Legitimizing strategies in transformative spaces: institutional meaning-making and organizational change in health care

Purpose Our aim is to reveal how the institutional context and the surrounding social practices can shape people’s meaning-making processes in transformative spaces through discursive legitimization practices. Design/methodology/approach We employed a case study approach and analysed ten video-taped hospital development meetings, using Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis. Findings According to the analysis, societal, managerial and professional discourses and discursive legitimization strategies of rationalization, normalization, authorization, narrativization and moralization collectively played a major role in the transformative space negotiations in legitimizing the content and means of change in the health care organization under study. These strategies allow us to pay attention to whichever voice is heard loudest and most shapes the reality in a transformative space. Originality/value While previous studies have acknowledged the inclusive and interactive nature of transformative spaces, far less attention has been given to the influence of institutional context on the negotiations occurring in these spaces.