ARTICLE IN PRESS
Management
S C A N D I N AV I A N J O U R N A L O F
Scand. J. Mgmt. 22 (2006) 3–30
www.elsevier.com/locate/scaman
Rethinking the polyphonic organization:
Managing as discursive practice$
Martin Kornbergera,b,!, Stewart R. Clegga,c, Chris Carterd
a
School of Management, University of Technology, Sydney, P.O. Box 123, Broadway NSW 2007, Australia
b
Institute of Organization and Learning, University of Insbruck, Austria
c
Aston Business School, Maastricht University, Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, Netherlands
d
Department of Management, University of St. Andrews, St. Katherine’s West, The Scores, St. Andrews,
Fife KY16 9L, Scotland, UK
Received 1 June 2003; accepted 1 May 2005
Abstract
Literary approaches problematize the practice of knowing in relation to managing. Drawing
on Kafka, Lyotard, Rorty and others, our overarching objective here is to widen and deepen
linguistic approaches to management and organization studies. We elaborate the concept of
the polyphonic organization: starting from Kafka’s reading of the story of the Tower of Babel,
we reflect on polyphony and, using Lyotard’s concept of the différend, we explore the linguistic
gaps that constitute the polyphonic organization. Interpreting these different language games
as a driving force behind organizational sensemaking, we theorize on the connection between
change, power and language. Management as a discursive practice focuses linguistically on
deconstructing and translating between language games divided by the différend.
r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Polyphonic organization; Power; Différend; Language games; Translation; Deconstruction
$
The order of authors has been established by throwing a dice: see Luke Rhinehart (1973) for further
instances of this invaluable method for settling existential dilemmas of everyday life.
!Corresponding author. School of Management, University of Technology, Sydney, P.O. Box 123,
Broadway NSW 2007, Australia.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M. Kornberger), [email protected] (S.R. Clegg),
[email protected] (C. Carter).
0956-5221/$ - see front matter r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.scaman.2005.05.004
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1. Introduction
It is not surprising that approaches to organization studies increasingly apply
literary models (Cunliffe, 2001; Ford & Ford, 1995; Hazen, 1993; Heracleous &
Barrett, 2001; Kelemen, 2000; Kilduff, 1993; Kilduff & Mehra, 1997; Oswick,
Keenoy, & Grant, 2000; Phillips & Hardy, 1997; Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001;
Westwood & Linstead, 2001). Change increasingly positions organizations in the
worlds of discursive rationality just as, in the past, they were centrally positioned in
economic rationality. For instance, a network that watches its words for
representational resonance as it builds its partnership is very different from a
network that decides to buy rather than make; a minority employee enrolled in a
senior position who leads an institutionally mandated anti-racist program is not just
a manager doing her job but a potent symbol, in words and deeds. In fact,
organizations are accomplished linguistically and are enacted discursively. Through
discourse, organizational members structure their experience of reality (Foucault,
1972) and make sense of their experience in doing so (Weick, 1995). Because there
are many experiences of reality and many accounts that strive to make sense of these
experiences, and because each becomes a datum that adds to that which it seeks to
account for, while order is an emergent phenomenon it is never transcendent—as
Garfinkel (1967) and McHugh (1968) showed so clearly in their practical
experiments regarding the way that situations are defined. The point is clear—the
discursive turn is not simply an academic fancy but represents, theoretically, real
changes in practice that require rethinking appropriately.1
The notion of polyphony, has been explored by Bakhtin (1984) who used it to
analyze the multiplicity of voices in Dostoyevsky’s oeuvre, represents a rich concept
with which to theorize language and organizations. As Hazen (1993) further
developed the notion in relation to organization studies, polyphony then came to
refer to the many voices that constitute organizations. The concept of polyphonic
organizations has thus come to represent the variety of different discourses that
constitute organizational reality (Hazen, 1993). Organizationally, polyphony is
always present, even though it may be silenced by a dominant discourse. We cannot
take the absence of dissent for the moral authority of genuine legitimacy in which
everyone assents to everything. It would be surprising if this were the case—a point
that we will elaborate with the help of Kafka’s story of the Tower of Babel, which we
1
In management and organization theory the linguistic turn is widely recognized in the field, see
Pettigrew (1979), Ashley and Zammuto (1992), Phillips and Brown (1993), Mauws and Philips (1995),
Ford and Ford (1995), Keenoy, Oswick, and Grant (1997), Barry and Elmes (1997), Phillips and Hardy
(1997), Grant, Keenoy, and Oswick (1998), Alvesson and Karreman (2000a, b), Kristiansen and BlochPoulsen (2000), Heracleous and Hendry (2000), Chia and King (2001), Thatchenkery (2001), Maguire,
Philips, and Hardy (2001), Phillips and Hardy (2002), Oswick, Keenoy, and Grant (2002). For a critical
perspective, see Donaldson (1992). To date the linguistic turn has been the subject of special issues of
journals such as Human Relations, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science and Organization, and, at the time
of writing, special issues of the Academy of Management Review and Organization Studies are being
prepared on ‘discourse’. For a practical perspective see Shaw, Brown, and Bomiley (1998) and Schultz,
Hatch, and Larsen (2000).
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take to imply that polyphony will always be created and immanently embedded in
the normal processes of organizing and managing. Kafka’s point is not that the
Tower of Babel is an extraordinary occurrence, but that it merely condenses and
concentrates, metaphorically, what are pervasive attributes of all organization that
has not reduced discursive activity to the nothingness of McDonaldized scripts
(Ritzer, 2004).
The idea of the polyphonic organization (Gergen & Whitney, 1996; Hazen, 1993)
is linked to other central currents in recent theory development, including the
heteroglossic organization, interpreted from Bakhtin (Rhodes, 2000, 2001), as well
metaphors drawn from avant-garde theater (Boje, 2002). We use not only these and
related organization theory resources elaborated by Hazen (1993) but also diverse
literary and philosophical sources, including Wittgenstein (1972), Foucault (1972),
Rorty (1989), Lyotard (1988) and Kafka (1970) to elaborate and answer four key
questions.
First, what causes polyphony? We question the taken-for-granted assumption that
the polyphonic condition simply mirrors the plurality of languages and voices that is
normally repressed.2 Usually, the question of repression is linked to status attributes
of the persons in question: they are people ‘of color’, women, those with disabilities,
etc. Using Kafka’s reading of the Tower of Babel, we will show how polyphony
works within the framework of normal organization—rather than being the
exception.
Second, we will explore the relation between different discourses that constitute
the polyphonic organization. We will introduce Lyotard’s concept of the différend to
extend understanding of the normally constituted differences between discourses.
Discourses are divided by the underlying differences between rationalities, enacted
through discourses. The gap between them is the différend. Using the concept of the
différend also enables us to think about the power that is exercised and imposed
whenever this gap is bridged by one language game that dominates all others.
Third, we ask, how are language and change related? As Hazen (1993, p. 15)
states, the concept of polyphony should enable us to understand change in patterns
of organizing among people. However, this relation remains unexplored, since
polyphony does not necessarily lead to change. In this respect, we identify a lacuna in
Hazen, who seems to assume that the discourses of the oppressed and the excluded
will automatically be ‘‘sources of change, since they are different from the discourses
of power’’ (Hazen, 1993, p. 21).
Fourth, we ask how the management of polyphonic organizations should be
theorized. Whereas the bulk of the literature switches between describing and
prescribing the importance of polyphony we seek to address how polyphony might
2
As one of the reviewers alerted us, the concept of polyphony might refer to the level of voices (hence
people) or the level of discourse. We would argue that both levels are closely linked: different voices enact
different discourses, whereas different discourses constitute different (potential) subjective positions
(voices) from which people can speak and be heard. Therefore, we suggest understanding polyphony as a
concept that looks at the interplay between voices and discourses. Depending on the analytical focus,
research will either study discourse, voices or their mutual constitution. In order to demonstrate this, we
employ both perspectives and clarify where necessary.
