The role of �dialogue conferences� in the development of

The role of “dialogue conferences” in the development of

“learning regions:”

doing “from within” our lives together

what we cannot do apart

John Shotter and Bjørn Gustavsen

Publication of

The Centre for Advanced Studies in Leadership

Stockholm School of Economics

Saltmätargatan 1317

P.O. Box 6501, SE113 83 STOCKHOLM, Sweden

Phone: +46 8 736 96 20

Fax: +46 8 33 72 90

Draft, August 22^nd, 1999

CONTENTS

Page

Preface................................................................................................... 4

Introduction............................................................................................ 6

An understanding from within the ‘inner life’ of a region................. 9

The emergence of the idea of “dialogue conferences”......................... 14

From implementation of theory to developmental discourse.............. 15

‘Setting the scene’ for dialogue 15

‘From ‘seeing like a state’ to ‘seeing like a regional participant’ 20

The “learning regions” program...................................................... 26

“Learning regions” conferences 26

Example 1: The Skåne conferences 26

Example 2: “Before” and “after”

- the Western Småland conference 34

Concluding remarks.................................................................... 38

References.................................................................................. 42

Notes.......................................................................................... 42

“[Social forms] become social consciousness only when they are lived, actively, in real relationships and moreover in relationships which are more than systematic exchanges between fixed units. Indeed just because all consciousness is social, its processes occur not only between but within the relationship and the related” (Williams, 1977, p.130).

“The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answerword: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation of any living dialogue” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.280).

“A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky's novels. What unfolds in his novels is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with his own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.6).

“The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop.

Language - I want to say - is refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.31).

“A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.123).

“It is, I think, a characteristic of large, formal systems of coordination that they are accompanied by what appear to be anomalies but on closer inspection turn out to be integral to that order... [a] nonconforming practice is an indispensable condition for formal order” (Scott, 1998, pp.351-352).

Preface

In this monograph we describe both the conduct and the role of “dialogue conferences” within the “learning regions” program currently being conducted in Sweden. Crucially influenced by Wittgenstein’s (1953) remarks to the effect that nothing is hidden from us in our conduct of our social practices, and Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) claims, both that we exhibit our practical understandings of one another in our spontaneous responses to each other and that such understandings are inevitably novel, we argue for the creative role of such conferences. Something very special happens when people from a region come into living contact with each other, face-to-face. In responding not only to each other’s uniqueness, but also to the unique features of their shared surroundings, they create between them, first-time events that are a rich mixture of all these influences. Aspects of these events can, if they are attended to and developed, function as the beginnings of new and productive relations in the region. Researchers can help regional members set the scene for such meetings, help to draw attention to the creative events to which they give rise, and, by an appropriate use of language, help participants articulate their relations to their surroundings in ways which take account of local particularities and details. Researchers in this sphere, thus, assume a somewhat unusual role. Rather than as external observers seeking to understand radically hidden processes that can only be understood inferentially, through the terms of a theory, researchers become interested partners in the process of development. As such, they come to work, not in terms of concepts, principles, or theories worked out in laboratories or seminar rooms ahead of time, but in terms of the selfsame dynamic, scenicsense of the region as a “relationallandscape of developmental opportunities” as all the other participants within it. It is this shared overall scenicsense of the region that researchers help participants develop in the “dialogue conferences” they facilitate. This kind of shared, dialogically-structured, synoptic sense of a region, shared between all those actively living and working in it, is quite different from what has been sought in the past. Previous, monologic attempts to construct overall “synoptic” visions of a region (or a State) have led to the production of documents, or other kinds of pictures, maps, or representations, which officials in central offices can “read” without any “lived experience” at all of life out in a region. But, as Bakhtin (1984) puts it: “It is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses, one that in principle cannot be fitted within the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to speak. by its very nature full of event potential and is born at that point of contact among various consciousnesses. The monologic way of perceiving cognition and truth is only one of the possible ways. It arises only where consciousness is placed above existence” (p.81). We seek in what follows below, to replace the single orders of connectedness sought in centralized, “administrative” views, with the richly structured scenic-sense of a region that all those participating in it can achieve between themselves... if only they can be brought into living, responsive relations with each other.

Introduction

A new mode of “research:” knowledge formation in interactive cooperation with practitioners

This monograph deals with a whole network of inter-related topics that can all be considered aspects of two major concerns: regional development and the role of research, of professional intellectual inquiry, in this context. In recent years, “regions” have to an increasing degree emerged as core reference points for development, be it industrialeconomic development or improvements in welfare and the quality of life. Within all societies there are differences in terms of ability to fulfill goals within these areas, and such differences can often be seen in a regional perspective. The interest in regions has created a flourishing literature on such issues as, what characterizes a successful region, and under what conditions can it be expected to emerge. While demonstrating a broad panorama in terms of characteristics and explanations there are also some emergent common perspectives, in particular a tendency to stress social relationships as the perhaps most important dimension, together with the ability to organize processes of joint learning (see, for instance, the overviews by Amin 1998, and Asheim 1999). A successful region can, as a point of departure, be identified in terms of dense, manysided horizontal relationships which are activated in learning processes.

