Journal of Organizational Change ManagementEmerald Article: Discursive manifestations of contradictions in organizational change efforts: A methodological frameworkYrjö Engeström, Annalisa Sannino

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To cite this document: Yrjö Engeström, Annalisa Sannino, (2011),"Discursive manifestations of contradictions in organizational change efforts: A methodological framework", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 24 Iss: 3 pp. 368 - 387

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Discursive manifestationsof contradictions in

organizational change effortsA methodological framework

Yrjo Engestrom and Annalisa SanninoUniversity of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new methodological framework for theidentification and analysis of different types of discursive manifestations of contradictions.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on the dialectical tradition ofcultural-historical activity theory. The methodological framework is developed by means ofanalyzing the entire transcribed corpus of the discourse conducted in a change laboratory interventionconsisting of eight sessions and altogether 189,398 words.

Findings – Four types of discursive manifestations, namely dilemmas, conflicts, critical conflicts, anddouble binds, could be effectively identified in the data. Specific linguistic cues were a useful first level ofapproaching the different types of manifestations. Critical conflicts and double binds were found to beparticularly effective lenses on systemic contradictions.

Research limitations/implications – The paper points to the need for theoretical and conceptualrigor in studies using the notion of contradiction. Further empirical testing of the framework is neededand may lead to more refined or alternative categories.

Practical implications – Dynamics of different organizational change interventions may beeffectively analyzed and compared with the help of the framework.

Originality/value – The paper presents an original, empirically-tested methodological frameworkthat may be a valuable resource for analyzes of contradictions driving organizational change.

Keywords Intervention, Organizational change, Organizational conflict, Change management

Paper type Research paper

IntroductionContradictions are often mentioned as a significant factor behind organizational change.However, the meaning of the term contradiction is commonly left vague and ambiguous.Almost any tension or aggravated problem seems to qualify as a contradiction.Similarly, related terms such as paradox, conflict, dilemma and double bind tend to bebundled together or used interchangeably in an ad hoc manner. Such ambiguity andlooseness of conceptualization are detrimental to research. There is a risk thatcontradiction becomes another fashionable catchword with little theoretical content andanalytical power.

A recent study by Osono et al. (2008) is a case in point. It uses the terms contradiction,opposite, paradox, and dichotomy synonymously, without definining or explicatingtheoretically any of them. It ends up listing no less than ten “powerful contradictions”that Toyota is embracing as keys to its business success. Most of these tencontradictions are formulated in a way which makes it difficult to see what actually is thecore of the contradiction. For example, the first contradiction is “Know where reality

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Journal of Organizational ChangeManagementVol. 24 No. 3, 2011pp. 368-387q Emerald Group Publishing Limited0953-4814DOI 10.1108/09534811111132758

stands to take on impossibly high goals,” and the second contradiction is “Conduct smallinterim experiments to realize the occasional big jump.” Contradiction generally refers topropositions which assert apparently incompatible or opposite things – “A and not-A”.There is nothing foundationally opposite or incompatible between knowing reality andtaking on impossibly high goals, or between conducting small interim experiments andrealizing occasional big jumps. To the contrary, common sense tells that to achieve highgoals one needs to know the reality. And the interplay between small interim steps andbig jumps is the very message of standard theories of punctuated equilibrium inorganizational change. In other words, what Osono, Shimizu and Takeuchi callcontradictions look more like commonsensical recommendations of taking into accountand keeping together different priorities simultaneously.

A paper by Smith and Tushman (2005) on managing strategic contradictions mayserve as another example. The authors declare that “recognizing and embracingcontradictions leads to increased success” (Smith and Tushman, 2005, p. 527). Theyexplain the emergence of contradictions as follows:

The act of organizing creates distinctions of roles and responsibilities, which must becoordinated and integrated to achieve an overall goal. These distinctions result incontradictions within firms (Smith and Tushman, 2005, p. 526).

Notable in this explanation, as in many other treatments of organizationalcontradictions, is its ahistorical character. Contradictions are depicted as a universalconsequence of organizing. They seem to have nothing to do with the socioeconomicformation, capitalism, within which the organizations operate.

Smith and Tushman use the term “inconsistency” as an equivalent to contradiction.Their argument is that managers must learn to “balance inconsistencies”. To do this,managers need to acquire paradoxical frames “embracing ‘both/and’ logic, rather thanan ‘either/or’ logic” (Smith and Tushman, 2005, p. 527). Again, contradiction is reducedto the existence of competing priorities, and the recommended way to deal withcontradictions is to combine or balance the different priorities.

In sum, in current organizational literature and research, contradictions tend to bewatered down in three interrelated ways. First, they are not theoretically defined; insteadthey are equated with a number of other terms, the exact meaning of which is left vague.Second, contradictions are depicted ahistorically, as a universal feature of organizations,without embedding them in the socioeconomic formation of capitalism. Third,contradictions are commonly presented merely as constellations of competing prioritieswhich need to be combined or balanced.

In this paper, we develop a systematic conceptual framework that tries at least partlyto overcome this unsatisfactory state of affairs. This requires, first of all, that we defineour own understanding of contradiction. A crucial point is that contradictions cannot beobserved directly; they can only be identified through their manifestations. This leads usto characterize four important types of discursive manifestations of contradictions.Taken together, these four kinds of manifestations may be used as a framework toanalyze sequences of change efforts in organizations.

In sum, we will address the following questions in this paper: how well does ourproposed framework of discursive manifestations work in the analysis of data from anorganizational change intervention? What kinds of dynamics can be found among thefour kinds of discursive manifestations in a longitudinal intervention? How might

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the framework of discursive manifestations serve as a tool for identifying andelaborating organizational contradictions?

We will use this framework to analyze data from a change laboratory interventionconducted in 2008-2009 with the managers of the municipal home care for the elderly inthe City of Helsinki in Finland. The analysis will proceed in three steps. First, we willanalyze rudimentary linguistic cues that potentially express discursive manifestationsof contradictions. Second, we will identify and analyze the actual manifestations in ourdata corpus. Third, we will bring the discursive findings together with a historicalperspective on home care in Helsinki in order to identify and elaborate on organizationalcontradictions in this system of activity. We will conclude the paper with a discussion ofthe relevance and limitations of our findings.

