Nonprofit organizations face an increasing expectation to be more business-like. Although scholars have theoretically explored this phenomenon and studied its influence in various contexts, there has been little empirical examination of the ways in which nonprofit practitioners themselves describe and make sense of their organizations and their work as business-like. Specifically, scholars have not explored the ways in which nonprofit practitioners communicatively reconcile the inherent tensions between being business-like and the pursuit of a social mission. Based on findings from an eight-month ethnographic field study of a US nonprofit organization, this article describes the sophisticated ways in which nonprofit practitioners understand, define and negotiate the need to be business-like within the nonprofit context and the central role of communication in that process. Additionally, critical assessment of these findings reveals the political qualities of talking about nonprofit organizing as being business-like, leading to potential transformative redefinitions of the business-like imperative that acknowledge rather than suppress conflicts inherent in the practice of nonprofit organizing.

With an interest in organizing discourses and attention to issues of power, I reconsider the relationship between communication and organizational change to better understand why change fails and what we can do about it. Specifically, I argue change fails because talk of change often suppresses, rather than celebrates, the emergence of conflicting organizational meanings. Embracing a constitutive perspective of communication and the notion that organizations are tension-filled, political sites of meaning-making talk, I argue that change fails when local articulations of alternative organizing discourses are unable to permeate mutually reinforcing understandings of organization. Meaningful change is thus enabled by creating open discursive spaces for organizational participants to constitute new organizing discourses. I provide the findings of a critically inspired, qualitative study of organizational change at a college of art and design to illustrate how embracing a constitutive-political perspective of communication can reveal how discourse alignment and conflict suppression during conversations contribute to failing change practices. This contribution provides a critically sensitive, discursive perspective of why change fails and extends an invitation for organizational scholars and practitioners to consider how conflictual conversations about a variety of possible organizational futures might better enable sustained organizational-change practices.

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Embracing a meso-level approach to discourse and change, I examine relationships among organizational-level discourses in the days following a formal change announcement at an international data services organization. The findings of this study show how particular articulations of the future aligned with existing organizational meanings to constitute a discursive constellation that maintained – rather than changed – organizational meaning systems. These findings reimagine organizational control as a process of organizational-level discursive alignments that further naturalize organizational understandings by suppressing alternative ways to know an uncertain future. Conceptualizing organizational control in terms of meso-level discursive alignments has potential implications for both scholars and practitioners of organizational change by refocusing attention on the ways participants talk about change while remaining sensitive to how announcing change might enable discourses of ‘sameness’ rather than promote discourses of ‘change’

As organization and management scholars increasingly embrace organizations as social constructions, communication is more commonly recognized as the practice that creates, maintains, and changes organization. However, scholarship attending to organizational culture and identification often relies on unsophisticated perspectives of communication without much concern for power and the politics of language use. In this contribution, I review central ideas across four communicative perspectives for understanding and critiquing organization that complicate and reorient attention to organizational culture and identification. These perspectives direct attention toward meaning-making practices and social performances, the sociohistorical qualities of meaning and conflict suppression, tension-filled components of organization and the embodiment of meaning, and self-discipline and strategized self-subordination. Embracing the complexities offered in these communicative orientations, I invite scholars and practitioners to attend to responsive conversations about everyday experiences of organizational life to generate more mutually satisfying organizational cultures that celebrate diverse subjectivities at work.