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actually be managed. We do so by using the linguistic concepts of deconstruction
and translation, conceptualizing management as a discursive practice.
2. Rethinking polyphonic organization through the metaphor of the Tower of Babel
Organizations are discursively constructed and reconstructed: they are spoken,
written, embodied and otherwise encoded and recorded. With the concept of the
polyphonic organization, Hazen (1993) understands organizations as socially
constructed verbal systems. Her seminal contribution provided a foundation for
other recent language-based approaches to management and organization theory.
For instance, Rhodes’s (2000, 2001) elaboration of the concept of the heteroglossic
organization, conceptualized organizations as composed of competing centrifugal
and centripetal forces that collide linguistically. What these perspectives have in
common is a realization that ‘people do not use language primarily to make accurate
representations of perceived objects but, rather, to accomplish things’, as Alvesson
and Karreman (2000a, p. 137) note. Elsewhere, Alvesson and Karreman (2000b)
discuss the stratification of language ranging from ‘grand’ and ‘mega’ discourses
through to ‘micro’ discourses. Their sensitivity to different types of discourses does
much to rebut those who are content to treat language as a relatively ethereal
concern, as something epiphenomenal.
Organizations, and those within them, are narratological, according to Brown
(2000). Integral to the sensemaking process is the way in which organizational actors
seek to craft and reproduce narratives that are both robust and inscribed with a
claim to verisimilitude. Brown (2000) and Brown and Jones (2000) examine British
public enquiries and illustrates the battles for meaning that ensue within the text of
these enquiries, a battle that reaches closure when the presiding enquiry judge
determines that one account will be privileged. As Molotoch and Boden (1985)
demonstrated, the judicial form privileges a power of strict determination of the
meaning of discourse that is not evident in many other areas of discursive exercise.
Usually, in most organizations, there is a persistent polyphony that shapes
organizational reality.
To capture the polyphonic constructions of organization reality Boje (2002) uses
the case of Tamaraland, a theatrical production, as a metaphor for understanding
organizations. Tamaraland is a play in which different acts take place simultaneously
in different rooms, which the audience are free to move between. What a member of
the audience encounters, as well as the sense they make of it, will vary markedly
according to the route through the rooms they take. Not only are notions of what it
is to be a member of the audience made problematic by this device; more
importantly, however, the play disrupts notions of linearity, especially through the
way in which the audience may have infinite experiences of the play by virtue of the
order in which they have entered particular rooms. For Boje, Tamaraland, as
multiplicities of meaning, outcome and experience, is a projection akin to experience
of contemporary complex organizations. His suggestion is that while organizations
may well be scripted through missions, strategies and so forth (Barry & Elmes, 1997)
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there are too many directors (i.e. finance, marketing, human resources) for only one
script to be followed. Boje suggests that we regard organizations as a meta-theater,
an arena in which a multiplicity of simultaneous and discontinuous dramas occur,
the sense of which we make up as we go along, using familiar cues, props and plots.
According to these studies, organizations are entities that persist, endure, and
reproduce themselves by being constituted discursively and accomplished linguistically. To stress polyphony, however, is not to say that everything that is
organizational is discursive. It is all too easy to think of action without words but
with huge implications: for example, the impact of a USAF high altitude bomber on
a remote target or of a bomb detonated in a crowded street is decidedly, and often,
bloodily, material. The skilled and concentrated craft worker or research scientist
engaged in solitary activity or the deft production worker with nimble fingers on a
noisy and high-speed production line, or fire crews fighting a ferocious blaze in
extreme conditions—all these suggest situations that render discourse difficult,
problematic, or even impossible. Yet, the understandings displayed in the work of
such actors will have partly been drilled discursively: the routines will have been
learnt through discursive interaction among texts and talkers. Of course, there are
considerable gaps between the causal relations that rhetoric constitutes in relation to
other organizational activity. For instance, the missile assembly worker on the
production line, the fire-fighter seeking to control an emergency in the assembly
worker’s factory, the research scientist developing more efficient means for delivering
death and mutilation, the pilot firing the resulting missiles, and the people and social
movements who are prepared in consequence to bomb and maim anyone at all on
the grounds of opposing whatever sense they made of the reasons behind the
dispatching of the missile—it’s hard to see any of these as sharing the same universe
of meaning let alone morality. Literally, they situate themselves in different
languages and communities, between which there are many gaps. And it is these gaps
that we seek to explore.
To describe organizations and the arenas within which they are constituted as
consisting of gaps between discourses and as being within/between discursive spaces,
is not to conceive of them as literally embodied and embedded in different languages.
But, metaphorically, it is to suggest that they might as well be. The corollary of the
argument that organizations are cultures—in the plural—is that organizations
constantly need translation, not only intra-organizationally within their discursive
spaces, but also inter-organizationally. On a more material level, such translation
has been analyzed by actor network theorists (Law & Hassard, 1999; Lee & Hassard,
1999; Newton, 2002). According to this theory, organizing is the effect of translation
processes between heterogeneous materials (Callon, 1986; Munro, 1999). Taken
more literally, organizations need to translate internally as well as externally in order
to make sense of messy polyphonic situations. Networks, alliances, and project
organizations (Castells, 1996; Ebers, 1997; Jarillo, 1993), for instance, can be seen [to
be struggling] with polyphonic realities. In their collaboration, they differ in terms of
the language they use, the order they impose, the rationality they employ, and the
interrelation they maintain internally. Thus, a polyphonic conception of organizations not only problematizes relations between organizations but also relations
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within organizations. The boundaries between inter- and intra-organizational
distinctions blur: in fact, instead of the simple inside–outside divide, boundaries
multiply (see Herbold, 2002).
The polyphonic organization is differentiated and constituted through different
languages and rationalities, which may or may not enter into dialogue with one
another (Rhodes, 2000, 2001). The Aston researchers (Pugh & Hickson, 1976)
repeatedly reinforced this point by saying that organizational growth and
development lead inescapably to distinct specialization (sales, marketing, design,
finance, etc.), which we can now understand as being constituted through culture,
grammar, argot, and style (Hofstede, 1998). As Hazen (1993, p. 16) suggests, ‘‘If we
conceive organization as many dialogs occurring simultaneously and sequentially, as
polyphony, we begin to hear differences and possibilities’’. Further, employing the
notion of dialog can enable research to account for diversity rather than trying to
stamp it out through creating a ‘false’ consensus (Rhodes, 2001, p. 230).
At root polyphonic means ‘‘many voices’’: indeed, in recalling the idea of many
voices to mind it orients us to one of the most enduring myths of Western history—
the Tower of Babel. As Czarniawska (1999, p. 109) puts it ‘‘the social division of
labor is actually a social linguistic division; each cooperation is a Babel Tower.’’
Kafka’s reading of this story helps us to better understand polyphony. Those readers
familiar with the Old Testament will know that in the story of the Tower of Babel,
God, in self-defence, destroyed the Tower and punished mankind with a multiplicity
of different languages, for daring, as mere mortals, to aspire to heaven. In his more
secular version of the story Kafka (1970) suggested the reason why erecting the
Tower proved impossible was not because of the actions of a punitive God carefully
observing human effort from on high. Rather, as an enterprise, erecting the Tower
constantly undermined itself in its attempted accomplishment.
Translated, we understand Kafka’s re-reading in the following way: the builders,
like many organization executives, were driven by a single goal. To realize this goal
they start to build a foundation for their enterprise, during which process their
knowledge increases. As they come to know more, then they come to revise some
aspects of the wisdom that had seemed to attach to the previously defined goal.
Metaphorically, one might say, the knowledge gained through realizing an idea
forces them to deconstruct its foundations, again and again. As Kafka’s story
concludes, the Tower could not be completed because this paradox paralyzed its
builders.
