First draft of a chapter for: D. Holman and R. Thorpe (Eds.) Management and Language. London: Sage Publications, Oct 2002 (subsequently published in a shortened version in Holman and Thorpe, (2003))

MANAGERS AS PRACTICAL AUTHORS:

EVERYDAY CONVERSATIONS FOR ACTION

John Shotter and Ann L. Cunliffe

“What is most difficult here is to put this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified, into words” (Wittgenstein, 1953, p.227).

“Though he was trained both to develop such models [of his country’s economy] and to evaluate the models others developed, he [Fernando Flores] seldom found time to do this work. Instead, he was constantly talking: he explained this and that, to that and this person, put person A in touch with person B, held press conferences, and so forth... Because he was sensitive to [this] anomaly [i.e., to the fact that his work was not producing any particular products but that he was working nonetheless], it led him to take a course on the theory of speech acts, and in that course he found the key to the anomaly... He saw that work no longer made sense as the craftsmanship of writing this or that sentence or the skilled craftsmanship of banging this of that widget into shape but that currently work was becoming a matter of coordinating human activity - opening up conversations about one thing or another to produce a binding promise to perform an act... Work never appears in isolation but always in a context created by conversation” (Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus, 1997, pp.45-46).

Lisa (a project manager): “So the understanding of what’s real and what’s ... um ...it isn’t OK to do, is not well understood... I have no control over the information and it really gets uncomfortable when you think the construction company has a whole lot of subcontractors they pull in, so you’re left with a lot of fuzziness .... and the whole project has that from start to finish... I was saying to someone yesterday that a lot of what I do at work is I have conversations with people and sometimes I feel I should be having more output, and they said to me, ‘well .... you tend to be in jobs with a high degree of ambiguity and in those circumstances, talking things out with people and discussing them, that probably is your job. It’s to help figure out where are you in those circumstances and what needs to get done.’ So a lot of what I have been doing in my job is calling together meetings which say we need to grapple with these issues, we need to confront this stuff, or ... I need to question these things.”

Rob (a program manager): “Other Program Managers, who have the same job description, have different measures and different things they key in on .... the Project Manager manages the people who are doing the design ... they are managing the task, and the term I’ve used is ‘managing the interactions’ -- which is what I do. That’s different from managing the actions. The project managers are managing the actions -- this person needs to get this task done by this date so this person can do their work.... I manage the interactions which says that the marketing person needs to know what the project is going to look like so they can develop some sales brochures.”

Something is changing in attitudes to human inquiry: we are moving away from analyzing the structure of dead forms as individual, external observers of them, toward entering into a living, bodily relation with the others and othernesses around us. From within such living relationships, we can use our own, unique spontaneous responses – responses ‘called out’ from us by their activities – as indicative in some way of their unique natures. Such a bodily response functions, as Merleau-Ponty (1964) puts it, as “a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other way except through it” (p.93). This recognition, that new understandings can emerge in our spontaneous living relations with the others and othernesses around us, that our bodily responses are instructive spontaneities which teach us something which cannot be learnt in any other way, is giving rise to new forms of inquiry, to what we might call collaborative or participatory forms of research (Reason, 1994, 1998). Such forms of inquiry, rather than seeking to describe states of affairs in terms of static (i.e., dead) configurations, consisting in the relationships between externally related parts, seek a kind of understanding which, as Wittgenstein (1953) describes it, “consists in ‘seeing connections’” (no.122). In other words, rather than new facts or further information about ourselves, what emerges in such inquiries is to do with new, practical ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings, new ways or orienting ourselves toward them. Rather than as a mechanically organized external world, we shall take it that we are surrounded by a living, responsive, complex, indivisible, temporally unfolding unity. Indeed, it is precisely this reorientation toward making sense of our surroundings in organizations, that we shall explore below.

Expressing in words the view “from within”

In the past, we have studied the activity of others while standing at a distance from them, and attempted to make sense of their activity in terms of two major realms: the realm of behavior, explained as a naturally caused sequence of events beyond our agency to control; and the realm of action, in which we think of individuals as taking responsibility for what they do, and we explain it in terms of their reasons for so acting. In other words, we have seen all human activity as in some sense already orderly activity, and felt that the underlying source of its orderliness could be found, either in its law-instantiating nature (i.e., in it being governed by lawful causal necessities) or in its rule-obeying character (i.e., in people’s conscious following of rules). Now, however, rather than understanding those around us in a one-way fashion, by fitting our observations of their activities into “forms of order,” theoretical schematisms, of our own devising, we are beginning to understand them in an utterly different way: we are giving them the chance, literally, to make their “presence” known to us. We are beginning to conduct our inquiries in terms of the very specific, ‘movement shapes’ that we can sense as emerging within our living relations with them – shapes that emerge when we enter into a two-way, conversational or dialogical relation with them. It is in the intricate ‘orchestration’ of the interplay occurring in such living relations, between our own outgoing (responsive) expressions toward them and their incoming, equally responsive expressions toward us, that a very special kind of understanding becomes available to us – we shall call it a relationally-responsive, practical understanding to contrast it with the representational-referential understanding more familiar to us in our traditional intellectual dealings with each other.

              As a consequence of its dynamic, relationally-responsive organization, this third realm of engaged, dialogically structured activity, is quite different from the other two realms of behavior and action. As Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1986) notes, as soon as we act in living response to the activities of the others and othernesses, although still partly responsible for our own actions, we cease to be wholly responsible for them – for what we do is partly shaped by our responsiveness to events around us. Indeed, our activities become a complex mixture of not wholly reconcilable influences. At work within them, as Bakhtin (1981) notes, are both “centripetal” tendencies (inward toward order and unity), and “centrifugal” ones (outward toward diversity and difference). So intricately intertwined are to many influences at work in our dialogically-structured activities, we have to say that they neither fully orderly nor fully disorderly activities, that they have neither a completely stable nor an easily changed organization, nor do they have either a fully objective or fully subjective character. What is so special about these jointly structured activities is that they are always incomplete. Indeed, we could say that it is its very lack of complete specificity, its lack of any fully-determined order, and thus its openness to being specified or determined yet further by those involved in it, in practice, is its central defining feature . No wonder Wittgenstein (1953) remarks, as we indicate above, that the task of putting the unique indefiniteness of each such activity, correctly and unfalsified into words, is not a easy one.

              As Bakhtin sees it, the co-ordinated interplay between people’s spontaneously responsive relations to each other gives rise to some very special phenomena that can come into existence in no other way. The dialogical is not simply to do with two self-contained people simply having a two way conversation. What matters for Bakhtin, practically, is the co-ordinated interplay between people’s spontaneously responsive, bodily relations to each other: “When [a] listener perceives and understands the meaning (the language meaning) of speech,” he says (Bakhtin, 1986), “he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He either agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on... [Likewise, a speaker] does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in someone else's mind (as in Saussure's model of linguistic communication...). Rather, the speaker talks with an expectation of a response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth...” (pp.68-69). In other words, before any awareness or consciousness of meaning occurs in us, before we have learnt any shared conventions of meaning (enabling us as individuals to express our meanings skillfully and deliberately even when all alone), meaning still occurs between us spontaneously in the living, practical responses a second person gives to the expressions (utterances) of a first. It is the particular way in which we bodily voice our utterances, shape and intone them in responsive accord with our circumstances, that gives our utterances their unique, once-occurrent meanings. And also, it is in the way that listeners act, bodily, in response to our utterances that we judge whether they have understood them or not. Dialogical relations only arise in our living, embodied relations to the others and othernesses around us.

              To the extent that the participants within such dialogically-structured activities are improvising or creating between them a unique sense of their shared circumstances, a shared sense which enables all involved to act in ways intelligible to the others, we could think and talk of them, even at this proto-stage, as being practical authors. For, just as in a literary ‘work’, they could be said to be creating between them a ‘work’ with a shared unity, with a shared practice with a shared structure of sense to it. But as they ‘go on’ together, certain styles or ways of speaking (and writing), certain language-games, may be intertwined into their shared practices, into their forms of life. Such speech may serve to express and specify in much more intricate and precise detail, ways in which their practices may be refined, elaborated, or otherwise be made more fitting to their circumstances. It is in this more developed sense that we would like to speak of people as practical authors, as speaking (or writing) in such a way that other participants can creatively respond, and, in so doing, ‘go on’ in their own way, but still in a way which ‘makes sense’ within the structure of sense shared by all.

              This concern with authoring, and with practical authoring in particular, connects with this book’s overall aim. For, as Richard Thorpe points out in the Introduction, its aim is to explore and develop the image, first outlined by one of us (JS) in the book Conversational Realities (Shotter, 1993a), of the manager as a practical author. That chapter was originally written in 1990. Much has happened since then, both in philosophical circles and in the sphere of management and organizational studies. Thus what we would like to do here, is both to deepen and extend the connections between the idea of the manager as a practical author and recent work in philosophy. Besides that of Vico (mentioned in the original chapter), we would now like to bring certain aspects of the work of Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Heidegger to bear on these issues also. But much more than that. While the original chapter drew on the work of Morgan (1986), Schon (1983), and Winograd and Flores (1986), and upon their reflections on managerial and organizational problems, it contained no data at all from actual managers themselves! We are now in a much better position to remedy that weakness. In a practical exploration of the idea of managers as practical authors, ALC has accumulated a certain amount of taped and videotaped interview and reflexive conversational material, in which managers discuss issues, events, and problems occurring to them in their everyday experiences of managing (Cunliffe, in press). We would like now to bring some of the words of these managers to bear on some of the points we shall try to make - indeed, as we shall make clear as we go along, these exemplary utterances are a crucial addition to the present chapter. They add to the “practical-descriptive” aim of the original chapter: as “instructive accounts,” they are of use, not to explain management practices theoretically, but to managers themselves and other practitioners involved in those practices, as an aid in them refining and developing them further.