Dialectical contradictionsIn formal logic, the principle of non-contradiction states that “if a given proposition istrue then its denial cannot be true”. As Wilde (1989, p. 102) points out, dialecticalcontradictions are different from the contradictions described in the principle ofnon-contradiction. Dialectics deals with systems in movement through time. Theelements of a dialectical contradiction relate to each other within the moving structure,historically. A dialectical contradiction refers to a unity of opposites, opposite forces ortendencies within such a moving system:

I would argue that in analyzes of systems in motion the principle of non-contradiction losesits prominence, in which case a tighter definition of the principle is needed [. . .]. Rather thansimply “two contradictory propositions cannot both be true”, we have to add “when referringto any given moment of time and when used in the same sense” (Wilde, 1989, p. 104).

At least since Benson’s (1977) and Heydebrand’s (1977) early papers, many if not mostof the authors in organizational studies who use the notion of contradiction eitherexplicitly or implicitly refer to dialectical contradictions. If they would stick tothe formal-logical understanding, the very idea of “embracing contradictions” would beuttter nonsense. Thus, uses of the notion of contradiction in organizational literatureneed to be assessed within a dialectical framework.

Our own concept of contradiction stems from Marxist dialectics (Marx, 1990).In Marxist theorizing, dialectics in general and the nature of contradictions in particularhave been debated topics both within Soviet Union and in the West (Althusser, 1969;Il’enkov, 1977; Kolakowski, 1971; Luckacs, 1972; Sartre, 1991; for an interesting attemptat a new synthesis, see Jameson (2010). For the purposes of this paper, we focus on a fewbroadly shared foundational ideas rather than on the differences and disagreementsbetween scholars. From this point of view, the three common misunderstandings ofcontradiction pointed out in the preceding section may be corrected as follows.

First, contradiction is a foundational philosophical concept that should not beequated with paradox, tension, inconsistency, conflict, dilemma or double bind. Many ofthe terms misused as equiavalents of contradiction may better be understood asmanifestations of contradictions. In order to be used fruitfully, these terms need to betheoretically defined on their own and set in relation to the concept of contradiction.In this paper, we will do this with the terms dilemma, conflict, critical conflict, anddouble bind.

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Second, contradictions are historical and must be traced in their real historicaldevelopment. The primary contradiction of capitalism resides in every commodity,between its use value and (exchange) value:

The formation of the capitalist organism emerges as the process of growing tension betweenthe two poles of the original category. The transformation of the opposites of value anduse-value into each other becomes ever more complicated (Il’enkov, 1982, p. 276).

The primary contradiction generates secondary contradictions specific to the particularconditions of the given activity or institution (Giddens, 1984; on primary and secondarycontradictions).

Third, developmentally significant contradictions cannot be effectively dealt withmerely by combining and balancing competing priorities. Seeing contradiction as aninconsistency or competition between separate forces or priorities corresponds to thegeneral mechanistic tendency to replace inner systemic contradiction with outer, externaloppositions. In organizational literature, “empirical work on structural contradictionshas tended to focus on contests of logics among segments of the organizational field”(Hargrave and Van de Ven, 2009, p. 123).

Focusing on inner contradiction requires that we analyze the concrete historicalsystem within which the contradiction takes shape; dealing only with externalcontradictions means escaping this crucial theoretical challenge. For analysis of innercontradictions at the level of organizations, we need a theoretical model of the systemic“anatomy” of organization. In our own work, situated within the dialectical tradition ofcultural-historical activity theory (Engestrom et al., 1999; Sannino et al., 2009), wefrequently use the theoretical lens of the model of a collective activity system (Engestrom,1987, p. 78), complemented and extended with models of multiple interconnected activitysystems (Engestrom, 2001, pp. 136 and 145).

Inner contradictions need to be creatively and often painfully resolved by working out aqualitatively new “thirdness”, something qualitatively different from a mere combinationor compromise between two competing forces. The notion of “thirdness” stems from Hegeland was coined by Peirce (1998) in his critical discussion of Hegel’s logic (Prenkert, 2010).In the present context, the idea of “thirdness” refers to the generation of novel mediatingmodels, concepts and patterns of activity that go beyond and transcend the availableopposing forces or options, pushing the system into a new phase of development.

As contradictions are historically emergent and systemic phenomena, in empiricalstudies we have no direct access to them. Contradictions must therefore be approachedthrough their manifestations. We may also treat manifestations as constructionsor articulations of contradictions; in other words, contradictions do not speak forthemselves, they become recognized when practitioners articulate and construct them inwords and actions (Hatch, 1997). However, contradictions cannot be constructedarbitrarily. Their material and historical power is not reducible to situationalarticulations and subjective experiences.

In this paper, we will focus on discursive manifestations of contradictions.In organizational life in general, and in change efforts and interventions in particular,contradictions are to an important extent manifested and constructed in patterns of talkand discursive action with the help of which actors try to make sense of, deal withand transform or resolve their contradictions (Engestrom, 1999; Taylor and Van Every,2011).

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Discursive manifestations of contradictionsIn her book on talk in teams, Donellon (1996) interprets her discourse data with the help ofa notion of organizational contradictions. Work teams were told to “make significant –and simultaneous – achievements on dimensions that are typically in tension with oneanother” (Donellon, 1996, p. 216). Typically teams were asked to cut costs, improvequality, and speed up the product development cycle, all at the same time. Suchcharacterization of organizational contradictions seems quite realistic. UnfortunatelyDonnelon’s analysis of discourse data and her discussion of contradictions remaindisconnected. In other words, the categories she uses in the analysis of talk (identification,interdependence, power differentiation, social distance, conflict management tactics, andnegotiation process) are neither theoretically nor empirically clearly connected to theconceptualization of contradictions as they emerge in the communications between teammembers analyzed within the framework of discourse analysis.

