Discourse In Organizational Change: China Travel Service Towards Globalization

Discourse is central to the social construction of an organization, as well as the transformation of corporate identity. Discourse acts as a powerful ordering force in the organization, shaping and influencing the attitudes and behavior of all the members concerned. Discourse analytic approaches allow us to identify and analyze the structure of an organization as well as the interaction of the global and local discourses by which the transformation of contemporary Chinese enterprises is formulated, articulated and rearticulated.This thesis is to examine the organizational change in China Travel Service (CTS) from the perspective of discourse analysis. The data consist of a collection of tourism government reports from 1990-2007 and a collection of transcribed recordings of conversations among my colleagues in CTS. As an old-timer in tourism business, China Travel Service has experienced rapid social and cultural change resulting from economic restructuring. The thesis treats communicative genre as a lens into the changing relationship between the government and the tourism business, which led to the periodic redefinition of the organizational structure of the tourism in the past few decades. The study traces how discourses are transiting from political discourse, economic discourse, managerial discourse to glocalization one.In mapping these shifts in the discursive transformation of corporate identity, the thesis tries to identify the linkages between tourism business and broader societal discourses about globalization and localization. Ethnographic fieldwork conducted in China Travel Service paints a picture of a managerial struggle in a network of power relations between global forces and local process, and the pervasive discoursal hybridity in interactions between tourism business, government and consumers are elaborated.The aim of the thesis is to shed light on the discourse aspect of organizational change, and the complex relations of communication between global and local forces. Meanwhile the analytical framework used in the thesis could be applied to researches on other Chinese enterprises for the current management issues caused by globalization.