JULIA BALOGUN. University of Bath ... potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilize antagonistsâ. (Snow et al., 1988: ...
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STRATEGIC CHANGE: A DYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE ON FRAMING STRATEGIC INITIATIVES WINSTON KWON Lancaster University Management School Lancaster, LA1 4YX, United Kingdom JULIA BALOGUN University of Bath EERO VAARA Hanken School of Economics ABSTRACT Through a longitudinal 21-year qualitative study we analyze how framing is used by protagonists and antagonists to influence the development of the change initiatives. We explore how a critical level of support is built across coalitions of competing interests to mobilize collective action towards change. INTRODUCTION It is broadly accepted that strategic change requires senior managers and other organizational members to engage in sensemaking to redefine their conception of their competitive environment and their organization, and that the new meanings that result determine people’s responses (Balogun et al., 2004; Bartunek, 1984; Gioia et al., 1991; Sonenshein, 2010). An essential part of how managers shape the meaning construction of others is thus framing (Corneilissen et al., 2014; Kaplan, 2008). Yet the political dynamics of meaning making are still poorly understood (Maitlis et al., 2010). Scholars still lack understanding of how managers engage in meaning construction in the face of internal diversity of views in order to build the critical level of support to mobilize collective action towards change. We build on the emergent stream of literature on framing and strategy making by exploring this issue. Our empirical study follows the 21-year development of a UK business school from inception to recognition as an established player. The case is a revealing one because it provides a rare opportunity to explore how strategic change occurs by identifying and studying the series of initiatives (hereafter referred to as ‘strategic initiatives’) put in place by successive Deans, many of which were contentious for other stakeholders in the school, and how support and opposition to these initiatives developed leading to both change and reversals of change through time. Our analysis of the framing activity across the successive strategic initiatives reveals a myriad of ways in which frames are used by protagonists and antagonists to influence the development of change. We develop a model that accounts for how strategic initiatives lead to change in organizations through the creation of collective action frames, frames that “mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilize antagonists” (Snow et al., 1988: 198).
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A FRAMING PERSPECTIVE ON ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE Strategic change has been studied from multiple perspectives. In particular, the sensemaking perspective has elucidated the central role of meaning in change initiatives. (Balogun et al., 2004, 2005; Gioia et al., 1991; Labianca et al., 2000; Maitlis, 2005; Rouleau, 2005; Sonenshein, 2010; Walsh et al., 2011). A limitation of extant sensemaking research, however, is that it has not yet fully accounted for the role of political activities and power relations within strategic change processes (Maitlis et al., 2010; Weick et al., 2005). We adopt a framing perspective to study how managers engage in meaning construction within the processes of meaning making and construction, in order to build consensus to mobilize collective action for change, from inception through to implementation. Framing enables a shift from conceptualizing organizations through the lens of hierarchy, to conceptualizing organizations as composed of competing stakeholder interest groups, encouraging us to recognize the fragmentation that exists within an organization. Although political activity is often driven by self-interest (Narayanan et al., 1982), sensemaking tends to explain perceptions of self-interest as primarily mediated by environmental perceptions and often unconscious processes of social interaction rather than explicit political activity. By demonstrating how meanings are adapted to those stakeholder’s perceived cultural and structural opportunities and constraints in order to gain legitimacy and support (Meyer et al., 2010), framing allows us to explain how individuals from both dominant and less dominant groups can construct meanings that resonate with others. The resurgence of interest in the concepts of frames and framing has led to a plethora of definitions and conceptual confusion (Corneilissen & Werner, 2014). This diverse body of research can be differentiated between cognitive and interactional paradigms (Dewulf et al., 2009). The former sees frames as mental schemas that help us interpret incoming information and classify it into existing perceptions of reality. In the latter, which we follow in this study, interpretive frames are alignments of meanings that form a collective schemata of interpretation (Goffman, 1974), that are negotiated through interactions to determine how a situation should be understood (Bateson, 1955). The interactional paradigm has been further developed within the SMO literature through the concept of collective action frame which is a specific type of interpretive frame that is constructed to make the external environment understandable through condensing the meaning of events and occurrences in ways that are “intended to mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilize antagonists” (Snow & Benford, 1988: 198). To explain how consensus becomes action, Snow and Benford (1988) conceptualized the framing process as consisting of three core framing tasks: diagnostic framing, prognostic framing; and motivational framing. Diagnostic framing is a diagnosis of an aspect of social life as problematic and requiring change. Prognostic framing is a proposed solution to a diagnosed problem that involves specific prescriptive action. Motivational framing is a rationale or ‘call to arms’ for actually engaging in that prescriptive action. While diagnostic and prognostic framing tasks are about achieving consensus for mobilization, the motivational framing task aims to provide the final impetus for participation in situations where diagnostic and prognostic framings are not adequate to create the critical mass of support required to implement an initiative. A strength of the framing approach is that it conceptually bridges the gap between sensemaking and political action. The process of framing is often contested through counterframing (Ryan, 1991), in which a frame is developed to directly refute, rebut or neutralize the logic of part or all of a collective action frame (Benford, 1987). Thus in this study we use framing to ask the following question: How do senior managers build consensus across multiple stakeholder groups to