              Besides elaborating the original chapter in these two ways, however, it is also clear that in between 1990 and now, the whole field of management and organizations studies has taken a discursive turn. Much new literature of direct relevance to the approach taken here has appeared. Over the last decade, organizational analysts have explored the notions of dramatization, dialogue, and rhetoric in organizational life from many perspectives (for example, Alvesson and Karreman, 2000; Czarniawska, 1997; Deetz, 1994; Hatch, 1997; Hopfl, 1995; Law, 1994; Pye, 1995; Tulin, 1997; Watson, 1994). We refer to it as it becomes relevant to our concerns below. Before we turn to work promised above, however, a number of other preliminary comments about the original chapter will also be useful.

              While it took an essentially social constructionist approach toward management problems - that is, that they are problems much more to do with making (poiesis = Gr.making) with creating something quite new than with finding or discovering something already in existence - it is worth emphasizing that it espoused a social constructionism of a quite specific kind. It embodied a strong leaning toward the primary or originary importance of our spontaneous, pre- or non-cognitive, bodily responsiveness - an emphasis explicit in the work of Vico mentioned in the original chapter, but crucial also in the work of Bakhtin and Wittgenstein explored in other chapters of the book (Shotter, 1993a). There, it was called a “rhetorical-responsive” version of social constructionism. Here, to emphasize our central focus on relational understandings, we would like to call it a relationally-responsive version, a version of social constructionism that is crucially concerned with “once-occurrent events of Being” (Bakhtin, 1993), with events which are occurring for yet “another first time” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.9). We mention this here because many other post-modernist and post-structuralist versions of social constructionism still focus on patterns or repetitions, on structures of rules or conventions, on frames, systems, or structures , and also take something of a cognitive, Cartesian, referential-representational stance toward the events they study.

              Without going into the differences between these two approaches to any great extent, let us just remark here, that rather than with patterns-of-already-spoken words, in our approach we are oriented toward studying words-in-their-speaking. In other words, we are concerned with the moment-by-moment unfolding of relationally-responsive events occurring in “the interactive moment” (Shotter, 1993a, p.3), rather than with interpreting the meaning or meanings of already completed events. Rather than wanting to talk ‘about’ such events, we want to explore the functions of talk that is intertwined in ‘with’ them.

              The difference between these two approaches is crucial to everything we want to say here. For what is at stake for us, is to do with the developmental or historical course of processes that unfold in time, processes which have a beginning, middle, and an end (which set the scene for yet a further new beginning). Situations of this relationally-responsive kind, in which novel realities gradually come into existence for a first time, are very unfamiliar to us. We lack an appropriate vocabulary in terms of which to characterize them. As academics, as intellectuals, we are much more used to talking in representational terms ‘about’ objective entities we suppose to be already in existence somewhere. It is as if with all our scholarly training, we arrive on the scene much too late and then look in the wrong direction. The only once-occurrent, first-time, originary events of importance escape our notice. They are too fleeting; they are already over. What we can see with all the special ‘framing’ devices we invent for ourselves, are only the finished products, a finalized and static picture of reality “over there,” a dead actuality existing independently of any of our involvements in it. Thus, we do not recognize that as individuals we “may live off scientific knowledge but not by it” (Czarniawska, 1997, p.21), that is, we (like managers) act and make sense from within our own ongoing, living relations. We do not recognize the interwoven, reciprocal nature of our interaction and ways of making sense.

              Participants in a living unity, however, like two lovers in love or two dancers dancing, cannot be ‘framed’ in this way. In their responsive relations to each other, they mutually influence the emergence of each other’s character; their identities, their ways of being in the relationship, emerge in the relationship. In being internally related to each other in this way, they do not require any third things to join them together. To frame their activities within a single coherent order of connectedness is to totally falsify the living complexity of their relations.

              Always standing at a distance from the situations we study, it is difficult for us to appreciate this. We need a new way of relating ourselves to our circumstances, of engaging with them in a more primitive or primordial way. As Wittgenstein (1980) put it: “When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there” (p.65) . To think of ourselves as nicely self-contained, self-conscious Cartesian “subjects,” set over against a well-ordered external reality full of “objective” things, whose hidden order awaits our discovery, is to focus on our late, self-consciously constructed, deliberated upon relations to our surroundings. We need to come on the scene much earlier and to regard it differently, to take what we will call a more primordial (or poetic) relation to our circumstances . It is the way in which we are responsive, and as a consequence, relate to events in our surroundings that is crucial. For, although we always carry over old always of acting into new circumstances, the very fact of their unique newness calls out from us uniquely new, spontaneous responsive variations in our old ways. And it is, as Voloshinov (1986) notes, the particular ways in which our utterances (and other expressions) are responsive to the circumstances of their use, that gives them their specific meanings: “What is important for the speaker about a linguistic form is not that it is a stable and always self-equivalent signal, but that it is an always changeable and adaptable sign... [T]he task of understanding does not basically amount to recognizing the form used, but rather to understanding its meaning in a particular utterance, i.e., it amounts to understanding [responding to] its novelty and not to recognizing its identity” (p.68).

Against the image of the manager as a scientist problem-solver

With the aim in mind, then, of trying to reveal in our everyday activities the beginnings of a new way of doing things, we are now in a position to move on to our exploration of the image of the manager as a practical author. We will begin by adapting some of the opening paragraphs of the original article, as they still seem to us to set the scene for the rest of what we want to say quite well.

              The original article took a remark of Winograd and Flores (1986, p.151) as its point of departure. Rather than urging managers to study theories established for them by outsiders, by scientific experts, they characterized the responsibilities of managers “as participation in ‘conversations for possibilities’ that open new backgrounds for conversations for action” (p.151, our emphasis). Where, by the term “background,” we take Winograd and Flores to mean what we mean when we talk of opening up new ways of responsively relating to our surroundings. And in what follows below, we shall also make a somewhat similar claim to their’s: that it is not yet more or different theories that we need in management studies, but a better understanding of the intertwining of conversational talk with an organization’s other activities, and of how events occurring within such intertwinings can afford the creation of yet further kinds of conversationally structured realities by those involved in them . Indeed, the implication of our comments below is that, at least in management studies, we should demote theory – as stated in terms of propositions, rules, or principles, and argued over as to its accuracy, etc. – right to the back room of our thought. This is because we want to argue (following Vico, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, etc. ) that management studies will fare much better if they function as a humane study, drawing upon the special knowledge we have ‘from within’ ourselves as conversationally competent human beings . For, by still treating management studies as a ‘science’, and by placing our central focus upon ‘theories’ (even when we have ceased to worry about whether they are true or false, and treat them only as ‘tools of thought’, as metaphors), we come, as we indicted above, too late on the scene. As a result, we hide from ourselves our lack of knowledge in at least two major spheres of activity, both crucial to an understanding of what is involved in managers managing organizations. To turn to the first of these spheres.

              1) What is it that makes for a ‘good’ manager? For instance, we still do not understand the nature of the core activities that make a manager a good manager. Clearly, it is not to do with finding and applying a true or false theory, or just acting out specific roles or functions (Kotter, 1982; Mintzberg, 1973; Stewart, 1967). Rather, it is to do with a complex of issues centered on the provision of an intelligible formulation of what has become, for the others in the organization, a chaotic welter of impressions. In this sense, a manager might be seen as a ‘repairer’, as someone who is able to restore a routine flow of action, to help give shape and direction to the actions of other participants in the organization. Thus, rather than ‘doing science’, managers may best be seen as involved in ‘making history’ . For – although they must often operate (as Marx said in general about people making history) “under conditions not of their own choosing” – good managers, when faced with such un-chosen conditions, can, if they can produce the appropriate utterances responsive to those conditions, help to create in conversations with those around them, a mutually shared ‘landscape’ of possibilities for action. Indeed, they can go further. Just as good novelists or playwrights can move others to experience a felt and actively lived sense of an (as yet) non-existent reality, so can the good manager move those they must manage through acting jointly with them. More than just ‘giving us a picture’ – which, because it lies dead on the page, is still open to interpretation – the good writer can bring us to experience a ‘living reality’, a ‘dynamic landscape’, which spontaneously offers us, as it were, a set of ‘action guiding advisories’, a ‘shaped and vectored sense’ of where we are now and where we might (or perhaps should) go next. Indeed, from within such a felt and actively lived reality, what is ‘in front’ and what ‘behind’ them, what is ‘in reach’ and what ‘out of reach’, and so on, becomes directly apparent to us. It is as if each event within it occurs, so to speak, with ‘strings attached’, so that those who are involved in it create a sense of ‘what leads to what’ or ‘what can go with what’. It is as if at each moment there are ‘rules’ as to what one should do next, rules of a kind that one obeys them immediately and spontaneously, in a way that is “not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.201). The rule is of a kind that, when I obey it, says Wittgenstein (1953), “I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly” (no.219).

              Managers can be seen, then, not just as individuals ‘making history’, but as creating in concert with those around them, new possibilities within both they and the others can live and work. It is in this sense that, more than just a ‘reader’ of situations, more than just a ‘repairer’ of them, a good manager can be seen as something of an ‘author’ of them too.

