The Role of Outside Consultants in Shaping Hospital Organizational Change

Achieving strategic change in hospitals, similar to other types of organizations, involves reorienting employees’ interpretative frameworks — shared assumptions, narratives or cognitive schema that give meaning to organization members’ experiences (Currie and Brown, 2003; Balogun and Johnson, 2004; Lockett et al., 2014; Nigam et al., 2014). Recent studies have begun to consider the social position of actors engaged in interpretative change activities (Battilana et al., 2009). For example, Lockett et al. (2014) show how actors’ social positions in the National Health Service in England — as physicians or nurses and as staff in research-oriented tertiary care centres or in clinical care-oriented secondary care centres — shape their ability to envision strategic change. Prior research on social position and interpretive change focuses on the social positions of diverse insiders. Although external consultants often play a critical role in the change process in all types of organizations, including hospitals, our knowledge how they are able to bring about interpretive change remains unclear (Bartunek et al., 2011).