Kafka’s interpretation of the story highlights several points that enrich our
understanding of the polyphonic organization and its origin. First, polyphony is not
imposed from the outside but is a result of the common effort. Second, it is the
process of pursuing the common project which leads inevitably to its deconstruction:
the knowledge that is gained through action leads to insights that question the
foundations upon which it is built and, in doing so, becomes an occasion for its
constructors to tear down the (metaphorical) Tower, again and again. The idea of
erecting one common Tower, of persuading all to adopt one common goal, or to
speak one common language, is contradictory and leads inevitably to paradox. The
idea of a unifying goal supported by a common language subverts and undermines
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itself incessantly. Third, it is not insufficient order—the view of functionalist
analysis—or the lack of an overall Leviathan,3 which is responsible for the Babel-like
condition we experience, but a too perfect order.
There are many well-known managerial tools that seek to increase order,
especially those that project the authority of a managerial host seeking to
incorporate the bodies and souls of subordinates who owe allegiance. Yet, in order
to minimize the apparent chaos of Babel, in fact, they constantly (re)produce
disorder (Cooper, 1990). Polyphony arises whenever a dominant voice tries to enact
a particular world-view, either within organizations in general or when the voice is
projected organizationally on to a wider world, and that voice is resisted. The
clearest indicators of this, not surprisingly, come from politics, whose rationality is
premised on precisely this articulation, counter-articulation and the dialectics that
ensue. (Think of the polyphony surrounding ‘‘The War on Terrorism’’ or any other
significant discursive political issue.) The efforts of one party to impose order on
ambiguous events create (consciously or not) the space for different and often
opposing voices. Divisions within and between political organizations amplify
divisions within and between people who are not necessarily members of these
organizations at all, but who learn to make sense in terms of their divisions through
other organizations such as the media, or in simple conversations among workmates,
friends, and families. The result is a constant tension between centrifugal and
centripetal forces (Rhodes, 2000, 2001). Such a dialectical dynamic has been
analyzed in the literature on power and resistance, especially those views that regard
power as a circulatory, flowing medium, something that moves through various
circuits of power whose meaning it redefines as it flows and which are always open to
either endogenously generated social change or exogenously induced randomness
(Clegg, 1989).4
The polyphonic organization now comes into better focus: it is not a lack of unity,
order or (managerial) control that leads to this Babel-like condition, but too much
order and homogeneity. Babel-like polyphony is not a necessary evil or something to
be avoided, but rather the inevitable result of every common project, of every
organized effort, one that constantly undermines itself as it progresses. However, we
think that it is insufficient to simply state the existence of polyphony, hoping it might
lead to change. Rather, we want to focus on how it is linked to change and how it
could be managed. It seems as though there are two possible ways out of Babel.
One exit route stresses the necessity to talk big, to integrate, through a unifying
grand narrative, to insist on those correspondences that one legislates. As Lyotard
(1993, pp. 63–64) has shown, this homogenization and installation of one language
game dominating all others is a form of repression and ‘‘terror’’. Such a solution
suggests that all would be well ‘‘if only people would shut up and listen while I/the
3
Which was how Hobbes (1968 [1651]) saw things, when he opted for a secularization of the Divine in
the body of the King in a way that has been many a management’s goal ever since.
4
Dialectically, when conceived as an ordering device, management is a congenitally failing operation: it
fashions order out of disorder as something whose substantive invariance can never be guaranteed. Of
course, congenital failure is part of its charm: it constantly produces new occasions for its further address;
hence careers for consultants and management scholars.
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Board/the Executive/the Government tell them what’s good for themy’’
Necessarily, shutting up, listening and learning the new talk always coincides with
the elimination of organizational richness, variety and possibilities. The price to pay
for an order erected and maintained through one unifying grand narrative is the
marginalization and silencing of other, softer, fainter voices, voices that might
address relevant problems through the difference they raise. Normally this first exit is
criticized from a humanistic point of view as being inhumane, undemocratic, etc. It is
said that we should celebrate the differences, enjoy them, and feel a warm glow of
inclusivity as we embrace the polyphony—but one should recall that in the myth, the
Tower never got built. If people cannot communicate effectively with each other,
then there is more chance that they will fail in task accomplishment; the richness and
variety of polyphony is not necessarily good.
There is a second way of dealing with the Babel-like constitution of organization
that sees the marginalization of employees not just as inhumane but also as
unproductive according to its own logic. For instance, Gary Hamel (1996) has
recently pointed out that a successful process of strategy-making will listen,
democratically, to voices normally silenced. People from the periphery—Simmelian
‘strangers’ (Simmel, 1950)—newcomers and outsiders—will think more creatively
because they are ‘‘exposed to ideas and developments that do not conform to the
company’s orthodoxies’’ (Hamel, 1996, p. 77). Thus, rather than provide strong
leadership that silences dissent, organizations should use the polyphony they possess.
We suggest elaborating on this perspective by understanding management as
discursive practice.5 In practical terms, the task of management as discursive practice
can be conceptualized as a deconstruction of existing language games and a
translation between them in order to build new organizational capabilities—
irrespective of status attributes but with regard to the specificity of language games.
And this requires an ability to move seamlessly from text to context and back again,
something indicated quite clearly by a response that the BMW design guru, Chris
Bangle, gave to a recent question from a journalist who asked ‘‘Is there a right and a
wrong in design?’’ Bangle’s answer was ‘‘We don’t have an advanced design group,
we call it advanced context, because context is everything. Why does the 7 Series sell
differently in Asia than it does in Europe? It’s a completely different context’’
(Dowling, 2004, p. 5).6 Any design is always a singular entity, irrespective of the
different interpretations it may be subject to. Thus, if we were to use the idea of a
specific design as a text constructed out of a design discourse, then it is a text that
never stands outside of context. Given the contextuality of any text, this introduces
the possibility of tensions in polyphonic organization, even at the very moment that
5
However, it should be clear that this is not an argument for diversity management: we are not stressing
inclusivity premised on status attributes as a liberal principle. Rather, we are stressing the systematic
search for and articulation of polyphony as a managerial device. Such a device is one where monological
truth claims are relativized against other views of the world in a way that counters the dominance of single
languages and absolute forms of thought (Rhodes, 2001, p. 29).
6
The example of BMW that we will refer to again at the end of this paper is by no means a substitute for
empirical research. However, it does provide an idea of how polyphony, deconstruction and translation
can be utilized and are actually at work in practice.
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they seem to be eclipsed in a singular production. As Bangle (Dowling, 2004, p. 5)
goes on to say ‘‘A global company with global products has to understand context
and then make tough decisions. It’s not like one is intrinsically right and one is
wrong intrinsically. Design comes in waves and depending where you are on that
wave there is going to be acceptance or there is not.’’
As the example illustrates, every text is embedded in the context of other,
potentially conflicting and contradictory texts. The concept of the différend both
recognizes this and seeks to make it theoretically a point of departure rather than a
cause for concern.
3. Tension in the polyphonic organization: the différend
Design puts the idea of the différend into context: Lyotard defines the différend as
a situation where there is an irreconcilable conflict between parties, one that cannot
be equitably resolved, because no judgment rule is applicable to all the parties’
situation simultaneously. In his words, ‘‘the rules of the genre of discourse by which
one judges are not those of the judged genre or genres of discourse’’ (Lyotard, 1988,
p. xi). Design is clearly an example of such a situation. As Bangle (Dowling, 2004)
says, there is no rule to apply and sometimes that which looks wrong gains
acceptance as just right: how, otherwise, would design innovation occur? It cannot
be imposed—people cannot be told that they will like something and then they do so.
Usually design persuades not through the denial of choice, through negative power,
but through the positive power of seduction. And as such, outside of design
competitions and inside markets, as Lyotard (1988, p. xi) suggests, people judge
design in terms of rules that are not necessarily those applied by the designers
themselves—which are, in fact, usually unavailable to the people concerned. Indeed,
the point of some design is to disrupt existing rules and sensemaking radically, to
create radical discontinuity in the grammar of design, thus creating markets brought
into being by ‘‘the shock of the new’’ (Hughes, 1981).
