How Speech Acting and the Struggle of Narratives Generate Organization

Thorvald Gran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317268918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

How Speech Acting and the Struggle of Narratives Generate Organization seeks to shed understanding on how speaking or speech-acting affects how we are organized and how we influence each other and wield power. It is suggested that speaking is a major clue to organization and to the creation of new organizations. The task is to describe how speech-acting organizes. This book takes findings in the project's philosophy of collective intentions – its philosophy of society – into the field of empirical study of organization and politics.

The book investigates the relation between knowledge and politics, between describing the world and changing it, between cognitive – sensing - and volitional – wilful – processes and goes on to describe how speech-acting organizes, reorganizes - and destroys organizations. It looks at persons and groups as speech-actors. It investigates how speech-acting can spur movements in organizations from routines to learning to innovations and back

How Speech Acting and the Struggle of Narratives Generate Organization develops a model of how speech-acting generates new organization – or social innovations. Empirical studies of some economic, political and ideological organizations are mined for model development. Speech-acting occurs in the context of institutions, with capital producing firms and nation states at present as the most ubiquitous. But speech-acting has an element of freedom that makes some of its results unpredictable and difficult to control.

Aimed at academics, researchers and students in the field of Organizational Studies How Speech Acting and the Struggle of Narratives Generate Organization examines a new contribution and direction in the field.

Part I
Questions and Approach

1
Questions and Approach

Some Hypotheses, Some Already Suggested Answers

How Speech Acting Organizes

This book is an attempt to take some of the findings in the international Social Ontology Project—a philosophy of collective intentions and society—into the empirical analysis of organizations. A central finding in the Social Ontology Project is how human rationality unfolds in the rule-free time-spaces between decisions, between interventions into the world. That finding is for practical reasons (access to data) transposed into “the formation of and struggle between narratives”.¹ A chosen narrative of an agreement to do a task—a project narrative—is the embryo of organization. The agreement constitutes and sets the character of the organization that may well follow. This finding puts focus on how we come to agreements on what to do, a select aspect of decision making on how to organize the implementation of a task. It suggests that agreeing on a narrative is a special process that, in part, is without rules. There is a real freedom in speech acting, in reflecting on what to do and how to organize an activity. The finding sets a research agenda in organization studies. It can deliver new insights to practical organizing about phases in decision making and about different types of organizing (in firms, in politics and in science). The finding has consequences for the description and understanding of hierarchy, control and innovation in (and outside) organizations, consequences that are presented and discussed in the following chapters.

Organization is ganging up, or joining forces, to do a job or to fulfil a task. When we are personally engaged in an organization, we want to see the organization thrive, and we want to improve it; when we see weaknesses we perhaps want to eliminate parts of it if those parts function poorly or even destructively relative to the organization’s task. We want to participate constructively in such processes of improvement. However, our relations are different about organizations we are in but which we have no feelings for or don’t like. We can be indifferent or actively negative to our own and others’ activities in them. And there are organizations that we in principle like or accept as necessary but that we want to stay away from. Jails can be an example for most of us.

Here I look into organizations that fit into all three categories, organizations the actors like, are neutral to and perhaps detest. However, prepare for some discouragement. How to improve an organization is always an open question—until an actual improvement is implemented. It is open in the sense that there are always different ways of improving a specific organization. The ‘how’ question depends on many factors, such as what knowledge I deem important, which values and tasks I mean the improvement should serve, which priority or strength I think the improvement should have relative to other activities in the organization and so on. When considering an improvement we process ideas about how specific changes in the organization will work in the future. We process ideas until we make a decision, a choice, and start implementing the chosen improvement. The task here is to produce knowledge on organizing independent of whether the organizations created are considered good or bad. The materials are about how organizations in modern, relatively democratic societies work and how they change, including how they work and change relative to different interests, social movements, social strata, social classes and different genders etc. in those societies. The task is to investigate how we as people inside and outside organizations can effect changes (improvements) in them and how we can help the creation of new organizations (or new units in existing organizations), participate in their management and ruin them or break them down—intentionally and unintentionally. The task is, more specifically, to check out how our use of language in speaking and listening to others and thus engaging in commitments, verbally, in writing and (sometimes) in producing agreements, creates or more correctly constitutes organization.

The task here is to contribute some new knowledge about how speech acting and agency affect organizing in modern, relatively democratic societies. The task is to take some findings in the philosophy of speech acting and rationality (Searle 2001) into the empirical studies of organizations. The task is to check the findings against knowledge about select economic, political and intellectual organizations. I specifically delve into the organization of select Norwegian firms and organizations and especially into the organization and regulation of Norwegian fisheries over time. The task is to outline what might be termed a speech-act theory of organization.

