Christiane Demers

Merger and acquisition announcements as corporate wedding narratives

This study uses a discursive perspective to analyze the way in which top managers legitimize change in official announcements. It focuses on the foundations of legitimacy invoked using both Webers typology, based on modes of authority, and the conventionalist model, stressing the constitutive frameworks that justify collective action. We use a narrative approach to examine four texts intended for employees in the context of mergers‐acquisitions in the Canadian financial services sector. We look at those announcements as wedding narratives. A framework based on the canonical schema and Greimass actantial model was applied to the texts. The analysis reveals that these narrations of corporate marriages, while describing the same event, give distinct versions of it. These distinctions bring out differences between firms in terms of the foundations of legitimacy invoked, the contribution of the various actors, and the narrative style favoured.

From Hand Drawings to Computer Visuals: Confronting Situated and Institutionalized Practices in an Architecture Firm

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in practice-based studies of organizational change. Most of this research does not explicitly consider the tension between situated and sociohistorical practices that are central to the transformation of work practices associated with an episode of change. In our study of the impact of off-the-shelf three-dimensional rendering software on the daily practice of architects in a small, highly regarded firm, we explore the incompatibility between these different levels of practice. By building on the concept of contradiction drawn from activity theory, we identify patterns of challenges, reenactments, and enactments through which situated change simultaneously reproduces and questions institutionalized practices.

Modes of design tools: sociomaterial dynamics of a horticultural project

ABSTRACT Our study of sociomaterial practices investigates design tools by drawing on activity theory. This framework examines how interactions among organisational members as well as with their material environment shapes and are shaped by past interactional patterns. The empirical investigation of a horticultural project allows us to build on activity theory’s concept of tool to develop three modes to characterise sociomaterial dynamics supporting design work. We present the projective, authoritative, and instructional modes through which ideas are concretised, legitimised, and operationalised in concrete settings.