Living Among Stories: Consolidated Narratives

In this chapter I will make several considerations on the case treated and I will outline a research path for future projects. I will focus in particular on the aspects that emerged from the research itself and constitute the novelty of my work. Several considerations have been made already on the excerpts in Chapter 5 and 6, the aim of this chapter is not to reproduce those considerations but rather to focus on the aspects that cannot find the support of the theory of the first part of the book and thus need further development in order to be inscribed in a discourse on organizations. The context, as already pointed out, is that of communication and storytelling perspective in the organizational field. The idea is that of studying organizational phenomena and organizations themselves “from within” (Shotter, 2006). In April 2006, I presented my project at a conference on “Polyphony and dialogism as a way of organizing” held at the University of Essex, UK. One of the convenors, Professor John Shotter, gave an inspiring speech on Bakhtin’s ideas, whose abstract I quote hereafter: 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 I will call the Cartesian account of language, people understand the linguistic representations contained or encoded in each other’s sentences. However, another account — articulated by Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1986) among a number of others, such as Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, and Merleau-Ponty — is of a much more dynamic, participatory, relation kind. In it, language and the world are intertwined in a chiasmic relation with each other, in which we are shaped just as much, if not more, by the world, as the world by us. 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 also still coming into being. In this view, we understand another person’s utterances in terms of the bodily responses, the felt tendencies, they spontaneously arouse in us, responses that relate or orient us both toward them and toward events occurring in our shared surroundings. In other words, language is not a system for use by individuals to give shared expression to already clearly conceived significations, but is a way of organizing shared sharable significations between us for always another first time — each utterance is a once-occurrent event of being. (Bakhtin, 1993)