But how might such regions created? What is involved in a group of people all coming to see themselves as participants in such a set of dense, many-sided, horizontal relationships? Some will argue that successful regions can be generated through conscious, planned action, i.e. through the administrative and research activities of public agencies for regional development. While others will argue that they can not be “created” in any other way than through natural historical processes. We must just wait while history takes its course. The choice would seem to be between natural causes or rational planning. No other way seems possible. The authors of this paper, however, will take an inbetween position on this issue, not a blurred average of the two, but a radical in-between position. Indeed, we will argue that there is a third realm of human activity, a real of joint or dialogically structured activity of a kind unto itself, quite different from either the realm of behaviour (to be explained by reference to natural causes) or action (to be explained in terms of people’s reasons).

Until recently, this realm of socially distributed activity has remained unnoticed in the background of our lives together. Under the influence of a modernist philosophy, as Toulmin (1990) points out, there has been a preoccupation with “starting again with a clean slate” - “any new construction is truly rational only if it demolishes all that was there before and starts from scratch” (p.175). But now, we are beginning to realize that we cannot do that: “The idea that handling problems rationally means making a totally fresh start had been a mistake all along. All we can be called upon to do is to take a start from where we are, at the time we are there: i.e., to make discriminating and critical use of the ideas available to us in our current local situation, and the evidence of our experience, as this is ‘read’ in terms of those ideas” (p.179). It is in the course of dialogically structured activity between ourselves and the others around us in this third realm, that the ideas (and knowledge) available to us in our own local situation are manifested.

Thus, rather than “starting with a clean slate,” regional development is a matter of those within the region finding points of departure already in existence in some sense, either explicitly or implicitly, between them. No “intervention” be it from a developmental agency or anyone else can hope to transform something from being, say, a lowincome high unemployment area into a mushrooming economy overnight. On the other hand: in the social field there are no “natural processes” in the sense that they occur without conscious acts from human beings. Participants must start from the opportunities available to them where they are, at the time they are there. And among these opportunities, they will find some that are supportive from a development perspective, while others will be destructive. Whatever is the case, the question now becomes, not “can a learning region be created or not,” but, in its creation or development, what kind of acts are called for and by whom.

This brings us to the role of research. Obviously, research can describe and analyse regions, but can it help promote the emergence of more and stronger regions? What kind of research is developmentally helpful?

We believe that research can be helpful, that reflective intellectual effort is of great importance, along with the more traditional activities of collecting and compiling statistics and other data, but that special attention must be paid to what kind of research is appropriate in what context. To move from the role of an external observer to that of a coconstructor, i.e., to a role as co-participant along with all the indigenous members of a region, demands a reconsideration of several major dimensions of the research process. Central to such a reconsideration, is a re-positioning or re-situating of intellectual work. Rather than an autonomous activity of a general kind conducted in special institutes set apart from everyday life, aimed at producing fresh, foundational principles from which to make a new start, it takes on a much more mundane, but quite crucial character: that our helping us at certain moments within the flow of our ordinary, everyday practices, to draw each other's attention to aspects of them previously unnoticed. Attending to such previously unnoticed features of our practices is the major way we elaborate and refine them. Indeed, it is crucial to us learning them in the first place.

Below, then, in carrying out such a reconsideration, we want to do a number of things: We want to examine the role of dialogue conferences as just such a special moment in forming a set of somewhat independent regional actors consisting of persons running enterprises, union officials and workers, those in regional authorities and municipalities, in educational institutions, and other such interested parties, along with a body of state funded researcher/facilitators into a community of collaborative practitionerteachers, practitionerlearners, and practitionerresearchers, all able to act as resources for each other. For, as we shall show in some concrete detail below, something very special occurs when people are involved in dialogues with each other. In spontaneously responding to each other’s living expressions, new relationships emerge both between them, and between them and their surroundings. This is the power of dialogicallystructured joint action (Bakhtin, 1981; Gustavsen, 1992; Shotter, 1980, 1984, 1993): when responsively linked to each other as “voices” in a living dialogue, resourceful and actionenabling relationsbetween them begin to unfold.

In other words, within the arena of the conference, previously unnoticed ways in which regional actors can help each other become publicly visible new “relationalfacts” of this kind (opportunities, say, to liaise or coordinate with other actors in quite specific ways which would otherwise remain unrecognized) can come into existence in no other way. But more than facts of this kind emerge, many other, previously unrelated details of the life of the region crucial to its development, known only locally, also become shared regionwide, and thus available for interconnection where and when appropriate. In other words, in the course of such conferences, a shared sense of the region as a “relationallandscape” of previously unrecognized “relationalresources,” can emerge. The participants can come to share between them a scenicsense of the region as a dynamic arena for industrialeconomic development. Rather than simply an inert and neutral container for their individual activities, which they must coordinate according to the external dictates of a rational plan, they come to experience their region as a living entity with an “inner life” of its own and “from within” this sense of their region, each can come to appreciate the part they can play in relation to all the others in its development. It is this social power of a group of people in dialogicallystructured, living contact with each other to create a shared, shaped, and vectored sense of their surroundings, a sense that enables them all to orient towards the future in a coordinated way that we want to explore below.