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mobilize the development and implementation of strategic change within and between specific change initiatives? CASE AND FINDINGS This is a qualitative case study of a business school within a UK research-led university, here referred to as The Business School (TBS) and Research University (RU). Over the past three decades, TBS has undergone significant change, beginning as a relatively loosely connected group of departments within RU, to its’ current status as a prestigious faculty that generates considerable revenue for RU from student fees and research funding. We followed a series of five strategic change initiatives over a 21-year period (1985-2006), also coinciding with a period of rapid environmental change in terms of regulatory policy, revenue models and market competition within the UK higher education sector. The data used in this study comes from indepth interviews and internal archive documents as well as documents and papers from the public domain. The interviews consisted of 158 semi-structured interviews of 125 respondents, representing a broad cross-section of stakeholders. For reasons of brevity, we only provide a detailed written account of World Class, the first initiative. This first initiative (see Table 1 for summary) represented a struggle between two different aspirations for RU and TBS, namely the American ‘Ivy League’ versus the British ‘Oxbridge’ institutional archetypes. In 1985, a group of professors, anticipating significant change in the UK higher educational sector, appointed an ambitious and transformational candidate, who was British but spent his career in America, as the 3rd VC of RU. The processual dynamic of framing and counter framing for World Class is summarized in Table 1. Three types of arrow notations (i.e. , and ) are used to indicate respectively where contests over issues resulted in reversals ( ) requiring further prognostic or motivational re-framings ( ) until the debate effectively ended ( ) through agreement, acquiescence, exhaustion or outright coercion. Thus collective action frames did not usually develop in a linear manner, but involved continuous framing, counterframing and reframing and going back to previous diagnostic, prognostic and motivational frames. ---------------------Table 1 about here ----------------------Our analysis suggests that strategic initiatives must pass through three sequential phases of framings in order to construct a collective action frame that resonates with supporters to make strategic change possible. The sequential nature of this process does not imply that initiatives develop in a linear fashion however. As our analysis shows, this process is characterized by fits and starts through forward movement as well as reversals through framing contests. Collective action frames are constructed through iterations of dispute, negotiation and compromise. A model of this dynamic of framing is summarized in Figure 1. ----------------------Figure 1 about here ------------------------
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The diagnostic phase consists of an explicit or implicit framings of a scenario consisting of a threat (i.e. what will happen if we do not take action) and an opportunity (i.e. what could be if we take action). The prognostic phase builds upon the previous phase by providing framings of a detailed description of a concrete ‘plan of action’ of what must be done to realize the opportunity and avoid the threat. The motivational phase brings the initiative to the implementation phase by providing organizational actors with further reasons for upholding commitments to the plan of action as agreed upon or acquiesced to in the prognostic phase. Reversals between phases were also common, particularly when motivational framings failed to recruit adequate people and resources necessary for implementation. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION As our empirical analysis vividly illustrates, each strategic change initiative emerged in relation to problems and challenges of the status quo. In fact, this is the essence of diagnostic framing. Moreover, new change initiatives can be seen either as ways to re-invigorate change efforts that build upon previous ones or as reactions to oppose and roll back previous changes. Diagnostic frames do not emerge tabula rasa – rather they exist in a dialectical relationship with the previous collective action frames. Essential here is not only the framings themselves, but how they serve successive coalition-building and consensus-seeking efforts. Moreover, we found that successive initiatives exert cultural (e.g. norms and values) and structural (e.g. processes and practices) changes, which in turn enable or constrain possibilities for future initiatives by ‘revising’ aspects of the organization’s interpretive frame. When viewed longitudinally across successive strategic initiatives, we see that strategic change is also an ongoing struggle between stakeholder factions who contend over the strategic direction of the organization. Power relations can shift between groups as certain factions gain ascendancy for extended periods of time. Opponents “lie in wait” for their opportunity to recover their organizational position, often through counter-initiatives constructed from alliances of aggrieved and disadvantaged stakeholder groups. New collective action frames are necessary because old