Relational Research and Organisation Studies

Charlotte Øland Madsen, Mette Vinther Larsen, Lone Hersted, Jørgen Gulddahl Rasmussen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815394150
• eBook ISBN: 9780429017667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This volume lays out a variety of ways of engaging in research projects focused on exploring the everyday relational practices of organizing and leading is presented. The main focus is through elaborate examples from the author's own research to further the understanding of how it is possible to carry out relational constructionist research inquiries. The book presents a series of examples ranging from conversations with top-managers, relational action learning processes in management groups, polyphonic inquiries for project management teams, transformative roleplaying in organizations, analyzing organizational dialoguing, and polyphonic future-forming ways of writing up research.

Relational Research and Organisation Studies does not only present and discuss guidelines for practice at a onto-epistemological level but also presents and discusses concrete cases of research projects building on relational constructionist ideas. Furthermore, excerpts of data are presented and analyzed in order to explain the co-constructed processes of the inquiries more in detail.

Relational Research and Organisation Studies invites the reader into the process of planning and carrying out relational constructionist research inquiries. Based on the authors own experiences, it inspires readers to develop their own relational inquiries within the field of organizing.

1 Studying Organising through Relational and Social Constructionist Inquiries

Introduction and Concepts

Charlotte Øland Madsen, Jørgen Gulddahl Rasmussen, Mette Vinther Larsen, and Lone Hersted

Introduction

Relational Research and Organisation Studies is a book on how research methods can be developed and used when the main objective is to collaborate with practitioners to study organisations, cooperation, groups of people, etc. from constructionist perspectives. Thus, it also becomes a book on inquiries for collaboration between organisational members and researchers, exploring relational and social dimensions together. In this first chapter, important terms and concepts of relational research are outlined and some of the bodies of thought that have inspired us are presented.

As Kenneth Gergen (1985: 266) wrote, ‘Social constructionist inquiry is principally concerned with explicating the processes by which people come to describe, explain, or otherwise account for the world (including themselves) in which they live’. Neither the relational and social constructionist philosophy as such nor the method, or as we prefer to call it in this book ‘inquiry’ (Gergen, 1985; McNamee & Hosking, 2012), used to study relational and social dimensions includes a specific definition. Instead, it can be seen as a broad philosophy that has some common points as well as variations in concept and approach. These variations are constantly forming due to the multiple bodies of thought which make up relational and social theory and inquiry and are accentuated by the degree of freedom each group of researchers has. This freedom allows researchers constructing inquiries to adapt to the specific processes they are studying in the organisations with which they are collaborating.

To explore from a relational and social constructionist perspective is to co-construct inquiries with the participants in a way that is relevant and interesting for all participants. Such an exploration also contributes to the ongoing, and never-ending, development of inquiries. Thus, relational and social constructionist research can be seen as a living field, meaning that while some of the terms and words we use today are more common than others, this might be different tomorrow.

The authors of this book have spent a number of years using and developing techniques of co-constructed inquiries. As researchers, we strive to apply ongoing reflexivity to important, central themes and processes to ensure the strength of such inquiries. At the same time, we also explore weaknesses to improve our research efforts. Areas for improvement are related to both very specific and concrete ‘technical’ bits and pieces of inquiry approaches as well as to more profound ontological and paradigmatic questions on how approaches could interact.

However, first and foremost, we want to underscore the one thread that runs through each chapter and is the steering principle that structures this book: the importance of dialogue, language, and conversation. For us, there could be no relational and social construction research without conversation between different partners. The theme of this book is, therefore, to describe how we engage in constructing inquiries from ‘with-in’ local organisational practices, as co-constructors with the aim of studying ‘before-the-fact processes of becoming’ (Shotter, 2016).

This book shows possible ways of constructing inquiries and transforming the sometimes-difficult concepts in social constructionism and relational philosophies into research practices. It is our experience that many students wish to construct relational inquiries, yet they often lack inspiration on how to apply these ideas in practice. With this book, we invite you into our practices of co-constructing relational inquiries.

The ideas of relational and social constructionism are well known to some readers of this book. To others, they open up something new and unfamiliar. This chapter presents some important terms and concepts to assist readers in the construction of meaning within this methodological field, especially readers who have not worked methodically with a relational perspective before. At the same time, we would also like to invite readers more experienced in the relational world into an ongoing conversation on methodological activities.

