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Manufacturing the Past: Loss and Absence in Organizational Change

Department of Management and Industrial Relations, University of Melbourne, Victoria

This paper describes different conceptions of the past presented in a retrospect ive analysis of organizational change. One day in 1993, an Australian subsidi ary of a United States manufacturing organization introduced changes includ ing product-based production teams, a three-shift factory operation, and employee redundancy packages. Eighteen months later, the teams were dis solved. In this paper, talk about change is interpreted through the concept of loss; loss as regret for what has been in the past, return to the past and loss of what might have been, loss as relief to move on to what can be in the future, and loss as release from constraints of the past. It is suggested that analysis of loss and absence can increase the complexity of representations of emotion in situations of organizational change, and that there are additional senses of loss which can supplement those associated with death and mourning. The association between loss and resistance is discussed, and a comparison is made between 'loss of' as a retrospective analytical frame and 'resistance to' as more prospective and modernist in orientation.

Key Words: Descriptors: organizational change • time • emotion • loss • resistance • retrospective analysis

Organization Studies, Vol. 18, No. 4, 623-654 (1997)
DOI: 10.1177/017084069701800404


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