Writing Organization : (Re)presentation and Control in Narratives at Work [1 ed.] 9789027298362, 9789027233042

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Writing Organization

Advances in Organization Studies Advances in Organization Studies includes cutting-edge work in comparative management and intercultural comparison, studies of organizational culture, communication, and aesthetics, as well as in the area of interorganizational collaboration — strategic alliances, joint ventures, networks and collaborations of all kinds, where comparative, intercultural, and communicative issues have an especial salience. Purely theoretical as well as empirically based studies are included. General Editors Stewart Clegg School of Management University of Technology Sydney Quay Street, Haymarket P.O.Box 123 Broadway, NSW 2007 Australia [email protected] Alfred Kieser University of Mannheim D 68 131 Mannheim Germany [email protected]

Volume 7 Writing Organization: (Re)presentation and Control in Narratives at Work by Carl Rhodes

Writing Organization (Re)presentation and control in narratives at work

Carl Rhodes University of Technology, Sydney

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia

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TMThe

paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rhodes, Carl, 1967Writing organization : (re)presentation and control in narratives at work / Carl Rhodes. p. cm. (Advances in Organization Studies, issn 1566–1075 ; v. 7) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Business report writing. 2. Research--Methodology. 3. Organization. I. Title. II. Series. HF5719.R48 2001 808’.06665--dc21 isbn 90 272 3304 7 (Eur.) / 1 58811 071 0 (US) (Pb; alk. paper)

2001025601

© 2001 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O.Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O.Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa



Table of contents

Acknowledgmentsix Pre-text: On writing a research monograph xi Part 1 Writing about organizations1 Chapter 1 Introduction: Writing, representation and research3 Language, genre and knowledge5 Representation in context8 Presentation, representation and (re)presentation11 Researching (re)presentation12 Outline of the book16 Scope of the research18 Moving on19 Chapter 2 Storytelling and the heteroglossic organization21 Organization as narrative21 Organization theory as narrative25 Theorising the heteroglossic organization28 Writing organization32 Chapter 3 Writing the heteroglossic organization35 Appropriating research texts35 ‘Ghostwriting’ research interviews39 Mixing generic (re)presentations43 (Re)presenting in genres45

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Table of contents

Part 2 (Re)presentations
53 Chapter 4 World Services: An official story
55 Jack Richards’ quality story
55 Chapter 5 World Services: Three autobiographical (re)presentations

61 Introduction
61 Claudia Debussy’s story
61 Joanne Wilson’s story
65 David Uck’s story
70 Chapter 6 World Services: An ethnographic (re)presentation

75 An ethnographic (re)presentation
75 Quality and learning at World Services
75 The official quality story: planned learning
79 Local quality stories: interpreted learning
80 Claudia Debussy
80 Joanne Wilson
81 David Uck
82 Issues for learning in organizations
83 Context
84 Experience
85 Perceived motives
86 Learning at World Services
86 Chapter 7 World Services: A fictional (re)presentation

89 Quality: A short story
89 Part 3 Closing the text
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Table of contents

Chapter 8 The politics of being conclusive
99 Reflecting on (re)presentations
101 Picking the Is out of the research
104 Issues for research and writing
108 Ending comments: Heteroglossia, writing and irony
109 Post-text: Pragmatic comments on having written

113 Bibliography
119 Name index
127 Subject index
131

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Acknowledgments

This book would never have been written without the contribution and support of a great many people. Some of them are named below. I would like to thank Alison Lee and Stewart Clegg, each of whom provided an ongoing dialogue that enabled my ideas and writing to develop. I also thank the late Michael Kaye whose encouragement and leadership first got me started and Nicky Solomon and John Garrick for their collegiality and faith in my potential. Thanks are also due to three people who told me the stories that form the empirical base of this research. As characters in this book, they chose the pseudonyms of Claudia Debussy, David Uck and Joanne Wilson. I would particularly like to thank Helen Rhodes for believing in me and for making the ‘space’ available for me to write, and my children James, Daniel and Natalie Rhodes for being such constant reminders that my pre-occupation with writing is not as important as it sometimes seems.



