Playing on the Game While Playing in the Game: Frames, Identities, and the “Fall Plan”

In recent years, currents of thought known as the “linguistic turn” (Thatchenkery 2001: 113) and the “discursive turn” (Grant, Hardy, Oswick, & Putnam 2004; Oswick et al. 2007) have rejected earlier views of the role of language in organizing-“viewed naively and simply as the medium of communication” (Westwood & Linstead 2001: 1). The new approach is to “consider organizations as texts” (p. 3). Organization, these latter authors write, “exists in the text”; it has “no autonomous, stable or structural status outside of the text that constitutes it” (p. 4).