Diversity and Organization: An Essay with Special...
Transcript of Diversity and Organization: An Essay with Special...
Diversity and Organization: An Essay with Special Reference to the Work of Mikhail Bakhtin
Paper number 01/03
Christian De Cock Robert Chia
University of Exeter
Abstract
In this essay we will engage with the thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin who put the issue of “diversity” at the core of his intellectual project. We will explore the manifold ways in which recent debates in our discipline are touched by the issue of diversity (for example, in the form of a yearning for a one-best-way-of-proceeding or as a denouncement of the intellectual straightjacket an institutionalised field imposes). We see the issue of relevance intimately intertwined with that of diversity and develop a position from where diversity is not only seen as “good” (a straightforward value judgement) but also as a natural state in the social sciences (and society in general). Bakhtin’s various writing allows us to flesh out this position. In a final section we consider some recent developments in the field of organisation studies from a “Bakhtinian” perspective and offer some tentative suggestions for future development. Contact details: Christian De Cock and Robert Chia University of Exeter School of Business and Economics Streatham Court Exeter EX4 4PU UK [email protected] [email protected]
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ISSN 1473 2939
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Diversity and Organization:
An Essay with Special Reference to the Work of Mikhail Bakhtin
“OMT [Organization and Management Theory] seems to be having a hiccup about the
legitimacy of the scientific method and knowledge. Instead of building scientific
knowledge that better approximates reality, we are building more and more paradigms
without a means for reconciling them (Van de Ven, 1999, p.119).”
“The diversity of organizational theory and the range of ideas about how to develop
organizational theory increased dramatically during the [past] decade... There has been
vigorous and unresolved debate about whether such diversity is healthy for the field.
There is far more consensus, however, that more integration of these varied ideas would
help move the field forward.” (Elsbach, Sutton & Whetten, 1999, p.627, editorial of an
AMR special issue on theory development, emphasis added)
“I take it that these are the most important questions which we confront. How to deal
with and fend off the simplicities implicit in a world in which: ‘Have theory, will travel’
makes for easy intellectual and political progress. How to resist the singularities so
commonly performed in the acts of naming and knowing. How to defy the overwhelming
pressures on academic production to render knowing simple, transparent, singular,
formulaic. How to resist the pressure to enact, yet again, the God-trick1 (Law, 1999,
p.11).”
Introduction
These quotes nicely frame the scope of this essay. The topic of “diversity” in the field of
organisation studies seems to resonate with the professional reality of all of us
organisational scholars in recent years. What exactly are we trying to achieve when we
1 The “god trick” was defined by Jacques (1992) as “the invisible power of seeing everything without the corresponding responsibility to acknowledge the social/cultural/historical site from which one is viewing (p.594).” Or to quote Hayden White: “What is “imaginary” about any narrative representation is the illusion of a centered consciousness capable of looking out on the world, apprehending its structure and processes, and representing them to itself as having all of the formal coherency of narrativity itself. But this
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conduct fieldwork, write academic articles, act as consultants, or teach students? Most
organisational scholars will admit to some pangs of anxiety when addressing some (or
all) of these questions. We see this anxiety manifesting itself in various, interrelating
ways. The knowledge-practice antimony, while lamented for many years, became
especially pertinent from the early 1990s onwards. As it appeared increasingly obvious
that the body of knowledge published in academic journals had practically no audience in
business or government (Daft & Lewin, 1990), the number of special forums devoted to
the topic of research relevance and utilization increased significantly (e.g. Rynes,
Bartunek & Daft, 2001), and the gap between academics and practitioners became a
prominent topic in Academy of Management presidential addresses (e.g., Hambrick,
1994; Huff, 2000; Mowday, 1997). The encounter with a body of writing rooted in the
distinctive preoccupations and manners of proceeding of Continental European
philosophy, initially under the label of “postmodernism” or “post-structuralism” (e.g.,
Chia, 1996, Kilduff & Mehra, 1997; Parker, 1992), started to affect (some would argue
“infect”) the field of organization studies from the early 1990s onwards (after visiting
most of the other social sciences, cf. Hatch, 1996). The settled view of “building
scientific knowledge that better approximates reality (Van de Ven, 1999, p.119),” was
steadily undermined by one that saw attempts to be “neutral” or “objective” by striving to
copy reality meticulously as no more than a pursuit of chimeras. As these ideas collided2
with a field largely dominated by an Anglo-Saxon tradition of conducting organizational
theorizing and research, it precipitated a “reflexive” turn in the practice of theory making.
Suddenly it became legitimate to make the craft of theorising more explicit (Clegg &
Hardy, 1996; Weick, 1999). This reflexive understanding conceived of theorising in
organization studies as a political process rather than merely as a neutral, truth-seeking
operation (Calás & Smircich, 1999). As people realised that knowledge was to a large
extent politicized, and that our understandings were limited by our conceptualisations and
meta-theory, some argued that uncertainty could have a positive value (e.g. Burrell, 1996;
Law, 1999). The apparent failure to connect with the presumed audience, and the upshot
is to mistake a “meaning” (which is always constituted rather than found) for “reality” (which is always found rather than constituted) (1987, p. 36).”
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of the spread among organizational scholars of enthusiasm for ideas derived from a not
always well understood cluster of philosophical traditions, has led to a heated, confused,
and rather protracted controversy about the whole nature and purpose of the field of
organization studies/science3. At times the controversy was pushed to such extremes that
some scholars started using the term “paradigm wars”. These “paradigm wars” put the
issue of “diversity” right in the centre of the battle ground. It is therefore only
appropriate that we turn to them first before examining the other developments discussed
in this introduction.
Paradigm wars?
“Given the relative recency of this internal focus and the unexpected turbulence, one is
tempted to say of the ‘paradigm wars,’ ‘Give war a chance.’ We seem to be in the midst
of an active shakeout. (Weick, 1999, p.797).”
Pfeffer (1993) is generally credited with reigniting the debate over the proper direction of
the organization science discipline in the United States. His argument typifies the self-
reappraisal of management research that has marked the 1990s, including pointed
discussions on the desirable direction of theory building and the true nature of
management research (e.g., Astley & Zammuto, 1992; Daft & Lewin, 1990; Sutton &
Staw, 1995; Weick, 1999). Pfeffer’s (1993) position was unequivocal:
“Consensus itself, however achieved, is a vital component for the advancement of
knowledge in a field. Without some minimal level of consensus about research questions
and methods, fields can scarcely expect to produce knowledge in a cumulative,
developmental process (p.611).”
His views on diversity also left little room for interpretation:
“A diversity in ideas and in methodology can be useful to the field as long as the
diversity can be resolved at some point (p.616).”
2 As Collini (1992, p.5) eloquently put it in reflecting on the encounter with Continental European philosophy the discipline of “English” has experienced: “any verb suggesting greater mutual understanding or good-will would culpably misrepresent the nature of the encounter.” 3 It is in itself significant that we do not even agree on a common name for our field, the terms “organization studies”, “Organization and Management Theory (OMT)”, and “organization science” being used interchangeably and depending on researchers’ geographical location.
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Van Maanen’s delightfully histrionic response4 led Van de Ven (1999), in an ironic turn,
to sketch the American version of the paradigm wars as a “Pfefferdigm” versus
“VanMaanendom”.