Besides giving some examples of dialogues conferences and outlining the practicalities involved in both setting them up and running them, we also want to say something about the special role of researchers in staging such conferences, and about the special status of conferences within the life of a region. Indeed, we want to go even further, and to interweave into our explorations here, at appropriate points, remarks and comments, mainly from the works of Wittgenstein and Bakhtin (and from others also), that we think will be helpful to researchers orienting themselves towards such a task. For, unlike in descriptiveanalytic research, or in experimentally oriented action research, in the developmental activities involved here, “researchers” cease to be investigators in search of new knowledge. In preparing for and in facilitating dialogue conferences, they become (along with all the other members of the region), resourceful participants in an overall development process within which a region can develop continuously into a selfresearching and thus a selfdeveloping region. A sensitivity to events of a dialogical-relational kind, the ability to draw participants attention to them, and the possession of a vocabulary for use in helping participants refine and elaborate the new beginnings they offer into workable relationships within the region, are precisely the resources that researchers can bring into the dialogue situation - resources that can help other participants to become aware of the resources the have to offer each other. Brulin (1998) has outlined this as the new task - “the third task” - of Swedish universities: knowledge formation in interactive cooperation with practitioners.

It is this shift from research “conducted by outside experts” to research “as an inner moment of activity within the ongoing life of region,” that we want especially to emphasize in what follows below. By making the shift to working “from inside” a region, we want to try to avoid the results of a tendency, noted by Raymond Williams (1977), that arises from academics always giving their descriptions and analyses “in an habitual past tense” (p.128). “The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity,” he continues, “is this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products... relationships, institutions and formations in which we are still actively involved are converted, by this procedural mode, into formed wholes rather than forming and formative processes” (p.128). The shift from a concern with systematic knowledge, expressed within the propositional forms of a theory, to a kind of knowledge that has its being only within people’s practices within a region, does not mean that the knowledge generation function is abandoned, but it is necessary to critically reassess the kind of knowledge we, as researchers, can help to create. We will return to this issue later, when we have said more about the “inner life” of regions.

An understanding from within the “inner life” of a region

In an earlier article, one of us outlined transformations occurring over the last forty years or so in social science research aimed at social change and reconstruction (Gustavsen, 1998). Especially in the Scandinavian context, there have been a number of major shifts: in the location or site of such research, in its style, and in its ownership. While in the 1960s and continuing on into the 1970s, there was a focus on field experiments aimed at producing scientific knowledge in the form of theories “owned” by researchers for implementation by practitioners, from the 1970s there has been a shift to a much more “participatory” or “collaborative” form of research. Rather than a group of expert researchers from “outside” the sphere of working life in question “discovering” (or inventing) a scientific theory suggestive of possible new activities, there has been a steady shift towards the study of already existing social practices “from within” their own ongoing conduct and a continuous improvement of these practices. Although to some extent with complementary roles relative to other actors (Gustavsen et al 1998) researchers function as copractitioners and practitioners as coresearchers, and all share in the goal of refining, articulating, and developing practices already existing in the workplace and its surroundings in ways that are agreed as more effective.

Accompanying this shift in perspective has been a shift in “unit of change.” Again, the shift has been gradual and complex but there is an overall drift away from working with single organizations and towards units of a growing size, or “mass.” Indeed, work of this kind has been extended to develop relations between enterprises within a region into a network of selfdeveloping social practices, thus to large scale “development coalitions” or “learning regions” (Gustavsen, 1998).

This paper, then, will deal with “regions.” However, no effort will be made to analytically define the concept. Although the kind of social processes we deal with are, in this context, linked to regions, they overlap strongly with processes in other contexts, such as in single organizations or smaller networks of organizations. From the brief historical overview given below, it will be seen that the dialogue conferences have their point of origin in single organizations. Successively, they have been developed and transformed to function in new contexts but there are no strong discontinuities in this process. This means, furthermore, that a “learning region” can not in itself be unequivocally defined in terms of structural characteristics. To be able to learn is the same as to be able to transform oneself: a learning region is by definition a region in transition, always on the move. It is also possible to take “region” in a metaphorical sense, as a social landscape where actors confront other actors and can choose different ways of relating to each other. Indeed, as we shall see, dialogically-structured, joint activity is, by its very nature, an indeterminate mix of very many influences - and thus it cannot (with justice) ever be fully characterized. As a third realm of human activity of a kind unto itself, we shall find that its central defining feature is its openness to being refined or further specified only by those involved in it, in different ways according to the different interests and concerns of those involved.

The cooperation between research and regional actors can thus give rise to a whole assortment of results shared between them all. Instead of the production of academic texts solely for an audience of academic colleagues, the primary result of such collaborative research is the joint production of new practices within the region with dialogue conferences often being a part of these practices. Intertwined with them may be pieces of writing and other forms of communication, e.g. videos. All taken together they can be thought of as a region’s development organization. The production of more academic texts, in which researchers try to promote the “carrying across” of developmental practices “carried in” one region’s practices into other regions as we are attempting to in this paper must be a secondary and much later development. In other words, rather than on or aboutpeople, research of a collaborative nature, development research or action research within the context of development coalitions, is research together with the people those others who are its subjects.

