager), “consumed by an unproductive urgency” (lecturer, information technology), and “too lazy to be conspiratorial” (lecturer, Web page design). They were particularly disparaging of two of their own ex-managers who, having spoken convincingly in support of the merger, were now members of the SMT:

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We think, “Well, you did awfully well out of this didn’t you?” Basically they spent a year, not organizing a merger, but fencing for position, and suddenly they’d moved to become directors of a new college, with a huge pay increase. (Lecturer, graphics)

Ex-Gamma staff also constructed the principal as ineffectual: “Her leadership is one of all smiles and concern; she cuts you off from the rest of the herd and patronizes you for a bit, but nothing actually happens” (lecturer, special education). They suggested that there was mutual antipathy between themselves and their exBeta colleagues: The nicknames are there; we’re “cushion stuffers” and they’re that sort of “tweed jacket with leather patches and pipe and technical college, and old blokes and masculine” thing. And we’re supposed to be sort of “women’s institute-y.” (Lecturer, craft studies)

Although they also talked sympathetically about ex-Beta staff, whom they said had been “bullied” (lecturer, computing), they argued that these staff could have done more to help themselves: There’s a sense of despair and despondency. . . . I think with quite a number of Beta staff, they’ve given up the ghost and that’s where morale has really, really flopped. . . . I think they are waiting for, you know, the fairy godmother to come along, and wave a wand. (Program manager, adult education)

They recognized that although they had been used to a better working environment than their Beta colleagues, whom they saw as working with “you know, thugs, dangerous students” (lecturer, office arts), they now faced a similar prospect: I’m not going to pretend that Gamma was perfect; I think that would be dishonest and deluding. No organization is perfect. You thought of yourself as working for a pleasant organization. We thought ourselves very lucky; we knew people from other colleges, particularly Beta, and their life seemed to be hell, so we thought, “Well very nice, glad we don’t work there.” So we’ve had like 10 years of, “thank-God-we-are-not-there,” and then suddenly we are there. (Lecturer, education)

In sum, ex-Gamma college staff said that their working environment was deteriorating, their close links to the community were being broken, their sense of mission was becoming blurred, and all this was the result of ineffective management who did not understand how community education functioned. This, they said, made them despondent about their futures: I think the redundancies, the voluntary severance, are an indication of failure. . . . I think that was seen by many of us as, not just a letdown, you know, but as being sort of tricked. We are now in an organization that needs to generate cash; that’s become more of a priority than perhaps the social need that you identified up on a rough housing estate. We try and marry the two but we might not be able to do it as easily as we have in the past. At the moment ducking and weaving is successful but I think that there’s large chunks of our work that’s not sustainable. (Program manager, adult education)

DISCUSSION To summarize, in this article we have sought to reconstruct elements of the shared sense-making narratives of senior managers and two distinct cohorts of subordinates


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in a recently merged FE college. In this section, we address three sets of related questions. First, what were the key elements of the putatively epic and tragic tales that these groups authored, and how can we account for our participants’ uses of these literary forms? Second, how did these group narratives frame people’s understandings of events, and how can we account, sociocognitively, for their evolution? Third, to what extent are the processes of change that we have described analyzable as exercises in power and resistance? These questions are considered in three sections: “Epic and Tragic Narratives,” “Making Sense of Change,” and “Hegemony and Resistance.” Epic and Tragic Narratives

