The Relational Dynamics of Issue-Selling: Enacting Different Genres for Dealing with Discontent
基于对六家制造企业中层管理者推动战略更新的实地研究，发现不满也能激发议题推销，并识别出三种由推销者与接受者共同塑造的体裁：建设性对抗、避免升级和集体抱怨。
Actors without formal power can initiate and shape organizational change through issue selling as a means to address their concerns about organizational practices. The literature has emphasized the need for perspective taking and found discontent to be associated with inhibiting fear. Based on a longitudinal field study of middle managers trying to instigate strategic renewal in six different manufacturing companies, we find that discontent can also energize issue selling, particularly if sellers and recipients also engage in perspective taking. We identified three different genres of issue selling and enacting discontent that are jointly shaped by sellers and recipients: 1) productive confrontation, 2) avoiding escalation, and 3) collective moaning. In a process model of issue selling as framing, mobilizing and pursuing, we illustrate how the genres form part of an organization’s collective repertoire of initiating and responding to change. Our findings have implications for pursuing change as well as for managers seeking to create a constructive environment for expressing discontent.