Curtis Chan (Boston College Carroll School of Management)

Date: 

Wednesday, December 8, 2021, 4:00pm to 5:30pm

Location: 

WJH 1550

Discursive Unraveling and the Cracks in Control: A Legitimated but Ambiguous Expression of “Impact” at a Management Consulting Firm

Organizations increasingly utilize legitimated but ambiguous expressions (e.g., “impact,” “diversity,” “authenticity,” “fit”) to attain a variety of vital organizational goals. In particular, organizations and their managers might seek to deploy such expressions to gain and maintain normative control—alignment of members’ hearts and minds to the organization’s interests. Extant research suggests that interpretive ambiguity is often strategic for resonating with a wide range of audiences and that the perceived legitimacy of language is beneficial for organizational members’ loyalty. Yet, when a particular expression is simultaneously ambiguous and legitimated, how it is deployed and experienced within an organization may yield different dynamics, potentially even leading to situations where normative control is lost rather than maintained. How, then, can a legitimated and ambiguous discourse deployed in an organization enable loss of normative control over members? To answer this question, I draw on data from a two-year ethnographic case study of a management consulting firm. I find that managers legitimated and ambiguated the expression of having “impact” at the firm. Many members, for their part, experienced the “impact” expression through broad resonance and anticipation. Yet, they also came to turn the expression back on the firm and use it to assess for themselves whether they felt their work had “impact” or not, with many parsing the ambiguity of the legitimated term in ways that negatively appraised the firm’s “impact”. Many of these divergent members exited the firm in disillusionment, sending waves of unrest through the firm. Hence, for many, the expression of “impact” discursively unraveled, as various threads of the legitimated but ambiguous expression were pulled apart into rationales for their exit. This study shows the cracks in normative control that may emerge from discursive interactions in the workplace around a legitimated but ambiguous expression, seeking to contribute to scholarship on control, legitimacy, and ambiguity in organizations.