The Use of Personality Typing in Organizational Change: Discourse, Emotions and the Reflexive Subject
研究一个组织变革项目如何通过迈尔斯-布里格斯类型指标改变员工自我认知、情感和行为，揭示话语通过个体的主动反思和情感参与来发挥权力作用。
This article is based on a study of an organizational change program that sought to alter employees’ self-perceptions, emotions and behavior through the use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a popular personality-typing tool. The program affords an opportunity to explore the various ways in which discourses advocating personal and organizational change work through employees’ subjectivity. We argue that theoretical approaches that view the targets of such programs as passive - as either ‘colonized’ or constructed by discourses - fail to capture the complex and contradictory nature of organizational control, and subjects’ changing positions within it. Drawing on symbolic interactionism, we argue that the power of discourses is mediated through an active, reflexive, and often emotional engagement on the part of individuals. Through their involvement, employees variously reproduce, resist or reconfigure power relationships which, during organizational change, are themselves unstable and inconsistent.