The change from outsider to insider and from single organizations to networks and regions might easily be seen merely as a set of refinements in an essentially unchanging form of action research. But to view them like this would, we believe, be a grave mistake. As we see it, almost every basic assumption in terms of which research has traditionally been conducted needs to be changed. For, in shifting from an objective, scientific, “outsider’s” stance towards those we study, to a participatory stance, a major change of a qualitative kind occurs: for, as we move into the role of a participant, as we become an “insider,” our focus must shift from a concern with patterns or forms to practical meanings; from things of a general, externally related nature to a set of internally interconnected particularities to do with the region for it is in terms of these particularities that members must make sense of the opportunities actually open to them. Thus, in particular, as researchers, we must turn from a concern with regularities and repetitions of past events to unique, “onceoccurrent events of Being” (Bakhtin, 1993), i.e., particular occurrences which, on appropriate occasions, can give rise to the beginning of new social practices for these are the incipient beginnings of possibly new relations from which regional developments can emerge. In other words, on becoming an insider, instead of being concerned with arriving at a final, completely correct but static “picture” of a region’s structure, our aim must be to promote amongst all its members a shared, dynamic scenicsense of the openings in the region for development where they are placed and the relationships among them.

Instead of a formal, representationalreferential understanding of the region’s actual structure (that might be viewed by an outsider as just another neutral object in his or her surroundings), we seek what might be called a relationalresponsive understanding of its “inner life,” i.e., a shared, felt sense of what, in practice, given certain momentary surroundings, we should do for the best.

As Bakhtin (1986) notes, while representational understandings are passive, in that they do not call for a response, in the actual practice of moving backand forth in a living conversation, “all real and integral understanding is actively responsive, and constitutes nothing other than the initial preparatory stage of a response (in whatever form it may be actualized)” (p.69). In other words, such an active kind of responsive understanding “from within” or “from inside” the life of a region allows each individual participant, not only to gain a sense of their present place or position in relation to all the other relevant actors around them, but also, a sense of the particular openings or invitations offered them by the regionfor their own future actions. Thus each participant can, from their own unique place in the “relational landscape” they all share, make a unique contribution to the region’s development in a way that fits in with those of all the others.

We say that such a shared sense is a shaped and vectored sense, or a dynamic sense, because the openings or invitations it offers each participant will be perceived by them, not as static and neutral objects to grasp and to use as they see fit, but as “callings.” From within the life of a region, just like players in a game of tennis, participants will spontaneously sense the specific openings and invitations offered to them in their part of the region as “calling for” a specific range of responses from them. It will be as if each move open to them has a “grammar” to it (Wittgenstein, 1953), so that only certain moves will fit with the region’s development, while others will not. Hence, rather than having to act “out from” their own inner plans or desires (or their own individual interpretations of a rational plan), they can responsively act “into” openings offered them by their surroundings. This is what is involved in a group of people coming to live “inside” a living human reality together. Again, say, like actors in a play, they do not each separately encounter “the play” as a neutral, inanimate object of knowledge standing over against them, to which they each must orient individually. As they craft between them a way of acting the play which expresses all the interrelationships between its myriad details, a dynamic scenicsense of “the inner life” of the play develops between them once this occurs, then rather than them each having to try to act the play, they begin to find the play acting them. Indeed, as we shall show, it is as if “it” the living reality created by a human group in its activities comes to have “a life of its own” with its own requirements. When this occurs, all involved in “it” come to coordinate their activities together in, so to speak, being answerable to its “calls.” When united into a living whole of this kind, participants can gain a sense, not only of how they might contribute towards what they agree to be the region’s development, but also, a sense of how their “voice” might count in modifying and developing that goal further. They can do this because, under the appropriate dialogicallystructured conditions, the shared dynamic sense of the region they create between them is not of a dead and finished, objective actuality, but is a sense of an living, unfinished, and still developing whole. Such a whole offers to all those involved in its creation, a shaped and vectored sense of what is yettobe achieved within it, a space of possible activities in which they can all participate.

Central to the structuring of dialogue conferences are a set of thirteen criteria, or what we shall call orientational directives. Although in presenting these, we may still seem to be arguing for a set of basic rules or principles which must underlie and govern people’s actions if they are properly to communicate dialogically for we do indeed seem to be making statements of a general kind this will not be so. For once inside a living human reality, rather than as foundational principles or fundamental propositions, such statements will be seen as serving a very different function. In Wittgenstein’s (1953, no.89 and no.127) sense, they work as a set of reminders a set of “resourceful reminders” which can function to remind us of features to which we must pay attention, in the situation in which we are now involved, if we want to coordinate our talkstructured activities in with those around us in an unconfused fashion. And furthermore, but again only if used at an appropriate moment within a flow of activity with others, such remarks can also serve another important function in development: to draw people’s attention to possibilities, to possible but yet unnoticed relations between aspects of their joint activities and other events in their shared surroundings. Thus, rather than a set of general underlying principles to which participants are meant to conform, these orientational directives can function as an overlay, as a special kind of extra linguistic practice which can work to supplement existing social practices. At certain crucial moments, they can work to bring to public attention, unnoticed tendencies already at work in people’s spontaneous ways of working with each other, thus to refine and elaborate them further. Rather than in any way foundational, when arrayed as a set of criteria, they can be seen as a set of reminders working to orient participants towards what a “dialogue conference” is.