              It is the fact that everything we do in the sphere of language use, to the extent that it is never a mere repetition of something already done, but requires us to be responsive to the others and othernesses around us as we negotiate with them the emerging meaning of our actions, that makes the notion of authorship especially appropriate. We are not concerned with merely finding an already existing category to fit an action into, but with creating, with crafting and shaping, a unique response to a unique circumstance. This is enough to suggest that a form of authorship is at work in human beings crafting the unfolding of their lives in a responsive relation to their circumstances. But the good manager must do more than this. They cannot just innovate as they please, for the fact is, not just ‘anything goes’ - they cannot be like novelists, the authors of fictions, nor can merely innovate simply in relation to what the conditions of their own personal lives might ‘permit’ or ‘afford’. This leads us to the consideration of a second sphere of knowledgeable activity in which the image of the manager as a ‘scientist’ fails us.

              2) How can ‘good’ managers prepare themselves? Often in the human sciences it is said that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.” Does this mean that good managers should, like academics, spend their time in seminar rooms devising and discussing theories? This where our focus solely on the idea of the manager as a scientist can gain mislead us. In attending to the many possible external “frameworks” or “systems” in terms of which make sense of events, we can easily ignore the many other special preparatory activities or practices relevant to any investigatory practice. We can easily neglect the importance of an organization’s common sense (see below), and how it can function both to motivate and to guide our inquiries. As Heidegger (1962) notes with respect to his inquiry into the general meaning of Being, that, although we do not know what Being means, “inquiry, as a kind of seeking, must be guided beforehand by what is sought. So the meaning of Being must already be available to us in some way... Out of this understanding arise both the explicit question of the meaning of Being and the tendency that leads us towards its conception... But this vague average understanding of Being is still a Fact” (p.25). We gain such a vague average understanding only from within our engaged involvements with the others and othernesses around us. Good managers must actively pursue such involvements.

              Thus, besides talking to or at others, they must talk with them; they must be sensitive and subtle listeners, as well as sensitive and subtle talkers. And within the relational interplay between their own outgoing talk (and other actions) and the incoming responses to what they do from others, they must be able to sense those aspects of other’s responses which are not just the mere reflection of their own responses back to them. In other words, they must be able to hear the possibility of “something new” in the nuances and tones of those around them. By taking what above we have called a “primordial” stance, they must be able in the continual routine flow of background activity within which all are immersed, to catch a fleeting glimpse of possible new beginnings and to “foreground” them.

              To do this, they must do more than merely touching on it and then moving on, they must as in an artistic presentation or performance, dramatize it. What is done in a dramatization, more than drawing attention to a mere moment, is to foreground and to make sensibly graspable, the shape and character of ‘a something’ which, nonetheless, still remains invisible - one must portray or display in one’s performance its presence as a unitary whole (just as Marcel Marceau ‘displays’ the existence of an invisible wall in his hand movements as he struggles to find an opening in it). If one is primordial enough (in one’s stance) and original enough (in one’s words), then one can express the fleeting, flickering presence of new possibilities merely glimpsed in such a way that others can not only glimpse them too, but dwell on them long enough to make them items of public discussion.

              The good manager, then, is able to start with the vague sense of possibility - a sense of something till now left unnoticed in the background to one’s daily circumstances -- and to work from within that vague understanding toward a much more explicit, linguistically expressible, account of it -- an account which preserves it as a ‘living reality’, and which provides a ‘shaped and vectored sense’ of the organization as it is now, and where participants might go to next, the enactment of sensible organizational environments (Weick, 1995). Talk in terms of objective theories fails to do this. Because theory is not oriented towards influencing events from within one’s living involvement in them, theory as such excludes the provision of such a ‘directed sense’. Indeed, theories can often seem to exclude action. A sense of being disempowered by one’s own analyses is still possible even with the most complex and sophisticated forms of theory . If good managers are to do more than just ‘give us the picture’, like a good novelist, through their use of words, they must create between themselves and their associates a dialogical space’, a ‘dynamic landscape’ within which they can find an orientation, places in which to take a stand and places to which to move. But if managers are to do this, they must also be sensitive to and to see, i.e., to ‘read’, their surroundings in a special way.

              Thus they must not only see what the given (i.e., unchosen) conditions, which all in the organization must face; they must also see them afresh as a poet might see them, as if for another first-time. They must see them as offering, permitting, or affording new possibilities unnoticed by others. They must then be able, linguistically, to stop others ‘in their tracks’, so to speak, to disrupt their routine ways of seeing things, and to draw their attention instead to the presence of a previously unnoticed “this” in their shared circumstances, and give it a sufficiently distinct initial formulation as to enable others to contribute toward “its” further specification. In other words, their authoring must be justified or justifiable authoring, and for that to be possible, it must be ‘grounded’ or ‘rooted’ in some way. They must be able to give a sharable linguistic formulation, to already shared feelings, arising out of shared circumstances - and that is perhaps best done, because of the inevitable vagueness of such the “this” or the “something” to be made visible, through the use of metaphors and other poetic devices. To assimilate current circumstances to a systematic theory, perspective, or framework, is to treat them as like an already well-known, quite specific state of affairs. While this may seem to help in enabling one to prepare one’s reactions ahead of time, it precludes all the possibilities of authorship we have discussed above. In fact, if we are to understand authorship, what we need, as we have argued above, is to move away from thinking of language as to do with representations. We need an account of language use which emphasizes what we might call its constitutive function or formative power: the ability of people in otherwise vague, or only partially specified, incomplete situations (arising in the joint action between 1st- and 2nd-persons), to ‘give’ or to ‘lend’ to such situations a more determinate linguistic formulation - and in doing this, in specifying the tendencies or possibilities in the situation only vaguely, allowing others to participate in specifying them further.

Shaping one’s talk to fit the “contours” of a circumstance

Now, as we have already mentioned above, someone who foresaw the nature of these problems very clearly, and who spoke against the modeling all our methods of intellectual inquiry upon those of science, was Giambattista Vico. In terms that might almost sound sacrilegious, he spoke out against the single-minded search for truth in the following terms:

“Since. in our time, the only target of our intellectual endeavors is truth, we devote all our efforts to the investigation of physical phenomena, because their nature seems unambiguous; but we fail to inquire into human nature which, because of the freedom of man's will, is difficult to determine... As a consequence, those [in public life] whose only concern is abstract truth experience great difficulty in achieving their means, and greater difficulty in attaining their ends. Frustrated in their own plans, deceived by the plans of others, they often throw up the game. Since, then, the course of action in life must consider the importance of the single events and their circumstances, it may happen that many of these circumstances are extraneous and trivial, some of them bad, some even contrary to one's goal. It is therefore impossible to assess human affairs by the inflexible standard of abstract right; we must rather gauge them by the pliant Lesbic rule, which does not conform bodies to itself, but adjusts itself to their contours” (Vico, 1990, pp.33-34, our emphasis).

In Vico's terms, then, the kind of knowing we need in dealing with those passing moments we call ‘circumstances’ is not knowledge formulated in terms of systematic and fixed principles, but practical wisdom, the special third kind of contextualized knowing, sui generis, that we have already mentioned above, knowing of a relationally-responsive kind – which, to repeat, takes into account (and is only accountable within) the social situation within which it is known. Indeed, as he remarks, it is a kind of knowing in human affairs which, in our assessments of them, we express by adjusting ourselves to “their contours” - we shall return to this notion below. Thus, says Vico (1990), the difference between the imprudent individual and the wise person is this:

“The learned but imprudent individual, traveling in a straight line from general truths to particular ones, bulls his way through the tortuous paths of life. But the sage who, through all the obliquities and uncertainties of human actions and events, keeps his eye steadily focused on eternal truth, manages to follow a roundabout way whenever he cannot travel in a straight line, and makes decisions, in the field of action, which, in the course of time, prove to be as profitable as the nature of things permits” (p.35).

Imprudent individuals must use force because they act in accordance with how, according to their theories, they think circumstances ought to be, rather than acting in accordance with how they actually ‘are’. But what ‘is’ their nature, what ‘are’ human circumstances, and in particular, the circumstances within organizations, like? What kind of talk is required to make their invisible “contours” visible to people for a very first time, and to orient them toward fresh, unnoticed possibilities within them?

              Vico, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Heidegger all claim that the kind of talk required is poetic talk. Our everyday, self-consciously thoughtful attitude toward our words, however, makes it difficult to see what they might mean by this. Routinely, we do not stop to attend to attend to the immediate dynamics of any images that they might, poetically, create. As Rorty (1989) puts it, our routine ways of talking depend on the “literalization of selected metaphors” (p.44), i.e., on us treating certain ways of talking as transparent, as describing how things are for us, “in reality.” But poetic forms of talk ‘arrest’ our routine ways. They work, not only to provoke us into the construction of a poetic image, the felt sense of a scene, a “dynamic landscape,” a “presence” (Steiner, 1989), but they also ‘strike’ us or ‘move’ to respond to it in some way. They put the imaged scene, so to speak, on ‘freeze-frame’, and then ‘instruct’ us in searching over the frozen “presence” so created, for ways in which to relate ourselves responsively to aspects of it that might not otherwise have occurred to us. Often, they do it by bringing two very ordinary words or phrases, not usually juxtaposed, into strange new combinations. While the words themselves may be quite vague, their unusual juxtaposition ‘directs’ us to attend to aspects of what is present to us in new and extra-ordinary ways. The precision in poetic forms of talk comes from the nuanced details in our circumstances that we would not otherwise have noticed. Thus such forms of talk are not “about” anything in the sense of “saying” something about a situation. More than merely representing, describing, or picturing a particular state of affairs, more than merely giving us information about it, a poetic image “shows” us, or “reminds” us, of our (many different) ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings, to the circumstances of our lives. It leads to a kind of understanding which, to repeat, “consists in ‘seeing connections’” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.122). And we can make use of such images – to look through them, to think with them, so to speak – in seeing and making connections between aspects of our surrounding circumstances that might not otherwise have occurred to us. As Merleau-Ponty (1964) remarks: “To think is not to possess the objects of thought; it is to use them to mark a realm to think about which we therefore are not yet thinking about” (p.160).

