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The Textualizing Functions of Writing for Organizational Change

University of Denver, danders5{at}du.edu

This article examines the role of writing during an attempt at organizational change. Through the investigation of conversational and writing practices used by members of a project team at a high-tech corporation, the article argues that writing has a textualizing function. In the context of members’work toward organizational change, writing served as a textualizing practice that documented, fixed, and stabilized ideas developed in conversation. Written forms that create general truths out of individual experiences help both to define the organizational change to come and to create the change as an object to be distributed and consumed by organizational members. The results of the study describe how writing helps to stabilize organizational reality to enable change to occur.

Key Words: organizational change • writing • discourse • textualization

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