Organizational Change Within Morally Ambiguous Contexts: A Case Study of Conflicting Postmerger Discourses
Based on a case study of a merger between organizations working with youth in trouble, this article analyzes the parallel success and failure discourses representing management and staff’s conflicting views about the organizational change. The symbolic core of these conflicting discourses was the transformation of a group home’s kitchen to food services for the merged organizations. For management, this transformation signified one of the best and most visible outcomes of the merger in terms of efficiency; for staff, it provided the clearest evidence of the harm caused by the merger in terms of providing a caring environment for youth. These discourses are analyzed in relation to two conflicting organizational identities championed by management and staff. It is argued that such contested organizational changes provide opportunities for open discussions of the dilemmas faced by human service organizations within their morally ambiguous contexts. Ethical organizational leadership entails the facilitation of such dialogue rather than ignoring the connectivity between internal and external ambiguities and enforcing the managerial rationale for organizational change.