              In other words, rather than a passive understanding, in which we supposedly compare the configuration of an inner mental representation with the configuration of a state of affairs in reality, we are doing something else very much more complicated. We are using such poetic images to guide us in organizing and assembling in a way which makes sense to the others around us, bits and pieces of information available to us in our surroundings, but dispersed in space and time, in accordance with the ‘responsive instructions’ provided to us by such images. Such images then, do not replace our responsive relations to our surroundings. Quite the contrary. Their function is to relate us to our surroundings in more refined, nuanced, and creative ways.

              A poem, as a literary text, is worked over deliberatively to produce in us such a felt sense of an imaginable unity, a complex poetic image, which we can use in some way in making an enriched sense of the circumstances of our lives. But, just as the origins of our more formal forms of abstract talk can be found in our everyday conversational practices, so can we find poetic ways of talking spontaneously at work there too. We can explore the kinds of spontaneous uses to which such talk can be put in the talk of our managers. When Lisa (quoted above) says that “you’re left with a whole lot of fuzziness... and the whole project has that from start to finish,” her aim is not just to give us a passive picture of her work (merely to give us facts about it). Indeed, if that were her aim her talk is extremely vague. No. She wants to orient us toward it, to evaluate it as she does, to instruct or direct us in how to make appropriate responsive sense of what she does. She wants us to see the connections between her having “no control over the information,” and how “a lot of what I do at work is I have conversations” is an intelligible consequence of that. It is a consequence, because in the middle of all the “fuzziness,” she has “to help figure out where you are in those circumstances and what needs to get done” (our emphasis). We can view Rob’s account below - of why he spends time “building relations” - in a similar way:

Rob: “I actually spend a fair amount of time just building relationships, talking to people, for two reasons. One is so that I have enough knowledge so that when I have to make those judgments I can do it, just getting the general lay of the land and understanding what people are concerned about and where the hot points are today, and also at the same time, building my credibility with those people, so that when I do come in and make a decision that goes against them, they feel good about it. They say, ‘OK, he came and talked to me and understood where I am coming from’.”

Like Lisa’s vague talk of “fuzziness,” in talking of his two reasons for “building relations,” Rob also uses a couple of vague, everyday images to which we can respond. He talks of the “general lay of the land” and of “where the hot points are today,” and also of needing to “build my credibility with those people.” What is Rob doing in such talk as this? Well, just like Lisa, Rob is also wanting us (wanting ALC) to see connections, to see why he spends so much time “building relations.” Like Lisa, he also sees it as a manager’s task to help the others around him to clarify their place in the larger scheme of things (to use another, vague, everyday figure of speech). As he comments in a later quote (see below), he often says to the others around him “this is where we’re heading, this is what’s important, this is what we need to do together.” But more than that, at the same time he wants us (wants ALC) to see the connection between his efforts at building relations and building credibility: he needs the others around him to sense him as in touch with their circumstances. For, as we all know (ALC included) -- once we are reminded of it -- that we can “feel good” about a difficult decision as long it is not imposed on us, as long we all take it together, so to speak.

              Both Lisa and Rob in their talk are, we feel, are spontaneously ‘tailoring’ the contours of their speech to the felt contours of their situation. More than merely picturing her circumstances to us in what she says, Lisa, in the movement of her words, ‘gestures’ toward certain detailed aspects in her circumstances in an effort to ‘point out’ their intricate complexity to us. We lack in our transcript of her speech, her pacing and pausing, her intoning of it, its sonorous rhythms. But even in the transcript, we can sense how, in stopping to focus on this, in going on to connect it with that, in adding a qualification here, in stating a value there, and then in moving on to project a future or to relate to the past, she is ‘orchestrating’ the movement of her talk. And this gives us a sense, not of the actual structure of her situation, but of her way of relating to her surroundings, of her way of understanding them. Thus, rather than being about something, rather than her talk being just a comment on her circumstances, it is a responsive, living expression of what her circumstances are uniquely for her . And if we are responsive to its ‘point’, not only to their detailed aspects but also to her evaluative attitude toward them expressed in her bodily posture and tone of voice, more than just a passive grasp of what she is talking ‘about’, we gain an active, relationally-responsive understanding of how to relate ourselves also to our surroundings as she does.

              Thus, not only can we, so to speak, see ourselves in her talk, but we can also see our surroundings through her talk as she does. To achieve this, rather than merely talking ‘about’ her situation, she is talking ‘with’ her situation in mind, and is following its contours in the ‘orchestrated’ movement of her talk. And, to the extent that the contours of her talk follow the contours of her circumstances, rather than merely being ‘about’ them, we can say that its resonates ‘with’ them.

              We are usually unaware of our talk as working in this spontaneously responsive fashion. For, as Merleau-Ponty (1964) remarks, in this kind of speech, “even we who speak do not necessarily know better than those that listen to us what we are expressing. I say I know an idea when the power to organize discourses which make coherent sense around it has been established in me; and this power itself does not depend upon my alleged possession and face-to-face contemplation of it, but upon my having acquired a certain style of thinking” (p.91). In other words, this is a style of understanding that comes before thought; it is, or can be, as Wittgenstein (1981) puts it, “the prototype [for] of a way of thinking, not the result of thought” (no.541).

              In organizations, because managers must work with the others around them and make meanings with them jointly, and because outcomes must be refinements or elaborations in already shared social practices, we shall call the kind of poetic methods at work, a social poetics (Katz and Shotter, 1996; Shotter and Katz, 1996; Cunliffe, 1999). And in what follows, we shall both fill in some of the background to this view, as well as outlining some detailed examples of how such methods may exert their effects and contribute toward the idea of managers as practical authors.

Managers As Practical Authors

Mike: “I think the essential management skills – as I use the term, the management of people – reside on this continuum that has things about communication, your ability to communicate your ideas, to empathize with other people ... you make meaning with them jointly .... you present ideas that are powerful – but you can’t do that unless people have faith in you.”

What is Practical Authorship? As Mike suggests above, it is to do with entering into the realities of the others around one and making meaning with them, jointly. To repeat, as practical authors, managers, in the course of their everyday conversation with other organizational participants, author the shape of their organization’s operational space or social landscape. And, in so doing, they also author a sense of their own identities and the identities of those around them, the different parts all involved must play in relation to each other upon that landscape. In this way, managers are more like artists and novelists than scientists or engineers. Such authorship is a dialogical practice in which features of experience and surroundings are articulated and brought into prominence. What makes managers ‘good’ authors, is that they are able to draw on a variety of linguistic resources to help those around them, who experience themselves as occupying indeterminate, ill-defined realms of activity, make intelligible sense of their surroundings. In so doing, they help them create new possibilities for action, as well as new ways of being and relating, while recognizing also, the ethical responsibilities associated with these new ways . What follows is our attempt to offer a practical exploration of how talk and writing of managers as practical authors can make sense, while attempting in our own talk and writing to remain close to the contours of our own philosophical ways of relating ourselves to the others and othernesses around us.

              As we have already noted, unlike literary authorship, the process of practical authoring is often unselfconsciously performed. Indeed, our view of managers as more like artists and novelists than scientists or engineers, is not widely shared. Business schools do not explicitly teach the linguistic skills we think of as associated with ‘good’ practical authorship. Yet, the managers we depict here, are not wholly unaware of their skills in this sphere. Indeed, they seem to possess a reflexive self-awareness of how they construct the very features they think of themselves as talking about, and how their linguistic practices influence this process of construction. For example, Rob is quite clear of the relation between his talk and its function. It is not and cannot be to impose a plan externally. He must help to create a network of participatory relationships within which all involved ‘call on’ each other to play their parts:

Rob: “We’ve actually done a fair amount of discussing around that and what successful managers tend to do and at least here in our environment we tend to be fairly participative. We want people on the project teams to self manage as much as possible, we want people to take ownership for the deliverables and really feel a part of setting the plan and executing the plan, and so for that reason, the job of manager tends to be more of a leader and integrator. To provide leadership in saying, ‘this is where we’re heading, this is what’s important, this is what we need to do together,’ to provide leadership to get different people to put their part in place and make it fit and then integrate that over time to make sure all the pieces continue to fit and if this person didn’t meet this objective, that this person over-achieved and as a whole we continue to meet the objective.”

He is also aware of the crucial nature of managing as an embodied process, as involving our living, bodily responses to our circumstances. This may be seen in a further comment:

Rob: “We’ve set a goal that 95% of the issues I hear about shouldn’t go further than me - only 5% should go to the next level of managers. Knowing which 5% to escalate and when to escalate them consumes a fair amount of time because there are no rules. The rule that I use is that if I start to feel in the pit of my stomach, or if I can’t sleep at night – it’s time!”