Our purpose in conducting our explorations in this manner in terms of detailed concrete examples and orientational directives is not simply to be persuasive, to try to prove the worth of the approach we outline, but, in fact, to raise some very fundamental questions as to how the whole enterprise of establishing regional dialogue conferences should be undertaken and understood. For, to repeat, we are not concerned with establishing a general theory, but with establishing social practices, and, as Wittgenstein (1953) points out, in teaching a practice, “giving examples is not an indirect means of explaining in default of a better,” (no.71); it is a proper part of how we do in act help each other learn and develop practices. For, as we have seen, as a joint activity, a social practice is coordinated in terms of a shared scenicsense of how we are each positioned upon “its” relationallandscape. And, just as we must walk the streets of a new town or city if we are to learn how to move about within it with ease and assurance, so must we also move from each concrete example to another, with each as an orientational landmark, if we are to build up a similar practical sense of the relationallandscape of a social practice.

The development of this inner sense of the internal relations constituting a living whole is crucial, and we can only do this by involving ourselves in a living, responsive relation to it; we cannot do it by standing over against it, merely observing in an uninvolved way, the patterns or forms it exhibits in its behaviour. Indeed, this is why it is impossible for a nondialogicallystructured human group to reconstruct itself into a dialogical community, as a material structure might be constructed, brickbybrick, from the ground up, according to an external blueprint. For, to coordinate the group’s activity around a blueprint, we must assume that the group’s members can already construct between them a shared sense of the practical meaning of the blueprint for each of them, and to do that, they must be able to dialogically respond to each other in some minimal way, i.e., to build on events which come into existence only in people’s relations to each other.

In discussing these kinds of difficulties in establishing dialogicallystructured communities, Bernstein (1983) reflects a somewhat similar stance: “a community or polis,” he remarks, “is not something that can be made or engineered by some form of techneor by the administration of society... The coming into being of a type of public life that can strengthen solidarity, public freedom, a willingness to talk and listen, mutual debate, and a commitment to rational persuasion presupposes the incipient forms of such communal life” (p.226). Although “a typical modern response” has been “the idea that we can make, engineer, impose our collective will to form such communities,” he continues, “... the attempts to do so have been disastrous” (p.226). The results have been disastrous because, as we shall show, all such attempts to channel or direct people’s activities into preestablished forms eradicate the one thing that makes dialogical conferences so special: people’s freedom to meet others who can spontaneously “call out” unique, firsttime responses from them that they could never call out from themselves, responses which can create relationships of precise relevance to the region’s development. In a dialogue conference, a group of people who until now have been somewhat strangers to each other, as long as they are uncommitted to any prior systematic theories, can work collaboratively to point out some of the previously unnoticed features in each other’s circumstances and practices, and to suggest possible ways in which these features might be linked or related to other crucial aspects of people's lives in the region.

Indeed, attempting to ground our communicative relations with each other in a systematic theory or a preestablished plan could be an impediment in such a process, for, in claiming to already know the “correct” or “true” way to proceed, we would be automatically refusing regional participants the right to modify and update the whole process in relation to what they see as the region’s needs. This does not mean, as we shall show, that in moving beyond theory (Toulmin and Gustavsen, 1996) we also wish to move beyond all use of reason, reflection, or rationality but it does mean, that we want to forestall the temptation once again to move to an outsider’s position, “above it all.” Thus, rather than beginning completely from scratch, as the grounding of a practice in a new theory seems to require, we want to suggest a very different kind of approach: the putting of a new practice into people’s already existing social practices, a new practice in which unnoticed relational features of their own current practices are brought to their attention, i.e., features to do with how their activities can link and connect with their surroundings in previously unnoticed ways. For this is what we feel people can learn in their participation in dialogue conferences. It is this public noticing and acknowledgment of possible relations existing between people’s current practices which we feel is crucial. These acknowledgments are the beginnings from which new, regionally shared practices can be developed^[1]. These crucial new beginnings occur, however, only among regional actors in the practical setting of the conference itself they cannot be conjured up by outside experts, no matter how imaginative theoretically.

The emergence of the idea of dialogue conferences

When the Norwegian Federation of Trade Unions and the corresponding Employers Confederation in 1983 made an agreement on development one of the measures to be introduced was conferences (Gustavsen, 1987; 1992; 1998; Ennals and Gustavsen, 1998). The conferences were intended to function as a meeting ground not only between labour and management in a traditional sense but actually between all the major levels and/or groups of actors into which a modern enterprise organization can be divided. The main purpose of the conferences was to explore the possibilities for joint development efforts: efforts where management and employees could work together to improve on conditions within their organization and/or its performance in relation to its environment. In principle, any topic could be made subject to efforts under the agreement but a preference was expressed by the labour market parties centrally for including the issue of work organization and the issue of local cooperation as such.