Pre-text On writing a research monograph

Readers, I would like to welcome you to the book. I have chosen to use this section that I call a ‘pre-text’ to offer you this welcome and to introduce myself to you. This introduction will not, however, be biographical nor (I hope) will it be confessional. Instead, I feel the need to talk a little about who this writing makes me out to be and also who I think it makes you out to be. In other words, I think it is important, up front, for me to flag the I and the you of the book; to reflect on our positions and how those positions relate to the text. By choosing to do this in a pretext I hope to clear up, or at least acknowledge, some of the messiness and some of the problems I am encountering with academic writing before I really get started. I want to articulate a general understanding of what such writing might be — to be self-conscious of the textual choices that I will be making and to share that selfconsciousness with you so that we might both know something of what we are dealing with. Having done this, I will then be able get on with the ‘real’ business of the book. For now, however, I crave your indulgence in reading this pre-text. What I seek to do here is to position myself both within this particular book as well as within the genre in which it is written — a genre we might sum up under the title of ‘research monograph’. The value of this is that it enables me to acknowledge some of my textual practice up front (at least that of which I am aware) instead of trying to wrestle with it all the way through. Part of my desire to do it this way stems from the fact that, as you will see, a key theme that informs the whole work is the role that writing genres have in the production and writing of research. As such, I feel that it is important to make this initial statement on research writing itself as a genre, and where I believe that I stand in relation to it. After all, one cannot write about genre (or anything else) without doing so in some genre or other. The reflexive moment when this is realised can be disturbing as any writing about writing falls under its own critique. This reflexivity is a condition of this text; it is a given from which I cannot escape. Let me explain … throughout this book I will employ a range of different generic conventions; for example in this pre-text I am using conventions that would be perhaps more familiar to the writing of letters than to the writing of research. I reason that this strategy gives me the opportunity to address you

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Pre-text

directly, as well as to acknowledge myself as the I of the writing. In the other parts of the book I will adopt a range of different conventions in order to achieve particular effects and to demonstrate particular practices. Despite this play of writing practices, some more conventional than others, overall this book is positioned by me, its ‘author’, as belonging to the genre of research writing. My choice of this genre, and indeed my choice to write this book in general, is an example of what Fuller and Lee (1997) call ‘textual collusion’. It is about writing within certain limits because to write that way is set out in the discursive regimes of the Academy. The book, by its nature and its location, seeks to be an academically sanctioned piece of work. For it to be considered worthy as a research monograph and for it to have passed through the hurdles set up for it to be published in this book series as an ‘advance in organizational studies’, it must meet the conditions, or an interpretation of the conditions, that have been set out in the history of the textual practices associated with academic writing. This issue of collusion is closely related to the notion of ‘addressivity’ — to whom the text is written. As Fuller and Lee put it ‘the notion of addressivity, that knowledge is always directed to someone at some time, is crucial to any analysis of literacy practices’ (p. 413); in this case the practice is that of writing research. In the academic site where you and I (as the writer and reader of this text) reside, it remains the case that I am writing for you, and you are created through my text as a member of the Academy. Within the confines of academic writing in which I operate, I am working to constitute myself as a literate subject; one who seeks for that work to be realised by your reading. I can (and will) play with these rules, but as long as I choose to call this volume a research text, I cannot break the rules. To break the rules would ultimately mean that this is no longer a research text, it would be something else. In some way, I must produce a text that is seen by you as a legitimate piece of research. Textual collusion, in this sense, is the (re)production of knowledge and the formation of subjects (Fuller and Lee 1997). For me to write this book, and for it to be accepted (by you) as a worthy of being called research, I must collude (at least to some degree) with the requirements of academic research writing. This book then, like any other, is a socio-discursive practice, and my collusion is about ‘moving around inside relations of power’ (Fuller and Lee 1997: 410); relations in which you and I are deeply implicated. The issue I face is about how much I can move around without trespassing into territories outside of those where an academic research text must reside so as to ensure that I don’t find myself banished from the Academy. As Lee (1998) points out, there is a complex relationship between producing knowledge through writing and the production of the subjectivity of a type of knower/writer. I agree with Lee that writing is central to the work of knowledge production and that aspirant researchers (like myself) must learn to (re)produce the writing conventions of a discourse community (represented here by you, a