Contrary to J. Campbell (1988), who argues that there is only one story of change that can be told, the heroic, we suggest that in complex, internally differentiated organizations separate groups will tend to evolve distinct understandings. These understandings, although influenced, culled from, and constrained by local practices, history, and context, also draw on broadly available cultural resources, notably literary genres and plots. In this case, although the SMT told a recognizably epic/heroic narrative, ex-Beta and ex-Gamma staff authored narratives that, although very different in terms of their detail, constructed the merger as a tragedy. One key point to note here is that it was the members of these groups, as well as us, the researchers, who understood events in these (epic/tragic) terms. Another issue of importance is that the epic and tragic genres have been subject to multiple analyses by different literary theorists and that there are many detailed versions of the supposedly “essential” features of these literary forms (e.g., Bowra, 1945; Brereton, 1968; Frye, 1957; Heilman, 1968). However, there is a consensus that both involve central characters who (generally sequentially) face many conflicts. The key difference between the two is that whereas heroes in epic tales succeed in their struggles, tragic heroes meet with disaster. As in conventional epics, the SMT described themselves as a select group of remarkable people who embarked on a quest in which they had overcome many daunting obstacles on their way to achieving a modern, student-centered, high-achieving college. Like many epic narratives, it was highly optimistic, packed with adventure, and projected to end with a “golden age.” Theirs, however, was a narrative that varied somewhat from “standard” renderings of epic tales. In particular, their story was incomplete, as the quest for a more perfect college had not been fulfilled but was ongoing. Their exultation as “heroes,” or, in the conventional language of bureaucratic organizations, as “achievers,” was a projection only. Other staff, by contrast, told stories suggesting that their engagement in the “valuable” activities of teaching, and teaching support, was being tragically undermined by a combination of circumstances and the actions of mercenary and hypocritical “villains,” that is, their senior managers. Unlike most traditional tragedies, however, their narrative did not have a single exceptional central figure, the tragic hero, but instead cast a very large and otherwise incohesive group as the tragic protagonist. Although their story was, like that of the senior managers, still being constructed, there was no sense that it was, as in many “standard” tragic tales, either cathartic or liberating. Rather, their tragic story was almost unremittingly negative and focused on irreparable loss.

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That SMT members understood their actions and events in terms of an epic plot should not surprise us given the extent to which the general management literature emphasizes the heroic aspects of change leadership. Hawkins (1997), for example, refers to the heroic school of management development, whereas Dutton, Ashford, O’Neill, and Lawrence (2001) contend that “the dominant portrait of change agents has centred on the heroic efforts of those at the tops of organizations” (p. 731). The availability of the heroic frame, combined with the self-enhancing rewards associated with a plot form that encourages simplification, in-group idealization, and stereotyping, may account, at least in part, for the structure and tone of the SMT narrative. Similarly, the tragic plot is a cultural resource generally available to participants in Western organizations that offers certain satisfactions when applied to their own situations. For example, it permits people to identify themselves as courageous (as tragic figures also are heroes) and, in this instance, to define the SMT as culpable (e.g., Drakakis & Liebler, 1998). Constructing their plight in this way also may have been self-enhancing. In their telling, failure, which should have been avoidable, was being made inevitable by the senior managers, abrogating ex-Beta and ex-Gamma staff from a responsibility to act. Our findings thus support Beech’s (2000) recent investigation of narrative styles, which concludes that managers tend to assume a heroic narrative style, whereas workers are more inclined to employ a tragic plot form. Making Sense of Change

For both the SMT and other staff, their collective narratives were means of making sense of complicated historical and current events and of anticipating likely future scenarios. Our argument is that these narratives constituted one part of the socially constructed cognitive apparatus by which individuals and groups coped with what they experienced as a high-load, high-complexity, and high-turbulence information environment (Huber & Daft, 1987). As we have constructed them, the groups’ narratives are consistent with empirical findings that people tend to attribute positive outcomes internally, as a result of their own actions, and negative outcomes to external agents and forces (e.g., Bettman & Weitz, 1983; Staw, 1980). The extent to which this behavior occurs as the result of cognitive information-processing effects (Miller & Ross, 1975), intentional impression management (Miller, 1978), or a motivation to protect self-esteem (Bradley, 1978) is contested. What is clear in our case, however, is that senior managers argued that problems were caused by outside agents, such as the Learning and Skills Council and commercially naive staff, and attributed successes to their own policy initiatives. In contrast, both ex-Beta and ex-Gamma staff suggested that although they were responsible for high-quality teaching and learning outcomes, problems relating to funding, bureaucratic procedure, and student quality were attributable elsewhere, namely to the SMT and other circumstances notionally beyond their control. The three groups’ narratives also framed their understandings of each other. The narratives related to us in interviews suggested that at Alpha, there were several very different social identities regulating the sociocognitive behavior of three distinct


