The Mobilization of Legacy Discourse During a Period of Crisis and Change: Academy of Management Global Proceedings

The paper demonstrates how managers mobilize their organizations in crisis by using crisis and change terminology that reconstructs historical legacy and organizational reality. In crisis, managers and employees alike use rhetoric's varied terminology intentionally to justify values, attitudes, and actions that relate to change interventions. The orientation of the rhetoric reflects the persuasion attempts of different social actors in the organization to put forward their version of the organizational legacy, the origin of the crisis, and the needed change. Our analysis is based on study at a leading Israeli high-tech firm whose characteristics are highly representative of the typical profile of technological start-up companies in Israel