Hatch (1997) analyzes managers’ ironically humorous remarks as constructions ofcontradiction. She point out that “ironic remarks taken in context allow us to pinpointaspects of experience that are constructed as contradictory by those producing orresponding to the remark” (Hatch, 1997, p. 278). Irony as well as humor in general as indeedinteresting as potential manifestations and constructions of contradiction. Hatch’sexclusive focus on these forms of talk only is, however, quite restrictive. In order to graspand exploit contradictions in an organization in a systematic way, more comprehensivemethodological frameworks are needed.

Fairhurst et al. (2002) analyze the discursive construction of contradictions ininterviews with employees who experienced successive downsizings of theirorganization. Significantly, the authors point out that the primary contradiction ofcapitalism is that between profits and people. Secondary contradictions are “anyopposing ideas, principles, or actions that are made bipolar, negating, or incompatible”and that “depend on or emerge as a result of primary contradictions” (Fairhurst et al.,2002, p. 507). In their data analysis, the authors set out identify secondary contradictionsmanifested in the talk of the the informants. In other words, they do not look for specifickinds of manifestations of contradictions but for the contradictions themselves. As aresult, they identify five secondary conradictions. These are useful in the interpretationand explanation of events, strategies and reactions that occurred in the specificorganization studied by the authors. However, it is questionable to what extent these fivesecondary contradictions are useful as resources for further studies in organizationalcontradictions in other settings. The very idea of identifying contradictions directly intalk seems methodologically problematic. Besides, a rather vague emphasis on bipolaropposites, the authors do not give a convincing account of their criteria for selectingsegments of talk that would qualify as contradictions. In this respect, Hatch’s study ismethodologically more interesting as it uses irony as a theoretically defined criterion forfinding constructions of contradictions. As Hatch (1997, p. 277) points out, “irony iscreated and shared when the words spoken by an ironist are intended and/or understoodto mean the opposite of what is literally stated.”

Within the framework of activity theory, Engestrom (2008) analyzed discursivedisturbances in the work of a television production team specialized in live broadcasts ofprofessional bowling contests. Disturbances were defined as deviations from the normalscripted course of events in the work process, interpreted as symptoms or manifestationsof inner contradictions of the activity system in question. A total of 330 discursive

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disturbances were identified in the data. The production team used a variety of ways todeal with the disturbances, but not a single instance of open conflict or innovationattempt was found. This led to the assumption that the team was effectively masking orsuppressing any signs of conflict and any attempts to initiate change in the standardprocedures of production. To explore this further, the analysis was focused on four“critical disturbances” which “at least momentarily reveal substantive disagreements,fears, or other strong indications of systemic contradictions” (Engestrom, 2008, p. 38).The analysis led to the conclusion that a pressing inner contradiction was developingbetween the expected higher ratings and revenues (demanded new outcome of theactivity) on the one hand and the existing stable instruments and rules of the activity(“There is only one way to cover bowling, and what we do is right”) on the other hand.

In the present paper, we will go beyond the relatively vague notion of disturbance andapply a more systematic and differentiated conceptual framework to identify discursivemanifestations of contradictions. In particular, the rather preliminary idea of criticaldisturbances is here theoretically and empirically sharpened to allow a more rigorousanalysis.

We will discuss four types of discursive manifestations of contradictions, namelydilemmas, conflicts, critical conflicts, and double binds. This is not meant to be anexhaustive categorization of manifestations. However, the notions of tension, paradox,opposition, dichotomy, opposite, inconsistency and disturbance seem so general anddiffuse that we do not find them sufficiently useful in an attempt to develop a robustframework for empirical analysis. On the other hand, Hatch’s notions of humor andirony imply very specific modalities of expression and emotion. It might eventuallybe feasible to build a complementary analytical framework based on such categories asfor example anger, humor, fear, enthusiasm, etc. Such an analytical framework would toa large degree have to build on theories and concepts from literary analysis (Booth, 1975)and possibly also on recent work on emotions in oganizations (Barsade and Gibson,2007).

“Dilemmas” are traditionally studied in social psychology as means forunderstanding processes of decision making, moral reasoning, social representationsand ideologies. Dilemmas characterize our everyday thinking and conduct. As Billig et al.(1988) point out, dilemmas do not refer to the agonized mental states of thedecision-maker who is faced with a difficult choice but to aspects of socially sharedbeliefs which give rise to the dilemmatic thinking of individuals. Contrary themes ofdiscourse “represent the materials through which people can argue and think about theirlives” (Billig et al., 1988, p. 8). Dilemmas are are ideologically created and products ofhistory; thus, “they can hardly be universal” (Billig et al., 1988, p. 149). A dilemma is anexpression or exchange of incompatible evaluations, either between people or within thediscourse of a single person. It is commonly expressed in the form of hedges andhesitations, such as “on the one hand[. . .] on the other hand” and “yes, but”. In ongoingdiscourse, a dilemma is typically reproduced rather than resolved, often with the help ofdenial or reformulation.

“Conflicts” take the form of resistance, disagreement, argument and criticism.As De Dreu and Van de Vliert (1997, p. 1) define it:

[. . .] conflict occurs when an individual or a group feels negatively affcted by anotherindividual or group, for example because of a perceived divergence of interests, or because ofanother’s incompatible behaviour.

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Another definition states that “people are in conflict when the actions of one person areinterfering, obstructing or in some other way making another’s behaviour less effective”(Tjosvold, 1997, p. 24). In verbal conflict, “participants oppose the utterances, actions,or selves of one another in successive turns at talk” (Vuchinich, 1990, p. 118). Commonexpressions of conflict in discourse are “no”, “I disagree”, and “this is not true”(Grimshaw, 1990). In particular, the negation, denial or rejection expressed with a “no” isa powerful potential indication of a conflict (Litowitz, 1997). The resolution of conflictstypically happens by means of finding a compromise or submitting to authority ormajority. Vuchinich (1990) found five formats of conflict termination, namelysubmission, dominant third-party intervention, compromise, stand-off, and withdrawal.

