How Institutions Communicate Change: Casuistry and Loosely Coupled Change in China’s Market Transformation

Abstract

How do institutions think about change? Building on Mary Douglas’s famous contention that institutions think by means of analogy, we suggest that institutions think about change by means of irony. Irony is pronounced during times of profound change when the rhetoric and the reality of change can be inconsistent. We show that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has enacted what we term loosely coupled change—change in which symbolic meanings and material practices are only weakly connected and retain their independence. The CCP employed the rhetorical form of irony, known as casuistry, to legitimize a change to market systems as being incremental while in practice radically adopting market systems and dismantling socialist practices. We contribute to research on institutional messaging by examining the hermeneutic depth of casuistry. We also contribute to research on organizational change by explicating how casuistry reconciles contradictory ideologies and facilitates loosely coupled change.