It is probably fair to pinpoint Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis
(Burrell & Morgan, 1979) as a starting point for a serious discussion about “paradigms”
in organization studies in Europe. In a reflective essay Burrell (1996) suggested that the
key contribution of the book was to raise awareness that the normal state of organization
science is pluralistic:
“This does not mean that organizational analysis is ‘immature’ or is awaiting its normal
science phase with bated breath. It is simply that a plurality of legitimate and competing
perspectives is to be expected in all sciences but especially in the social ones (p.648.)”
Administrative science, although it shows more of a “fractured visage” than it did thirty
years ago, has never been a stranger to fractured lines of analysis. It is just that the
powerful agreed to ignore fundamental problems in addressing fundamental issues5:
“Contestation over political, epistemological and methodological grounds was present
even in the heyday of the Aston Studies, the launch of Administrative Science Quarterly
(ASQ) and the rise of contingency theory. Whilst the leading figures did not shout out
their concerns about its coherence – indeed one might argue that ‘leading’ figures only
4 In academia insults tend to be highly euphemised, transformed into names of concepts and analytical labels (cf. Bourdieu, 1988). Not so Van Maanen: “I want to suggest here that this sour view of our field is-to be gentle-insufferably smug; pious and orthodox; philosophically indefensible; extraordinarily naive as to how science actually works; theoretically foolish, vain and autocratic; and -still being gentle- reflective of a most out-of-date and discredited father-knows-best version of knowledge, rhetoric and the role theory plays in the life of any intellectual community (Van Maanen, 1995, p.133).” Hence our use of the word “delightful”. 5 Of course, the diversity “crisis” is not peculiar to organisation science. In a polemical piece titled Vive la crise! For heterodoxy in social science, Pierre Bourdieu certainly offered little reason to mourn the crumbling of the orthodoxy in the field of sociology: “Indeed, I think that for a variety of converging reasons, including the desire to give sociology a scientific legitimacy – identified with academic respectability and political neutrality or innocuousness – a number of professors, who held the dominant positions in the most prominent American universities, formed a sort of “scientific” oligopoly and, at the cost of mutual concessions, elaborated … a working consensus designed to give sociology the appearance of a unified science finally freed from the infantile disorders of the ideological war of all against all. This fiction of unanimity, which today some still strive to restore, resembled that of those religious or juridical orthodoxies that, being, entrusted with the preservation of the symbolic order, must first and foremost maintain consensus within the community of doctors (Bourdieu, 1988, p.773).”
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become so because they never voice any doubt in public about the integral nature of their
project – such coherence had to be asserted rather than demonstrated to audiences which
were not yet aware… (p.643).”
According to Burrell, the belief in paradigm incommensurability has, at least partly, its
origins in politics, acting as a defence against hegemonic tendencies of the orthodoxy of
the day, rather than necessarily forming a coherent epistemological position (“Dialogue is
a weapon of the powerful”, p.650).
Whilst functionalism is no longer seen as representative of a normal science in our
discipline, there still seems to exist a strong, if implicit, yearning among (mainly)
American authors that it will be replaced eventually and inevitably by another single
approach after the period of “revolution” we are going through. Indeed, if we were living
through a true paradigm “war” (or even a contest), it very much looks as if a mild form of
“Pfefferdigm” (emphasizing the ultimate importance of pursuing scientific consensus for
paradigm development) is winning out in most theoretical discussions concerning
diversity in organization and management theory. For example, numerous papers have
been devoted to “paradigm bridging” (e.g. Gioia & Pitre, 1990; Lewis & Grimes, 1999;
Schultz & Hatch, 1996; Weaver & Gioia, 1994). Furthermore, there seems to be an
emerging consensus that theoretical proliferation and turnover seem to generate
impossible demands on our ability to keep current in the field; threatening our confidence
and making it difficult to determine the appropriate foundation on which to build research
(Elsbach et al., 1999; Hauge Fabian, 2000, Van de Ven, 1999). Standardisation on the
other hand helps translation and aids communication (Czarniawska, 2001). Theory
development forums have therefore concentrated mainly on procedural issues, integrating
existing models and searching for a single conceptual framework to unify “false”
differences between various theories and paradigms. Hauge Fabian (2000), in the
conclusion of an intelligent piece on “controversy” in the management discipline, seems
to catch a prevailing mood when she suggests:
“…a proliferation of theoretical perspectives without any cohesion leaves researchers
unable to discern the pragmatic ‘what’s what?’ Theory again turns meaningless when
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constantly contradicted, disparaged, or upstaged by vying theories and paradigms
(p.366).”
In a revealing diagram Hauge Fabian (2000, p.360) sketches the pressures that demand
greater theory consensus and those that encourage diversity. Consensus is driven by such
“pragmatic” issues a relevance, consistency and comprehensibility, particularly against a
background that the very legitimacy of our field could be at stake (cf. Hambrich, 1994,
Huff, 2000). Opposed to these “pragmatic” pressures, we find “scientific” pressures,
emanating from an increasing sophistication in our theorising and researching following
the (attempted) assimilation into our field of preoccupations and manners of proceeding
rooted in Continental European philosophy. Both pressures create a sense of “crisis”,
pushing in different directions and making the issue of “diversity” a key one in the
development of organization studies in the 21st century.
Hiccups about the legitimacy of scientific knowledge
“In 1989, the notion that skilled organizational theorists are not just objective scientists
but also good storytellers who weave convincing tales of cause end effect, was unknown
in many corners of the field end ridiculed in most others. It is now accepted by a large
proportion of organizational theorists and is often used as an argument…about why good
theory requires using many of the same methods as good literature… Finally, in 1989,
the notion that there is no objective means of assessing the value of a theory would have
been viewed as heresy in many of the same corners that it is now accepted as given truth,
or at least a plausible and troubling possibility (Elsbach et al., 1999, p.633).”
Inspired by developments in social theory and philosophy, management scholars have
started to question the traditional view of theory as the cumulative compilation,
classification, or elaboration of “facts” and concepts (the “scholarly common sense”, cf.
Bourdieu, 1990) and more specifically the representational practices employed within the
theorising process. Scholars most tuned in to those developments have taken on board
the idea that language has a role in the constitution of reality and their work is marked by
a deep questioning of the nature of reality, of our conception of knowledge, cognition,
perception and observation (e.g. Chia, 1996; Cooper & Law, 1995, Czarniawska, 1997).
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Any representation should be understood not as a true and accurate reflection of some
aspect of an external world, but as something to be explained and accounted for through
discursive rules and themes that predominate in a particular socio-historical context
(Foucault, 1966; Silverman, 1994). Knowledge (or theory) therefore can no longer be
presumed to represent some form of stable phenomena existing outside their
representation and in the absence of a stable structure of signification upon which
meaning can rest, there can be no “objective” means of assessing the value of a particular
theory.
However, this increasingly sophisticated understanding of the nature of our collective
enterprise does not seem to hold any unequivocal directions as to where to go from here.