“Critical conflicts” are situations in which people face inner doubts that paralyze themin front of contradictory motives unsolvable by the subject alone. As Vasilyuk (1988,p. 199) points out, a critical conflict is “a situation of impossibility or unintelligibility.”In social interaction, critical conflicts typically involve feelings of being violated orguilty, often silenced (Sannino, 2008). The discursive working out of critical conflictsinvolves personal, emotionally and morally charged accounts that have narrativestructure and frequently employ strong metaphors. The resolution of critical conflictstakes the form of finding new personal sense and negotiating a new meaning for the intialsituation. Such a resolution often takes the shape of personal liberation or emancipation.

“Double binds” (Bateson, 1972; Sluzki and Ransom, 1976) are processes in which actorsrepeatedly face pressing and equally unacceptable alternatives in their activity system,with seemingly no way out. Such repetitive processes tend to get aggravated, to the pointof reaching crises with unpredictable and “explosive” consequences. In discourse, doublebinds are typically expressed first by means of rhetorical questions indicating a cul-de-sac,a pressing need to do something and, at the same time, a perceived impossibility of action.This impossibility is commonly expressed with the help of desperate rhetorical questionsof the type “What can we do?” A double bind is typically a situation which cannot beresolved by an individual alone. Thus, a discursive elaboration of a double bind typicallyinvolves an attempt at a transition from the individual “I” to the collective “we”, such as“we must”, “we have to,” loaded with a sense of urgency. The resolution of a double bindrequires practical transformative and collective action that goes beyond words but is oftenaccompanied with expressions such as “let us do that”, “we will make it.”

Key characteristics of the four kinds of discursive manifestations of contradictionsmay now be summed up (Table I).

The distinction between contradictions, their discursive manifestations, andlinguistic cues indicating possible presence of those manifestations has importantmethodological implications. We may think of the analysis of contradictions indiscourse data as similar to the peeling of an onion (Figure 1). The outer layer of the onionconsists of rudimentary linguistic cues, that is, simple expressions such as “but”and“no”, or somewhat more vague but still relatively straightforward forms like narrativesseasoned with metaphors and rhetorical questions. Going through and identifying themmay help us to locate potential discursive manifestations. For example, clusters of “buts”may lead us to dilemmas, and clusters of “nos” may lead us to conflicts.

This does not mean that rudimentary linguistic cues correspond mechanically tospecific manifestations. Clearly a “but” can express many other things besides adilemma, and a rhetorical question is certainly not always a sign of a double bind.In other words, we should expect that a corpus of discourse data contains many more

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rudimentary linguistic cues than actual discursive manifestations of contradictions. Stillthe relative ease of detecting rudimentary linguistic cues, for example, with the help ofan appropriate computer program, makes their analysis a useful preliminary step.

Furthermore, a high frequency or heavy concentration of some cues in some parts ofthe discourse may in itself be an indication of something important that is not fullycaptured by looking only at the actual manifestations. For example, when the discourseis heavily saturated by “nos” although not so many of those “nos” are directly connectedexplicit conflicts, we may ask whether there might be a strong conflictual undercurrentwhich is for some reason largely kept implicit and under surface. This example indicatesthat the connection between contradictions and rudimentary linguistic cues may notalways be mediated by explicit discursive manifestations. In other words, a careful look

Manifestation Features Linguistic cues

Double bind Facing pressing and equally unacceptablealternatives in an activity system:Resolution: practical transformation(going beyond words)

“we”, “us”, “we must”, “we have to”pressing rhetorical questions, expressionsof helplessness“let us do that”, “we will make it”

Criticalconflict

Facing contradictory motives in socialinteraction, feeling violated or guiltyResolution: finding new personal senseand negotiating a new meaning

Personal, emotional, moral accountsnarrative structure, vivid metaphors“I now realize that[. . .]”

Conflict Arguing, criticizingResolution: finding a compromise,submitting to authority or majority

“no”, “I disagree”, “this is not true”“yes”, “this I can accept”

Dilemma Expression or exchange of incompatibleevaluationsResolution: denial, reformulation

“on the one hand[. . .] on the other hand”;“yes, but”“I didn’t mean that”, “I actually meant”

Table I.Types of discursive

manifestationsof contradictions

Figure 1.Methodological onion

for analyzingcontraditions in discourse

data

Rudimentary linguistic cues

Discursivemanifestations

Contradictions

No

But

Double bind

Rhetorical question

Narrative,metaphor

Dilemma Criticalconflict

Conflict

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at the linguistic cues may be worthwhile in and for itself, not only as an instrument forthe purpose of locating possible manifestations.

Intervention and dataTo demonstrate and examine the potential of this conceptual framework, we will analyzedata from an organizational change intervention conducted in 2008 and 2009 with themanagement group of municipal home care for the elderly in the City of Helsinki. TheHelsinki municipal home care employs over 1,700 home care workers, mainly practicalnurses and nurses. It supports elderly people who live at home with various kinds ofmedical problems. The home care managers are struggling to redefine their service so asto meet such demanding problems as increasing loneliness and social exclusion, loss ofphysical mobility, and dementia (Nummijoki and Engestrom, 2009). The challenge iscomplicated by the fact that the population of Finland is aging very rapidly and it isincreasingly difficult to recruit and retain competent home care workers.

The vision of home care in the City of Helsinki is “to enable the client to lead a good lifesafely at home despite his/her illnesses and impairment of functional ability.” Themodels that in practice dominate encounters between home care workers and theirelderly clients do not fit well with this holistic service vision. When the home care workerencounters her or his elderly client, time is spent mainly to help the client in bathingand/or toileting, feeding, giving medications to the client, and informing the client aboutother possible services. Fulfilling these tasks usually takes up all the time of the homecare worker, leaving no opportunity for her or him to focus on the clients’ broader needsand risks. The growing problems of loneliness, immobility and dementia are typicallyleft in the shadow of the necessary minimum tasks. In addition, the delivery of home carehas been fragmented. Care is delivered into the old person’s home by several actors.In addition to the home care worker, there are employees from external servicesincluding meals-on-wheels, supermarket home delivery, dry cleaning and housekeepingwho come and go to and from the old person’s residence. It is the responsibility of thehome care worker to coordinate the external services. In practice, there is hardly anycommunication between the services.

