1st Edition

How Speech Acting and the Struggle of Narratives Generate Organization

By Thorvald Gran Copyright 2017
    258 Pages
    by Routledge

    258 Pages
    by Routledge

    How Speech Acting and the Struggle of Narratives Generate Organization seeks to shed understanding on how speaking or speech-acting affects how we are organized and how we influence each other and wield power. It is suggested that speaking is a major clue to organization and to the creation of new organizations. The task is to describe how speech-acting organizes. This book takes findings in the project’s philosophy of collective intentions – its philosophy of society – into the field of empirical study of organization and politics.

    The book investigates the relation between knowledge and politics, between describing the world and changing it, between cognitive – sensing - and volitional – wilful – processes and goes on to describe how speech-acting organizes, reorganizes - and destroys organizations. It looks at persons and groups as speech-actors. It investigates how speech-acting can spur movements in organizations from routines to learning to innovations and back

    How Speech Acting and the Struggle of Narratives Generate Organization develops a model of how speech-acting generates new organization – or social innovations. Empirical studies of some economic, political and ideological organizations are mined for model development. Speech-acting occurs in the context of institutions, with capital producing firms and nation states at present as the most ubiquitous. But speech-acting has an element of freedom that makes some of its results unpredictable and difficult to control.

    Aimed at academics, researchers and students in the field of Organizational Studies How Speech Acting and the Struggle of Narratives Generate Organization examines a new contribution and direction in the field.

     

    Part 1: Questions and Approach

    1. Questions and Approach. Some Hypotheses. Some Already Suggested Answers

    2. A Realistic Paradigm

    3. Problem, Materials and Methods of Analysis

    4. Questions of Speech-Acts, Narrative Struggles and the Organization of Norwegian Fisheries

    Part 2: How Speech-Acting in Context Organizes

    5. The Language Institution

    6. Speech-Acting, Narratives and Organization

    7. How Institutions and Institutional Dynamics Affect Reasoning in the Gap

    Part 3: Struggles Over Organizing

    8. Competing Narratives of the Firm in a Capital Producing Market Economy

    9. The Speech Act Theory of Innovativeness and Innovations

    10. Discourse Mode Changes in Organizations and Societies

    Part 4: Political and Private Organization. Narratives, Identities and Power in Norwegian Fisheries

    11. From Private to Public and Political Power

    12. The Speech Act Theory of Organization and New Technology in Norwegian Fisheries

    Part 5: The Pressure for Democracy

    13. The Narrativity of Leadership and Management in Organizations

    14. How Competing Ideas of Society Permeate Organizations, Daily Life and Personalities in Norwegian Fisheries

    Conclusion

    Biography

    Thorvald Gran is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Bergen, Norway.