As Van Maanen (1995, p.14) pointed out, it is a little like recognising that the explanation
of a joke is not itself funny but at the same time realising that knowing so does not help
one construct hilarious one-liners. Thus, the work at the coal face of research goes on
much in the same way as it did before textuality came into vogue. Evidence must be
offered up to support arguments whose pedigree must be established in a way that will
convince readers that the author has something credible to say. Researchers are still
expected to perform a given task and thus here still exists a strong tendency in
organisational research, particularly when writing up field work, to pronounce
authoritatively on the organisational world “represented” (this is how organisational
reality “really” is, give or take a few caveats). This “true” knowledge is then to inform
practitioners (indeed, would it not be irrational to ignore this “true” knowledge?) 6. As
Rorty (1991, p.71) suggests, we cannot seem to shake of the ascetic priest in us, we all
hanker after essence. Thus epistemological and ontological battles associated with the
paradigm wars should not be exaggerated when the extent to which they actually have
informed our research practice is marginal. To use Vickers’ (1995) terminology: there
seems to be a disjunction between the ways in which organisational scholars are ready to
see and value the organisational world (their appreciative setting – which can be often
6 A particularly enlightening example is Newton’s (1998) critique of “Foucauldian” organisational writers when they come to write up their fieldwork (especially p.430ff).
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adventurous) and the ways in which they are ready to respond to it (their instrumental
system – which tends to be rather conservative).
With the realisation that much is to be gained by shaking off the idea of observation as a
docile record of pre-existing reality, the traditional ascetic description of scientific
procedure gave room to reflexive pieces that switched the attention of the readers from
the practice of management to the practice of theory-making. Whilst at first such texts
caused much interest, actually revealing the effort hidden behind the supposedly
‘automatic’ writing, the reflexive turn soon ran up against its own limits (Czarniawska,
2001). In counteracting the effect that a text should be naively believed by the reader as
in some way relating to a referent “out there”, texts are often made unfit for normal
consumption. Weick (1999) suggested that a disappointing lack of “boldness” in a
special issue on theory building in AMR may have been due to the fact that “reflexivity
has tied people’s hands (p.803).” Latour (1988), commenting on the obsession with
reflexivity the field of anthropology was experiencing in the 1980s, argued that
reflexivity is counter-productive since it makes texts less interesting, less rich and less
believable as authors are whirling helplessly in their efforts to outdo and outwit each
other. This is not to say that we should not pay attention to the craft of writing, but rather
that readers should enjoy the fruit of those efforts without being minutely informed about
their production (Czarniawska , 2001). To quote Latour:
“Instead of piling layer upon layer of self-consciousness to no avail, why not have just
one layer, the story, and obtain the necessary amount of reflexivity from somewhere else?
After all, journalists, poets and novelists are not naïve make-believe constructionists.
They are much more subtle, devious and clever than self-conscious methodologists….
Just offer the lived world and write! Isn’t this what novelists have done for three
centuries (Latour, 1988, p.170)?”
Furthermore, the idea that reflexivity might come about as the result of some specific
combination of techniques drawn from a set of standardised “reflexive devices” is
unlikely to prove satisfactory because it pays little attention to the concept of reader and
perpetuates the belief that we can write “truer” texts. Woolgar (1988) suggested that we
must develop an understanding of text as just one element in a reader-text community,
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otherwise there is little hope that readers will recognise the more subtle features of textual
organisation.
Knowledge and praxis: the antimony revisited
“Why do so much education and training, management consulting, and business research
and so many books and articles produce so little change in what managers and
organizations actually do (Pfeffer & Sutton, 1999, p.83)?”
“Each August, we (academics) come to talk with each other; during the rest of the year
we read each others' papers in our journals and write our own papers so that we may, in
turn, have an audience the following August: an incestuous, closed loop (Hambrick,
1994, p.13).”
That there is a wide gap between organizational research and managerial practice is
hardly a new observation (see, e.g., Daft & Lewin, 1990; Jacques, 1992; Rynes et al.,
2001; Susman & Evered, 1978). Findings in scholarly management journals appear only
remotely related to the world of practising managers and as a consequence the perceived
impact from the research coming from business schools is close to nil (Astley &
Zammuto, 1992). The traditional view that business school academics generate
knowledge based on their research, and managers use this knowledge to inform their
actions seems to have become increasingly suspect (Huczynski, 1993). In conforming to
our implicit assumptions regarding a scientific style of writing (e.g., in choosing to direct
our work toward mainstream academic journals), our writing discourages a managerial
audience from engaging it (Golden-Biddle & Locke, 1997). Recent studies by Boland et
al. (2001) and Mohrman et al. (2001) suggest that the typical way of presenting academic
information (through objective, declarative knowledge) is a relatively ineffective way of
getting knowledge to “take” in practitioner settings. Setting aside the issue of whether or
not knowledge is crossing academic-practitioner boundaries, it has been noted that there
are also relatively few visible instances of socialization, externalization, and
internalization of knowledge within the academic community (Rynes et al. 2001).
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In response there have been various “call to arms”, not least in recent presidential
addresses at the Academy of Management (Hambrick, 1994; Huff, 2000; Mowday,
1997). Hambrick’s appeal is typical:
“We must recognize that our responsibility is not to ourselves but to the institutions
around the world that are in dire need of improved management, as well as to those
individuals who seek to be the most effective managers they possibly can be (Hambrick,
1994, p.12).”
The subtext is that organizational researchers must bridge the many disciplinary and
ideological islands in the academic community in order to see the whole system that they
are studying and so be of use to a wider constituency (with usefulness determined by
whether the research findings are actually being incorporated in organization design
decisions; and whether action was taken that was informed by the research, cf. Mohrman,
2001).
However, we view this “commonsensical” position as problematic. A lot of these “call to
arms” have a “this goes without saying” character that effectively kills dialogue. We
believe it is far from “evident” to exactly whom we should be responsible and in what
way. Rather, answers to these questions are continuously up for negotiation and are
crucially bound up with the identity of the field of organization studies itself. Again, this
realisation is not particular to our field. For example, the historian Hayden White
posited:
“To what is the historian responsible, or rather, to what should one be responsible? There
can be no answer to this question, I should think, that is not value-laden and normative,
prescriptive and judgmental, rather than obvious, self-evident, or objectively
determinable (1987, p.188).”
Czarniawska (2001) provided another insightful angle on this issue through a reflection
on a consulting experience. Managers may demand a normative “solution” rather than
give credence to the reflections of the academic researcher who may wants to “improve”
the particular organisational situation. Thus the account most likely to gain acceptance
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would have to be formulated in terms of normative theory (the state of affairs as wished
by the mandators) adorned with snippets of the logic of practice for verisimilitude:
“It was clear that my ‘consultation’ was a flop. I failed to meet their expectations: I had
no ‘scientific facts’ to offer. Politically minded as Z was, he did not expect me to consult
him on the ways of doing politics, but to deliver to him the arguments he might use…
The present irritation of practitioners seems to stem from their conviction that the logic of
representation, once its construction is exposed, will not function properly, that is, as a
political tool (p.262-264).”