For the home care managers, the challenge was to work out a new, future-orientedconcept for home care as a whole. This effort was made in 2008-2009 by means of achange laboratory intervention (Engestrom, 2007). The change laboratory is a methodfor developing work practices by the practitioners in dialogue and debate amongthemselves, with their management, with their clients, and – not the least – with theinterventionist researchers. It facilitates both intensive, deep transformations andcontinuous incremental improvement. The idea is to arrange on the shopfloor a room orspace in which there is a rich set of representational tools available for analysis ofdisturbances and for constructing new models of the work activity. The changelaboratory in Helsinki home care consisted of eight intensive sessions. In these sessions,the top manager, six area managers, two or three expert members of the managementgroup, and a personnel representative went through a cycle of collaborative analysis anddesign. In addition, a group of four researcher-interventionists participated in thesessions as facilitators. The first seven sessions took place between April and October2008. The last session was conducted in March, 2009. In the process, the participantsconstructed of a new type of document, the service palette, a 40-page overviewof the services offered to home care clients. The palette is meant to serve as shared basis

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of negotiations between managers and supervisors, outside service providers, frontlinehome care workers, and the elderly clients.

The change laboratory sessions began with the viewing and dicussion of a series ofvideotaped interview excerpts and service encounters from the field. These led to apreliminary attempt to analyze the situation in historical and systemic terms, and toexamine critically recent solutions implemented in Sweden and the UK. Starting with thethird session, the work was focused on the design of the service palette, first its generalstructure, then its substantive contents and textual formulations. In the eighth session,the participants discussed the experiences gained in testing the service palette inpractice.

The change laboratory sessions were videotaped and the conversations weretranscribed by a professional transcriber. The length of the eighth sessions ranged 236 to116 minutes. From the entire corpus of conversation data contains altogether189,398 words. The excerpts used in this paper were translated from Finnish to Englishby the first author.

Linguistic cues for discursive manifestations of contradictionsTo identify rudimentary linguistic cues in a large corpus of discourse, the cues need to besimple and unambiguous, preferably so that they can be picked up by a computerprogram, even with the help of the “find” function of MS Word. To accomplish this,we limited our search for linguistic cues to a single type of cue for each type of discursivemanifestation of contradictions (bearing in mind that the correspondence between thecues and the manifestations is only probabilistic).

For dilemmas, we identified the occurrences of the word “but” (in Finnish, “mutta”).For conflits, we identified the occurrences of the word “no” (in Finnish, “ei”); wepurposefully excluded all other linguistic forms of the basic negative. These two cueswere easy to pick up with the help of the “find” function.

For critical conflicts, we could not determine a rudimentary linquistic cue comparableto “but” and “no”. Critical conflicts are by their very nature personal, and they areexpressed by means of emotionally and morally charged accounts. The commonlinguistic characteristic of such accounts is their narrative structure accompanied byvivid metaphors. There seems to be no simple way to identify them, so we did it bycareful reading of the corpus.

For double binds, we identified the occurences of rhetorical questions, that is,questions expressed without expecting an answer. We had instructed the transcriber topay attention to any kinds of questions in the data and to mark them with a questionmark. Thus, we first picked up all question marks in the corpus, then read the associatedutterances carefully to identify rhetorical questions. In terms of simplicity, thisprocedure was between that used for “but” and “no” on the one hand and that used forcues of critical conflicts on the other hand.

The quantitative results of this step of our analysis are presented in Table II. In thetable, the numbers in parentheses represent the average frequency of the given cue perminute in the data.

Several initial observations may be made on the basis of Table II. First of all, the “but”expressions are consistently fairly frequent across the sessions. At the end of theprocess, the relative frequency of these potential indicators of dilemma is the sameas in the first meeting. This may imply that not only the analysis of the problematic

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situation but also the design of the new artifact, the service palette, was inherently adilemmatic process saturated with doubts and hesitations.

Second, the frequency of negative “no” expressions is consistently high through thesessions, more than twice the relative frequency of the “but” expressions. Perhaps,surprisingly, these potential indicators of conflict are more prevalent in the last threesessions than in the first three sessions. This calls for particular attention to the natureof conflicts in the next step of the analysis.

Third, narrative structures peppered with vivid metaphors are extremely rare in thedata. This may indicate that this type of management context, combined with theFinnish cultural heritage of not showing one’s emotions, does not favor the explicationand elaboration of critical conflicts.

Finally, the frequency of rhetorical questions is quite high in the first two sessions butdrops radically after that, to practically disappear in the last three sessions. This mayindicate a presence of aggravated double binds at the beginning of the process.Conceivably the double binds may have been set aside, perhaps even partiallytranscended or resolved, in the ensuing design efforts oriented toward the generation ofa new pattern of practice.

These tentative observations may be solidified or refuted in the next step of theanalysis in which we look closely at the actual discursive manifestations ofcontradictions.

Dilemmas and conflictsIn our analysis of the discursive manifestations of contradictions, we will first examinetheir quantitative distribution (Table III). We will then move into the qualitativecharacteristics of the first two types of manifestations, namely dilemmas and conflicts.

A comparison between Tables II and III shows that while dilemmas and conflicts areindeed more frequent than critical conflicts and double binds, the relationship betweenmanifestations and cues is very different between the first two and the last twocategories. We identified a total of 38 dilemmas and 41 conflicts in our data. Thesenumbers represent 3.3 and 1.6 percent of the numbers of “bits” and “nos”, respectively.In other words, the linguistic cues are extremely frequent compared to the correspondingmanifestations. This relationship changes completely when we move to critical conflicts.Every time we identified a cue, we also indentified a critical conflict – a one-to-one

Lab session Length (min) “But” “No”Narrative and

metaphorRhetoricalquestion

(1) April 9, 2008 228 161 (0.7) 409 (1.8) 0 (0) 20 (0.09)(2) April 16, 2008 236 136 (0.5) 412 (1.8) 1 18 (0.08)(3) June 2, 2008 190 170 (0.9) 257 (1.3) 0 (0) 3 (0.02)(4) June 5, 2008 218 233 (1.1) 432 (2.0) 1 4 (0.02)(5) August 27, 2008 164 158 (1.0) 300 (1.8) 0 (0) 2 (0.01)(6) September 3, 2008 116 93 (0.8) 247 (2.1) 0 (0) 0 (0)(7) October 1, 2008 128 81 (0.6) 280 (2.2) 0 (0) 0 (0)(8) March 24, 2009 155 112 (0.7) 306 (2.0) 0 (0) 1Total 1,144 2,643 2 48

Table II.Rudimentary linguisticcues potentiallyindicating discursivemanifestations ofcontradictions

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correspondence. In the case of double binds, roughly every second cue (46.8 percent) ledalso to a discursive manifestation.