While it was expected that conferences would as a rule be organised on the level of the single enterprise there was nothing against organising conferences where a number of organizations participated simultaneously. In the period from the agreement went into force and until 1992 the board that was established to make decisions under the agreement made 478 decisions about support to conferences, economically and/or in terms of advice (Gustavsen, 1993, p.147). Since one and the same case could come up before the board more than once the number of conferences held in this period was probably somewhat lower, say about 450. After reaching a high degree of popularity throughout the 1980s the conferences fell into a period of decline after 1990 not because they lost their purpose and functions but because other forms of development organization started to emerge, taking over some of the functions of the conferences (Engelstad, 1996; Ennals and Gustavsen, 1998).

While these conferences were made subject to a rather sketchy set of design criteria a series of conferences organised as a part of the LOM program in Sweden running from 1985 up to and including 1990 were more highly elaborated in this respect (Gustavsen, 1992 (LOM is short for the Swedish terms for Leadership, Organization, and Determination). Altogether about 60 conferences were organised within the framework of this program (Naschold, 1993, p.65). While single enterprises were the main users of conferences within the Norwegian program although with some reservation for efforts to create branch programs (Pålshaugen, 1988) most conferences within the LOM program were organised for clusters of organizations, ideally four (Gustavsen, 1992, p.42).

Since LOM was a program with a finite time frame there was no direct carrying on of the activities of the program. If there had been, the use of conferences would probably have shown the same pattern as in Norway, successively being overtaken by other arenas, not least permanent development activities within each organization as well as across organizational boundaries. After the middle 1990s conferences have emerged in a new context. Typical of this is the program “Learning regions” in Sweden. As the name indicates, the conferences are used to bring regional actors together to explore the possibilities for cooperation on a network or regional basis. The actors come from enterprises but also from regional authorities and municipalities, educational institutions and others. 12 such conferences have been organised so far.

Below, focus will be on how these conferences function and how they are to be understood: within what kind of framework should they be interpreted? The presentation falls into three parts: First, an overview of the points of origin of the conferences will be given. Second, some snapshots from conferences within the “Learning region” program will be presented Third, we will conduct a discussion of how this kind of event is to be understood are the conferences for instance “theoretically structurable” or must they be understood primarily as forms of practices? If they are to be seen as forms of practices what does this imply?

From the implementation of theory to discourses on improvement

“Setting the scene” for dialogue

The Norwegian agreement on development went into force in the early 1980s and reflects issues, needs and ideas as they were seen by the labour market parties, with some support from research, at that time. In brief, the 1960s and 70s had been characterised by much debate on issues like industrial democracy, health and safety, job satisfaction and much else pertaining to the role of work in people`s lives. Several efforts at actual reform had emerged as well, particularly notable was a series of field experiments with new forms of work organization conducted in the latter 1960s (Emery & Thorsrud, 1976) with ensuing diffusion programs, and the work environment reform of the 1970s where considerations of health and safety were brought out of what was primarily a controlexpert context to be linked to issues like work organization and worker participation (Gustavsen, 1981; 1989; Gustavsen & Hunnius, 1981).

Along with the debates and actual efforts at reform a number of theories, or more or less general ideas, about “the good work” were argued. The sociotechnical school confronted the labour process school and these in turn whatever remnants existed of the older human relations school. Theories of democratisation entered into more or less uneasy relationships to biologically oriented ideas on human stress; efforts were made to reconcile ideas on optimal production systems with ideas on job satisfaction, and so on. The theories and ideas all tended to claim general validity and the period was, consequently, characterised by much confrontation between different schools of thought.

What set of ideas emerged as victorious? As a point of departure: none. When the labour market parties entered upon the agreement on development they endorsed no specific set of ideas concerning “the good work” and “the good organization”. What they did was just the opposite; to establish arenas where these issues could be made subject to discussion. These discussions were, furthermore, to be performed directly between those concerned and on the local level, implying, for instance, that different workplaces could choose to be guided by different views. The agreement gave process precedence over content.

However, process can also be steered by general theory. Not endorsing a specific view on what constitutes “the good work” does not mean that a view was not endorsed concerning “the good conference.” And, clearly, such a view was expressed. There were, for instance, several theoretically founded conference models available: confrontation conferences, visiongenerating conferences, search conferences, and more. While these and other conference models played some role within the broad landscape of views and experiences that came to influence the agreement and its associated practices, it is also clear that the main ideas were drawn from the history of the labour market parties themselves:

Traditional negotiations between employers and unions came to be seen as “discourses.” As such, they have certain characteristics. They are, for instance, conducted between representatives, they are set up in an adversarial form, and they concern clearly identified issuesand topics. What was done in the agreement on development was essentially to negate these characteristics. The discourses should in principle include all concerned, be cooperative rather than adversarial, and allow for diffuse topics and openended outcomes. It was thought that since development seemed to be rather different from traditional negotiations, the discourses needed to perform development should depart from characteristics opposite to those prevailing in traditional negotiations.