In more general areas of management other than the specifics of markets and
design, the différend might occur when humanistic discourse assesses management
actions whose point of reference is wholly to arguments that are driven by market
rationality. The two discourses are divided by the différend—an irreconcilable
conflict—because to judge the one discourse on the basis of the other is to exercise
power in terms of the discourse that one speaks for. Huspek and Kendall (1991)
provide a good example of the différend in analyzing North American industrial
lumber workers, who they found were unable to understand and use the dominant
vocabulary of politics and so eventually developed their own political language, one
which made sense to them but which cut them off from the dominant political
system. In fact, they could not articulate their interests in the dominant language
and, being unheard, they withheld their political voices. Although the two languages
were parasitic upon each other, they were divided by what Lyotard calls the
différend. The différend refers to cases of conflict between differing parties that
cannot be resolved without repressing one of the involved parties.
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We can take as a further example of the différend the case of a conflict between
departments: if they disagree upon a certain issue there will be no third party able to
reconcile the conflict, because, following their individual rationality and living in
their separate worlds, shaped by their specific languages, each department seems
right in their own terms. Both have reason (and often good reasons) for insisting on
their point of view, even though, taken together, their views are incommensurable
and contradictory. Normally management exercises its authority and imposes a
hierarchy on the differing parties: marketing is judged more important than R&D,
for instance.7 But as Lyotard argues, this leads to an unsatisfying solution, because
the rules of the discourse by which people judge are not those of the judged
discourses. Management that favors one over the other is a form of power exercised
through the use of a certain unifying discourse. Now, we do not want to be so naı̈ve
as to suggest a management without power, but we do want to suggest that
management power need only be exclusively prohibitive and negative but might also
be what Foucault (1977) termed positive. But for positive power to emerge,
organizations have to abandon their grand narratives.
If we agree that organizational polyphony is a major resource for innovation and
development, management’s homogenizing grand narratives hinder and eradicate,
rather than enable, organizational success. Conflicting parties and discourses
constitute organizations: characterized as they are by the différend, there can be
no ‘‘recourse to higher authority to reconcile the conflict’’ (Mintzberg, 1991a, p. 449)
without simultaneously eliminating potential organizational creativity and innovative power (Hamel, 1996). Grand narratives that inhibit, prohibit, prescribe,
proscribe, limit, direct, and dominate in the name of executive order or managerial
privilege or the maintenance of order to silence otherness and dissent are totalitarian.
Of course, from a humanist-libertarian position, most employing organizations are
authoritarian because they demand control of zones of the autonomous self and its
time. From this perspective, the labor-time rented and used has subservience
demanded of it; individual autonomy is surrendered to some putative organizational
good or interest that must always be other than that of the free subject.8
What, then, is to be done? To put it provocatively, how can management theory
avoid the tyranny of scientific ‘legislation’ (Bauman, 1987, or ‘mode 1 knowledge’ in
terms of Gibbons et al., 1994) without lapsing into a nihilism in which anything goes
while simultaneously rien ne vas plus? Are the only choices between polyphony, on
the one hand, and the unifying grand narrative, on the other? Recognizing in this
7
In the example of the lumber workers and the marketing/R&D department we can understand the
difference between voices and discourses, both of which constitute polyphony (see footnote 2). In the latter
case, people enact discourses using them to voice their ideas and concerns. Marketing people might use
MBA talk to convince others how important their issues are. The discourse of marketing enables them to
define their position and argue for it. The lumber workers, however, cannot utilize such an
institutionalized discourse; rather, their voices form a discourse that might lead to their own political
language. In both cases, polyphony describes an important part of their social realities.
8
From the perspective we are developing, such a conception of real interests opposed to free subjects is a
double mythology; namely that there are interests that are real without realization and that there are
subjects who are free of subjectification.
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division the reproduction of the front between a liberating, humanist yearning (let
everyone people talk in their own voices, and everything will be fine) and an urge for
a strong hand that orders the chaos we have to struggle with, and feeling comfortable
in neither camp, we seek another conceptualization.
4. Change, power, and language
Nietzsche (1969, p. 26) highlighted the tremendous power of discourse when he
wrote that to ‘‘conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the
part of the rulers: they say ‘this is this and this,’ they seal every thing and event with a
sound and, as it were, take possession of it.’’ Following this lead, Foucault (1980)
developed the idea of the truth effect, to state that language does not naively mirror
or innocently re-present the world but actively creates and powerfully shapes it.
Therefore, the different languages embody and reinforce differences and gaps
between the parts that form the polyphonic organization. Drawing on the linguistic
turn, discourses—as well as categories and concepts—are mostly understood as
imposing an order on the ever-changing world (Foucault, 1972; Nietzsche, 1968;
Wittgenstein, 1972).
While there are well-established precedents for this approach in previous research
(Clegg, 1975), recent organization studies present several contemporary instances of
this linguistic turn. Putnam and Fairhurst (2001, p. 111) emphasize the power of
language when they argue ‘‘y labeling or naming a discursive practice, such as
sexual harassment, inscribes patterns of sensemaking that affect what people see,
what gets silenced, and what is regarded as reasonable and acceptable.’’ Drawing on
Foucault, Brewis (2001) argues that organizational discourses concerning sexual
harassment ‘‘may (re)produce consequences counter to those which its proponents
espouse’’ (Brewis, 2001, p. 37). She argues that ‘‘if we accept the relationship that
Foucault posits between power, discourse/knowledge, and subjectivity, then it is
possible to argue that a particular way sexual harassment is spoken, written, and
thought about within harassment knowledge may (re)produce the subject positions
of harasser and recipien.’’ (Brewis, 2001, p. 38). She shows that ‘‘the depiction of
harassment in harassment knowledge may compel us to think [of] ourselves and
behave in ways which foster the abusive behaviour which harassment knowledge
avows to expose and remove from the organizational arena’’ (Brewis, 2001, p. 39).
Here, we see language inextricably intertwined with power and vice versa. Issues do
not simply arise, but are defined by certain parties, confined within a certain
linguistic frame of reference, and, most powerfully, identified discursively (Mumby,
1987; Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001, p. 255; see Clegg, 1975 for the earliest organization
studies examples of such an analysis).
The imposition of powerful order may be seen as a more negative than positive
process (Burrell, 1996, p. 645). Such a negative view stresses the limiting and
repressive side of language and is typical of many critical approaches. Hardy,
Phillips, and Clegg (2000) question this prohibitionist view by developing the point
that discourse can have important constructive effects and consequences in
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organizational contexts. They demonstrate that talk is far from ‘ethereal’, is less an
abstract entity and more a discourse mobilized by agents in order to act as a
‘strategic resource’ for the realm of management practice. From such a perspective,
discourse enacts and actively creates organizational reality (Hatch, 1997, p. 368).
These views in organization studies accord with Foucault’s (1972) statement that
language shapes reality through an inherent power bound up in the order of
discourse (Foucault, 1972). New discourses that have the power to enact new
realities always imply a deferring of power relations (in terms of: Who speaks? What
counts as a rational argument? What creates truth-effects?). Therefore, in a
polyphonic organization, with different and changing discourses, power relations are
constantly shifting. Different discourses, language games, and metaphors talk
different realities into existence; they become a major source of organizational
change and development, as Weick (1995, pp. 106, 181) and Hatch (1999) recognize
in their discussion of performative engagement—echoing Rorty’s (1989, p. 9) claims
who argues that what is interesting and new usually represents ‘‘a contest between an
entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new
vocabulary which vaguely promises great things’’ (Rorty, 1989, p. 9). Once a pattern
of usage emerges from the new types of redescription and becomes institutionalized,
that which is institutionalized requires no criteria ‘‘common to the old and the new
language games. For just insofar as the new language really is new, there will be no
such a criteria’’ (Rorty, 1989, p. 9). New language games, emergent concepts and
metaphors, are an attempt to see, to perceive, and to think differently—just to see
pragmatically ‘‘how we get on’’ (Rorty, 1989, p. 8).