Astley and Zammuto (1992) argued that the extent to which organization scientists can
provide managers with specific tools and techniques that influence managerial practice
may be quite limited, precisely because of their location with respect to the organisational
context in which action needs to be taken. For example, Kanter and Eccles (1992)
observed a conference of academics and managers on network organizations and
discovered there existed a gulf between the two communities: each found different kinds
of data compelling, defined the phenomena (“networks”) quite differently, and had
different purposes that underpinned their interest in the subject. It would be nonsensical
to “blame” either of the parties for an “incorrect” stance here. Astley and Zammuto
(1992) suggested that the increased emphasis on direct application is hence misplaced
and that organization science may facilitate practice more through process than through
content – instead of discovering empirically derived solutions to specific problems, it can
infuse practical experience with “cosmic significance” (sic), providing a means of
coming to terms with reality in the face of ever-changing and ambiguous situations.
Dewey can serve as an interesting example here. While insisting on the subordination of
theory to practice; he also saw the task of philosophy as breaking the crust of convention.
Consequentially, we should be distrustful of contemplative ideal, where we have an a
priori place prepared for everything that may happen (Rorty, 1991). Astley and Zammuto
(1992) further suggest that whilst our field does a poor job of tracking phenomenal
changes in the managerial world, becoming more phenomenally current would enable the
field of organization studies to advance its own ends while increasing its influence on
managerial practice. Yet this may cause organisational scholars some psychological
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problems: without enduring normative or descriptive theory, management scholars will
experience the continuing threat of being outmoded, and of their authority becoming
increasingly suspect, subjecting them to the insecurity of the imposter syndrome (cf.
Hauge Fabian, 2000; Huff, 2000). Normative theory does not only serve as
psychological anchor for managers!
The practice of theory making
“We contend that, as the field has grown and as it has sought scientific legitimacy
through adoption of many of the trappings of scientific enterprise, it has simultaneously
become more rigid, more homogeneous, more self-referential, less able to embrace
novelty, and hence less able to co-evolve with the world to which it is connected . At a
moment in history when management itself is undergoing dramatic change, management
research, imprisoned as it is by its institutional structure, finds itself needing to adapt but
effectively unable to do so (Bouchiki & Kimberly, 2001, p.78-79).”
“I grew up with the belief (hope) that we would produce cumulative scientific knowledge
of OMT… It is a belief that I can advance knowledge by standing on the shoulders of
great scholars and that I can pass it on by having my students get a leg up from me (Van
de Ven, 1999, p.119).”
The belief (or hope) Van de Ven expresses in the above quote has in recent years proved
to be rather idealistic. There is now a growing awareness that the whole research and
theorising process is a rather messy practice, with its own particular rules and action
theories. Weick’s (1999) more down-to-earth description of himself as “a practitioner
who works with abstract words for a living, reads a lot, and would like to get better at
crafting images that capture what I think organizing is all about (p.798),” seems far more
apposite. Knowledge production can no longer be seen as a result of a neutral,
anonymous process but occurs in a politically charged, socio-cultural context of real
people with real agendas working within important personal relationships and
institutional ties (Calás & Smircich, 1999). Power-laden mechanisms of production and
control (e.g. resource allocations and refereeing procedures) discipline the research
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process and condition what is to count as “scientific knowledge”. Indeed, the research
process has acquired strong commercial overtones as increasingly the expression of
knowledge claims becomes economically rewarded apart from its contribution to mutual
understanding (Deetz, 1995).
Bouchiki and Kimberly (2001) suggest that there is a growing disjunction between what
many management researchers would really like to do in their research do and what they
feel constrained to do by the existing institutional framework. The internal politics of
style (how the elements are put together) is determined by its external politics (its relation
to alien – vis-à-vis the research itself – discourse). Sutton and Staw (1995), for example,
discussed how authors’ expositions of their methods often bear little resemblance to the
actual processes that got them to the final published product. Because underlying
assumptions, values, complexities, and processes are omitted from discussions, research
conclusions appear less tentative and conditional than they really are. This sanitization is
likely to make research findings less credible to practitioners who work in “messy”
worlds (cf. Nohria & Eccles, 1998, p.286). The institutionalisation of business education
and management research has led to the development of procedures, controls and
mindsets which effectively act as a sort of intellectual straitjacket7. Against this
background, Pfeffer’s call to commit “to a set of fundamental questions… and working
through a set of processes or rules to resolve theoretical disputes and debates (Pfeffer,
1993, p.618)” sounds a little shrill. Perhaps nowhere is the intellectual straightjacket as
obvious as in our obsession with the classification of scholarly journals. The pressure to
publish in elite journals is intense, and has an inevitably conservative impact on the
priorities and choices of individual researchers (Bouchiki & Kimberly, 2001). Research
that does not conform to the dominant paradigms of the day has little chance of ever
7 This is a reflection that has, of course, surfaced in other fields: “One of the major obstacles to progress in the social sciences no doubt resides in this formidable gap between compliance with the rules of proper scientific conduct as they are defined by the methodological doxa taught in universities, and true scientific virtues (Bourdieu, 1988, p.777).” “When a discipline establishes an organization with committees, officers, publications, when it distributes titles and responsibilities to its adherents, it imposes itself on the scholarly world in symbolic fashion. The proliferation of offices and committees probably inhibits scholars more than it promotes it, but it does give a discipline an effective presence in the symbolic system of academic research (Culler, 1981/2001, p.22, on the emerging field of semiology).”
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being published. Publication tends to make things official, but in order to achieve this one
must have access to the means of publication and also to the speech genres and styles
considered worthy of publication. Burrell’s (1996) reflection on how he found it simply
impossible to publish an article on Foucault, however well written and argued, and
however pertinent the material to the study of organisations, is one of our favourite
examples:
“… in 19848, when a piece written on Foucault’s contribution to organizational analysis
was submitted to ASQ… I treasure its referees’ comments to this day, for all three
questioned the relevance of ‘an unknown French philosopher’ and asked ‘what could an
American audience learn’ from such thought. My understanding of the importance of the
North Atlantic Ocean as a divide as well as a communication route was firmly fixed at
this moment (p.652).”
Bouchiki and Kimberly (2001) provide a similar example:
“The dilemma we see is best illustrated by a rejection letter we were shown regarding a
submission to a special issue of an ‘A’ management journal in which the guest editor
concluded with the statement ‘It’s difficult to innovate’ (p.80).”
Clearly, without system support at higher institutional levels, individual researchers (as
well as those who advise them) will continue to be risk-averse.
Calás and Smircich (1999), in a sophisticated reflexive move, suggest we take seriously
the politics of knowledge making (in our own practice of research) and explore how the
issues of representation and form are implicated in sustaining the power relations behind
our theories and institutions. It is behind the conventions of writing theory that the ethics
and values of our institutions can be found.
“We are in an excellent position to deconstruct the logics of our institutions (the
construction of institutions is the primary object of our theories). In the process of doing
so, all of us would be learning how to teach others to do the same for their own
organisations: an immediate integration of theory and practice, if there ever was one
(p.659).”
8 Readers will no doubt be aware that 1984 was the year of Foucault’s death, and that by then he was anything but an “unknown French philosopher” outside the field of organization studies.
17
Calás and Smircich thus frame their aim toward relevance in the context of “doing
theory” as the specific practice of our own community (this does not preclude an
engagement with “the world”), without a direct interest in articulating the content of
theories for some other constituency. They further suggest that organisational scholars
specify the aspects of the world with which they are trying to engage and why; to situate
knowledge and so de-reify it. This position resonates with a new genre Czarniawska
(2001) sees emerging; that of a disciplinary reflection.
“The authors practicing it do not offer abstract models. They tell stories from their
experience and they offer reflections over such experiences… InterestingIy enough, this
kind of reflection begins to be legitimate as the logic of representation: instead of an
abstract distortion of practice, a reflective account of practice is offered-and often
accepted. Has this innovation a chance within the practice of management (p.264)?”
We have explored so far the manifold ways in which the recent controversy in our
discipline revolves around the issue of diversity (be it in the form of a yearning for a one-
best-way-of-proceeding or, alternatively, as a denouncement of the intellectual
straightjacket an institutionalised field imposes). In this context it is somewhat surprising
that so little effort has been devoted to exploring the work of thinkers who have put the
issue of diversity at the core of their intellectual projects. No one was more pre-occupied
with “diversity” than the Russian literary theorist-cum-philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin and
it is to him we turn next. In the following pages we will discuss key aspects of his work,
and in a final discussion section we will indicate how his thinking about diversity and
relationality can enrich the current debates in the field of organization studies.
An encounter with Bakhtin
“Rumour has it that Bakhtin scholars persist in adding water to the good wine. Witness
the overuse and dilution of Bakhtin’s terms, the embarrassment we now feel upon the
words ‘dialogue’ or ‘carnival’ dropped once too often in academic conversation… He
wrote it all – earlier and better than anyone else (Poole, 2001, p.109).”
18
Whilst it is easy to deploy such characteristically Bakhtinian terms such as heteroglossia,
dialogism, the carnival, or chronotope; such efforts often only serve as incantations to
dignify already existing analytical habits that have not been affected by Bakhtin’s thought
in any meaningful way. Indeed, as Shepherd (2001) suggested, “To bring Bakhtin to bear
is to risk seeming to rehearse the tired gesture by which the Soviet theorist is burdened
with the credit for having, either singlehandedly or with a little help from his friends,
anticipated and surpassed the most significant theoretical trends of recent decades
(p.136).” It is worth pointing out at the start of our “encounter”, that in his several
attempts to find a single name for diversity, such as heteroglossia or polyphony, Bakhtin
was at pains never completely to stifle the energizing role of the paradox and conflict at
the heart of his enterprise. We therefore turn to Bakhtin, not for answers or a “solution”,
but because throughout his life he has thought deeply about the issue of diversity and we
therefore believe we can enrich our thinking by connecting with his.
Throughout his various writings Bakhtin charted an epic struggle over time between the
forces of “centralization,” which he also called “the centripetal forces of sociolinguistic
life,” and the “centrifugal” forces of heteroglossia. Thus there exists a contradiction-
ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language. Bakhtin,
who always opposed language becoming mechanical or authoritative, was an astute
student of his own time and place, marking for example Pravda editorials with coloured
pens to bring out the hidden meanings behind the different levels of discourse (Clark &
Holquist, 1984, p.153). Bakhtin’s goal was to overcome simplified linear thinking by
introducing a multiplicity of perspectives. This meant, above all, an emphatic rejection of
dogmatism (Shotter & Billig, 1998). Bakhtin never found the absence of certainty a
matter to deplore. His uniqueness resides in the manifold ways he celebrates and specifies
the world’s unpredictability. Heteroglossia, or the mingling of different language groups,
cultures, and classes, was for Bakhtin the ideal condition, guaranteeing a perpetual
linguistic and intellectual revolution which guards against the hegemony of any “single
language of truth” or “official language” in a given society, against ossification and
stagnation in thought. In effect, heteroglossia serves as a master trope at the heart of all
19
his other projects, which are all characterised by an extraordinary sensitivity to the
immense plurality of experience.
“All languages of heteroglossia, whatever the principle underlying them and making each
unique, are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualising the world in
words, specific world views, each characterised by its own objects, meanings and values.
As such they all may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement one another,
contradict one another and co-exist in the consciousness of real people… (Bakhtin, 1981,
p. 292, emphasis added)9.”
Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, or “polyphony,” was most comprehensively formulated
in his book on Dostoevsky as a theory of the novel10, though its implications extend
beyond the world of literary study. A word or discourse undergoes dialogisation when it
becomes relativised, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same things.
Dialogism is founded on the ineluctability of our ignorance, the necessary presence of
gaps in all our fondest schemes and most elaborate systems. The important fact,
according to Bakhtin, is that Dostoevsky permits each of his characters to speak in their
own voices with a minimum of interference from him as author; there is no authorial,
overbearing voice. Dostoevsky juxtaposes points of view that are never subordinated to
any single or monological perspective: his characters are the bearers of different truths;
their voices embody different ethical positions which are tested in the course of a novel
and there is a continuous renegotiation of opinion.
His discussion of Dostoevsky allows Bakhtin to attack two conventional ideas. One
conventional idea that must be discarded, which Bakhtin earlier attacked in The Problem
of Content, is the concept of the text as a finished thing, a hermetic unity. Insofar as a
work continues to live, it must be engaged in dialogue, which is possible only when the
work is still open and capable of interaction: the text is never finished. Another
9 While it is logically impossible to act from a formally contradictory scrip most people, most of the time, wittingly or unwittingly, accept that their beliefs about themselves and their environment are full of unresolved contradictions which one just lives with. 10 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Works was the first book that appeared under Bakhtin’s own name and was published in 1929. It was also his last appearance in print before disappearing into exile and
20
conventional idea which must be discarded holds that authors are able to manifest their
intentions completely in their works, so that readers can know precisely “what they
meant.” The author is only to be thought of as located in a network of relations and
speech genres and is not a point of origin for these things (Burkitt, 1998). Most theories
of literature having taken it for granted that authors are able, in more or less mediated
ways, to control their characters in such a way as to have predictable effects on readers.
The sum total of the characters’ collective interaction is a message whose meaning was
that intended by their creator. It is essentially the theory of authorship represented by
Saussure’s drawing of the two talking heads who send out messages to each other that
monologically embody their intentions.
Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism is based upon a deeply relational understanding of
discourse. “Speech” as Bakhtin (1986) uses the term covers many of the aspects of
Saussure’s parole, for it is concerned with what happens when real people, in all the
contingency of their myriad lives, actually speak to each other. But Saussure conceived
of the individual language user to be an absolutely free agent with the ability to choose
any words to implement a particular intention. Saussure concluded, not surprisingly, that
language as used by heterogeneous millions of such wilful subjects was unstudiable.
Bakhtin, on the other hand, begins by assuming that individual speakers do not have the
kind of freedom parole assumes they have. The basic unit for the study of actual speech
practice is the “utterance” which, “with all its individuality and creativity, can in no way
be regarded as a completely free combination of forms of language, as is supposed, for
example, by Saussure (Bakhtin, 1986, p.82).” He is able to conclude, unlike Saussure,
that the immediate reality of living speech can be studied, for although “each separate
utterance is individual . . . each sphere in which language is used develops its own
relatively stable types of these utterances”. Although Bakhtin’s concept of speech genre
points to the cardinal fact that utterances are always in some degree formulaic, he does
not catalogue the precise shapes that these formulas assume, in accord with his principle
obscurity. The second edition of 1963 heralded his re-emergence onto the Soviet publishing scene and his rise to international prominence (see Clark & Holquist, 1984, p.238ff).