When the Norwegian agreement went into operation, further criteria or orientational directives were added to those mentioned above in the light of issues and problems emerging when unions and employers locally started to use the agreement. Since these further directives emerged out of largely undocumented practices it is difficult to reconstruct their emergence in terms of time and context. Instead, we will turn to the Swedish LOM program, where a broader set of criteria was made explicit from the beginning: the LOM program arose out of an agreement on development similar to the Norwegian agreement, but with some crucial differences. While the Norwegian agreement was implemented through a central apparatus set up between the labour market parties themselves, with some support from research, the Swedish agreement came to rely much more on intermediate agencies. Lacking a central apparatus for implementation, institutions like the Work Environment Fund where the labour market parties were well represented on the board came to act as such mediators. In this context the LOM program was launched, in 1985, as a combined research and development program to support the implementation of the agreement (Gustavsen, 1992; Naschold, 1993). Following the same general line of reasoning as in Norway, the program placed its focus primarily on process and, in this context, on the notion of democratic dialogue as the medium in which development processes were to be generated.

The idea of “democratic dialogue” was operationalized in terms of a set of 13 criteria, or what we shall now call “orientational directives:”

• Work experience is the point of departure for participation (concrete examples are important in particular, “moving” events that one has been “struck by”).

• All concerned with the issues under discussion should have the possibility of participating.

• Dialogue is based on a principle of give and take, or twoway discourse, not oneway communication (participants must be responsive to each other).

• Participants are under an obligation to help other participants be active in the dialogue.

• All participants have the same “rank” in the dialogue arenas

• Some of the concrete experiences possessed by participants on entering the dialogue must be seen as relevant.

• It must be possible for all participants to gain an understanding of the topics under discussion (time must be spent in achieving this).

• An argument can be rejected only after exploration of its details (and not, for instance, on the grounds that it emanates from a source with limited legitimacy).

• All arguments that are to enter the dialogue must be expressed by the actors present.

• All participants are obliged to accept that other participants may have arguments better than their own.

• Among the issues that can be made subject to discussion are also the ordinary work roles of the participants noone is exempt from such a discussion (something unique can be seen from every position in a relationallandscape).

• The dialogue should be able to integrate a growing number of differences (indeed, it is precisely from their integration into a living whole that a sense of the region’s relational landscape emerges).

• The dialogue should continuously generate decisions that provide platforms for joint action.

From where did these criteria come? As indicated above, they are seen as directional directives rather than as a theoretically founded approach to the one and only best way in which to conduct dialogues. Their main source was already existing practical experience. In performing workplace experiments, for instance, much of the effort actually consists of discussions with the workplace actors. In the experimental period, these discussions were seen as means to an end the end being the redesign of the workplace and hence their dialogic importance in creating relationships, remained unnoticed in the background. However, with the developments in the 1980's, they moved into the foreground.

While the sources of the orientational directives were practical experience rather than theoretical derivation, theory was not absent. When criteria emerged out of practice, they were confronted with theory; in particular, of course, given the time and the context, with Habermas’ (19841987) theory of communicative action. The purpose of such a confrontation was not to decide on which criteria were “most true” or “most valid.” Rather, it had to do more with perceptual than with cognitive matters. As Shotter (1993, and see also, for instance, Giddens, 1990) suggests, confrontations between theory and practice can have a number of other purposes than establishing a “true” or a “valid” interpretation of these practices. As we pointed out above, when used in a context, at a particular moment, rather than as a grounding for a practice, theoretical statements can offer useful orientation. They can draw attention to important but often unnoticed details, especially those with only a fleeting existence within the ongoing flow of a continuous process. Most crucially, they can draw out responsive reactions from those to whom they are addressed - the possibility of people being able, spontaneously, to responsively relate to the expressions of the others around them is central. The crucial importance of such responsive moments in the functioning of dialogue conferences cannot be overemphasised.

Although most of the criteria cited above emerged out of trial-and-error experiences with what is needed to make workplace and enterprise dialogues function, with hindsight, it is possible to formulate good reasons for their usefulness. For instance, the first orientational directive - the demand that work experience form the point of departure - leads people away from talking in abstractions, and towards talking in terms of concrete, personal experiences: a way a talking to which others can readily respond! Indeed, if the overall aim of a dialogue conference is to provide opportunities for all those concerned with a region’s development to create a shared sense of their previously unnoticed resourceful relations to each other, then their living responsiveness to each other is crucial. As we noted earlier, like actors in a play, rather than each separately experiencing “the region” in which they live and work as a neutral, inanimate object, standing over against them, to which they must orient themselves individually, in their responsive relations to each other, it comes to have “a life of its own.” When this occurs, all involved in “it” come to coordinate their activities together in, so to speak, being answerable to its “calls.” But this is only possible if all involved play out aspects of their roles with the others around them in responsive attendance.

Hence, it is not surprising that many conferences, that start with such general questions as “How to define the environment of an enterprise, its location in markets, supply chains, access to resources, and the like?” will tend to create highly unbalanced discussions. Since people in the outwarddirected roles of the organization mostly management will not only have more knowledge of such matters than, say, ordinary workers, but ordinary workers will be responsively excluded form participating in such talk. This does not mean that one should not focus at all on the issue of an enterprise’s surrounding environment, but only when the dialogue is going so well that all participants are able to play an active role in its discussion. And even then, such talk should be in terms of actual concrete events experienced by participants - “There was this time when....!”

