Dialogue: Life and Death of the Organization
Abstract
There is a pervasive tendency in organizational studies to view acts of
communication in terms of the individual agent. It is the individual who speaks,
writes, gestures, and so on; it is the individual we credit for effective speaking,
just as it is the individualís ineffective listening that invites discredit. This
tendency to focus on individual acts of expression is indeed unfortunate because it
suppresses perhaps the central feature of such actions, their function within
relationships. Indeed, as we shall soon make clear, it is from the relational matrix
that the very possibility of individual sense making comes into being, and without
the existence of ongoing relationship communicative acts lose their status as
communication. As the editors of this Handbook have made clear, organizational
worlds are created and sustained through discourse. This chapter makes it equally
clear that it is through relational process that discourse acquires its significance.
More broadly stated, it is by virtue of relational processes that organizations live
or die.
Description
Draft copy for the Handbook of Organizational Discourse, D. Grant, C.Hardy, C. Oswick, N.
Phillips and L Putnam. (Eds.) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.Collections
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