Proust

Marcel Proust wrote² about his love affairs (Proust 2006 Vol. 1 and 2). He tells us about his attraction to Gilberte, but he definitely had difficulty getting the world (her) to conform to his emotional ambitions and longings. One day, we are told, the family maid, Francoise, had taken Marcel to an open grass park near Champs-Élysées. While Marcel was waiting for Francoise he heard a red-haired girl call out to her friend—Gilberte—whom she was playing feather ball with: “Goodbye, Gilberte, I’m going home now. Don’t forget, we’re coming to you this evening, after dinner.”

Proust writes

The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcibly her whom it labelled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of a man in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action, so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and as it drew near to its target—carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impression of her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called to her, everything, while she uttered the words, she more or less vividly reviewed, possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let her message brush past me without my being able to penetrate its surface, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry: letting float in the atmosphere the delicious attar which that message had distilled, by touching them with precision, from certain invisible points in [Gilberte’s] life, from the evening to come, as it would be, after dinner, at her home—forming, on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud, exquisitely coloured, like the cloud that, curling over one of Poussin’s gardens,³ reflects minutely, like a cloud in the opera, teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition of the life of the gods; casting finally, on that ragged grass, at the spot on which she stood (at once a scrap of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the fair player, who continued to beat up and catch her shuttlecock until a governess, with a blue feather in her hat, had called her away) a marvellous little band of light, of the colour of heliotrope, spread over the lawn like a carpet on which I could not tire of treading to and fro with lingering feet, nostalgic and profane, while Francoise shouted: ‘Come on, button up your coat, look, and let’s get away!’ and I remarked for the first time how common her speech was, and that she had, alas, no blue feather in her hat.

(Proust 2006 Vol. 1:373–374)

Names, it seems, can generate memories and emotions spontaneously, without an active search from the person experiencing the effect. Physical sites can have that effect. If true it suggests how complex human communication may be: the words—as names—have the intention of conveying a message. At the same time, specific words and names can generate memories and emotions from very differing times and periods of our lives. Thus, understanding why we say things and finding how the person we speak to interprets what we say are no simple tasks. This speaks to the richness of, the possible depth of even, simple statements. The possibilities of misfits and misunderstandings are also there; so are superficial understandings, overlooking or bypassing the depth of statements.

Speaking

Speaking and writing, sending and receiving pictures and data in qualitative and numerical formats are common and rife in most social relations and organizations. We have registered how the international research on social ontology and collective intentions (Tollefsen n.d.) has ventured into how social facts are produced, inspired originally by the work of John Austin (1962). Speaking springs from our intentionality, our being active in the world finding out about our place in it and what we can and should do. Languages are heavily present in the form of concepts and rules for making and interpreting statements and in many variants (some 6,000 reasonably separate languages?). Speaking also springs from the language institution, or at least we enter into that institution and use concepts and standards there when making and interpreting statements. Institutions (some) are well known by all. Institutions have been a theme in social science over a long time. Here I try to look at language as an institution, specifically as a rule system that people enter actively into when speaking, listening, writing and reading. Language is not a functional institution or an organization because a language does not have a specific task; language is not an operational institution or an organization. An institution can be seen as a historically produced structure of rules and expectations within which people act. Institutions as rule systems attempt to regulate human behavior (traffic rules, rules for conversations, for sexual behavior, for various games, for war, etc.).

Language

Looking at language as a (rule) institution in this (usual) sense has hardly been done or explored within the field of organization studies. In work on the social interpretations of language (e.g. Halliday 1978), where the institutional understanding of language might seem relevant, language is seen as a system for communication. Halliday defines his task as finding out how everyday language and speaking to children transmits more than the message, like more general ideas and norms in society. This way of thick communication (cf. Proust on “Gilberte is coming to dinner”) does more than transmit a message. It affects the parties in the communication, adding to their conceptions of who they are and where they are: “The striking fact is that it is the most ordinary everyday uses of language … that serve to transmit, to the child, the essential qualities of society and the nature of social being” (Halliday 1978:9). Halliday writes in this way of language as institution: “The salient fact about language as institution is that it is variable; there are two kinds of variation, (a) variation of dialects, variation according to user, and (b) variation as register, variation according to use.” The idea of dialect is that “dialect variation is functional with respect to social structure”. Because social structures are hierarchical, “linguistic variation is what expresses its hierarchical character, whether in terms of age, generation, sex, provenance or any other of its manifestations, including caste and class” (Halliday 1978:184). Register reflects which social process we are in: “register variation also reflects the social order but in the special sense of the diversity of social processes” (Halliday 1978:185). Halliday sees language as a tool for communicating and moving within the social structure, within society, and as a tool for strengthening or weakening social positions. In the Austin/Searle conception of language these are aspects of specific speech acting. Their point is that the use of language or speech acting goes beyond communication and under certain conditions constitutes or gives rise to new social institutional facts or to qualitatively new organized cooperation. Take away the word cocktail parties and the intention to arrange cocktail parties, and that phenomenon cannot exist, despite all kinds of material and other social conditions that make cocktail parties possible.