Given these 13 criteria, the next step was to work out a set of more specific design criteria for the various types of arenas where the idea of democratic dialogue was to be applied. Among such arenas, conferences were seen as important, but not as exclusively structuring the whole process. A fruitful development process needs a number of different arenas for different purposes (Engelstad, 1996). And in the section below, on the Swedish “Learning regions” project, we shall note that many other activities involving pieces of writing or the showing of videotapes having their origins in the conferences, continue as a part of the region’s development outside of the conference arena. Here, however, we will continue with our focus on conferences, and turn to their design. The main criteria for the outline design of conferences were and are as follows:

• The duration time for a conference is flexible, but a point of departure is one and a half working days including an evening for social purposes.

• The location should be a conference centre or similar, where the participants can stay together for the duration of the conference.

• If the whole organization can not participate, the participants should constitute a vertical slice so as to ensure participation from all major levels and groups.As a point of departure, the discussions are to rotate around four main topics: aims or visions for the future; challenges to be met; ideas concerning how to do it and, finally, how to organise for action.

• Each theme is discussed in groups, discussion time about one hour.

• The groups can be composed differently: the main pattern is to use homogenous groups for the first theme, diagonal groups for the second, freely composed groups for the third, and groups composed of those that need to work together to continue the process after the conference for the fourth. By homogenous is meant that all participants have the same kind of role in their organization, i.e. as employee, supervisor or manager. By diagonal is meant that for instance management in one part of the organization meets workers from another part or management in one enterprise workers from another, if more than one organization participates.

• Each group presents its main views in a plenary session; presentation time for each group around 5 minutes.

• The plenary presentations constitute the “public” part of the event, and should express those points that are to steer further activities. In this way a clear separation is made between, on the one hand, the discussions and their organization in terms of settings that allow for deep participation, and on the other, the operational outcomes that have to represent syntheses, condensations, or other forms of operational statements that are accessible to almost everyone.

• Number of groups depends on number of participants. In the LOM program, conferences were thought to ideally encompass about 40 people, giving four groups of 10.Time is a scarce resource and should in principle be shared equally between the participants.

• The scarcity of time and the need to emphasise that the conference is a discussion implies that it is important to go straight to the first group discussion immediately upon opening the conference. In this way a sense of urgency is emphasised together with the principle of equality, the idea of dialogue, and the idea that it is the participants who constitute the resources of the conference. Lectures or other forms of establishment of authorities are to be avoided.

• All “official” tasks, such as chairing or reporting from groups, are subject to rotation.

• A conference staff of, for instance, researchers, takes care of organization, composition of groups, the putting together of the conference report and similar, but generally does not intervene in the discussions, at least not in the early phase of the process where the constitution of the workplace participants as actors in dialogue is a main objective. There is one exception: The group discussions need to be made subject to some degree of monitoring in the initial phases participants may need reminding of the 13 orientational directive above and interventions may be needed to ensure the principle of equality.

From these ideas about “basic design,” actual developments have gone in various directions. As we outlined above, this kind of conference has come into a fairly broad use, as one of the main tools to be applied to create development. This broad use has, of course, also implied modifications in a number of different directions. If conferences are used, for instance, not to launch a process of development but to coordinate ongoing processes, several of the directives mentioned above can be taken more lightly, sometimes totally skipped. For instance, rather than around an overall vision for the future, more limited goals may be set. The important point, however, is to apply these criteria rather strictly until a dialogue is well established, and all participants feel that they have a secure position within it. With the broad use of conferences within different types of processes it also follows that this particular kind of arena can become absorbed by, or transformed into, other types of arenas like project groups, workplace meetings, general meetings, evaluation conferences and so on characterising modern development work (Gustavsen et al, 1996).

From “seeing like a State” to “seeing like a regional participant”

Our central concern in discussing “dialogue conferences,” to repeat, has been with how those involved in them can gain an overall ‘inner sense’ of their region as a resourceful environment. How can they gain a sense of it as offering or affording them a whole range of ‘invitations’ to possible, economically advantageous actions? The beginnings of such a shared sense can be found, we have suggested, in the spontaneous relational-reactions of regional members to each other, in the course of the conference, beginnings which once noticed can be elaborated and refined. Indeed, something very special happens in the meeting and intertwining of two or more living, responsive consciousnesses with each other that cannot happen in any other way: a new ‘world’ is created. As soon as a second living human being enters into a responsive relation with a first, so that what the second does is partly ‘shaped’ by the first (and the first’s acts are ‘shaped’ by the second’s), then a strange and complex unity begins to emerge between them. It is, as Bakhtin (1984) puts it, a “unity... of unmerged twos and multiples” (p.289, our emphasis). This oxymoronic notion of a (dynamic) unity made up of a plurality of unmerged participants is pivotal to an understanding of what occurs in people’s meetings with each other. Just as when A and B shake each other’s hand, and A gets a sense of B’s mood in the process while B gets a sense of A’s, so in many other joint activities: when A as A, and B as B, actively relate themselves to each other, they each can gain a relationally-responsive understanding of each other’s nature. If they were to merge, to form merely a blurred average between them, the unique sense that they can gain of each other’s character would be lost. This, however, is only a part of the strange and complex nature of dialogically-structured events. Before examining them further, let us state some of their essential characteristics in summary form: