On the Narrative Construction of Multinational Corporations: An Antenarrative Analysis of Legitimation and Resistance in a Cross-Border Merger

Eero Vaara () and Janne Tienari ()
Additional contact information
Eero Vaara: Hanken School of Economics, FI-00101 Helsinki, Finland; and Strategy and Organization Department, EMLYON Business School, 69132 Ecully, France
Janne Tienari: Aalto University School of Economics, 00076 Aalto, Finland

Organization Science, 2011, vol. 22, issue 2, 370-390

Abstract: Although extant research has highlighted the role of discourse in the cultural construction of organizations, there is a need to elucidate the use of narratives as central discursive resources in unfolding organizational change. Hence, the objective of this article is to develop a new kind of antenarrative approach for the cultural analysis of organizational change. We use merging multinational corporations (MNCs) as a case in point. Our empirical analysis focuses on a revelatory case: the financial services group Nordea, which was built by combining Swedish, Finnish, Danish, and Norwegian corporations. We distinguish three types of antenarrative that provided alternatives for making sense of the merger: globalist, nationalist, and regionalist (Nordic) antenarratives. We focus on how these antenarratives were mobilized in intentional organizational storytelling to legitimate or resist change: globalist storytelling as a means to legitimate the merger and to create MNC identity, nationalist storytelling to relegitimate national identities and interests, Nordic storytelling to create regional identity, and the critical use of the globalist storytelling to challenge the Nordic identity. We conclude that organizational storytelling is characterized by polyphonic, stylistic, chronotopic, and architectonic dialogisms and by a dynamic between centering and decentering forces. This paper contributes to discourse-cultural studies of organizations by explaining how narrative constructions of identities and interests are used to legitimate or resist change. Furthermore, this analysis elucidates the dialogical dynamics of organizational storytelling and thereby opens up new avenues for the cultural analysis of organizations.

Keywords: multinational; merger; acquisition; integration; culture; identity; discourse; narrative; storytelling; antenarrative; polyphony; heteroglossia; power; ideology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (44)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1100.0593 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:22:y:2011:i:2:p:370-390

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().