Just as Merleau-Ponty (1964) suggests above, Rob talks here of his spontaneous bodily responses as an “instructive spontaneity” that teaches him something that he cannot learn in any other way except through it. It constitutes a sensitive instrument for him, indicating perhaps vaguely at first, something of the nature of his relational involvements. Indeed, as we shall see, while such talk involves managers in recognizing themselves as always in conversational relations with others, they are also acting from, while working on, their own inner sense of themselves as they talk. What they do or say, how they create and fit actions into the social traces of the organizational context is entwined within embodied, responsive dialogues and therefore part of who they are and want to be. We cannot separate talk and action from self, nor self from others: Rob and Mike’s comments above, about credibility and faith, highlight this. They are both extremely knowledgeable about their own inner ‘workings’, about how they themselves must ‘orchestrate’, so to speak, the unfolding movement of their own management activities, what precisely and concretely must be related to what, and in what order. From this perspective, management is not a disembodied series of activities, enacted roles or core competencies, but a precise way of being and relating with others in terms set by, so to speak, the possibilities made available to them by their organization’s momentary ‘landscape’. Indeed, we can go further. We want to suggest that we can identify in the poetic ways of talking managers use to make sense of, to act in, and to negotiate their way through organizational life, a set of particular social poetic ‘methods’ which they can use in creating such possibilities. It is to these methods that we would now like to turn.

A preliminary outline of methods in a social poetics of managing:

We must begin by reminding ourselves of the momentary nature of our access to such organizational landscapes, that their nature is not continuously accessible to external public scrutiny. Their ‘shapes’ become known to us only from within our particular, momentary, living involvements in them. Thus, first, as we have already suggested, such moments of involvement are unique. They are situated within the background flow of people’s ongoing, everyday, talk-entwined, spontaneously responsive activities. Hence, the examples of dialogue we shall provide, do not focus on the analysis of repetitive events or the development of theories about what managers do. Instead, they offer glimpses of crucial interactive moments in which possibilities emerge for constructing some kind of sense or orientation. Second, from a dialogical perspective, language is seen to be constitutive rather than representational, characterized by ambivalence and ‘otherness’ (Cooper, 1983). Thus, the conversational moments reported here are always at the boundaries of my (ALC) voice with your voice, my sense with your sense, what I am struck by with what you are struck by, and so on. The utterances reported are always responsive to the relational circumstances within which they occur, as well as offering further relational opportunities.

              These characteristics occasion both possibilities and impossibilities for managers and researchers alike: possibilities for thinking about how language can persuade, express, engage, constitute realities and meaning, impossibilities in terms of how we can act within, draw conclusions, and write about unique processes which we claim occur only in a particular moment.

              Social Poetics embraces the notion of the living experience of authorship and sense-making by exploring how meaning may be created between people, both in the moment of speech and after the moment in reflection upon it. We will therefore focus on interactive moments in which opportunities occur for constructing shared significances, and draw attention to the type of dialogue in which such moments of connection and meaning may be created. Wittgenstein’s later work (1953) offers a number of resources for grasping these practical and taken-for-granted aspects of our talk; the impact of words in their speaking. They may be summarized as follows:

‒            i) noticing in practice: “giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook” (no.132): ‘stop’ ‘look’, ‘listen to this’, ‘look at that’ (breaking routine ways of responding by pointing out features of the flow from within the flow) (no. 144);

‒            ii) new connections and relations: “a picture held us captive” (no.115): the use new metaphors to reveal new possible connections and relations between events hidden by the dead metaphors in routine forms of talk;

‒            iii) continue to gather examples: “don’t think, but look!”... “and the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (no.66);

‒            iv) bring some order to our experiences by making comparisons using (sometimes invented) “objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities but dissimilarities “ (no.130);

‒            v) this will help us “to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view [so that we can all participate in discussions toward that end]; one out of many possible orders, not the order” (no.132);

‒            vi) our task is not to see something behind or underlying appearances, but to see “something that lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement” (no.92).

Indeed, the aim of all these moves is to achieve a “perspicuous representation” {Ger: übersightliche Darstellung}, a way of surveying a sequence of experiences (as if they were moments of fixation in one’s visual scanning over a landscape) with the aim of producing “just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’” (no.122). They do not lead to any new theories, but to the kind of understanding which enables us to be more ‘at home’ within our own cultural creations, to know our “way about” (no.123) within them, and thus to avoid becoming “as it were, entangled in our own rules” ( no.125), i.e., to avoid being at cross-purposes with each other. Wittgenstein calls these “reminders” (no. 89) because they direct attention to “what we have always known” (no.109): about our relations to our circumstances; about how we intertwine our activities in with those of others; about how we make sense of our surroundings, and create living relationships.

              These resources have been explained in depth elsewhere (Shotter and Katz, 1996). What we are interested in here, is how they may be used by managers (unselfconsciously or otherwise) to constitute organizational ‘realities’ and identities. And how we as researchers may also draw on them in attempting to carry over the kind of practical understandings they display, the features of interactive moments they gesture toward, into other circumstances. The illustrations we provide are drawn from a number of audio and video taped conversations with managers which formed part of research designed to explore the notion of managers as practical authors. We offer excerpts from those conversations to portray how poetic language may orient our responses and ways of relating. Given our position that meaning is constructed in the moment and retrospectively - we offer a participant’s (ALC) embedded interpretation of the possibilities for meaning construction from within the talk itself, and a reflective commentary.

Intelligible formulations of surroundings: new beginnings, poetics, dramatizations, making rationally-visible

Earlier, we made a distinction between managers ‘doing science’ and ‘making history’ (MS, p.5), that is, applying theory and techniques as an objective ‘expert’ versus creating intelligible formulations as a responsive participant. While managers probably do both, we suggest the latter is the most crucial, because it is through responsive dialogue that they create a scenic sense of an organization’s social landscape and the possibilities for action it invited. In so doing, we find they draw on a number of dialogical resources: metaphor, poetic images, stories, gestural talk, and so on.

              We suggest that an organizational discourse or an organizational common sense (sensus communis - Vico, 1968 ) - a figurative understanding which incorporates shared responsive understandings rather than literal descriptions - is constructed between organizational members as they articulate shared feelings in the everyday flow of shared activities. Managers act as authors with others in co-constructing a dynamic sense of place and trying to make an unarticulated “imaginary” organizational landscape into an “imagined” one (see Shotter, 1993, pp. 88-93). This transition, from a fleeting sense to the grasp of a “presence,” a “thereness” which is open to exploration, is central to our stance here. The imaginary is something tacit: feelings, tendencies, anticipations, projected possibilities, i.e., entities which do not actually exist as such because they are still emergent in the internal relations of our experience, but which nonetheless do play a real part in structuring our activities. When such relations are made rationally-visible, so to speak, by being articulated as a shared, ongoing languaged activity, they become the imagined or imaginable: in talking with various images in mind, which resonate with the contoured movement of our experience, we ‘instruct’ ourselves in the form of active understanding we outlined above. We become sensitive to more possible connections and relations between aspects of our surroundings than previously.

              However, there is a danger. The vague but rich images may become “literalized” (Rorty, 1989) into precise but sparsely detailed ‘models’. It is then only too easy for talk of managers as ‘authors’ or ‘scientists’, of organizations as possessing ‘relational landscapes’, or of ‘excellent’ organizational ‘cultures’ (Peters & Waterman, 1982), etc., to be used in a de-contextualized way by a group of experts to indulge in theoretical talk, and to attempt to ‘calculate’, so to speak, ‘rational solutions’ to problems by the manipulation of such precise models – solutions which must then be externally imposed. While, perhaps, persuasive in seminar and committee rooms, and conference halls, such talk is useless to involved practitioners. It is totally unresponsive and thus unrelated to its surroundings. Rather than disrupting our routine ways of paying attention to and responding to our surroundings, such talk assumes them to still be in place, and that we can go out from the committee rooms to ‘apply’ the theories. Talk which articulates the imagined within the imaginary, however, works within the living moment. In enhancing our responsive relations to our surroundings, it is a living part of the everyday conversational background which functions practically and persuasively by influencing and being influenced by our actions and talk. It is a socially constructed and socially maintained “presence” within it (see fig. 1). ‘Good’ managers are able to jointly author acceptable features and create possibilities for action from the welter of impressions organizational members experience: to create an imagined from the many imaginaries.

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Fig. 1

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We suggest that managers both consciously and unconsciously help to construct an organization’s common sense by responding to aspects available to all in the conversational background, and by creating shared ways of talking about features of its organization. This common sense and the discourse it sustains, unlike the generalized talk of outside theory-driven experts, is unique to organizational members; it emerges from within the relational-responsive activities, the rhetorical practices, and spontaneous utterances occurring between them. All these different forms of expression may enfold and unfold in unselfconscious ways within the organizational discourse; nevertheless, they offer a basis for creating some kind of shared significance.

              A conversation with the President (Vince) and various managers (Dave and Jeff) of a small manufacturing organization, offers an example. Vince, the President, talks about his experience:

Vince: “I live in this world of uncertainty, I’m not naive any longer. Maybe, Ann, one of the problems is the way you operate as a manager - I come in in the morning now and I’m a skeptic. I say, ‘Okay, first tell me about all the casualties, I want to set priorities. What are the things that might take us out of business today?’ I’m not being wise, I’m being a realist .... right now we’re wrestling with keeping two boilers up and running....Yeah, we gotta game plan and we try to set a course of direction, but then I live with the reality of the situation. I can go back Monday and the boiler is gone - so how do we address this problem? You really have to be nimble of foot here, you’ve got to be able to react, you don’t know what’s going to be thrown at you. You try to prepare yourself for the unexpected, and with a number of eyes looking ahead with me, maybe we’ll see a few of the potholes that are approaching us.... if you look at the plant, the plant itself is like a rickety old car with band aids and rubber bands!”

Vince is perhaps trying to deal with the chaotic welter of impressions by constructing contoured poetic images: “casualties”, and “wrestling” and drawing upon the metaphor of the battlefield. These linguistic practices may help him construct opportunities for shared responsive understandings (with both me, ALC, as a researcher as well as with organizational members) as he articulates features (the imaginary) and brings them into the realm of talk (the imagined). In asking “tell me about all the casualties...,” his talk may influence and be responsive to (intentionally or unselfconsciously) the talk of other organizational members. He constructs with other conversational participants themes around which further organizing activity can take place. By using the root metaphor of a battlefield, and using instructive forms of talk (“I say, ‘Okay, first tell me about the casualties...’”) to draw the attention of other organizational members, Vince may be co-authoring a common organizational discourse.

              Of course, some of the features Vince brings into presence are not literally real in the sense of being independent or experienced in exactly the same way by those involved. I saw no casualties, wrestling or potholes as I walked around the Plant, but his way of talking created an image of a chaotic organizational life; an image of darkness I still carry with me when I recollect my visits. Bakhtin (1981) puts this process of bringing to a poetic image to presence thus: “The prose writer elevates the social heteroglossia surrounding objects into a [poetic] image that has finished contours, an image completely shot through with dialogized overtones; he creates artistically calculated nuances on all the fundamental voices and tones of this heteroglossia” (pp. 278-9). That is, he takes all the complex strands and weaves them into a coherent text. In this way, managers create and shape ‘features’ of the organizational landscape by dramatizing a not-yet-visible dynamic whole, which then may take on a ‘presence’ by becoming a taken-for-granted part of shared organizational discourse. This shared discourse provides the background conversation in which further possibilities for action are constructed. Such imagery can be very powerful in shaping meaning and has its impact in how others respond and whether they take up similar ways of talking. Other managers in Vince’s organization used a similar rhetoric:

Dave : “You plan to use this machine and have to use that, and some weeks this breaks and then that breaks - so it’s very difficult .... You plan something then ‘Boom!’ something happens ....that’s one of the dark tunnels.”

Jeff: “For half of every decision that’s made, there’s some sort of unanticipated personnel backlash!”.

We suggest it is through responsive dialogue and intralinguistic practices, between managers and those they must manage, that a shared organizational discourse or architecture emerges, a sense of organizational reality, into which we then act. This process is a complex, interwoven relationship in which it is difficult to distinguish between the world, the way we talk about the world, and the way we situate ourselves within it, our identities. Yet it is in this way, that managers may create and shape ‘features’ of their organizational landscape in their conversations. Such features are often spoken of in metaphorical ways, yet may take on a ‘presence’ by becoming a taken-for-granted part of the shared organizational discourse on which possibilities for action are constructed: ‘reality’ takes on the characteristics of images created in language.

              Metaphors and poetic forms of talk are used extensively in our everyday conversations (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Watson, 1995, p. 812). They are key resources in poetic forms of talk in creating vivid images, immediate reactions, and embodied responses which can lead to shared significances and intelligible formulations. Thus the good practical author-manager renders the invisible visible by engaging with and dramatizing his/her sense of the surroundings.

Back and forth: the ‘otherness’ of process:

Rob: “Ideally, the strategy would be set, I would be charted to deliver a piece of that strategy, and then I would tactically implement that. The reality is that we never nail down the strategy part to a level where it’s purely tactical for the program team. It’s always still fairly strategic, fairly open and undefined .... Problems are at a much higher level of abstraction; nothing is designed, nothing is given, everything is what you decide it is. If you ask somebody, ‘What is this product going to do?’ -- ‘Well I don’t know, you tell me.’ ‘When is it going to be finished?’ ‘Well I don’t know -- you tell me.’ ‘How much is it going to cost?’ ‘Well I don’t know -- you tell me.’”

Essentially, organizational participants draw on a range of intralinguistic resources as they respond rhetorically to each other in an attempt to shape realities. We make and remake realities and identities in an ongoing flow of activity in which no one person (manager or other) is wholly in control. Rather, meaning is an ongoing, complex, back and forth process full of tensions and taken-for-grantedness, often on the edge of the imaginary/imagined boundary. This back and forth process takes place at many levels: self-others, self-self, self-background, individual-organizational discourse - a negotiation between different senses and accounts.

              Rob’s comments above highlight this in two ways. First he talks about the difficulty of defining or ‘nailing’ strategy down. Second, in the way he talks about handling problems: he speaks rhythmically; using alliteration; repetitive words in tempo - “nothing is designed, nothing is given...”, and uses dialogue within dialogue in an iterative way: “Well, I don’t know -- you tell me, ... well, I don’t know.....”. To me, as a conversational participant, this seemed not only to emphasize his point about the openness of the process, but meaning lay in both the words and the iteration: both gave me an impression of the unrelenting, back and forth nature of these problems. His verbal performance, his practical use of words, their very rhythms in their voicing, like being another’s dance partner, helped to create a more wholistic sense of experience for me as conversational participant.

              In other words, the ‘otherness’ of others is embedded, both ontologically and linguistically, within authorship. Ontologically in the sense that organizational realities and identities are created and recreated through a constant interplay of presence/absence, a tension between what is/is not, imagined and imaginary. Good practical authors recognize this implicit otherness, that reality is not an absolute but an effect of various voices, as well as lack of voices. Linguistic otherness lies within poetic forms of talk; the potency of metaphors often arises from their ability to provoke an embodied response from the listener through contrast: they say one thing but imply another. Meaning is never fully present but “a kind of constant flickering of presence and absence together” (Sarup, 1989, p. 35), metaphors and analogies can startle the listener by presenting an image of what is and is not. In the previous examples from Vince, Dave, and Jeff, each evoked images (casualties, potholes, backlash) in which meaning seemed to be authored by the image itself and through a sense of “otherness”: the mimetic is both subverted and incorporated (Cooper, 1983; Derrida, 1978) by evoking a shared sense of disorder and an absence of well being and order. This interplay may be seen in another comment from Vince:

Vince: “we don’t have a planned maintenance program on our machines -- we’re trying to bring in a guy and that’s one of the things on his plate -- so that people show up at the machine and they know it’s going to run because it’s been serviced and maintained, not, ‘it’s broken we’d better fix it,’ you know? It’s people working with people......”

Thus meaning may be constructed within a complex, back and forth process as managers and other organizational members create images which resonate because of an implied presence and absence. Identities are also contested and reformulated in this way.

Practical authorship as a way of being:

“The basic practical-moral problem in life is not what to do but what [kind of person] to be”

                                                                                                                                                (Shotter, 1993, p. 118)

Clearly Rob, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, wants to be a leader without followers, i.e., he wants people on the project teams to be self-managing as much as possible. He doesn’t want to be a coercive, threatening leader. How should we be in relation to the others around us? Our stance here is that authorship is a way of being-in-relation-to-others/self/surrounding, and that managers in particular must contest and negotiate who they are in responsive dialogue. This is a complex process not under the control of any one person. The origins of self, of dialogue, of actions are embedded and embodied in the way we give shape to, and are shaped by our circumstances. Managing is therefore not separate from who we are, does not stem from a detached knowledge of the world, but is intimately linked with what we feel, say, and how we relate with others. This is very different to modern conceptions of managerial identity which are often based on the assumption that identity is a noun, ‘it’ can be generalized, has coherence, continuity, and yet something we work on as individuals (Czarniawka- Joerges, 1996). Managers themselves do not talk about their identity as fixed or bounded in terms of roles or competencies. Instead, they talk about different facets of themselves, ways of relating, and dilemmas of who to be as they respond to different circumstances. Thus a sense of being emerges in rhetorical-responsive dialogue between multiple organizational voices: we “continually work on (our) humanness.” (Watson, 1994: p.19), i.e., on who we are as we relate and converse with people.

              Gergen (1991) argues that our days “become a chaos of competing opportunities and necessities” (p.73) - a multiphrenic condition in which we acquire many, often contradictory, views. We attempt to deal with these conflicting views through argumentation with ourselves and others. In other words, we are rhetorical beings (Watson, 1994, p. 24) who continually debate our constructions of reality and selfhood; with ourselves and others. This idea of a “multivoiced self” (Hermans, Kempen & van Loon, 1992: pp. 28-29) based on a process of internal and external argumentation was embedded in comments from a number of managers. For instance, comments similar to Vince’s comment above – “I am naive no longer...”, “now .. I’m a skeptic..” – surfaced in other conversations. In the excerpt below, the dilemma of multivoiced being can be seen as Lisa describes how she tries to situate herself in relation to the voices of others:

Lisa: “Part of my job is to tell people things that they don’t want to hear and draw the line and make them happy. There are times when it just becomes too tiring -- when a group of ten people is arguing just becomes too exhausting. They have more energy for this than I do so in the grand scheme of things I’ll let this one go. The big danger in that is that you’re trying to do it across a whole organization .... so you have to be very careful balancing the expedient and something that is going to come back and bite you later .... One of the issues I have, is that a lot of my job is trying to sell to customers things they don’t want to hear, and I’m telling it to people who are far higher up than me.”

Lisa : “The Personnel Manager described this job as the Texas Ranger and what I’d heard was that it was more like the Lone Ranger!”

              (and later....)

“I’m either the virgin or the whore - as a woman you either get to be tough or nice but somehow you can’t be both”

Ann : “Does that bother you?”

Lisa : “Well, I was especially offended by the idea I was thought just to be tough. I can be tough but I usually believe I have a purpose in it. My reaction was - that’s why I have this job! If I weren’t willing to stand up to managers bent at me and tell people bad news, I would be completely ineffective ...... and yet the men aren’t described in that way.”

Lisa is perhaps drawing on familiar cultural icons and archetypes to open up a story line to fit herself into the relational landscape, perhaps as metaphors for ways of being and relating. Her use of contrasting archetypes gave me a deep sense of her dilemma because of the images and different ways of relating they conjured up. Metaphors and archetypes may tap into our tacit understanding by resonating and moving us in a poetic imaginative way. In the moment of speaking, I didn’t view her comments objectively, or work through the theoretical implications of each, but I was struck by the impressions, the images and feelings created by her dramatization. In this sense, in the process of being struck, there is an ‘other’ (person(s), meaning) who is coordinating our actions back to us as a result of our actions outward toward them. Such embodied talk can be potent in making connections and co-authoring identities and ways of relating.

Social Accountability and Ethical Discourse

Mike: “I think it’s also possible to act out of values ... particularly I think when people sense themselves making a decision that has a moral component to it. It’s probably one of the times we do get intentionally reflective. You know, if someone comes in and says, ‘Gee the numbers look really bad this quarter, but I think I’ve found a way.... I’m not sure it’s exactly right, but I think I’ve found a way we can maybe rework the numbers and it won’t look as bad as it really is.’ Most of us, I think, with any kind of sense of moral element to management would be very reflective about that and say, ‘Well, what are you talking about!’ ‘Well, I could do this and this..’ and you would say, ‘Well, is this right?’”

Conventional views of management as a science and managers as technocrats making economically rational decisions often deny the moral aspects of managing because the ends and means are taken for granted (Alvesson & Willmott, 1996; Jackall, 1988; Mumby 1988). Managers are often perceived as morally neutral technicians (Roberts, 1996) and management itself as a value-free practice in which moral judgments are validated against objective, technically-rational, system-oriented criteria of efficiency and effectiveness. Indeed, MacIntyre (1981) suggests the Manager is one of three characters (the dramatization of a moral philosophy) most representative of the modern age. As such, s/he is a rational agent who treats the goals of the organization as a given, and manipulates others in the achievement of those goals. An alternative argument is that managers are not value-neutral but often act in self-interested and political ways (****). The claim seems to be that managers are able both to deny and to offer the resources required to develop social identity and personhood, yet often fail to consider the moral implications of their actions . If we accept this position (although already, Mike’s comments above should caution us against an easy acceptance of it), then how do/might managers act in an ethical and morally responsible way, from within an already morally textured, yet continually contested social landscape?

              The dialogic perspective offers possibilities because it draws attention to how we relate with each other ethically: “We must go forward to the selves hidden in each moment of opportunity and realize that the irreducible conflicts between our many legitimate selves are not different from the conflict with diverse others.... ethics rests not in agreement to principles, but in avoidance of the suppression of alternative conceptions and possibilities.” (Deetz, 1995, p. 223).

              But more than this. At a deeper level, practical authorship, with its roots in dialogical interaction, brings issues of social accountability and morality to the fore by emphasizing the nature of our being- in-relation-to-others, and the creative and responsive manner in which our identities, organizational experiences, and opportunities for action are shaped within our everyday conversations. If I need you in order to be me, if my appearance in the human world as another person of worth depends upon your responsiveness to my expressions, then, strange though it may seem, ethical values are prior to, not a consequence of, our knowledge of the others around us. To appreciate this, consider for a moment occasions when, simply, we meet the eyes of an Other, when we are struck just for a moment by the ‘presence’ of an Other before us. If we dwell for a while on the character of such moments, one thing we find within them, is a sense of being obligated the Other in some way, a way which we must play out according to the local (moral) requirements of our actual involvement with them. We become aware of such obligations if, for instance, we stare too long at someone, or look away from them too quickly - either response seems to express disrespect and can occasion anger. Similarly, if in the course of our involvement with an other, they sense us as failing to respond ‘spontaneously’ to their expressions appropriately, they feel justified in complaining: “Hello,” they say, “anyone at home?” Goffman (1967) explores in detail what he calls our “involvement obligations,” and the many different forms of “alienative misinvolvement” that we can experience in our relations to and with others. We need not list them here. Suffice it to say that, it is only if we honor our “involvement obligations” in our conversations with those around us, can we each gain a sense of each other’s unique ‘inner worlds’ i.e., where we each are ‘coming from’ and/or ‘going to’.

              Hence, we suggest ‘good’ authorship takes place within a multivoiced or plurivocal and responsive realm, where possibilities are discussed and debated, where realities are constituted as ‘ours’ not mine or yours. As Rob noted above, it mattered that he had “credibility with those people, so that when I do come in and make a decision that goes against them, they feel good about it. They say, ‘OK, he came and talked to me and understood where I am coming from’.” Or as Mike remarks about being able to present “ideas that are powerful: “you can’t do that unless people have faith in you,” i.e., others must trust their very being to you.

              Pålshaugen (1998) notes that although many problems arising in an organization consist of “trifling things,” and often remain unresolved “because they are considered ‘insignificant’ by those whose responsibility it is to do something about them,” they “still cause difficulties in the everyday work situation” (p.60). But “when these problems are brought into a common arena, a public sphere inside the company – which in our case was the development organization,” Pålshaugen continues, “then their significance changes and increases... A handwheel on a machine which is difficult to turn, too narrow a stairway next to a machine, a failure in the planning route, the lack of a spare part, a problem with raw deliveries - all these are examples of 'trifles' that form a problem both for efficient production and for the working environment” (p.61). The significance of these trivial problems changes and increases as they become publicly visible because, in fact, they are not just technical, mechanical problems: Each time workers, who have taken the trouble to articulate a problematic detail they have noticed in carrying out their daily task are ignored, not only is a small, possible improvement in efficiency lost, but their dignity as caring workers has been slighted - their identity as someone of moral worth within the company is diminished.

              Indeed, in his account of the effects of direct, two-way verbal contact replacing or supplementing customary written contacts in the project, Pålshaugen gives us just such an example of a seemingly trivial problem, that many in different positions within the workplace have often voiced, but which just as often has been ignored: He quotes project workers from the union as saying about the drawbacks of written contacts, that: “Letters simplify.” While a departmental head articulates the issue in more detail as follows: “Personal contact means that both the problem and those who are responsible for its solution, in every section, become visible in a way that both deepens our understanding of the problem and our obligation to do something about it. Far more than impersonal notes” (p.64). In other words, both the unions and the departmental head spontaneously note that something of importance is lost in one-way, monologic forms of communication that is restored in two-way, dialogic forms. The departmental head gives more detail. He or she suggests that it is not just a detail of possible technical importance that is being ignored, but also an obligation - and if management can ignore their obligations, can't the workforce also ignore their’s? Thus, for everyone to have a visible place within a company's public sphere, then, is more than just a matter of giving everyone the opportunity to participate in the development of the company's production capacity, just as crucially, it is a matter everyone being able to see the nature of each other's moral involvements - their rights and duties - and thus to come to a much more detailed grasp of what, justifiably, is expected of them, and what, justifiably, they can expect of others. Human values do not disappear from a company just because its single, dominant, organizational discourse only allows expression of technical matters, but what does disappear are the arenas within they can be publicly discussed and resolved.

              To have a voice in establishing one's own conditions of work, and to be listened to seriously - in the sense of others visibly responding to what one has to say - is a part of what it is to feel oneself fully a person, and not subject to a reduced status in one's workplace (Braverman, 1974; Sennett, 1972; Shotter, 1984, 1993a). Indeed, to insist on judging everything that occurs within a person's worklife solely in terms of production values and to reduce human relations to mechanical ones - even in a factory, where it may seem justifiable - is to discount the complexity of people's moral and ethical relations to each other. It is to act as if we already knew their unimportance, when in fact, the opposite is the case - as those with any sensitivity to their surrounding circumstances appreciate.

              In creating a common sense, participants should recognize a morally textured landscape of opportunities for joint action, and act in a socially shared responsive way. This entails moral interdependence, a moral requirement to make available communicative opportunities - socio-ontological resources - to each other (Shotter, 1993, p.163). This means recognizing our place in creating ethical discourse, respecting the rights of those around us to speak, and understanding how our use of words orients responses and ways of relating, a “knowing how, knowing how to live, knowing how to listen.” (Lyotard, 1984). A crucial aspect of ethical discourse is reflexive dialogical practice -- engaging in dialogue (both oral or written) with self/others/other to explore how our own actions, conversational practices, and ways of making sense may create and be sustained by particular ways of relating and by implicit or explicit power relationships (Halliwell, 1999). In doing so, we can work towards more linguistically expressible and reflexive accounts, from within experience itself, so that we may act as critical practitioners and influence events from inside.