Metaphors are one example of how language games work: as Otzel and Hinz
(2001) demonstrate, metaphors can multiply perspectives on particular business
situations; they enable managers to have a wider range of options for action (also, of
course, see Barrett & Cooperrider, 1990; Morgan, 1993). Metaphors ‘‘make thinking
‘move’’’ and allow an ‘‘overcoming (of) the ‘inertia’ of thinking in categorical terms
(that is) so endemic to modern Western thought’’ (Chia, 1996b, p. 143). Metaphors
are a ‘‘transport vehicle’’ (Grant & Oswick, 1996), ‘‘suited to carry our thinking
along [an] endless journey of intellectual discovery’’ (Chia, 1996b, p. 143). Yet, there
is always an element of foreignness in the act of conceptual creation, as though what
is new is always expressed in a language as yet unspoken and never fully understood.
Old words come to be used in new ways and new words are invented in an effort to
open up new domains of thought. New and old languages are in the kind of
opposition that we described before as the différend: new languages and metaphors
always emerge in an uncontrollable zone, in the ‘‘unmanaged organization’’
(Gabriel, 1995). As Rorty (1989, p. 18) says, metaphors are always incalculable
and surprising.
New metaphors make new sense just as surely as old metaphors, held dearly and
authoritatively, can block it. Innovation comes through metaphorical imagination:
the idea that music could move with you can become the ‘‘Walkman’’—where the
metaphors of individualism and freedom became captured in the idea of music
accompanying privatized movement that the marketing term then represented (Du
Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay, & Negus, 1996); missile delivery systems for popular
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liberation movements become young culturally disaffected people prepared, as
‘‘suicide bombers’’, to become unknown testaments to concept of the importance of
altruistic suicide Durkheim (2002). Organizationally, innovation springs from
discourse into existence by imagining meaning hitherto unconsidered. Language
both detects and constitutes knowledge possibilities that really make a difference.
That power and language are intertwined is, of course, hardly news—except for
those pre-tuned to screen out the normal dissonance in everyday life: the complex
interrelation within knowledge between language, metaphor, change, and power,
was delineated more than 100 years ago by Nietzsche (1990, p. 34) in his conception
of truth as ‘‘a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically
intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a
people to be fixed, canonical, and binding’’ Thus, truth is an illusion made
concrete—metaphors ‘‘worn out y drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost
their embossing and are now considered as metal y’’ (Nietzsche, 1990, p. 34). New
organizational ‘‘truths’’ (of strategy, products, ideas) emerge through the unfolding
of concepts and vocabulary; what we consider as truth in knowledge is in reality only
a metaphor whose metaphoricality we have forgotten. Metaphors change, and with
every transformation they change our world. Think of the move from natural
resource exploitation to natural resource sustainability. Like every creative process,
ushering something new into being, this change cannot be controlled and managed
from within the previous paradigm (Orssatto & Clegg, 1999).
Reflecting on the link between change and language we begin to understand the
role of language in organizational transformation, turning the threat of a chaotic
multiplicity of voices into an opportunity for change. Elaborating this in a practical
reflection in the final section, we will suggest that management should encourage the
deconstruction of dominating narratives and languages and provide space for new
languages, for a philosophical language that is a ‘‘language of many portals’’ (Serres,
1982, p. 6). The constructive task for (non-positivistic) schools of management
confronting polyphony is to learn to regard this very polyphony as creating space for
voices not normally heard, providing a space that will ‘‘multiply the voices’’ (Gergen
& Thatchenkery, 1998, p. 34). Using the concepts of deconstruction and translation
it becomes possible to circumscribe management as a discursive practice not
dominated by a single language or discourse, but driven by different discourses,
language games, and metaphors, which, together, constitute ‘‘multivocality’’
(Law, 1994, p. 32).
5. Managing the polyphonic organization: deconstruction and translation
Our stress on language is not meant to suggest that organizations are constituted
in a single linguistic register. Ever since the seminal empirical contributions of
Mintzberg (1973), Clegg (1975) and Silverman and Jones (1976), management
scholars have been alert to the fragmentary, disparate nature of managerial work as
language. Empirical research on managerial roles and work has repeatedly shown
that managerial activity has high oral communication content (Boden, 1994; Gowler
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& Legge, 1996; Pondy, 1978). One can conceptualize managing the polyphonic
organization as a discursive practice circumscribed by the processes of deconstructing
existing language games and translating between different language games. This
concept of managing is beyond the dualisms: planned change or evolution,
managerial coordination or self-organization, and so on. Rather it shows a way
in-between the passive and powerless acceptance of polyphony and the restless
efforts to control it.
5.1. Deconstruction
Narratives’’, as Mumby (1987, p. 113) says, ‘‘provide members with accounts of
the process of organizing. Such accounts potentially legitimate dominant forms of
organizational reality, and lead to discursive closure in the sense of restricting the
interpretations and meanings that can be attached to organizational activity’’. Thus
narratives are not only devices of sensemaking but also represent a ‘‘politically
motivated production of a certain way of perceiving the world’’ (Mumby, 1987,
p. 114). As Witten (1993, p. 105) argues, ‘‘narratives can set forth powerful and
persuasive truth claims—claims about appropriate behaviour and values—that are
shielded from testing or debate.’’ Such narratives as they provide the matrix for
normal organizational talk, action and decision making are potentially counterproductive and dysfunctional, to the extent that they enact and reinforce a certain
image of an organization that can influence it almost subliminally, beyond the
threshold of the organizational members awareness. Thus, deconstructing these
narratives provide a means of understanding and changing the stories that guide
organizational sensemaking.
Deconstruction focuses on procedures that subvert the taken-for-granted realities
and ways of world making (Chia, 1996a; Derrida, 1986a). Deconstruction is a form
of intervention, an attempt to change things through maximum intensification of a
transformation in progress (Derrida, 1992, p. 8). It questions the taken for granted,
the seemingly self-evident and natural, in order to demonstrate that it has a history
and that it was institutionalized at a very precise moment, with a very precise
intention (Kallinikos & Cooper, 1996, p. 5). Deconstruction makes us aware that the
stories through which we organize our thinking, which make organization thinkable,
are, in Nietzsche’s terms, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and
rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage,
appear to be fixed, canonical, and binding, metaphors whose metaphoricality we
have forgotten to remember. Deconstruction questions ‘‘truths’’ that are split off
from the conditions and the context of their production. Like Foucauldian
genealogy, it offers very detailed documentation of what otherwise may have
become naturalized. It tries ‘‘to identify internal contradictions in systems, to exploit
the conflicts and absences present in the interplay between representations, using
[the] nominally stated arguments of those with voice (y) to create openings for
those without’’ (Jacques, 1999, p. 216). In doing so, deconstruction questions the
limits that may have been imposed upon discourses that shape reality, and opens up
the possibility of enacting other, different discourses in a restless and demanding
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effort to open up space for others to enact different worlds in ambivalent spaces not
yet inside or outside the ‘‘texture of organizing’’ (Cooper & Fox, 1990). Willmott
(1998, p. 211) suggests that deconstruction is destabilizing, an opening up, a
‘‘subversion of closure rather than providing an authoritative means of resolving
ethical dilemmas’’. It is an intervention into the language games that ultimately
shape our realities.
