| |
Dialogue: Life and Death of the Organization
Working Paper:Draft copy of the chapter for the Handbook of Organizational Discourse, Thousand Oaks, CA. Sage Pub.
Author: Kenneth J. Gergen , Mary M. Gergen , Frank J. Barrett
The Taos Institute
02/01/2003
In this chapter we focus on the dialogic dimension of relational process in organizations. Although dialogue as a topic of study has been little mentioned in traditional handbooks of organizational study, its importance to organizational functioning has been subtly apparent since the inception of the science. Even the earliest research in organizational development attests to the importance of dialogue in organizational change. For example in Lewin's ( 1953) groundbreaking research, the attempt was to enlist housewives in serving unfashionable meat products (e.g. beef hearts, kidneys) as a contribution to the war effort. Comparisons were made between groups exposed to persuasive information and groups that received the information and then discussed its implications. The results revealed that the discussion groups were far more likely to purchase the meats. In effect, "involved participation" in decision making was critical to change. Yet, while this study is often credited with spawning the field of action research, we actually know very little about the essential process of dialogue itself.
There is a pervasive tendency in organizational studies to view acts of communication in terms of the individual agent. It is the individual who speaks, writes, gestures, and so on; it is the individual we credit for effective speaking, just as it is the individual’s ineffective listening that invites discredit. This tendency to focus on individual acts of expression is indeed unfortunate because it suppresses perhaps the central feature of such actions, their function within relationships. Indeed, as we shall soon make clear, it is from the relational matrix that the very possibility of individual sense making comes into being, and without the existence of ongoing relationship communicative acts lose their status as communication. As the editors of this Handbook have made clear, organizational worlds are created and sustained through discourse. This chapter makes it equally clear that it is through relational process that discourse acquires its significance. More broadly stated, it is by virtue of relational processes that organizations live or die.
Resource Files:
Draft Copy of the Chapter - Dialogue: Life and Death of the Organization (doc )
|
|
| |
|