Pre-text xiii

person who I presume is interested in ‘advances in organization studies’). In this book, while I am indeed colluding with these (re)productive strategies, at the same time I am questioning them. Writing to you and acknowledging you as the reader here, in this way, is in part an example of this questioning. If the writing of research lays some kind of claim to ‘new’ knowledge then the productive and reproductive elements of the text must always be held in tenuous balance. Take note, however, that I am not suggesting separateness of production and reproduction as if this distinction were in any way natural or given; the two co-exist in any form of writing. The issue relates more to the way that productive or reproductive effects are staged in a text. Writing down words is always something new; yet, at the same time, the words have always been used before. ‘Production’ may be most evident in those texts that try to appear unconventional, whereas ‘reproduction’ may be most evident in those that adhere more openly to convention. The balance of (re)production is not absolute but rests in the staging of the text; newness can be a matter of ‘look’. Thus, in opening this book, I am suggesting my concern about the balance that I am able to strike in negotiating my textually manifested knowledge claims in the shadow of the conventional rules imposed by the Academy. Nevertheless, I must proceed in an attempt to write myself into the subject positions of researcher, author, writer, knower and advancer of organization studies simultaneously. The Academy that casts the shadow on my writing is not, however, a static object and I propose to you that I am writing this book in the aftermath of what has been called the ‘postmodern turn’. This ‘turn’, as discussed by Hodge (1995), is one where academic work is characterised by its refusal of a system of disciplinarity; that is, it deconstructs taken for granted distinctions and boundaries around knowledge. This knowledge is what Hodge calls ‘transdisciplinary’. It is not interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary (ie drawing from independent disciplines or using one discipline to inform another), but rather it creates knowledge formations where knowledge from different disciplines mingle with each other and with knowledge from outside traditional academic disciplines. This intends to disturb the disciplinary assumptions that are embodied in institutions of discourse defined by objects, methods, theories, tools and techniques. As Hodge explains, it is by disturbing these assumptions that ‘monstrous’ knowledge can be sought. In writing this book, then, I am taking Hodge’s (p. 37) reluctant advice when he suggests that ‘original’ research should: – Be open to the monstrous — take especially serious those problems, beliefs and experiences that are annulled by (‘quaint’, ‘naive’, ‘outrageous’, unthinkable in terms of) a dominant discipline, whether they are intractably personal or contaminated by the disreputable demonic or popular, by passion or anger or delight, by the desire to change the world or to dream a new one.

xiv Pre-text

– Be transdisciplinary — follow the curves of a folded disciplinary space, seeing what disciplines are necessarily super-imposed in the common space of your problematic, what the new centre of gravity is that is formed by the intrusion of this density of layered disciplinarity, what is the emergent structure of the transdisciplinary formation. – Detect the shadow — work with the old prohibitions as well as the new knowledges incorporated into the ‘field of the true’ and made visible by the juxtaposition of disciplines; especially the proper monster, the unspeakable, the forbidden Other of a given discipline.

In attempting to write this book in such a way, I recognise that it runs the risk of alienating readers by creating a discursive space that might be judged too idiosyncratic, too monstrous or even too strange. Nevertheless, the pages you hold in your hands are proof that I have chosen to take this risk. In doing so, I trust that the productive and reproductive elements of the text are sufficiently balanced to warrant the judgement that I, as a subject, have not stepped outside of the genre of the academic research text. After all, as this subject, I still seek to be defined in that discipline that confirms and confines me as a worthy researcher. In developing the ideas in the book I have drawn from a range of disciplinary sources. Most particularly, I have used literature from disciplines and sub-disciplines located under the titles of anthropology and social ethnography, literary theory, linguistics and organizational studies. Despite this, I hesitate to say that what has been produced is ‘about’ any of these things; I have tried to work between and outside of these disciplines in order to produce something ‘new’. In writing this way I also put myself in the position of a ‘postmodern writer’ and take countenance from Lyotard (1992: 24) when he writes: The postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he [sic] writes or the work he creates is not in principle governed by pre-established rules and cannot be judged according to a determinant judgement, by the application of given categories to this text or work. Such rules and categories are what the work or text is investigating. The artist and the writer therefore work without rules, and in order to establish rules for what will have been made.

Lyotard’s comments reflect the tension that exists between you, this text, and myself; a tension between reproduction and production, between the conventional and the unconventional, between the legitimate and the illegitimate. Such tensions are never resolved and always coexist and depend on each other for their existence. Moreover, the creation of a text, such as this one, is concerned with managing the tension. In the context of research, your reading practice is about judging how well that tension is managed; judging in what ways I have and haven’t followed rules, even if I have been involved in (re)constituting them.



Pre-text

These rules are the rules of genre. They propose, albeit ironically, that ‘as soon as a genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly or monstrosity’ (Derrida 1980: 56). My text here has announced itself as of the genre ‘research monograph’ and so I must not cross that line — further, it is both through my writing and through your reading that this lack of crossing is to be judged and that the line is (re)drawn. In producing and reading this (or any other) text as an example of research it must be judged in relation to genre. This judgment, however, can be done in recognition that, as Derrida (1980: 65) writes, ‘a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging’. This text then might be said not to ‘belong’ to a genre of research, but it does intend to participate in it. What you might choose to judge, in this like any other research text, is whether the participation is close enough to the genre to make it acceptable and in doing so to make transparent and to question what such ‘participation’ might mean.