Scholars frequently employ deconstruction as a mode of analysis of purely textual
materials, as in the seminal deconstructive analysis of leadership in Calás and
Smircich (1991) and in the exploratory and critical discourse about organizations
developed by writers such as Cooper (1989), Kilduff (1993) and Chia (1996a). Such
deconstructions often incur wrath, particularly from those who are being
deconstructed, who often argue, from the privileged position of the author, that
the deconstructionists have got it wrong (Mintzberg, 1991b) Rather than enter into
irresolvable debates about authorial intent, the textuality of texts, and the
intertextuality of critique, we want to argue that deconstruction can be employed
in a more ‘‘pragmatic’’ way (Rorty, 1996). Rather than confining deconstruction
merely to the critique of academic texts and for ‘‘unmasking books and authors—
showing what is really going on behind the false front’’ (Rorty, 1996, p. 14), we
suggest utilizing deconstruction to open up and unlock organizational narratives and
stories. Such stories, in part, constitute organizations, by guiding the lives of those
within them and speaking to the identities that they constitute as customers,
employees, regulators and suppliers. Organization constantly talks itself into
existence: we make sense of its experience through narratives and stories (Boden,
1994; Weick, 1995). These discourses shape organization through their ‘‘truth
effects’’ at the deepest levels (Foucault, 1972). In practical terms, deconstruction is a
means for allowing us to question these truth effects; to analyze the language games
that shape reality and to open up space for different concepts and perceptions. Used
in this way, deconstruction becomes a facilitator of change. Thus, we are arguing
that deconstruction can have impacts outside and beyond the closed hermeneutics of
texts. That this is the case has been demonstrated by researchers working in the fields
of family therapy and organizational change.
The family therapist Michael White has shown how a deconstructive approach can
facilitate change (White, 1992). In organization theory, this stream has been
recognized and developed by Barry (1997) as well as Boje, Alvarez, and Schooling
(2001). As Barry (1997) argues, organizational realities are locally defined and
framed by the meanings-in-use of actors. People’s lives and identities are heavily
influenced by the stories people employ to make sense of themselves and others.
Especially the power of categories and dominant interpretations affect how people
see themselves and frame problems (Barry, 1997). Although there are differences
between families and organizations (size, changing membership, degree of
organization, etc.), some important learning can be derived from family therapy
for organizational change (Barry, 1997).
Building on therapeutic approaches we can utilize deconstruction as a means of
managing the polyphonic organization. Grand narratives always impoverish the
complexities the world already presents; deconstruction provokes a curiosity in
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regard to alternative versions of how things might be. For instance, in analyzing his
case study of narrative change within a health care organization Barry (1997) found
that two stories dominated the organization—administrative angst and overwork. In
the change process, organizational members assigned names, images, characters and
careers to the two distress factors. As these abstract categories were fleshed out and
related to people’s stories, they became tangible and open to deconstruction (Barry,
1997). What we can learn from this and other narrative and deconstructive change
processes is that they sensitize us to the concepts that frame the realm of the
imaginable and to the stories that structure the flow of our experience.
Deconstruction shows that the world is accomplished linguistically and its status
quo maintained discursively. Even more important, it provides the space for things
to be different. As organizations are powerfully constituted and constantly enacted
through languages, deconstruction is thus the precondition of change as it melts all
necessities and shows that they were established at a very particular moment in
history. However, the driving force, the vehicle behind change, has to be something
more than deconstruction.
5.2. Translation
Translation has had a long and peripheral relationship with the social sciences
as a topic of enquiry as well as a practice of knowledge dissemination.
While translation, as an analytic practice, was a central focus of Benjamin’s
contributions to the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, it lapsed into marginality, at least
until the development of actor-network theory. In the seminal paper, ‘‘Some
elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the
fisherman of St. Brieuc Bay’’, Callon (1986) tells the story of a group of three
researchers who worked in St. Brieuc, a small fishing community near Brest in
France, to repopulate the dwindling resources of scallops. The paper identifies three
key agents of concern in determining the success or failure of the study: the
researchers themselves, the fishermen, and the scallops. The focus is on
the translation and non-translation of the needs of each of these into the terms of
the others. Law explains the complex inter-relationship, described as translation,
which occurs between the subject and the object, the non-living and the living
(Law, 1996, p. 300).
Subjects endlessly turn themselves into objects: perhaps into rules and procedures
which, for instance, assume the form of the standing orders or conventions that are
performed at meetings, while at the same time objects are similarly turning
themselves constantly back into subjects so that—in this case—they may judge
whether or not the rules have been properly followed. This syntax is a mode of
accounting that is told and performed in documents such as agendas and minutes.
And it is something that demands the performance of a constant weaving to and fro
between subjectivity and objectivity. The former is not distant, strategic, and
occasional. Rather, together with its interventions, it is continuous, reflexive,
iterative, unfolding and tactical, distributed across time in ways that cannot be
predicted or told in any detail at a single time or place.
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Employing the concept of translation we can make sense of polyphony. Recall our
interpretation of Lyotard’s différend. The différend directs our attention towards the
different discourses that enact different organizational realities such as marketing,
R&D, sales, HR or finance. The différend suggests that there is no meta-language or
no grand narrative that could represent the different polyphonic realities accurately
and judge them from the heights of its meta-perspective. Given that organizations
are constituted through different language games—including the language game
legitimated by top management as only one of them—no single language can be
identified that could cope with the complexities emerging from the Babel-like
polyphony. But how can we understand the practice of managing in such a
condition? Where sense is made it can only be so through the effective translations
that Law (1996) suggests.
Drawing on philosophical (Benjamin, 1982; Deleuze, 1994) and sociological
(Latour, 1983) sources, we suggest using the concept of translation as an adequate
means of understanding and conceptualizing management. Translation is not
concerned with one language but with the differences between languages; it is
not about elaborating one single language but moving from one to the other; it is not
about speaking in one’s own tongue but about understanding the other. In short,
translating is a constructive way of managing the polyphonic organizations and
working with its heteroglossic condition. It is important to note that translation in
itself is not a language divided from other languages by the différend; translation is
the process of moving from one language to another, a process of becoming. That
this is the case can be illustrated by looking at the etymological origin of translation:
it derives from the Latin word translatus, meaning ‘‘to bring or to carry over’’. Thus,
translation, at root, is a process, a becoming rather than a being (Chia, 1996a). This
meaning is echoed in the most literal use of translation as an act of translating
between two languages: translating between (let’s say) Danish and English does not
mean that you have recourse to a third ‘‘neutral’’ language where the translation
process would unfold. Rather, you wend from one language, never straight into the
other but through all of its presuppositions and presumptions and, through a process
of trial end error, you try to repeat the message within the context, the rules, and the
conditions of the other language. Therefore, translation is not cut off from languages
by the différend; it does not establish its own language. At the same time, it can never
bridge the différend perfectly—there is no such thing as a perfect translation.
Translation will always be a temporary, imperfect and somehow improvised process.
It cannot smooth over differences but tries to work with them, creating a resonance
between languages. Translation is not a perfect bridge that somehow mystically
unifies the two languages divided by the différend. Rather it is a process that
acknowledges that there is a different language enacting a different reality that has
its own logic, rules and context; it investigates possibilities of communicating one’s
own thoughts in the realm of the other.
Thus, translation can be understood as a form of mediation between different and
contradicting languages and the realities they constitute. From this perspective,
managing becomes a discursive practice translating between divisions by the
différend. Management activities such as leading, or more generally intervening, are
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not therefore driven by the production of consensus, nor by reduction of complexity,
nor even ‘‘voicing seduction’’ (Calás & Smircich, 1991)—but by traduction (from the
Latin root, ducere, leading). Translating, as a concept for managing the Babel-like
polyphony of organization, suggests that translation takes place in-between existing
formations. Following the current interest of organization theory in the space inbetween (Bradbury & Lichtenstein, 2000; Cooper, 1990), the gaps, the interstices
(Gherardi, 1999) and the therein-unfolding in-tensions (Cooper & Law, 1995), the
process of translation focuses on the ‘‘what is between’’ as ‘‘where the real action is’’
(Cooper & Law, 1995, p. 245). Translation explores ‘‘the space between’’ different
sensemaking; it explores the actual space where organizing occurs (Cooper, 1990,
p. 168). Translation is the organizational form of intervention par excellence: intervenere as mediating; it becomes the process of linking, netting, connecting through
stories, metaphors and language games that temporally bridge the différend. It
provides a translation that allows and enables both maintenance of difference and an
understanding of it.
