ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at organizational change from the perspective of external financial stakeholders: shareholders and debtholders. When companies initiate strategic change in response to environmental pressure, the management needs to gain the support of investors. Implementing effective change may require their endorsement or active engagement. How do companies communicate about change? This study suggests positive communication is a useful method. We look for supporting evidence in a corpus of textual disclosures published by companies listed on the London Stock Exchange. We apply computational linguistics to extract relevant text fragments. We use topical analysis to identify words related to change management. The results confirm a predominance of positive wording. We provide guidelines for managers based on a case study of Shell, an oil company under pressure to change while maintaining strong relationships with shareholders.
