Abstract

We examine practice-enabled organizational change by building on an emerging practice-based conceptualization of organization. We argue that organization is enacted through discursive coupling of core practices. Organizational events that decouple these core practices, introduce new core practices, and/or reconfigure core practices can facilitate organizational change. We find evidence of such events by examining organizational change over the one-hundred-year mission work of The Scarboro Foreign Mission Society, a Roman Catholic order of missionary priests headquartered in Toronto, Canada. We explore the implications of our study on organizational change, organization practices, and discursive sensemaking. Through a grounded theory methodology, we develop a practice-induced process model of organizational change. We find that change begins when coupled core practices are decoupled, then infused with emerging core practices to form a new entity consisting of recoupled core practices.