Concluding comments: Implications for Knowledge and Practice

We began this chapter by emphasizing the importance of our living, spontaneously responsive relations to our surroundings. This leads to a recognition of the embedding of our everyday activities in a third, background realm of dialogically constituted, intricately structured, joint activity, quite different from the other two realms of action and behavior that have occupied our attention in human affairs in the past. Situating management in this third realm of activity, led us to claim that the essential core ability to do with being a good manager is not that of finding and applying true theories. Managers should not be looked upon as experts in theoretical talk, as experts in devising ‘models’ to be used in calculating rational solutions to problems by their manipulation. While it is easy to be persuasive in seminar and committee rooms with such talk, due to its de-contextualized nature, to its unresponsiveness to the context of its use, it is useless to involved practitioners. They can try to externally impose the effects of such talk, but, as Vico puts it, that is to try to “bull” one’s “way through the tortuous paths of life.” If we are to act only “as the nature of things will permit,” then we need forms of talk which work from within the living moment (actual or actively imagined) to enhance people’s responsive relations to their surroundings. In other words, as we see it, being a good manager is to do with a whole complex set of issues centering on the provision of intelligible formulations of what, for the others in the organization, appears to be a chaotic welter of unconnected impressions. Good managers must be good conversationalists, both responsive listeners and responsive speakers – where what marks off the manager from those they must manage, is their attention to, not to this or that specific job within the organization, but to making a comprehensive set of connections and relations between them all. As Rob puts it in one of our epigraph quotes, while others “manage the actions,” the good manager must “manage the interactions.” And they must do this by helping to promote among all concerned a shared common sense (a shared sensus communis in Vico’s sense), a shared spontaneous responsiveness to events within the organization, no matter whereabouts within it such events may occur.

              Our view of managers as practical authors has implications for how we think about meaning and meanings, of the relation of knowledge and knowing to management, and also for how we think about their relation to thinking and to the development of new ways of doing things, i.e., to our practices. And we would like to conclude our chapter with some comments on these issues.

              Traditionally, meanings have been thought of as like inner pictures, and meanings have been thought of as accurate or correct to the extent that the configuration of the inner mental picture or representation corresponds with (stands in a logical relation to) an outward configuration of a state of affairs in the world, a certain arrangement of things around us. Further, we have thought of putting our inner meanings into our outward words much as one might code one structural pattern into another. But the things around us are only seen literally as things of a certain kind when the images through which we see them have ceased to be poetic images of a living kind, and have become ‘transparent’, like ‘dead metaphors’. Such an approach to meaning misses out our unceasing, living, bodily responsiveness to our surroundings, the way in which events in our surroundings can ‘call’ us to respond to them, whether any words occur intertwined with those events or not. Further, in being concerned with past patterns, with repetitions, the traditional representational approach misses not only how we ‘carry over’, so to speak, practical ways of responding developed in one sphere into another, but also how in responding in anticipatory ways to the unique nature of what our current circumstances ‘point’ toward, our responses are always creative in some way. As Bakhtin (1986) notes: “An utterance is never just a reflection or an expression of something already existing and outside it that is given and final. It always creates something that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable... “ (p.119). An author’s ability to say, “Look at it like this rather than like that!” frees us from being trapped in routine pictures we have forgotten were of our own making, and allows us to appreciate the uniquely new aspects of our current responses to our circumstances. While so far we have emphasized the shared or common aspect of a common sense, this, of course, what we are emphasizing now is what the ordinary person means when he or she says of an academic, that they “lack common sense.”

              As Geertz (1983) notes: “Common-sense wisdom is shamelessly and unapologetically ad hoc. It comes in epigrams, proverbs, obiter dicta, jokes, anecdotes, contest morals - a clatter of gnomic utterances - not in formal doctrines, axiomized theories, or architectonic dogmas” (p.90). It has, he says, “immethodicalness.” In other words, crucial in the creation of such a shared common sense, is the creation between all concerned of an interconnected set of shared, richly textured, poetic images, what we have called an organization’s operational space or social landscape. Such a set of images does not work mechanically, to produce plans for action in thought which must then be applied in action. A passive understanding in terms simply of ‘getting the picture’, is often unhelpful – pictures still need interpretation, and different people in interpreting them in different ways can easily mislead each other. More than just a picture, practitioners need, and good authors can provide, a sense of a ‘living reality’, the sense of a ‘dynamic landscape’ orienting people to where they are now and where they might (or perhaps should) go next. Such managers can help to provide those around them with a ‘shaped and vectored sense’ of their circumstances which spontaneously ‘calls out’ responses from all those involved in it. As practical authors, then, they must work to give shared relational significances to already shared, but often vague and disorienting feelings, arising within shared circumstances in an organization, thus to help everyone orient toward the same ‘landmarks’ or ‘landmark events’, so to speak (“to help figure out where are you in those circumstances and what needs to get done” - Lisa). It is in this way that practical authors, unlike theorist managers who ‘regiment’ people’s actions in having them all act in the same way irrespective of their circumstances, can allow those they manage to act as their circumstances will permit: the images in terms of which they orient to the others around them allow them to make the same connections or see the same relations between events occurring around them as everyone else. It is by helping all involved to look over their surrounding circumstances through or with such a set of images in mind, and use them to ‘instruct’ themselves in attending to possibly crucial connections they may otherwise ignore, that practical authors can help restore a flow of action that has become unintelligible in some way, when people have begun to function at cross-purposes.

              In seeing our circumstances through other images, we suddenly noticed features that our previous (image guided) ways of looking had led us to ignore. Thus essentially, the good manager, if he or she is to be able to produce a new way of looking at things when the old ways have ceased to work, and the spontaneously coordinated flow of an organizations’ responsive activity has become disoriented, should not be seen as if involved in ‘doing science’, as coming up with accurate pictures. Instead, they should be seen as actually engaged in the ‘practical authoring’ of meanings: to sustain a continued flow of spontaneously responsive, organizational activity, they must continually re-author ‘imaged or imaginable worlds’, new ‘dynamic landscapes’ upon which a whole range of next actions (as far as the nature of things will permit) become possible, and upon which the ‘positions’ of all those who must take part in these actions are clear.

              In this kind of activity, finalized knowledge as such is less important that different ways of knowing. The manager known as Mike above, describes the differences between knowledge and knowing much more eloquently than we can:

Mike: “Knowledge is like an asset you can acquire, and file and go back to - it’s there. While it’s not concrete, its objectifying information and owning it - take it off the shelf, use it and put it back on the shelf - right? Whereas knowing is an ongoing process, it’s more synthetic, contextual, what you’re doing at the time, almost with that knowledge and the experience you’re having at the time - almost the intersection of experience, environment and knowledge becomes knowing.”

Ann: “Something that’s not graspable?”

Mike: “It happens in time, it affects your future knowing but it’s not like knowledge in the sense that you can take it off the shelf. Knowing changes you - knowledge gives you more bricks to build your wall out of.”

Ann: “It could change you on a moment by moment basis because it’s something you react to ...”?

Mike: “Well, I was thinking in the way you know things in the future, it’s kind of ... I don’t think knowing is something that happens and you forget it and it had no impact on the next event in your life..... it seems to me your very ability to know is continually being re-informed by your experiences of knowing, and the content of what you know is always being impacted by your knowledge base - so you take it off the shelf and put it away. In the process you are changing the shape of the vessel.”

As Merleau-Ponty (1964) remarks: “To think is not to posses the objects of thought; it is to use them to mark out a realm to think about which we therefore are not yet thinking about” (p.160). Indeed, as Mike notes, our very ability to gain and establish bodies of knowledge as such is continually being “re-informed,” as he so aptly puts it, by different (image guided) ways of knowing. While the images in the different bodies of knowledge we encounter -- in textbooks, classes we attend, ideas told us by others -- may continually suggest to us also new, possible ways of knowing.

              These comments about meaning, knowledge, ways of knowing and thinking, have implications for how we should go about developing new ways of doing things in organizations and other social institutions. To treat the process of developing new practices as a process of putting theories into practices, is to ignore the importance of our current practices within the organization. It is to ignore the fact that, due to the spontaneously responsive, dialogically-structured way in which they are conducted, they are inevitably creative: new possible ways of responding to events in an organization’s environment are continually being created by those within it. This is what Cooperrider and Srivasta (1981) have drawn to our attention in suggesting that inquiry should be appreciative rather than critical. Spontaneously created local understandings by certain practitioners within an organization have often already ‘solved’ a difficulty, i.e., created a new way to go on when old ways had become inadequate. If managers can draw the attention of others to it, then they can perhaps ‘carry over’ that way of going on into their own spheres of activity.

              What we have been suggesting in this chapter, then, is a new theory that people might put into practice, but a set of new, dialogically-structured, mostly linguistic practices, that people might put into their already existing practices. The new practices would function within the context of the old. Simply by the utterance of certain crucial words at certain crucial moments in the routine flow of current practice - the equivalent of saying: ‘Hey, stop! Wait a moment! Lets look more closely at what’s happening here. Look at it this way!’ - we can move those involved in it to notice aspects of it previously unnoticed. We can then go on from such new but fleeting beginnings to fashion utterly new ways of acting which do not ‘solve the problems’ of the old ways, but leave them behind. Like the “anomaly” to which Fernando Flores became “sensitive” (in our opening epigraph quote), the good manager must be continually sensitive to those events in which routine ways of making sense no longer work. But rather than implementing a few very basic principles and insisting that everyone derive their actions from these (as if deriving theorems), the good manager (like a good Wittgensteinian philosopher) must continually produce a “synoptic view” of a whole, inter-related melee of particular, concrete events and conditions. From all the small details, he or she must fashion a dynamic, scenic sense of the circumstances they all share, toward which everyone concerned can orient, and within which they can know their ‘way about’. It is through their own invention - with the ‘authorial’ help of a co-participant/manager - that the participants of an organization can conversationally fashion for themselves a shared, dynamic, relational-landscape for action, and in so doing, elaborate themselves into a “mutually enabling community,” in which, instead of obstacles to each others projects, can come to see each other as resources, as resourceful conversational partners.

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