This difference does not necessarily mean that “but” and “no” are poor cues.Dilemmas and conflicts are very commonly associated with whole clusters of several“buts” and “nos”, so a one-to-one correspondence is not to expected. Such “atom-like”clustering cues seem all but impossible to find for critical conflicts, and the clusteringtendency is weak in rhetorical questions as cues of double binds. Moreover, as we havestated above, high prevalences of “buts” and “nos” may also indicate suppressed orimplicit dilemmas and conflicts which cannot be identified as explicit expressions.

The occurrence of dilemmas in our data shows a temporal dynamic not revealed by the“buts” as linguistic cues. In the first two sessions, dilemmas were common (nineoccurrences in both sessions), then their frequency drops and stays relatively consistent.This indicates that the first two sessions, devoted to analysis of the situation, were after allthe most dilemmatic ones. When the process moved to design, the frequency of dilemmasdecreased, although the design process itself remained dilemmatic to the very end.

The occurrence of conflicts confirms the observation tentatively made on the basis ofthe cues: this intervention was all through a conflictual process. Interestingly, enough,the highest frequency of conflicts occurred in the sixth session, when the design processwas coming toward its conclusion. The conflictual nature of the process did not,however, translate into critical conflicts. In other words, the conflicts remained almostexclusively relatively impersonal.

One of the repeated dilemmas in our data had to do with the tension between theproclaimed services officially available on the one hand and the actualy limited or missingcapacity to provide those services on the other hand. The following excerpt demonstrateshow a dilemma often emerged in an exchange between two or more interlocutors. It alsodemonstrates the fluidity of the line between a dilemma and a conflict:

Home care manager 4: On the one hand, we promise, or we aim at, that our physician will seeeach one of our regular clients once a year. We do promise [. . .] And it is specifically forassessment of the client’s health situation that the physician goes to visit the home [. . .]Home care manager 8: [. . .] Only 30 percent of the clients are visited.Home care manager 4: Yes, yes, but the goal is still that [. . .] [Session 5].

Another recurring dilemma was that between the official principle of equally andcomprehensively competent home care workforce on the one hand and the realizationthat many of the home care workers were in fact not competent to conduct acomprehensive assessment of the client’s situation on the other hand:

Session Length (inch) Dilemmas Conflicts Critical conflicts Double binds

1 228 9 7 0 52 236 9 5 1 93 190 1 1 0 24 218 4 5 1 35 164 5 6 0 26 116 3 9 0 07 128 3 3 0 08 155 4 5 0 1Total 38 41 2 22

Table III.Distribution of discursive

manifestationsof contradictions

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Home care manager 6: But I think that here we see what I took up earlier, should it be experts,competent evaluators or planners, who takes them [clients] in into home care. And they thinkthrough the whole palette and package, and whatever things starting with a p they need tothink about. And then they distribute the work tasks into the frontline teams, to executors,ready and prepared.Researcher: Well [. . .]Home care manager 6: But, well [. . .]Researcher: Yes.Home care manager 6: [. . .] but then we are in [. . .]Researcher: [. . .] Then we are in two levels, steeply.Home care manager 6: The we are in two levels, but is it necessarily [. . .]Researcher: Is it bad or is it necessary? [Session 2].

In this excerpt, home care manager 6 used four times the word “but”. The excerpt alsocontains rhetorical questions. Since the rhetorical questions in this case seemed toexpress hesitation and doubt rather than impossibility and helplessness, we categorizedthis excerpt as dilemma, not as a double bind.

There were three kinds of conflicts in our data, namely:

(1) those between the standpoint of a home care manager and the perceivedstandpoint of the researchers;

(2) those between the standpoints of two or more home care managers; and

(3) those between the standpoint of a home care manager and an the perceivedstandpoint of authorized text, rule or practice.

Here, is an example of the first kind of conflict:

Home care manager 4: But I would like to ask, don’t you [the researchers] really see that we dohave a service palette? We have rationalized [. . .] these, what I’ve been talking about, we haveorganized as support services the meals and house cleanings and laundry tickets. And all thathas been submitted to competitive bidding, all the terms and conditions have been kind ofproduced for the workers. For me this if anything is a service palette. [. . .] So I am somewhatbothered by the fact that you sort of start from point zero, as if we did not have anything here.This has brought me to the threshold of irritation [Session 1].

The above excerpt exemplifies conflict as resistance toward the intervention, as defenseof the already existing practice. The next excerpt, representing the second kind ofconflict, shows how conflict emerges in the opposite direction, as critique of the statusquo. Not accidentally, the critical utterance of home care manager 5 is saturated by noless than five “nots” (four of them were expressed in Finnish as “no”):

Home care manager 3: In my opinion it [the tool for getting the client committed to his or herown care] is the service and care plan, which is also signed by the client. It also lists theagreed-upon tasks. And it is what we try to get the client committed to.Home care manager 8: Yes, it is simple enough.Researcher: Does it work at the moment?Home care manager 3: Well, it is the only thing that works.Researcher: Mmm, yes, your turn, please.Home caremanager 5:Well, I disagree a bit. The clients do not know what they sign. We are notable to open up for them what it means what they sign. So I am not quite [. . .] Well, surely someof us can, but not all. We take a paper to the client and tell her that she has to sign it, and she

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signs it and we leave it in the folder, and [. . .] In fact they do not know what they have signed[Session 4].

