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 c.de-cock@exeter.ac.uk r.chia@exeter.ac.uk

2

ISSN 1473 2939

3

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

4

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).”

5

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.

6

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).”

7

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

8

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).

9

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).

10

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,

11

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).

12

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

13

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

14

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

15

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).”

16

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

References

Astley WG, Zammuto RF. 1992. Organization Science, Managers, and Language Games. Organization Science 3(4): 443-460 Bakhtin MM. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin (C Emerson, M Holquist, Trans.). Texas University Press: Austin Bakhtin MM. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (C Emerson, Trans.). Manchester University Press: Manchester Bakhtin MM. 1986. Speech Genres and other Late Essays (VW McGee, Trans.). University of Texas: Austin Bakhtin MM. 1993. Toward a Philosophy of the Act (V Liapunov, Trans.). University of Texas: Austin Barthes R. 1977/1982. Inaugural Lecture, College de France. In S Sontag (Ed.), A Roland Barthes Reader: 457-478. Vintage: London Barthes R. 1981. Le Grain de la Voix: Entretiens 1962-1980. Seuil: Paris Bauman Z. 1997. Postmodernity and its Discontents. Polity Press: Cambridge Boland RJ, Singh J, Salipante P, Aram J, Fay SY, Kanawattanachai P. 2001. Knowledge representations and knowledge transfer. Academy of Management Journal 44: 393-417 Bouchikhi H, Kimberly JR. 2001. 'It's difficult to innovate': The death of the tenured professor and the birth of the knowledge entrepreneur. Human Relations 54(1): 77-84 Bourdieu P. 1977/1990. The Logic of Practice. Polity: Cambridge Bourdieu P. 1988. Vive La Crise: For Heterodoxy in Social Science. Theory and Society 17: 773-787 Bourdieu P. 1990. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Polity: Cambridge Bourdieu P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Polity: Cambridge Bourdieu P. 1992. Thinking About Limits. Theory, Culture & Society 9: 37-49 Burkitt I. 1998. Bodies of Knowledge: Beyond Cartesian Views of Persons, Selves and Mind. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 28: 63-82

33

Burrell G. 1996. Normal Science, Paradigms, Metaphors, Discourses and Genealogies of Analysis. In SR Clegg, C Hardy, WR Nord (Eds.), Handbook of Organization Studies: 642-658. Sage: London Calas MB, Smircich L. 1999. Past Postmodernism? Reflections and Tentative Directions. Academy of Management Review 24(4): 649-671 Calvet J-L. 1994. Barthes: A Biography. Polity: Cambridge Chia R. 1996. The Problem of Reflexivity in Organizational Research: Towards a Postmodern Science of Organization. Organization 3: 31-58 Clark K, Holquist M. 1984. Mikhail Bakhtin. Harvard University: Cambridge (MA) Clegg SR, Hardy C. 1996. Organizations, Organization and Organizing. In SR Clegg, C Hardy, WR Nord (Eds.), Handbook of Organization Studies: 1-29. Sage: London Collini S. 1992. Introduction: Interpretation terminable and interminable. In S Collini (Ed.), Interpretation and overinterpretation: 1-21. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge Cooper R, Law J. 1995. Organization: Distal and Proximal Views. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 13: 237-274 Culler J. 1981/2001. The Pursuit of Signs. Routledge: London Czarniawska B. 1997. Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity. University of Chicago Press: Chicago Czarniawska B. 2001a. Having hope in paralogy. Human Relations 54(1): 13-21 Czarniawska B. 2001b. Is it Possible to Be a Constructionist Consultant? Management Learning 32: 253-266 Daft RL, Lewin AY. 1990. Can Organization Studies Begin to Break Out of the Normal Science Straitjacket? An Editorial Essay. Organization Science 1(1): 1-9 Davis MS. 1986. That's Classic! The Phenomenology and Rhetoric of Successful Social Theories. Philosophy of Social Science 16: 309-344 De Cock C. 2000. Reflections on Fiction, Representation and Organization Studies: An Essay with Special Reference to the Work of Jorge Luis Borges. Organization Studies 21(3): 589-609

34

De Peuter J. 1998. The Dialogics of Narrative Identity. In M Gardiner, M Mayerfeld Bell (Eds.), Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: 30-48. Sage: London Deetz S. 1995. The Social Production of Knowledge and the Commercial Artifact. In LL Cummings (Ed.), Publishing in the Organizational Sciences: 44-63. Sage: London Eco U. 1992. Reply. In S Collini (Ed.), Interpretation and overinterpretation: 139-151. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge Elsbach KD, Sutton RI, Whetten DA. 1999. Perspectives on Developing Management Theory, Circa 1999: Moving from Shrill Monologues to (Relatively) Tame Dialogues. Journal of Management Inquiry 8: 627-633 Foucault M. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Gallimard: Paris Gioia DA, Pitre E. 1990. Multiparadigm Perspectives on Theory Building. Academy of Management Review 15: 584-602 Golden-Biddle K, Locke K. 1993. Appealing Work: An Investigation of How Ethnographic Texts Convince. Organization Science 4(4): 595-616 Golden-Biddle K, Locke K. 1997. Composing Qualitative Research. Sage: Thousand Oaks Hambrick D. 1994. What if the Academy Actually Mattered? Academy of Management Review 19(1): 11-17 Hatch MJ. 1996. The Role of the Researcher: An Analysis of Narrative Position in Organization Theory. Journal of Management Inquiry 5(4): 359-374 Hauge Fabian F. 2000. Keeping the Tension: Pressures to keep the Controversy in the Management Discipline. Academy of Management Review 25(2): 350-371 Huczynski A. 1993. Management Gurus: What makes them and how to become one. Routledge: London Huff AS. 2000. Changes in Organizational Knowledge Production. Academy of Management Review 25(2): 288-293 Jacques R. 1992. Critique and Theory Building: Producing Knowledge "From the Kitchen". Academy of Management Review 17(3): 582-606 Kanter RM, Eccles RG. 1992. Making network research relevant to practice. In N Nohria, RG Eccles (Eds.), Networks and organizations: Structure, form and action: 521-527. Harvard Business School Press: Boston (MA)

