I n this paper, I explore both management and non-management literature using,
Handy (1993) and Hammer and Champy (1995), amongst others, and critique these
approaches with symbolic interactionism and actor network theory. One of the principal
emphases, providing the paper’s plan is the notion of Latour’s (1993, 2005) ‘actor
network theory’ and its contribution to understanding the conflicting dilemmas posed
when managers in four private sector organisations introduced new forms of working
practices to change their organisational cultures. The second part of the paper discusses
the complex processes involved in cultural changes using the data from my field
work on 4 organisations in the United Kingdom that have recently been “reengineered”,
as a limited number of organisations undergo fundamental changes to their
management and organisational systems at any given moment in time. The importance
of language and levels of discourse in understanding respondents’ interview statements
and stories are explored so as to deepen insights into the dynamic richness of organisational
cultural change and gain understanding of some of the conflicts and tensions
when managers, who rely heavily on Hammer and Champy’s (1995) and their followers’
“reengineering” rhetoric introduce organisational changes in a top-down, autocratic
and totalising manner