The third kind of conflict appeared in our data several times as critique or rejection of atext that the home care managers themselves had collectively produced in previoussessions:

Home care manager 3: And then, this “according to a physician’s order”. Well, a physiciancertainly does not command home care [Session 6].

In this case, home care manager 3 was not epressing a direct conflict between herselfand physicians. She expressed a conflict between what she herself with her colleagueshad written and what she now saw as a negative implication of the text.

Critical conflicts and the primary contradiction in home careAs pointed out above, we found only two critical conflicts in our entire data. Here, is thefirst one:

Home care manager 5: Last week I participated in a home visit to a client who is, who lies inbed and receives 80 hours a week personal assistant service, plus another similar number ofhours of our services. And his needs are just enormous. Even what he now gets is not nearlysufficient. You know the case.Home care manager 8: Yes, I have also visited his home.Home care manager 5: And the situation has been terribly aggravated for a long time.Negotiations have been conducted for a long time, I’ve been involved. And now we were there,the chief physician, and the social worker, and me, and the responsible home care nurse, andthe home care supervisor, and we are sitting around his bed, thinking about this client’s [. . .]quite concretely, what does he want and what do we have, what do we have to give. And asI am myself competent in the substance [of nursing], having been there in the field, I have aterrible agony, about having to be a sort of a policeman and gatekeeper: “no we cannot”, “nowe cannot”, “no we cannot”, “unfortunately this will be terminated”, “and this [. . .] and this,and this, and this”. We cannot provide. I don’ know. This client’s need is completely absurd,what he would want. And I understand it. That is somehow it. And our workers are in panicbecause they cannot respond to the need. And they have to say “no, we cannot” all the time,and they feel awfully bad about it. They want me to come and say that “no, we cannot”, sothat they get someone to take the load off their shoulders, that they cannot meet the need.I mean, it is somehow extremely difficult to bring this up, I mean the client’s need and ourneed, and what is actually the object. I at least can ponder, what is our object [Session 2].

Home care manager 5’s account was a narrative seasoned with the vivid metaphor ofpoliceman and gatekeeper. It also operated with reported speech, in the form of therepeated “No, we cannot”. The personal agony stems from the fact that the manager hasalso nursing competence and understands substantively the medical need of the client,yet as a maneger and “gatekeeper” she cannot accept the need and offer the services theclient would want. Thus, the conflict is not between the manager and the client, it isbetween the manager as nurse and the manager as gatekeeper.

The other critical conflict in our data (Session 4) had to do with a somewhat similartension. A home care manager told that she had helped an old lady on the street andmentioned to her the possibility of home care. The old lady responded that she does not havemoney to pay for such services. The manager recounted that “a red lamp” was lit in hermind and she took up the possibility of getting services free of charge. “But I could not tellher any criteria or anything, or the minimum amount of Euros one may earn to be eligible.”

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The two critical conflicts are both related to the primary contradiction between usevalue and exchange value in home care work. The foundational purpose and use value ofhome care is help. Old people who suffer from illnesses but try to keep living at homeneed help. On the other hand, municipal home care services cost money and budgets aretight. In other words, the exchange value is measured in negative terms, as costs tobe contained and as fees or payments to be collected to cover part of the costs. A homecare manager is torn between two opposite but mutually dependent motives: to providehelp and to contain costs. This primary contradiction is experienced as personal conflictbetween one’s role as a helper and one’s role as a bureaucrat.

From double binds to secondary contradictionsAmong the double binds in our data, one core theme stood out above the others. Thiswas the theme of reduction and fragmentation of services to separate minimum choresvs the principle of holistic assessment, care and activation of the client. Eight out of the22 double binds were directly focused on this. Here, are three examples:

Home care manager 7: Somehow I think we are not taking comprehensive responsibility. It isnot clear. I mean, comprehensive responsibility for the situation of the client. Our serviceshave been split into small pieces with all the support services. I am not criticizing them, wewouldn’t have managed without putting together those support services. But this has createda new need for us. To satisfy the client and to handle the totality in a manageable way withregard to our resources and the client’s needs, who has the responsibility for that? [Session 2].

Home care manager 8: On the one hand, it [fragmentation of services] takes away motivationfrom our workers, that they don’t have a holistic grasp of the patient, the client. And on theother hand, it is not possible for us because we have so little time per client, so that doesn’tmake it possible for us to activate the client. So we function inefficiently in my opinion.I cannot say how we’d function better. I cannot say anything but that we’d need more time.But how? [Session 2].

Home care manager 9: But in practice, home care culminates in the physiological functions ofMaslow’s hierarchy, hunger, cold, thirst, medications, wiping the ass and toilet functions.Because those are things which cannot necessarily be taken care of by others than trained andexperienced personnel, people who can endure all that. So what remains outside Maslow’sphysiological functions is stuff that we easily outsource. Because that can be handled and doneby someone else. So our resources go solely into maintaining life, oxygen [. . .] so that oxygenflows and the heart beats. That’s our domain. We restrict our resources into a really small circle.Or is it resources, or is our set of values wrong? Why don’t we instead outsource the sick, andthen home services would focus on something different? Well, now we have directed ourselvesthis way, focusing on illness. We do not focus on health and resources but on care of the illness.And this makes home care workers anxious because they would like to provide good care. Andwhat would reward them would be to take the client out. Not so much that the wound is takencare of. That is not so rewarding as enabling the old lady to go out, or enabling her to dosomething herself. Or allowing her to chat about her own things for half an hour and having thepatience to listen. That’s what we all need, that someone listens [Session 2].

Moreover, additional three double binds were focused on the closely related theme ofmaking clients passive vs finding, supporting and activating their own resources. Here,is an example of this theme:

Home care manager 2: We make the people passive there, when we serve them. I’m not sayingthat they are served helpless, but we are not giving them an opportunity during our visit

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to do the things they could still do. And from my point of view, this little by little pushes thepeople a bit too early toward their death. They are not so frail as we imagine [Session 2].