21
that meaning is context bound but that context is boundless. The name of this
boundlessness is heteroglossia11:
“The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes
shape, is dialogized heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously
concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual utterance (Bakhtin,
1981, p.271).”
The key point to make here is that for Bakhtin there are no “neutral” words and forms –
words and forms that can belong to “no one”. Not only are words and sentences “always
already there,” but so are the forms for their combination into utterances. Language is not
an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the
world. All words and forms are populated by intentions; each word tastes of the contexts
in which it has lived:
“As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing… language… lies on the borderline
between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes
“one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent,
when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive
intention… Language… is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others.
Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult
and complicated process (Bakhtin, 1981, p.293-294).”
We are never free to impose our unobstructed intention but must always mediate that
intention through the intentions of others, beginning with the otherness of the language
itself in which we speak. We must enter into a dialogue with others. This does not mean
that we cannot make our own point of view understood; it simply implies that our point
11 But to use a genre freely and creatively is not the same as to create a genre from he beginning; genres must be fully mastered in order to be manipulated freely. Many people who have an excellent command of a language often feel quite helpless in certain spheres of communication precisely because they do not have a practical command of the generic forms used in the given spheres. An academic who has an excellent command of speech in the area of organisation and management theory, who is able to read a scholarly paper or engage in a scholarly discussion with commendable fluency, may be silent or very awkward in social conversation. Here it is not a matter of an impoverished vocabulary or of style, taken abstractly. This is entirely a matter of the inability to command a repertoire of genres of social conversation, the lack of a sufficient supply of those ideas about the whole of the utterance that help to cast one’s speech quickly and naturally in certain compositional and stylistic forms, the inability to grasp a word promptly, to begin and
22
of view will only emerge through the interaction of our own and others’ words as they
contend with each other in particular situations (Clark & Holquist, 1984). Our speech,
that is, all our utterances (including creative works), is filled with others’ words, varying
degrees of otherness or varying degrees of “our-own-ness,” varying degrees of awareness
and detachment. These words of others carry with them their own expression which we
assimilate, rework, and re-accentuate. Not only do we appropriate others’ words, the
position from where we speak and the role of the others for whom the utterance is
constructed is extremely great in determining what we say. Each utterance is filled with
echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of
the of speech form. Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to
preceding utterances of a given sphere of speech communication.
Whilst it is now more or less generally accepted (even in organisation and management
theory) that there is a cut-off between the order of things and the order of the signs that
nominate those things, Bakhtin’s thinking expressed in Toward a Philosophy of the Act
(1993) has the potential to reinvigorate this almost banal position. In this book Bakhtin is
seeking to get back to the naked immediacy of experience. Most of us will intuitively
recognize that something is always left out of account when we describe our actions.
Bakhtin argues this is not merely a weakness in our own powers of description, but a
disunity built into the nature of things. Bakhtin is not so much concerned about the now
familiar gap between the order of signs and the order of things12, as meditating the more
originary difference between acts (physical and mental) we feel to be uniquely ours in
their “performance-events” occurring in what Bakhtin calls the “once-occurrent event of
end correctly. We act confidently only when we do so not as ourselves, but as those possessed by the immanent necessity of the meaning of some domain of culture. 12 For example, Nietzsche’s theory of truth explains to us in the most impressive terms that what calls itself reality within the context of institutional discourse can be nothing other than a reality in place of a reality (Sloterdijk, 1989). Bourdieu perpetually reminds his readers that his accounts of social life should only be read as models of that social reality - it all happens “as if”: “The logic of practices can only be grasped through constructs which destroy it as such... (Bourdieu, 1977/1990, p.11).” In topological terms we can observe that a pluri-dimensional order (the real) cannot be made to coincide with a uni-dimensional order (language) . It is precisely this topological impossibility that literature rejects and to which it never submits. Thus, “We can imagine a history of literature, or better, say, of productions of language, which would be the history of certain (often aberrant) verbal expedients men have used to reduce, tame, deny, or, on the contrary, to assume what is always a delirium, i.e., the fundamental inadequation of language and the real (Barthes, 1977/1982, p.465).”
23
Being”, and the consequences of such events. He is in a very real sense going back to the
point where Kant began his questioning: how can concepts that by definition must be
transcendental (in the sense of being independent of any particular experience if they are
to organize experience in general) relate to my subjective experience in all its
uniqueness? Bakhtin is condemned from the outset by the nature of his subject to perform
an impossible task:
“All attempts to surmount - from within theoretical cognition - the dualism of cognition
and life, the dualism of thought and once-occurrent concrete actuality, are utterly
hopeless (p.7).”
For Bakhtin the unity of an act and its account, a deed and its meaning, is something that
is never a priori (a “truth”), but which must always and everywhere be achieved.
Recognizing that all accounts of acts fundamentally differ from those acts as they are
actually performed he nevertheless seeks to relate the two orders. He turns again to the
metaphor of the author to explore the relation. The pure activity of authorship during the
act of authoring is similar to the pure activity of self during any conscious moment, since
it is the self that is the whole governing all the partial images we manifest of ourselves.
Although the self is experienced, “the experience does not hear and does not see itself,
but only the created product toward which it is directed.” As a result, not only do the
characters take on a life of their own after completion of the work containing them, but so
does the author-creator who gave them shape and direction. She separates from the
author-person to become the secret legislator of the text that her energy has brought into
existence. In short, the author who determines the text is not a person. The mode of being
of the author-creator in the completed text is different from that of a person, and it is
different from that of the characters. Such an author is in a different place from a person
who is not creating, because people are always, as people, outside the text.
Thus, insofar as we detach a judgement from the unity constituted by the historically
actual act/deed of its actualisation and assign it to some theoretical unity, there is no way
of getting out from within its content/sense aspect and into the ought and the actual once-
occurrent-event-of-Being. The two states: lived experience, on the one hand, and systems
24
for registering such experience on the other, are fundamentally different from each other.
For example, Bourdieu ask us to
“Consider the case of a tennis player who suddenly ‘decides’ to rush the net, or the
quarterback who ‘decides’ to pull out of the pocket and scramble, to understand that
action has, in practice, nothing in common with the “theoretical” (theorein, it may be
recalled, means to see, to contemplate) reconstruction of the play by the coach or the TV
commentator after the game (Bourdieu, 1988, p.781).”
Our participative and demanding consciousness can see that the theoretical and
theoreticized world of culture, is in a certain sense actual, that it possesses validity. But
what it can also see is that this world is not the once-occurrent world in which we live
and in which we answerably perform our deeds. To look for the actual cognitional act as
a performed deed in the content/sense is the same as trying to pull oneself up by one’s
own hair. The detached content of the cognitional act comes to be governed by its own
immanent laws, according to which it then develops as if it had a will of its own.
