Performative Silences: Potentiality of Organizational Change
通过精神卫生机构的民族志研究，提出沉默是一种表演性行为，能分配权力、影响决策过程，并创造新的工作实践，对理解组织变革有重要意义。
The article highlights the importance of silence in the change process of organizations, making the claim that silence distributes authority and decision-making processes. It thus adds to existing organization literature that applies a performative approach to silence as neither static nor neutral. It creates new realities. Silence as an act, rather than a noun, is conceptualized as central to organizational change. Through an ethnographic study in a mental healthcare organization, it is shown how different performances of silence make new decision-making processes available and influence new work practices that are central to understanding the particular characteristics of psychiatric organizations. Although the performance of silence can have somewhat immaterial and mundane connotations, when one uses an actor-network theory approach to organization studies, the performance of silence becomes helpful in conceptualizing how new and old practices are often imbedded into each other.