The task is to study how the institution of language and speech acting from within it in a social and material setting, directed at people in the same language institution and active in all kinds of other institutions and social relations, constitutes—or is destructive—of organizations. Insights into this function (given that it exists as I will attempt to describe it) have practical consequences for organizing, making people more effective in communicating cooperative groups or organizations and (perhaps) changing people’s perceptions of who they are and what their influence and power is. The task is to explore that constitutional/destructive function of agency, of speech acting, so as to increase human sensibility and power in organizations.

Language as institution is missing in the register of institutions normally studied in the fields of organization studies and political science. The linguistic turn has in these disciplines raised the language and discourse questions, but—as with Halliday—the focus is most often on how discourse unfolds and functions in firms and organizations and used by different social groups in different places (Alvesson and Karreman 2000; Gran 2012). It is hoped here that taking the norms and rules of the language institution, investigating how they are applied in speech acting and exchange of narratives between people (and groups, firms and states) will contribute some new questions and new knowledge, especially about the functions and dysfunctions of hierarchy and decision-making systems in organizations.

Rationality

A major concern in organization studies is describing what people in organizations in differing situations consider as rational actions. Rationality is a question of finding efficient ways of putting decisions (goals or prior intentions) into practice. Being rational is acting, making choices that implement intentions, defined tasks or goals. The Social Ontology Project suggests that we need (in addition) a definition of rationality as a ubiquitous human competence. The most radical idea is that the competence unfolds in time-spaces between decisions, between chosen actions into the world (Searle 2001:61). When we don’t fully know what to do we are in that space, that gap. That space is rule-free. Our desires, knowledge, interests and obligations and commitments relevant to the situation we are in are materials for us in that space. We reflect and reason in the gap on what to do in the specific multi-institutional setting we are in. If rules determine what to do, there is no gap, no room for reasoning. The task here is to take this idea into the empirical study of some (mainly Norwegian) organizations. Because of (for the time being) a lack of detailed speech-acting data at the mental and interpersonal level, an attempt is made to transpose the ideas of the activities in the gap to (the higher level) of the construction of, reasoning on and struggle between project narratives, narratives defining how actors want to organize specific tasks. A major example is the periodic struggles of narratives of how to organize and regulate Norwegian fisheries.

Searle on the Cognitive and Volitional Sides of the Gap: Brute and Social Facts

A focus here is on social innovations or the creation of new organizations. Such innovations fill an empty space and therefore invite insight into the basics of organizing. It is possible to follow the creative process step by step. For Searle, social is by definition the presence of a collective intention:⁴ “I will henceforth use the expression “social fact” to refer to any fact involving collective intentionality” (Searle 1995:26). A collective intention implies agreement—at some level—on a task for the group (minimum of two people). The agreement, a product of reasoning and deliberations of some kind, is a new phenomenon in and for the group. The agreement is more than the sum of the intentions and task definitions held by each member before and during the deliberations. The agreement cannot be reduced to the sum of the individual intentions, wishes and task definitions. Two questions are in the minds of the members of the group after accepting the agreement: (1) What was and is my intention? and (2) What is the agreement? An agreement constitutes a new social fact.

Prepare for some discouragement. The task is descriptive, not normative. Suggesting improvements to the selected organizations and regimes is beyond the task. However, the struggle of narratives does invite insight into how narrators of organization relate to each other. One question is the power struggle: how actors speak down (or up), marginalize and even suppress competing narratives. The study can try to identify narratives that lose out and can search for conditions that could have counterfactually eased the success of the losers.

Knowledge and Projects

Knowledge is basically statements that with reasonable precision represent what exists or what has existed earlier and can be documented. Know...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• PART I Questions and Approach
• PART II How Speech Acting in Context Organizes
• PART III Struggles over Organizing
• PART IV Political and Private Organization
• PART V The Pressure for Democracy
• Conclusion
• Index