Narratives of change and collaboration: The role of professional and organizational identities in shaping school improvement plans

Abstract

This article discusses the results of two studies of how schools make sense of changes and collaborative work at a historical moment that some might deem critical for both institutional and personal identities. Our interpretive analyses pinpoint the crucial role that both organizational and personal narratives play when interwoven in the process of making sense of externally designed proposals for change, which seem to be embedded in discourses that wholeheartedly celebrate innovation and collaboration as purveyors of social progress and transformation. By underlining the way in which the subjective, organizational, and social orders relate to each other to (re)make sense of the world, our research also illustrates the relationship between narratives of change and counter-narratives, and how they can be developed as both transformative and conservative discursive practices. Implications are also studied in relation to the usefulness of critical discourse analysis for organizational studies and the operationalization of this research approach.