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groups: the SMT and those associated with the premerger categories Beta and Gamma. Our findings support other evidence that mergers may lead to a loss of psychological attachment to the (merged) organization (Buono et al., 1985) and can bolster the link between the self and premerger identities (Haslam, 2001). In this case, processes of categorization, self-enhancement, and uncertainty reduction evidently had led to the self-perceptions and conduct of group members becoming both in-group and outgroup stereotypical and normative. Given that each group subjectively construed the others as very different from themselves, and their environment as difficult and resource constrained, it is perhaps unsurprising that relations between the groups had become competitive and discriminatory (Terry, 2001). It seems likely that the subjective belief structures of all three groups, which meant that each believed that it was stable and legitimate and should be accorded high status, had led to an intensification of intergroup conflict (Jost & Elsbach, 2001). As a result, although each group exhibited positive in-group attitudes, cohesion, and empathy, they had also developed extremely negative prototypical understandings of the others, which threatened the functioning of Alpha as a bureaucratic entity (Schopler & Insko, 1992). In addition, negative feedback in the form of poor government inspection reports, combined with confused internal working practices and a general recognition that the future of the college was in doubt, meant that Alpha had an “entitativity” problem. Entitativity refers to “the degree of having the nature of an entity, of having real existence” (D. T. Campbell, 1958, p. 17). The extent to which a merged organization is perceived as a single entity with a secure future is “of crucial importance for intergroup relations within . . . merged organizations” (Van Knippenberg & Van Leeuwen, 2001, p. 252). Although SMT members stressed the unitary nature of Alpha, they recognized that the college lacked coherent information, communication, and control systems and that job titles, terms, and conditions between the premerged groups were yet to be harmonized. Ex-members of Beta and Gamma said that they did not regard Alpha as a single entity, and these perceptions may have heightened intergroup biases (Van Knippenberg & Van Leeuwen, 2001) and further reduced psychological attachment to the merged college (Schweiger & Weber, 1989). Hegemony and Resistance

Our conception of organizations suggests that they are socially constructed locales in which individuals and groups are engaged in reciprocal but asymmetric relations of power (Humphreys & Brown, 2002a, 2002b; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). Group narratives are one “powerful form of talk” (Witten, 1993, p. 98) by which dominant groups seek to “impose their own monological and unitary perceptions of truth” (Rhodes, 2000, p. 227). Complementarily, the shared narratives of subordinate groups are a significant means by which they attempt to contest and resist the worldviews of their superiors. The sense-making and identity-defining narratives that groups evolve are power effects, complex outcomes of processes of subjugation and resistance (Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994) that variously extend, maintain, and undermine the hegemony of others (Foucault, 1977). Our conception of hegemony represents it as an imposition

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of beliefs and practices on one group by another, resulting in the active and spontaneous consent of the subordinate group to the views of those whose hegemonic understandings they accept (Clegg, 1989; Gramsci, 1971; Mumby & Stohl, 1991). The successful deployment of a hegemonic narrative thus constitutes an invisible prison to those who are subject to it, which restricts their ability to voice alternative accounts to define their existence (Foucault, 1977; Lyotard, 1984). In our case, the SMT sought to impose their diagnosis of the college’s ills, their prescriptions for remedial treatment, and their prognosis for the future on other staff. Their actions may thus be interpreted as an effort to “reify a particular social structure” (Rosen, 1985, p. 33) that privileged them, a structure whose success, if/when it was ultimately consensually understood to have been achieved, would legitimate in due course (Gagliardi, 1986). Yet their narrative was largely hegemonically ineffective, in part because it was countered by two equally well-developed staff narratives that provided different (and for them more attractive) modes of understanding. In fact, rather than affect the sense-making and identity-defining activities of the other groups, all three groups authored narrative understandings that inoculated them from the others’ viewpoints. For the senior managers, the fact that their hegemony was so effectively countered was experienced by them as problematic, not least because it restricted and slowed their ability to act. For both ex-Beta and ex-Gamma staff, their narratives (combined with physical acts) of resistance nevertheless arguably constituted a form of “psychic prison” that self-defeatingly undermined their capacity for positive action (Filby & Willmott, 1988; Morgan, 1997). Our case is suggestive not only of how difficult it is for elites to dominate in merger situations, in which entrenched social groups have considerable resources to promote, protect, and contest the articulations of others, but of the problems faced by subordinate groups seeking to author self-narratives that provide scope for growth and development.

IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH AND PRACTICE In this article, we have sought to analyze how groups in organizations make sense of major change events. Drawing on the literatures on narrative, sense making, and intergroup relations, we have provided an illustration of how groups in one organization developed understandings of a merger event and its implications for their working lives. Our case has implications for both future research and the practice of change management. From the perspective we have adopted, organizations are social constructions that are built through networks of conversations (Ford, 1999) or dialogues (Rhodes, 2000) that maintain and objectify reality for participants (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Change, on this reading, is not a simple matter of external events affecting participants’ interpretive schemes (e.g., Gioia & Thomas, 1996; Ranson, Hinings, & Greenwood, 1980). Rather, what we label as change in organizations refers to change in participants’ understandings. At both the individual and group levels, these understandings tend often to be expressed in narratives, as “narrative is a primary cognitive instru-


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ment” (Mink, 1978, p. 131) and one important means “by which human experience is made meaningful” (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 1). Different groups contest their frequently distinctive narrative understandings through processes of social interaction, processually constituting their organization. Change occurs with alterations in the stories that people tell, and it is these stories that demand increased attention from scholars. We believe that interpretive research, reflexively conceived and conducted, is required if we are to tell more context-sensitive “tales of the field” (Van Maanen, 1988) in our efforts to better understand how notions of change are evoked and contested in work organizations. Finally, our work has at least two sets of implications for the practice of change management. First, it focuses attention on the idea that the “successful” leadership of change fundamentally requires the molding and manipulating of people’s understandings rather than of material things. In particular, our article suggests that senior managers need to work at providing other groups with a narrative that contains explanations for current events and future projections. These accounts need to both serve the needs of management and be sufficiently plausible for others such that they do not feel motivated to question them. There is some preliminary research evidence that in those situations in which senior managers ignore or attempt to coerce others into accepting their position, dissatisfaction with the organization increases, and its capacity to function effectively is impaired (e.g., Humphreys & Brown, 2002a, 2002b). There are, as yet, few general prescriptions for senior managers regarding precisely how they can impose their hegemony most effectively. Indeed, it seems likely that the unique features of each sociohistorical context in which managers attempt to manage change in a programmed way will mean that meaningful advice, other than broad injunctions to be sensitive to issues of history and context, will prove extremely difficult to formulate. Second, our analysis suggests that in merger situations, considerable attention should be paid to issues of intergroup relations (Alderfer, 1987). In general terms, the degree to which people feel threatened by merger can be lessened by senior managers if they demonstrate an active involvement with, and concern for, employees, for example by being seen to communicate unambiguously and allowing employees to have some influence over events (Gaertner, Bachman, Dovidio, & Banker, 2001). More specifically, negative intergroup attitudes can be reduced through contact between members of the different groups (Allport, 1954), as long as the contact is of a kind that promotes intimacy (Cook, 1962) and is institutionally supported (Brewer & Miller, 1984). Although existing social identities need to be respected and preserved (Hewstone & Brown, 1986), recategorization, that is, the invocation of a superordinate category (the merged organization) with which members can identify, also needs to be explicitly encouraged, for instance through the introduction of goals that require cooperative interaction and strong interpersonal ties (Gaertner, Mann, Dovidio, Murrell, & Pomare, 1990). A policy of decategorization, which encourages the sharing of personal information between members of different groups and thus makes personal rather than social identities salient, also may inhibit in-group bias (Brewer & Miller, 1984). Use of these strategies can reduce intergroup tensions and make mergers more likely to succeed.

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NOTES 1. “Alpha,” “Beta,” and “Gamma” are all pseudonyms. 2. The Further Education Funding Council, until 2001, was the organization through which the government funded and exercised control over the sector. That year, it was replaced by the Learning and Skills Council.

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