As actor network theory has demonstrated (Law & Hassard, 1999), translation is a
powerful process, especially where it involves enrolling others as relays in strategic
agency. It is, of course a fallacy of translation ever to think that others might be the
passive beings that the notion of strategic relays suggests. Once others have been
delegated to become relays then they are acknowledged as autonomous and have
opportunities for the exercise of their autonomy in the pursuit of whatever action has
been authorized. Here, the term authorized bears a dual sense referring both to the
textual originator and to the legitimacy that is construed as the context within which
any action will unfold. Delegates are empowered to speak and act as legates or
envoys of those who represent authority. And in this role it is a rare delegate who is
effective by sticking solely to the script and eschewing opportunities for
improvisation and creativity. And it is in often-necessary improvisation that the
most creative, the most powerful, and the most authentic moments will occur. Thus,
translation is far more than a pure repetition of the same in the words of the other:
rather, translation always combines difference and repetition at one and the same
time (Deleuze, 1994). According to Benjamin (1982, p. 69), the ‘‘essential quality’’ of
translation ‘‘is not statement or the imparting of information. Yet any form of
translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit
anything but information—hence something inessential.’’ Rather, translation seeks
to communicate the ‘‘unfathomable, the mysterious, the ‘poetic’’’ (Benjamin, 1982,
p. 70) that constitutes our reality; it attempts to impart the underlying feeling beyond
the surface of the written and spoken word. Therefore it is never an ordinary task to
reproduce an original in translation because no translation would be possible if, in its
ultimate essence, it strove for likeness to the original (Benjamin, 1982, p. 73).
Benjamin suggests translations touch their original lightly and only at the infinitely
small point of the sense they make, thereupon pursuing their own course, according
to the interplay between fidelity and displacement, difference and repetition
(Benjamin, 1982, p. 80). Translation touches the original, takes one element on a
journey, developing and transforming it through its line of flight. Benjamin’s image
circumscribes the productive and creative process within translating: it is
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‘‘displacement, drift, invention, mediation, creation of a new link that did not exist
before and modifies in part the two agents’’ (Latour, quoted in Czarniawska, 1997,
p. 370), it ‘‘comprises what exists and what is created’’ (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1995,
p. 182).
Translation has a power of invention: during its unfolding it modifies and changes
both languages. It is the driving force behind organizational change and
development. Like jazz improvisation, translation is a play that implicitly changes
the grammar and the words (see Hatch, 1999; Zack, 2000; Special Issue of
Organization Science October 1998; Kamoche, e Cunha, & da Cunha, 2002). Jazzimprovisation can be described as a curious and hesitant way of exploring and
exploiting new patterns, while old ones are still proceeding. Like translating, it is a
movement from the known and established to the new and as yet unknown. In order
to be like this, both follow a particular process—carefully varying existing patterns
and looking for new themes and ventures emerging and evolving during
improvisation. Like improvisation, translation helps us linguistically ‘‘to maintain
the images of order and control that are central to organizational theory and
simultaneously introduce images of innovation and autonomy’’ (Weick, 1998, p. 548)
It ‘‘involves reworking precomposed material and designs in relation to unanticipated ideas conceived, shaped, and transformed under the special conditions of
performance, thereby adding unique features to every creation’’ (Berliner, quoted in
Weick, 1998, p. 544). Translation reflects on the former ‘‘original’’ text while
exploring new implications in a process in which the ongoing action can still make a
difference. Since every single attempt may provide a point of departure for a new
understanding the process does not produce a wrong or a right translation (Bangle
made a similar point we talking about there being no right or wrong design),
although some may work better than others in specific contexts. Translation is
always provisional (Benjamin, 1982, p. 74), on the way to making sense, constituting
the ‘‘organization’’ from different perspectives. Interestingly, translation comes
closer to an understanding of polyphony than any language on its own ever could:
while the languages being translated remain in conflict, separated by a state of
différend, the process of translation allows for underlying harmonies, rhythms and
differences to recur.
Finally, translation typically takes place backstage (Goffman, 1997): the better the
translation, the less one perceives the translators. This has important ethical
implications: managing the polyphonic organization means listening carefully to the
voices of others, keeping oneself in the background and mediating between different
language games. However, there is an important difference between the ethics of
translation and ‘‘soft’’ management practices. First, translation explicitly focuses on
language and its constituting effect on organization and management. It does justice
to the fact that managing and organizing are language-based processes. Second,
whereas ‘‘soft’’ management practices build on understanding, caring, nurturing,
etc., translation is a more dynamic and active concept that focuses on differences. Of
course translation takes as its starting-point listening and understanding, but the
task of the translator is to repeat in one language what was voiced in another one.
Therefore, the translator needs an understanding of different and sometimes
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conflicting languages that enact different realities. Translating is a process of dealing
with differences and the power that they command, rather than of unifying
perspectives. Our argument is therefore located between two positions. On the one
hand it is stated that diversity, multiple perspectives, polyphony, etc. lead almost
automatically to change (Hazen, 1993; Hamel, 1996). On the other hand more
conservative theorists emphasize the need for a strong hand to direct organization
and preserve it from chaos (Donaldson, 1992; Porter, 1996). The concept of
translation offers an alternative position: it builds on polyphony, but simultaneously
suggests a way of managing polyphony by translating between the different
languages that constitute organizations. Translation thus offers a constructive way
of dealing with differences. It resolves the paradox of management as implying either
too much order or too much chaos.
As we have seen, translation does not imply speaking on behalf of other people.
Speaking for others implies defining common ground and identifying a common
perspective. Such a strategy obviously implies exercising power since differences can
get lost when someone claims to represent an issue better than the people who are
directly affected by it. Translation works on a different level. It does not identify or
unify, but takes the differences between languages and tries to deal with them in a
constructive way. It does not speak for someone else, but repeats what someone said
in a different language. The translator does not become the author, but stays in the
background. Translation is still a powerful process, of course, but rather than
claiming to represent a standpoint for others, the translator has to explore different
ways of linking languages between different people. Whereas speaking for someone
else implies knowing their position and expressing it accurately, translation is much
more of a hesitant and improvisational process. There can never be anything like a
perfect translation: it is always a ‘‘provisional way of coming to terms with the
foreignness of languages’’ (Benjamin, 1982, p. 75). The language of translation never
fits perfectly; rather, it moves, folding and unfolding, enveloping and developing,
and, with every single move, there (dis)appears a new but as yet hidden reality. Far
from transporting a clear-cut message from one point to another, translation creates
a bridge between differing language games that shape organizational reality,
deferring to both of them.
6. Closings and openings
In this paper we have conceptualized management as discursive practice, focusing
linguistically on the deconstruction of old languages and translation between
different languages. In doing so we provide an approach that links the practice of
managing to the polyphony that constitutes organizational reality. Our approach
has important implications for the theory and practice of management, including
some important issues for further (empirical) research.
First, our paper deepens our understanding of the interrelation of change and
language. Given that polyphony does not necessarily lead to change, we explored
language, and sought its potential impact on change. As we have suggested, drawing
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23
on Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Rorty, language games shape reality and are capable
of producing new forms of organizing. New developments derive from the contest
between an old entrenched vocabulary and a new, as yet half-formed, one. This
powerful contest needs further (empirical) investigation. For instance, buzzwords
such as Business Process Reengineering, TQM, Corporate Social Responsibility, etc.,
engage the attention of top management teams, who then translate them into their
context and respond by using their understanding of the genre enacted by these
concepts. Often, they will innovate as they translate. More empirical research is
needed to understand whether this leads to fundamental change, superficial
adoption, or the reinforcement of existing behavior (for exemplary research on the
effects of ISO 14001 on strategic positioning see Bansal & Hunter, 2003). Further
research is also needed to examine the limits to discursive change: language may also
be employed as a ceremony, as something that happens on the surface of
organizations while the real action takes place somewhere else (as Meyer & Rowan,
1977, suggest). Theoretically, we would propose that language does not necessarily
lead change, but that there is no change that is not articulated discursively and
ushered into being linguistically.
