Abstract
Head Start is the American anti-poverty program that, over time, has served more than 18 million children. For this article, the authors culled interviews with Head Start staff members across seven grantee agencies to explore how people talk about the organization and invest it with meaning. They illustrate how the varying discursive constructions (e.g. metaphors and ‘frames’) staff members employ are similar to interpretative frames that have been used by organizational theorists over the last century (structural or rational/formal, organic, human resources, etc.) It is argued that alternative frames are useful for understanding how we construct and are constructed by the social fields in which we operate, and for imagining new possibilities for organizational life.