Dialogism and Polyphony in Organizing Theorizing in Organization Studies: Action Guiding Anticipations and the Continuous Creation of Novelty

Abstract

Bakhtin's ideas of polyphony and dialogism in language are explored as ways of organizing our thinking in organizational theorizing. Traditionally, language has been thought of as an already established, self-contained system of linguistic communication that sets out a set of rules or social conventions that people make use of in expressing themselves. In this account, what could be called the intellectualist, Cartesian account of language, people understand the linguistic representations contained or encoded in each other's sentences. However, another account—a relationally responsive, emotionalvolitional account articulated by Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1986, 1993), along with a number of others, such as Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, James, and Bergson—is of a much more dynamic, participatory, relational kind. In it, language and the world are intertwined in a dialogical or chiasmic relation with each other, in which we are shaped just as much, if not more, by the world, as the world by us. Indeed, in arguing for the importance of an utterance's capacity to call out a bodily response from us, spontaneously, Bakhtin is arguing that our intellectual knowledge is dependent for its achievement on a much more fundamental, spontaneously occurring, sensuous attunement to the events occurring in our surroundings—an understanding that occurs in the `movements' of our expressions, prior to our grasp of their finished forms. Thus, to switch to this very different view of language is also to switch to a very different view of the world in which we live: it is to see it as a living, dynamic, indivisible world of events that is still coming into being. It is also to switch to a form of complex thinking, very much as outlined by Chia and his colleagues (Chia 1996, 1998, 2002; Chia and King 2001; Tsoukas and Chia 2002), in which, instead of our thinking retrospectively about organizations (assuming we all already know what `an organization' is), we are reoriented toward thinking in duration, a very different way to organize our thinking in organizational studies.