What has been “reengineered” thus far?

I n this paper, I explore both management and non-management literature using, Handy (1993) and Hammer and Champy (1995), amongst others, and critique these approaches with symbolic interactionism and actor network theory. One of the principal emphases, providing the paper’s plan is the notion of Latour’s (1993, 2005) ‘actor network theory’ and its contribution to understanding the conflicting dilemmas posed when managers in four private sector organisations introduced new forms of working practices to change their organisational cultures. The second part of the paper discusses the complex processes involved in cultural changes using the data from my field work on 4 organisations in the United Kingdom that have recently been “reengineered”, as a limited number of organisations undergo fundamental changes to their management and organisational systems at any given moment in time. The importance of language and levels of discourse in understanding respondents’ interview statements and stories are explored so as to deepen insights into the dynamic richness of organisational cultural change and gain understanding of some of the conflicts and tensions when managers, who rely heavily on Hammer and Champy’s (1995) and their followers’ “reengineering” rhetoric introduce organisational changes in a top-down, autocratic and totalising manner