Using Boundary Objects to Facilitate Culture Change and Integrate a Global Top Management Team

As business anthropologists, we are often called upon to work on organizational change initiatives as members of a change team. This article is the story of one organizational change initiative involving a global top management team in a healthcare division of a large multinational firm and the research that was used as the basis for implementing change in the top management team and subsequently in the division as a whole. Specifically, the article focuses on how the change team, of which I was a part, communicated the research results to the top management team and to employees of the company by presenting the results in a map that became a boundary object, that facilitating translation across diverse groups, joint sensemaking, and local action in the change process.