Second, we have raised questions about the nature of polyphonic organization.
We have offered a strong argument, not imposed from outside, but emerging from a
process of immanent ordering, namely that seeking to accomplish one common
Tower, working on one common project, would lead through the progress achieved
during its realization to the questioning of the common fundamentals that grounded
it. In terms of archetypes, this should not be a surprise: a quest that is not thwarted
at some point by the unanticipated consequences of some action by its protagonists
is not the stuff of drama. Consequently, it is incessant and immanent deconstruction
that informs the empirical analysis of reasons for organizational success or failure in
conditions of complexity: to what extent is polyphony produced by just those
ordering devices with which management tries to avoid polyphony? For instance, if
management tries to implement a strong, hegemonic culture enacted by a single
language game (excellence is everything, anything else is failure—Enron has been
analyzed as an example of such a culture by Sims & Brinkmann, 2003), this might
give rise to polyphony, enacted in discourses of resistance (see, for an example,
Humphreys & Brown, 2002). Moreover, a key issue that needs empirical research
addresses the extent to which translation between different language games can
affect change, raising the question of how power is present in particular processes of
translation. Circuits of power theory can be used as a starting-point towards
understanding the dynamics at work in such translation (Clegg, 1989).
Finally, more research is needed in order to chart the phenomenological contours
of management as discursive practice. As Mintzberg (1973) and others have shown,
management is a highly fragmented task. Our approach situates managerial work in
the realm of language. Further studies need to analyze managing as linguistic work
informed by the analysis of polyphony. We encourage the investigation of
management’s discursive practices in terms of the limits to power, deconstruction
and translation. How is an unstable equilibrium between these key terms maintained
in practice?
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Our approach has two implications for the practice of management. First, the
polyphony of voices and perspectives can trigger creativity and innovative potential
beyond conformity. As Hamel argues, outsiders, newcomers and people with
different perspectives can contribute significantly to an organization’s development
(see Hamel, 1996). However, it is not clear how polyphony as such could contribute
to change or how this could be managed. Starting from the notion of translation and
deconstruction we suggest building on polyphony and understanding management
as discursive practice. Management as discursive practice allows for the importance
of polyphony, while simultaneously seeking to manage this same polyphony through
deconstructing and translating between different language games that constitute the
organization.
The example of BMW (Bangle, 2001) once again shows the power of such an
approach. As a global organization operating on many different national markets
BMW has a highly specialized internal structure. While engineers learn from BMW’s
own Formula One Team and develop high performance engines for the everyday
user, the finance department has to keep an eye on costs and competitors’ pricing
strategies; at the same time the design team, creating features that express BMW’s
individual character, work with a comparatively different mindset and type of
understanding. In view of this polyphony, BMW’s management needs to ensure that
all the different subdivision work together, despite the differences in their language
and culture. BMW’s global chief of design, Chris Bangle (2001, p. 53), describes this
as managing at the intersection between commercially driven realities and the
creative aspirations of the design team, in terms of ‘‘translating the language of art
into the language of corporation.’’ In other words, managing becomes a task of
translating between different rationalities (design, manufacturing, commerce) that
are enacted in different language games. Bangle cannot rely on one meta-discourse to
unify the discourses that enact different realities. Rather, he practises managing as
translation. For instance, when he presents design solution to technicians he does not
speak of ‘‘tensions, stance, attitude, etc.’’ Rather, he translates these terms into
descriptions such as ‘‘the front end looms’’, or ‘‘the rear bumper maybe sags like a
waddling baby with a full diaper’’ (Bangle, 2001, p. 53). While this is, of course, quite
a mundane example it does illustrate the point we want to make: translation is a
process that investigates as it unfolds how to move a truth from one discursive world
into the words of another. In doing so, translation connects the heterogeneous,
without unifying it. Deconstruction and translation should be understood as one
way of bridging the gap between different language games that constitute
organizational reality. And they delineate a concrete way to manage the change
that potentially lurks in polyphony. Such approaches enable and actively encourage
us to think of management as a discursive practice—and what could be more
appropriate, given that we live increasingly in an organized world enacted
linguistically and accomplished discursively, a world that is semiotically saturated
in a plethora of representations, signs, and discourses?
Secondly, the polyphonic organization is less standardized and ordered, which
provides the necessary flexibility to cope with, and be in, a fast-changing
environment (Cox & Blake, 1991). Polyphony can be understood as the linguistically
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25
played out ‘‘dis/organization’’ (Cooper, 1990) that an organization needs in order to
change (Pascale, 1999). In the voice of Karl Weick, ‘‘the inability of people in
organizations to tolerate equivocal processing may well be one of the most important
reasons why they have trouble. y It is the unwillingness to disrupt order, ironically,
that makes it impossible for the organization to create order’’ (Weick, 1979, p. 189).
Polyphonic organizations are capable of dealing with equivocal processes, and their
plural character helps them to disrupt order and invent it anew. Deconstructing
existing language games (as already successfully applied in therapy—see White,
1992) could be a viable way of disrupting order and, by doing so, initiating change.
Thus management as discursive practice provides a link between polyphony and
change. Seeing management as a discursive practice, managers themselves should
concentrate on mediating between discourses and exploring the gaps. This implies
listening carefully to voices from the margins as well as being able to speak and
understand many tongues. Managing does not mean silencing difference in a strong
culture of excellence—practicing domination—but exploring and exploiting the
complexities and possibilities that organizations provide through their increasingly
complex divisions of knowledge and labor.9
Naturally, discursivity cannot be seen as the only game in town—we have to agree
(ironically, being convinced by what we just wrote) that our own perception is also
just another language game, and that an infinite number of other language games are
possible. While granting the truth of this, we have to acknowledge just how little this
insight has been exploited. So long as we do not practise deconstruction and
translation (in both our academic studies and our organizational work), it would be
surprising if the dominant ethos of these two activities were to offer any more than
opportunity for us to add yet another metaphorical brick to the equally metaphorical
wall that surrounds us—what critical theorists are wont to refer to as the repressive
normalcy of everyday life. In which case, our attempts to think and conceptualize
social reality in a different key will be of little more deconstructive significance than
were the graffiti on the Berlin Wall.
9
We could also put it the other way round and argue that the lack of polyphony can have a damaging
impact on organizations and can lead to disasters such as the Challenger explosion, Enron or Barings, to
name but a few (for the example of the Challenger see Messerschmidt, 1996; for Enron see Sims &
Brinkmann, 2003; for Barings see Stein, 2000). It was the ignorance of polyphony or the inability to
manage it that provided the context for these disasters to occur. Messerschmidt (1996) for instance
analyzed the causes of the Challenger explosion in 1986. He documents the discussions between
management and engineers at the spaceship manufacturing company and NASA. Chief engineers were
aware of the risk that a particular part of the space ship represented, whereas management wanted to
approve the launch. An engineer tried to explain the risk of a launch, but eventually gave up ‘‘y when it
was apparent that I couldn’t get anybody to listen’’ (Messerschmidt, 1996, p. 39). Management excluded
the engineers from the decision-making process, simultaneously excluding critical voices representing
potential problems. In the situation described by Messerschmidt there was no translation of the engineers’
concerns into the managers’ reality. We argue that polyphony in organizations can help to avoid such
disasters by providing space for many perspectives and critical voices (Daboub, Rasheed, Priem, & Gray,
1995). Equally important, deconstruction and translation can be understood as means of making sense of
polyphony and utilizing it in a positive way.
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