35

Kilduff M, Mehra A. 1997. Postmodernism and Organizational Research. Academy of Management Review 22(2): 453-481 Latour B. 1988. The Politics of Explanation: an Alternative. In S Woolgar (Ed.), Knowledge and reflexivity: new frontiers in the sociology of knowledge: 155-176. Sage: London Latour B. 1999. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University: Cambridge (MA) Law J. 1999. After ANT: complexity, naming and topology. In J Law, J Hassard (Eds.), Actor Network Theory and After: 1-15. Blackwell: London Lewis MW, Grimes AJ. 1999. Metatriangulation: Building theory from multiple paradigms. Academy of Management Journal 24(4): 672-690 Locke K, Golden-Biddle K. 1997. Constructing Opportunities for Contribution: Structuring Intertextual Coherence and "Problematizing" in Organizational Studies. Academy of Management Journal 40(5): 1023-1062 Mohrman S, Gibson C, Mohrman A. 2001. Doing research that is useful to practice: A model and empirical exploration. Academy of Management Journal 44: 357-375 Mohrman SA. 2001. Seize the day: organizational studies can and should make a difference. Human Relations 54(1): 57-65 Mowday RT. 1997. Reaffirming Our Scholarly Values. Academy of Management Review 22(2): 335-345 Newton T. 1998. Theorizing Subjectivity in Organizations: The Failure of Foucauldian Studies. Organization Studies 19(3): 415-447 Nohria N, Eccles RG. 1998. Where does Management Knowledge come from? In JL Alvarez (Ed.), The Diffusion and Consumption of Business Knowledge: 278-304. Macmillan: London Parker M. 1992. Post-Modern Organizations or Post-Modern Organization Theory? Organization Studies 13(1): 1-17 Parker M. 2000. Organizational Culture and Identity. Sage: London Pfeffer J. 1993. Barriers to the Advance of Organizational Science: Paradigm Development as a Dependent Variable. Academy of Management Review 18(4): 599-620 Pfeffer J, Sutton RI. 1999. Knowing What to Do is Not Enough: Turning Knowledge into Action. California Management Review 41 (1): 83-108

36

Poole B. 2001. From phenomenology to dialogue: Max Scheler's phenomenological tradition and Mikhail Bakhtin's development from 'Toward a philosophy of the act' to his study of Dostoevsky. In K Hirschkop, D Shepherd (Eds.), Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, Second ed.: 109-135. Manchester University Press: Manchester Rorty R. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume 2. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge Rynes SL, Bartunek JM, Daft RL. 2001. Across the great divide: Knowledge creation and transfer between practitioners. Academy of Management Journal 44(2): 340-355 Schultz M, Hatch MJ. 1996. Living With Multiple paradigms: The Case of Paradigm Interplay in Organizational Culture Studies. Academy of Management Review 21(2): 529-557 Shepherd D. 2001. Bakhtin and the reader. In K Hirschkop, D Shepherd (Eds.), Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, Second ed.: 136-154. Manchester University Press: Manchester Shotter J, Billig M. 1998. A Bakhtinian Psychology: From Out of the Heads of Individuals and into the Dialogues between Them. In M Gardiner, M Mayerfeld Bell (Eds.), Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: 13-29. Sage: London Silverman D. 1994. On Throwing Away ladders: Re-Writing the Theory of Organizations. In J Hassard, M Parker (Eds.), Towards a New Theory of Organizations: 1-23. Routledge: London Sloterdijk P. 1989. Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism. University of Minnesota: St Paul Susman GI, Evered RD. 1978. An Assesment of the Scientific Merits of Action Research. Administrative Science Quarterly 23: 582-601 Sutton RI, Staw BM. 1995. What Theory Is Not. Administrative Science Quarterly 40: 371-384 Van de Ven AH. 1999. The Buzzing, Blooming, Confusing World of Organization and Management Theort: A View from Lake Wobegon University. Journal of Management Inquiry 8: 118-125 Van Maanen J. 1995a. An End to Innocence: The Ethnography of Ethnography. In J Van Maanen (Ed.), Representation in Ethnography: 1-35. Sage: Newbury Park / London Van Maanen J. 1995b. Style as Theory. Organization Science 6(1): 133-143

37

Vickers G. 1995. The Art of Judgment: A Study of Policy Making (Centenary edition ed.). Sage: London Weaver GR, Gioia DA. 1994. Paradigms Lost: Incommensurability vs Structurationist Inquiry. Organization Studies 15(4): 565-590 Weick KE. 1999. Theory Construction as Disciplined Reflexivity: Tradeoffs in the 90s. Academy of Management Review 24(4): 797-806 White H. 1987. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Johns Hopkins: Baltimore