Inasmuch as we have entered that content, i.e., performed an act of abstraction, we are
now controlled by its autonomous laws or, to be exact, we are simply no longer present in
it as individually and answerably active human beings. From this perspective the rather
bizarre theoretical reflection (a cognitional, abstract act itself) on action by Latour makes
imminent sense:
“I never act; I am always slightly surprised by what I do. That which acts through me is
also surprised by what I do… Action is not about mastery. It is not a question of a
hammer and shards, but one of bifurcations, events, circumstances (Latour, 1999,
p.281).”
Reflecting on the Bakhtinian encounter
“For as we practise our trade as intellectuals, the premiums we place on
transportability, on naming, on clarity, on formulating and rendering explicit what it is
that we know – this premium, though doubtless often enough appropriate, also imposes
costs. And I am concerned about those costs. I believe that they render complex thinking
– thinking that is not strategically ordered, tellable in a simple way, thinking that is
lumpy or heterogeneous – difficult or impossible (Law, 1999, p.9).”
25
Bakhtin’s deeply relational view of language suggests that the position from where we
speak is of great importance in determining what we say; there are no “neutral” words
and forms – words and forms that can belong to “no one”. Every utterance must be
regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of a given sphere of speech
communication13. Furthermore, we cannot separate the act of speech from its conditions
of execution. As Bourdieu puts it:
“The performative utterance, as an act of institution, cannot socio-logically exist
independently of the institution which gives it its raison d’être, and if it were to be
produced in spite of everything, it would be socially deprived of sense (Bourdieu, 1991,
p.74).”
In other words, who says something, in which circumstances (e.g., a reply to someone),
from what position (with what, possibly implicit, authority) is extremely significant. This
may sound like a truism, so let us be a little more controversial and suggest that these
issues can be more important than the content of what is actually being said. It matters
greatly if something is said by the president of the Academy of Management14 or by a
distinguished scholar (e.g., Karl Weick in the field of organization studies, Pierre
Bourdieu in the field of sociology, and, of course, Bakhtin himself); arguments suddenly
carry more weight if they are published in ASQ, AMR or AMJ. To give an example,
would any else but John Van Maanen have been able to publish such a histrionic
response to Jeffery Pfeffer? Would there have been such a vigorous debate, described as
“paradigm wars” (cf. Van de Ven,1999; Weick, 1999), if anyone of less stature than
Jeffrey Pfeffer had offered their views on diversity in organization studies15? In this
13 This puts into perspective the epistemological battles typical of the paradigm wars: “One does not say the same thing in epistemology no matter what the time or place. One develops more or less this or that principle of epistemology according to the state of the unconscious in the given society. For example, in a society dominated by positivism, it is necessary to accentuate constructivism. To put this another way, epistemology is a politics of science (Bourdieu,1992, p.47).” 14 For example, Hambrick’s assertion that “We must recognize that our responsibility is not to ourselves but to the institutions around the world that are in dire need of improved management… (p.12),” on the vacuousness scale rates near the top which such assertions as “power is complex”. Yet, it gets published in AMR and provokes debate. 15 It is not as if the content of Pfeffer’s article was that provocative. He eloquently worded, and thus brought into explicitly codified existence, a tacit uneasiness among mainly American scholars about recent developments in the field. Furthermore whilst Van Maanen’s response got quoted extensively in AMR
26
essay we quote Andrew Van de Ven extensively. This is not because we are great fans or
detractors, but because he held the presidency of the Academy of Management in 2001,
and therefore his words carry a great weight to the extent that they reflect the
“orthodoxy” of the field. Indeed, the president of the Academy cannot say just anything.
He or she has to speak for the field as it were. The arguments and explanations of anyone
speaking from that position are not primarily aimed at contributing to knowledge but
have to be seen as fairly formulaic attempts at empire building16, giving the discipline an
effective presence in the symbolic system of academic research (Culler, 1981/2001,
p.22).” In writing this text we make extensive use of quotes from a few key people, and
appropriate their words to build our arguments. It is not our intention to set up straw men
or women, but rather to be reflexive in our writing and exemplify how we mediate our
intentions through the intentions of others (and what better way to do this than to work
with the actual words they wrote), regardless of whether we agree or disagree with them.
We hope to demonstrate in the remainder of this text that this does not preclude
developing our own point of view.
Bakhtin’s thinking on diversity suggests that the cultivation of a mutual desire to connect
with others’ meanings17 would be of far greater importance than the ultimately futile
attempts at trying to establishing some common framework to which we all could
subscribe (cf. Jacques, 1992). The resulting diversity (as, for example, in contradictory
theories that try to make sense of a particular phenomenon) does in no way preclude
dialogue between living acting interlocutors – various meanings “all may be juxtaposed
to one another, mutually supplement one another, contradict one another and co-exist in
the consciousness of real people… (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 292).” Thus contradiction is to be
fully accepted and worked through, something we would prefer to omit in our rush for
(e.g. Hauge Fabian, 2000), it is interesting to note that it was published in the (perceived as) “radical” Journal of Management Inquiry and not in AMR where Pfeffer’s article was published. 16 Note that we are not offering a value judgement of the individuals who fill that position. They face an immanent necessity to speak in a particular way. The field needs them to speak in such a way. 17 Eco (1992) suggests that a willingness to connect with others’ meanings is a far more powerful rhetorical strategy than the traditional antagonistic stance: “The force of the Copernican revolution is not only due to the fact that it explains some astronomical phenomena better than the Ptolemaic tradition, but also to the fact that it – instead of resenting Ptolemy as a
27
consistency. Does this incoherence create confusion? Yes. Does this create the
impression that the field of organisation studies is unclear about what knowledge it is
passing on? Yes. There are many who would see this as a serious problem. For example,
Van de Ven (1999), has a fictional student say:
“The classes were echo chambers between contingency theory, resource dependence
theory, resource-based theory, institutional theory, transactions costs theory, agency
theory, network theory, organizational ecology theory, and complexity theories… You
exposed me to all these theories but gave me no way to sift and winnow among them.
How do I know which view is better or worse than another (p.120-121)?”
Yet, is transparency necessarily a good? Perhaps in communicating our research and
teaching our students, sometimes it is good to leave our audience puzzled, uncertain
about what is being said, even confused. This is where the real thinking may start.
Rather than trying to find the best “grid” to impose on the world that will reveal its
essence, we see the act of becoming a scholar as one of progressively mastering the
field’s (possibly contradictory) speech genres. In taking this position we connect with
others’ ideas. Bauman (2000), for example, considers the absence of guaranteed
meanings, of pre-drawn and no-longer-needing-attention borderlines, of guaranteed rules
of successful action, as the conditio sine qua non of a truly autonomous society (also see
Bourdieu, 1992; Law, 1999). A mature science is one that knows there are no assured
meanings. In any case, fears of the “messy” diversity that would make our field ripe for a
takeover are largely without substance. Bakhtin’s thinking on “speech genres” indicates
that in any given time and place there can be no unlimited variety of idiosyncratic
interpretations. Centripetal forces that emanate from fashions, institutions, peer pressure,
or myths peculiar to any space-time continuum (such as, for example, “the market”), will
ensure that there will always exist a strong underlying desire for consistency and
standardisation, a way ‘fixing’ the organisational world and scholars’ attempts to make
sense of it.
crazy liar – explains why and on which grounds he was justified in outlining his own interpretation (p.150-151).”