Inspiration for the Relational and Social Dimensions of Organising

The paradigm related to the inquiries presented is called relational constructionism (McNamee & Hosking, 2012: 1) and social constructionism (Gergen, 1985; 2009) and grows from the philosophy of subjectivism from Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, hermeneutics (Gadamar), phenomenology (Schütz), pragmatism (Dewey, James, and Pierce), symbolic interactionism (Mead), system thinking (Bateson), and social constructivism (Berger and Luckmann).

The book The Social Construction of Reality, published by Berger and Luckmann in 1966, spurred new interest in the idea that the social world must be studied and understood as social constructions. This also includes all kinds of organisations: firms, public institutions, and third-sector organisations. Socially constructed institutions, such as organisations, are made by people, but at the same time seen as realities by people in their everyday lives. Thus, organisations can be seen dialectically as having been constructed by people while, at the same time, they are seen as socially constructed realties that play an important role in forming people and their actions.

The contribution from Berger and Luckmann (1966) is usually called social constructivism, but to reach the foundation of this book it is necessary to take a step further into social constructionism (Gergen, 1994; 2001; 2009). Thus, from this point of view, processes of organising are constructed relationally (Gergen & Thatchenkery, 2004), including the ongoing activities of everyday life, and the more formal decision-making processes can be studied. This includes how strategies, organisational culture, and management practices are formed.

Gergen (Gergen, 1994; Yang & Gergen, 2012: 132) views social constructionism as ‘ontologically mute’, by which he means that it is not possible to make any assumptions about ‘real world’ phenomena because these phenomena only are real as they are constructed via language-based interaction (Bakhtin, 1981; Vološinov, 1929/1973). In relational constructionism, it is the in-situ and ongoing processes of social construction that we seek to study. Inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), it relates to his seminal work on a changed conception of language. Language in its use is, from this perspective, no longer seen as a way of mirroring or of making a map of phenomena ‘out’ in the world. Language becomes instead a set of ways of co-constructing the world. Since then, this way of understanding language has been heavily used and discussed, but undoubtedly most intensely in the 1990s (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000a). What the book has taken away from the many debates is close to Wittgenstein’s way of conceptualising language, which is through the expression of language games (Wittgenstein, 1953).

Understanding language use in this way was a precondition for the development of the term ‘linguistic turn’ (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000a) in the social sciences and organisation studies. It has spurred an increased interest in studying language use and has underscored the significance of relations and social construction in organisational life (Corradi et al., 2010; Denis et al., 2012; Gergen & Thatchenkery, 2004; Golshorkhi et al., 2010). Further inspiration on the importance of language use can be found in research on organisational discourse (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000b; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004).

A relational constructionist perspective supports inquiries into how dialogue between people is actionable and constitutes what we perceive as knowledge and reality (Cunliffe, 2003; Gergen, 2009; McNamee, 2015; McNamee & Hosking, 2012). Following this tradition, the inquiries presented in this book aim to study organising as language-based ‘living, responsive relational activities’ (Shotter, 2005: 114).

All the chapters in the book are connected to these lines of relational and social constructionist philosophies. Thus, we draw upon the work of a number of researchers who, over the last three decades, together with Kenneth Gergen, have constructed the field (Cunliffe & Eriksen, 2011; Gergen et al., 2004; McNamee & Hosking, 2012; Ospina & Uhl-Bien, 2012; Shotter & Cunliffe, 2002). This process of constructing the field has been done through a combination of inquiries into practice as well as theoretical and philosophical analyses.

Organising in Flux and Becoming

The first steps of organisational research inspired by social constructivism (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) led to the replacement of the noun ‘organisation’ by the verb ‘organizing’ – a concept first introduced by Karl Weick (1979). The replacement of words represents an important ontological shift in organisational research from studying organisations and organisational life as static entities and phenomena to studying processes of organising.

This shift has played an important role in developing relational constructionist research into the field of organising. However, from a social constructionist perspective, research is not about portraying THE socially constructed worldview and taken-for-granted assumptions of the organisation members, departments, or workgroups. It is about studying the local, everyday, relationally responsive dialogic practices of groups of organisation members (Chia, 1996; Cunliffe, 2011; Shotter, 2005), which includes finding variations in these practices and noting how they interact and co-construct locally produced moments of organising and how these moments are influenced by past, present, and future constructions of reality (Larsen & Madsen, 2016; Larsen & Willert, 2017; Shotter, 2005).

