Technological determinism and discursive closure in organizational mergers

In times of organizational change leaders often tell stories that justify publicly the directions in which organizations move. Such stories are always political in nature and often reflect the motives of the storyteller. We observe how leaders in high-tech organizations use the story of technological determinism in organizational settings as a discursive practice through which they invoke the “inevitability” of technology to justify managerial decisions to the public. Rather than taking ownership of certain actions, managers are able to use this story to claim that certain organizational changes are inevitable, and to eliminate alternative stories. We examine this strategy as it appears in the public discourse produced during two mergers in the high-tech and telecommunications industries occurring from 1998 to 2002: US West and Qwest, and AOL and TimeWarner. Finally, we demonstrate that the story of technological determinism performs discursive closure around each merger. Organizational change, often contested, is likely to be even more so in the case of a corporate merger. As Howard and Geist (1995) remark, “The decision to merge provides a dramatic enactment of organizational change” (p. 110). Although merging may affect organizational processes and discourse on all levels, we are concerned with the discourse that, seeking to make sense of the merger, answers the questions “Why should we change?” and “What should we change to?”. Following Alvesson (1990), and Cheney and Christensen (2001), our concern is with issue management, or the ways in which this discourse positions the new organization within its environment and eliminates controversy and oppositional discourses. We suggest that this discursive positioning can occur through storytelling. While stories certainly make sense of changes (Weick, 1993), in doing so they suppress certain conflicts and mask multiple interpretations of the situation (Martin, 1990), and perform what Deetz (1992) has called “discursive closure”. Through elimination of alternative conceptualizations, storytelling discourses deliver political, social, and economic advantages to certain organizational ideologies over others (Deetz, 1992). One of the challenges faced by merging organizations is that of crafting and then communicating a new corporate identity (Gancel et al., 2002; Ralls and Webb, 1999). Although traditional research has focused on the practices of internal communication surrounding a merger (Larkin and Larkin, 1994; Schweiger and Denisi, 1991), recent The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister www.emeraldinsight.com/0953-4814.htm Technological determinism