28
Bakhtin’s characterization of the novel as anticanonical, as constantly redefining itself,
offers further intriguing possibilities to reflect on the reading and authoring of
organisational texts. From a Bakhtinian perspective the attachment to a particular theory
(a finished text as it were) is less important than remaining true to the “thinking”, the
once-occurrent-event-of-being that produced it. Indeed, attachment to theories or
concepts indicate no more than that one is playing the “authority” game (which involves
subjecting oneself fully to the centripetal forces18). Drift, rather than an expression of
fickleness, can and should be interpreted as a positive value.
“To persist means, in short, to maintain, over and against everything, the force of drift
and of expectation... To shift ground, then, can mean… to abjure what you have written
(but not necessarily what you have thought) when gregarious power uses and subjugates
it (Barthes, 1977/1982, p.467-468).”
As the act of publishing a text makes it at once the property of the reader, by necessity
authors must have something of the attitude of a mother cat to her litters. Of course, every
competent author will try to produce the “Model Reader” (cf. Eco, 1992) – that is to say,
the reader who reads the text as it is in some sense designed to be read, where that may
include the possibility of being read so as to yield multiple interpretations. Yet, the
author’s pre-textual intention – the purposes that may have led to the attempt to write a
particular work – cannot furnish the touchstone of interpretation, and may even be
irrelevant or misleading as guides to a text’s meaning or meanings. If the properties they
imputed are not intrinsic but relational, then there is little reason for authors to feel
compelled to act as legislators of their texts. As Eco (1992) eloquently puts it:
“But if the duty of a scientist is to understand that even gravitation is a three-relational
property involving Earth, Sun and a given observer of the Solar system, then even a given
interpretation of a text involves; (i) its linear manifestation; (ii) the reader who reads from
the point of view of a given Erwartungshorizon; and (iii) the cultural encyclopaedia
comprehending a given language and the series of the previous interpretations of the
18 We see these centripetal forces as quite formidable. They are extremely efficient at translating concerns, ideas and approaches originating from “outside” into their own terms. For example, Burrell (1996) ask us to “Think of the way in which ‘alienation’ becomes transmogrified as a concept. The words remain the same. The content, ideology and political significance are stripped out however, leaving behind the word but not its signification (p.647).”
29
same text. This third element… can only be viewed in terms of responsible and
consensual judgement of a community of readers – or of a culture (p.143).”
Bakhtin sees the role of the “community” as crucial, not just at the moment of
interpretation, but also at the stage of the creation of texts (Shepherd, 2001). According
to Bakhtin we are never free to impose our unobstructed intention but must always
mediate that intention through the intentions of others, beginning with the otherness of
the language itself in which we speak, thus making the idea of “authenticity”19 become
rather suspicious (De Peuter, 1998). Our own writing exemplifies this struggle to
appropriate others’ words in that we have tried to incorporate as many direct quotes as
possible while (hopefully) preserving the readability of this text. However, this is not to
say we cannot be creative, that we cannot make our own point of view understood. It
simply implies that our point of view will only emerge through the interaction of our own
and other’s words as they contend with each other in particular situations. We can mean
what we say, but only indirectly, at a second remove, in words that we take and give back
to the community according to the protocols it observes. Bourdieu’s (1992) reference to
Gershom Scholem, a historian of Judaism, illustrates this point well. Scholem told
Bourdieu:
“I never speak of Judaism in the same way when I am in New York, as when I am in
Paris, or in Berlin, or in Jerusalem. Yet, I never lie (p.47).”
So where does this leave our practice, that of conducting research and generating
theories? As language can do no more than hint at the complexity of what it seeks to
represent, an intriguing possibility would be to make the discontinuities on which
representation depends more conspicuous (De Cock, 2000). In representing experience
we are inventors of meaning. But just as the aim of literature is to put meaning into the
world, but not a meaning, so too we organisational scholars could learn to wrote more
tentatively. It is the openness to accommodation, the plurality of significances from
which every reader misses some and prefers one which keeps classical texts alive under
19 Interestingly enough, “authenticity” - the ability of the text to convey the vitality of everyday life encountered by the researcher in the field setting; being genuine to the field experience as a result of having “been there” - is one of the three criteria Golden-Biddle and Locke (1993) identified that were used to evaluate texts within the interpretive tradition.
30
varying interpretations (Davis, 1986). The novelist’s substitute for the appearance-reality
distinction is a display of diversity of viewpoints, a plurality of descriptions. What the
novelist finds especially comic is the attempt to privilege one of these descriptions, to
take it as an excuse for ignoring all the others (Rorty, 1991, p.74). This raises serious
questions, of course. If we were to make it obvious how much we appropriate from others
in our writings, would our texts still be accepted as “original” and hence worthy of
publication? If we were to move beyond the models, prescriptions and lists of rules in our
field, would be willing to sacrifice the piece of mind these provide20? And if we were to
start writing in a way that fixes signification far more tentatively, would it still be
accepted as research by our community? Van de Ven’s words, arguing for a rigorously
transitive approach to our writing, should make us aware of the resistance such a stance
would invoke:
“A key point… is that empirical evidence about the topic being addressed – not
rhetorical debates nor social-political advancement – provides the answer to how, where,
and when to explore and exploit OMT knowledge (1999, p.123-124).”
We indicated earlier in this text that it was our aim to offer reminders and suggestions on
the topic of diversity, rather than a meta-framework or firm conclusions. Any text that
tries to stay true to Bakhtin’s thinking cannot, by definition, be finished or complete.
Dialogue is essentially interminable. This leaves the authors in a somewhat awkward
position as they must solve the riddle: How to “conclude” a text (thus complying with a
generic expectation of closure in our field) without offering a conclusion21? We chose
to let another voice provide our postscript, appropriately enough in a piece where we
have appropriated so many words. The voice is that of Roland Barthes22’, speaking at the
20 As Czarniawska puts it: “I do not know anybody who has ever learned anything from these, although there is a consensus that they have a tranquilizing effect once you copy seven rules on ‘how to write a publishable article’, you feel that the job is almost done. They also offer useful legitimating devices, called ‘methods’ (Czarniawska, 2001, p.263).” 21 Parker (2000), in a recent book, also struggled with this problem. He started his conclusion with the ambivalent sentence, “I would rather not ‘conclude’… yet some kind of ending is needed, so here it is… (p. 231).” 22 There are few direct references to Bakhtin in Barthes’ work. However, it is a fact that Barthes invited his friend Julia Kristeva to give a series of seminars on Bakhtin and intertextuality in the 1960s (Barthes, 1981, p.51).
31
inaugural lecture that marked his acceding to a position of the highest authority - the
Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France in 1977.
“The semiology proposed here… denies that it is possible to attribute to the sign traits
that are positive, fixed, ahistoric, acorporeal, in short: scientific… Semiology has a
relation to science, but it is not a discipline… In other words, semiology is not a grid; it
does not permit a direct apprehension of the real through the imposition of a general
transparency which would render it intelligible. It seeks instead to elicit the real; in places
and by moments, and it says that these efforts to elicit the real are possible without a grid.
It is in fact precisely when semiology comes to be a grid that it elicits nothing at all
(Barthes, 1977/1982, p.473-474).”
32
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