The focus on ‘flux’ and constant change was inspired by pragmatism as it was developed from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, especially in the US, where researchers such as John Dewey (1916) and William James (1909) viewed the world as being in constant flux and change. From this perspective, it becomes impossible to find, and uninteresting to search for, fixed understandings and established truths. The idea of pragmatism is instead directed toward finding, in the moment, plausible meanings about the local world to make it possible to act upon.

The themes in pragmatism are important for how this book works with relational and social constructionism. Pragmatism was further developed by Tim Ingold (2008; 2012), who reinstated the term ‘becoming’. Becoming underscores the constant change at play in processes of organising and takes an interest in understanding flux. From a ‘being’ perspective, an organisation is rather steady and stable; it is in a state of equilibrium or the management tries to bring it into equilibrium. From this perspective, it is assumed that an organisation, as much as possible, follows a rather linear, planned development and is only momentarily brought into imbalance. A becoming perspective interprets processes of organising, as well as the world, as constantly under development and only occasionally in a state that only seems to represent a balance. Rather, an organisation develops, to a large extent, in uncoordinated movements and actions shaped by the interactions between the different local groups and individuals both inside and outside the organisation (Larsen, 2014).

The importance of studying organising as processes of dialogue, flux, and becoming is further highlighted by the social and relational constructionist onto-/epistemology that people are bound to co-construct (Cunliffe, 2002a; Gergen, 2010; Larsen & Rasmussen, 2015; Shotter & Billig, 1998). People co-construct through words, actions, gestures, preferences, music, food, how they dress, what they acknowledge, etc. In relational and social constructionism, every action is based on interpretation, and such interpretations are constructed through collaboration and conversation between human beings. This means that everybody is always involved in not only relations that shape the actions he or she is occupied with but suggestions that those actions shape the person and the ways he or she co-constructs and interprets the world. This includes mundane daily activities like answering the phone or setting up a meeting as well more formal activities such as confirming a new strategy or a new organisational plan.

Becoming a Relational Researcher

How can these ongoing processes of organising, flux, becoming, and co-construction be studied? In the following paragraphs, we will turn our attention to unfolding the role of the researcher in relational constructionist research, while in the following chapters of the book, we use examples from our own practices to show how we co-construct our own roles in shared organisational inquiries as ‘disturbers’, ‘facilitators’, and ‘co-constructors’ immersed in the flow of the dynamic world we study (Shotter, 2016).

By following a relational constructionist onto-/epistemology, the role of the researcher changes from one engaged in classic qualitative and social constructivist research (Cunliffe, 2011). The role shifts from constructing a subject position as ‘The Researcher’ (Hosking & Pluut, 2010; Shotter, 2016), often described as being able to put brackets around ourselves and our activities in the field, to a position as co-constructor of the inquiry by acknowledging that we play an equal part in the meaning construction processes during our inquiries.

Constructing inquiries based on the ideas of relational constructionism means co-constructing the inquiry by immersing ourselves, together with the participants, into the constructionist flow of meaning creation during the unfolding research processes. As Shotter (2009: 3) describes, we join the organisational members for a walk in ‘somewhat foggy surroundings’. By inquiring into the process with the participants, we encourage the organisational members to find their own way in the sometimes bewildering landscape of new circumstances in which they find themselves. It is important to join them on a shared journey and walk down unfolding and multiple pathways through shared dialogic explorations.

The aim of our inquiries is not to find or show the appropriate path to follow, but rather to keep exploring the emerging possible ways to move on (Shotter, 2009). This role as a researcher has been described as ‘before-the-fact’ ways of exploring d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• 1 Studying Organising through Relational and Social Constructionist Inquiries: Introduction and Concepts
• 2 Using Adjusted Responses to Engage in Research Conversations with Organisational Members
• 3 Exploring Unadjusted Gestures and Responses in Research Conversations with Organisational Members
• 4 Engaging in Relational Action Learning Processes: A Way to Make Sense of Everyday Relational Management Practices
• 5 Polyphonic Inquiry for Team Development, Learning, and Knowledge Production
• 6 Doing Relational Research through Roleplaying
• 7 Analysing Organising as Dialogical Practices
• 8 Working with Data Is a Polyphonic and Future-Forming Endeavour
• Contributors
• Index