collective action frames, as shown in our description of the progression of framing between phases, become increasingly structured. Thus new initiatives and counter-initiatives provide supporters with a flexibility to create new collective action frames with less ‘baggage‘ and therefore fewer constraints in taking advantage of opportunities of the moment to recruit potential supporters. We also found that the progression or reversal of the development of collective action frames are linked with opportunism; in particular, unexpected events often provide an opportunity to promote or reinforce the resonance of particular framings. These events by themselves however are not always enough to affect progression and reversal, but rather a combination of opportunity and preparation. In other words, reversals and progressions occur when supporters or opponents of an initiative, who are sufficiently prepared, encounter an unexpected event that is congruent with their particular stance, they will often ‘play it up‘ to justify their position and reveal contradictions in opposing frames to progress or reverse an initiative. Thus through our comparative analysis of progression and reversal across the five initiatives of TBS, we see that regardless of how ‘critical’ these unexpected events appear in retrospect, their impact upon change initiatives are in fact the result of process of meaning construction. The pacing of strategic initiatives is often beyond the control of organizational actors. Rather this is determined by the inherently unpredictable timing of unexpected events,
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which are opportunistically seized upon by supporters or opponents to force forward or backward movement between the phases of a collective action frame. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Altogether, this analysis makes three contributions to our understanding of strategic change. As we discuss above, our process model also reveals how: i) resistance to change tends to manifest itself as opposition to specific actions rather than the initiative as a whole, and ii) how this resistance can be overcome by paring away objections through tactical concessions in the form of prognostic and motivational framings. Although narrative studies have explored the sequential quality of meanings attributed to initiatives (Brown & Humphreys, 2003), the framing perspective is able to pick up on the nuanced pattern of interplay between the construction of and negotiation between dominant and alternative meanings. In exploring this process of meaning negotiation across multiple initiatives, we also enable a better picture of the multi-vocal nature of change (Buchanan & Dawson, 2007) with our focus on coalitions and understanding how competing narratives are resolved through framing and counterframing actions. It does so by: elucidating the crucial role of framing within and across strategic change initiatives; helping us to understand the role of power and politics in sensemaking; and contributing to research on framing in social movement organizations. First, our analysis contributes to research on strategic change by elucidating the role of framing within these processes of strategic change. Framing practices deployed by supporters of strategic initiatives to develop resonance for their collective action frame with the multiple stakeholders they need to mobilize toward their preferred solutions vary over time. We find that certain coalitions of support and resistance are formed and then reformed across initiatives. We identified a pattern of initiatives meant to affect change and also subsequent counter-initiatives intended to reverse or stall the changes affected by the previous initiative. Support and opposition consisting of coalitions of interest, can shift and reformulate. Second, the SMO approach to framing allows us a better understanding of micro-politics in sensemaking research (Maitlis et al., 2010). While sensemaking places emphasis on concepts such as the discursive competence of organizational actors (Rouleau et al., 2011), a framing perspective enables us to explore the role of actions involved in the deployment of discursive skills. Finally, in viewing organizations as coalitions of stakeholders rather than through the lens of hierarchy, this study helps us to recognize the fragmentation that characterizes stakeholder groups (Kaplan, 2008), allowing for a micro-political view of how coalitions that are built upon meanings in line with interests (Fiss et al., 2005) can coalesce and splinter as organizations progress from the recognition of the need for change to the actual implementation of actions to affect that change. From a perspective of organization as composed of often unstable coalitions of stakeholders, we see how the support of stakeholder groups can neither be assumed nor taken for granted, and is constantly subject to negotiation – explaining why framing activity is crucial throughout the lifecycle of initiatives and must be repeated in each and every new initiative. REFERENCES AVAILABLE FROM AUTHORS
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Diagnostic Framing TBS must transform itself into ‘world class’ business school (VC)
Prognostic CounterFraming framing Renovate TBS facilities (Dean) Develop Interco for Interco is a sell-out executive mkt of academic values (Dean & some TBS (Depts) faculty) Develop an MBA We lack the to raise profile resources to deliver (Dean and some the MBA and TBS faculty) Interco (Depts)
Motivational framing
Counterframing
Interco will be monitored and moderated (Dean) Recruit specialist staff and create a ‘cash economy’ system (Dean) the MBA to be taught entirely by school staff (Dean) the MBA will be ‘small but beautiful’ flagship programme (Dean & some TBS faculty)
Staffing plan will sideline departments (Depts) The MBA is ‘vocational’ (Depts)
Implications Interco successfully launched but resistance towards the MBA continues, creating issues, which eventually precipitate the profile initiative. The 1st phase of expansion was completed in 1996. Table 1 – World Class (1985-1995)
Figure 1 – The three phases of framing a strategic initiative
