The Continuity–Change Duality in Narrative Texts of Organizational Identity*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
abstract This paper focuses on how continuity and change are managed discursively in narrative texts of organizational identity and thus helps move forward the discussion about persistence and change in organizational identity. The study reports on the content, context and authorial elements of the evolving narrative composed by a Canadian bank's senior managers. The analysis indicates that the discursive strategies employed by organizational authors to establish confluence (or simultaneous continuity and change) include the selective reporting of elements from the past, present and future, the juxtaposition of the ‘modern and attractive’ with the ‘outdated and undesirable’, the persistent use of expansive labels that allow the addition and subtraction of meanings attached to the labels, and the importation of selected themes from the wider macro‐discourses. In keeping with the view that organizations are plurivocal, evolving narratives of the organization in the business press are also presented. These narratives contribute themes that are at times concordant with senior managers’ accounts and thus confirm the value of the changes in identity elaborated by management; at other times, press accounts are discordant with senior managers’ narratives and provide alternative evaluations of the changes. The paper concludes with reflections on the indeterminacy of both organizational identity – for the texts that constitute it remain open to multiple readings and to subsequent re‐writing that continually destabilize it – and the narrative research enterprise that falls short of providing comprehensive and incontrovertible accounts of the voices that constitute organizations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".