There were two other themes represented by two double binds each, namely the need forcoordination and overview of services vs the prevalence of low-level tasks of “dirtywork” in the current practice, and the need to get the client committed to her care vsexisting tools that exclude the client from joint negotiation. The remaining seven doublebinds were scattered into seven different themes.

The core theme of the double binds indicates that secondary contradictions in currenthome care stem from an object split into two poles. The home care pole consists offragmented tasks of routine maintenance of the client’s life – the physiological “lowestlevel of Maslow’s hirarchy” often referred to by the home care managers. The client’spole consists of the old person’s life resources and threats. These translate into simplebut foundational needs, such as going out or being listened to, as mentioned for exampleby home care manager 9 above. These life needs generally do not fit into the list ofnecessary tasks to be peformed by the home care worker. In everyday practice, there is adeep gap and constant struggle between the to poles of the object. This contradiction isindicated with the help of the horizontal lightning-shaped arrow in Figure 2.

The two poles of the object are mediated by actions. In the discourse of the home caremanagers, three distinct spheres of action may be identified. The sphere of execution ofstandard chores dominates home care work. It tends to marginalize and exclude the twoother spheres. The first one of these marginalized spheres of action is the coordination ofservices, the handling of “the totality in a manageable way” in the words of home caremanger 7 above. The other one is the activation of clients’ resources. As homecare manager 2 says above, “we are not giving them an opportunity during our visit to dothe things they could still do.” These contradictions between the spheres of action aredepicted with the help of vertical lightnings in Figure 2.

What gives rise to these contradictions? Cost containment seems to be the primesource, as expressed by the top manager of home care:

Top manager of home care: It is so that we just have to handle it. Surely taxpayers demandthat we keep things in order and under control. With the tax money, we do first what the lawrequires. [. . .] This is a bit difficult. The content of our work becomes taking care of dirtytasks. And the nicer stuff is given to others who then find it easier to recruit personnel. So, ifwe more and more concentrate on the tuning and maintenance of basic vital functions, thenwe hand over to others those other things [. . .] [Session 2].

In this and other double binds, pressures toward outsourcing and privatization weretaken up as forces that threaten to fragment and flatten the services even further. In herstatement, the top manager actually spelled out the historical tendency of the neoliberal

Figure 2.Secondary contradictions

in home care

Instruments Instruments

Rules RulesCommunity CommunityDivisionof labor

Divisionof labor

Object

Home care:

Tasks of routinemaintenance of

life

Liferesources

and threats

Client:

Activation of client'sresources

Execution of standardchores

Coordination ofservices

Subject:home care

worker

Subject:Oldperson

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new public management that has strongly influenced the City of Helsinki over the pastten years. In the very last session of the change laboratory, this contested historicalperspective was taken up again:

Home care manager 2: Somehow I would expect from ourselves now a discussion. We talk allthe time about privatization and buying services. We should somehow now define ourstandpoint. I myself have a notorious case, and we have plenty of examples that what we buyfrom private providers is not purchasing the whole. We must do a part of it all the timeourselves. [. . .] We live as if in a bubble. Our politicians live in a bubble: privatize, privatize,privatize. [. . .]

Home care manager 9: The conservative party would attack us if we said that we won’toutsource and buy services. They always remind us how much cheaper it is. [. . .] Wewouldn’t get any broad support if we said that we won’t do it, that buying is out of question.Home care manager 2: Certainly we won’t get support, but we can discuss and make visiblethat it does not work this way. And how terribly expensive it actually is.Home care manager 2: Well, it is approximately two to three times more expensive than ourown production [Session 8].

The contradictions shown in Figure 2 are not natural forces. They are societallyproduced and can be influenced by collective human actions. This is indeed what homecare manager 2 realized in the above excerpt.

ConclusionAt the beginning of this paper, we asked three questions: How well does our proposedframework of discursive manifestations work in the analysis of data from anorganizational change intervention? What kinds of dynamics can be found among thefour kinds of discursive manifestations in a longitudinal intervention? How might theframework of discursive manifestations serve as a tool for identifying and elaboratingorganizational contradictions?

The framework shown in Table I and Figure 1 worked well in the analysis of ourcorpus. The obvious next step is to conduct comparative analyzes between multipleChange Laboratories or similar organizational change interventions. Especially, therudimentary linguistic cues, the outermost layer of the methodological onion (Figure 1),may take a quite different shape if a particular social language (Bakhtin, 1982)dominates in an organization.

In this article, we have barely started to uncover some of the dynamics of thediscursive manifestations in a longitudinal intervention. In our case, the frequencies ofdilemmas and double binds were relatively high in the early sessions of the interventionand went down in the later sessions. This implies that the contradictions in this activitysystem were quite mature, if not aggravated, so that they could be made explicit from thevery beginning. The ensuing design work aimed at producing a partial solution inthe form of the service palette did not eliminate the contradictions but focused theparticipants’ attention to construction rather than analysis.

Overall, analyzes of the dynamic movement and evolution of different types ofmanifestations and their various combinations or strings over time will benefit from theuse and testing of theoretical models of organizational transformation. Within activitytheory, the theory of the stepwise cycle of expansive learning (Engestrom, 1987;Engestrom et al., 2007; Engestrom and Sannino, 2010) is an obvious framework for suchanalyzes.

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We used critical conflicts and double binds as windows into systemic contradictionsin the activity system under scrutiny. In this case, the two critical conflicts shedlight on the nature of the primary contradiction. The double binds were decisive for theformulation of our hypothesis about the secondary contradictions (Figure 2). We do notclaim that these connections can be found more generally in other similar analyzes. But itwill certainly be interesting to explore the possibility further.

In organizational change efforts, transitions from dilemmas and conflicts to criticalconflicts and double binds may lead to the articulation and historical specification ofthe contradictions actors are facing. Of course, a discursive identification of systemiccontradictions is in itself only a hypothesis, to be tested and revised in practicaltransformative actions. Concrete studies on agentic uses and resolution efforts ofcontradictions in organizational change efforts are sorely needed.

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