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Part 1

Writing about organizations



Chapter 1

Introduction Writing, representation and research

People who write about organizations tell stories; they recount events, they reconstruct experience, they reformulate opinions and they tell readers about what is going on. It is in and through the telling of these stories that meaning is constructed and it is these stories that are the embodiment of both organizational knowledge and knowledge about organizations. In creating stories, writers have available to them a range of writing strategies and these different ways of writing are important to the way that knowledge is staged. As writers create textual images of organizations and the people within them, they impose meaning on experience. Writing is not a neutral conduit of meaning, it actively constructs that which it ostensibly seeks to represent. Acknowledging this highlights the power that is played out in the writing of research — a power through which to write is to take control through text. Richardson (1992) uses the phrase ‘horrid postmodern writing dilemmas’ (p. 131) to refer to the problem faced by people who write about other people yet accept that the act of writing is an act of power over those others. Writing, and in particular writing in the social sciences, privileges the creator of the written work over those people being written about. As Richardson puts it ‘no matter how we stage the text, we — the authors — are doing the staging. As we speak about the people we study, we also speak for them. As we inscribe their lives, we bestow meaning and promulgate values’ (p. 131). The horridness of this act is the realisation that intentions of objectivity, empathic interpretation or accurate representations are romantic illusions which achieve their effect through an avoidance of the issues of power and identity that exist between the writer, the written about, the text and the reader. Hodge and McHoul (1992) suggest that there is a ‘politics of text and commentary’ where any authorial commentary on the ‘texts’ created by other people (ie research participants) establishes the commentary as superior irrespective of whether that commentary seeks to colonise or liberate the text of the research participant. In a similar vein, Clegg and Hardy (1996) raise the question of how people in organizations are represented in research and are positioned as socially constituted categories of analysis. In examining this practice of representation, they note that the nature of the identity of these organizational subjects is

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contingent on discursive practices where it is the position of the researcher that tends to be privileged over the position of the researched. Clegg and Hardy suggest that research practices need to be employed that are destabilising, ambiguous and lacking in closure such that ‘people are less likely to be pressganged into forced roles or confined in straight jacket identities’ (p. 696). An example of such a practice is suggested by Hodge and McHoul (1992: 207) who propose a writing where: a number of quite different writing positions (or voices) are at play, working through and across one another, delving into registers and genres which … they would not normally reach. In such a work, a single position or narratorial voice is destabilized, such that readers cannot clearly tell which of the often contradictory positions is supposed to represent the text’s own truth or self-understanding.

Putnam (1996) argues that researchers need to ‘open up text for multiple readings; to de-centre authors as authority figures; and to involve participants, readers and audiences in the production of research’ (p. 386). She suggests that this can be achieved by representing research in formats that not only challenge conventional models but also open the text to multiple meanings. Richardson (1994) suggests that in the realisation that writing conventions shape what is being written about, new forms of experimental writing are appearing in which genres are blurred and jumbled. In doing so, experimental writing questions the author’s position as a knower and teller and therefore destabilises the authority of authorship through a reflexive practice which gives up the vain attempt to ‘get it right’ and instead produces texts which ‘interrupt themselves and foreground their own constructedness’ (Lather 1991: 124). It is within this realm of experimental writing that this book seeks to locate itself. Particularly, what will be demonstrated is the use of different and even conflicting genres of writing to represent research; by doing this, the role of the author and the author’s power will be both questioned and potentially destabilised. The main problematic to be explored is the tension of representation and control that emerges from the process of writing about others. This perspective sees research writing as an activity that involves writers utilising textual strategies that provide a representation of their understanding of the experiences of their research subjects. In providing this representation, language does not act as a mirror for reality, but rather the linguistic and discursive conventions employed by a writer are inseparable from the possibilities of meaning in the text. The use of these conventions is related to the ways in which writers work to control the meaning of their research through the ways they create textual representations of other people. As Geertz (1995) suggests, representing others cannot easily be separated from manipulating them (even if this manipulation is not pre-meditated). The tension of representation and control emerges as research writers make use of different textual strategies in how they write their research.

Introduction

This problematic is conceived in reaction to the modernist notion that science and knowledge are based on an assumed relationship between ‘truth’ and the medium through which truth is expressed that suggests that an objective truth exists independent of the language that is used to express it (Brown 1994) and that language is descriptively adequate to represent the ‘real’ world (Tyler 1986). This is an approach based on the principle of equivalence between the sign and the real. Such an approach is contested by postmodern and poststructuralist views on knowledge which assert that language is not neutral, it is not a mirror of an object world, and it cannot describe the supposedly fixed properties of the physical world (Hassard 1993). From this perspective, an equivalence approach to representation is regarded as utopian in that it confuses the real with the model in order to maintain an illusion of actuality (Baudrillard 1983), instead of accepting that descriptions of reality are imitations and illusions of the ‘real’ (Tyler 1986). Hassard (1993) describes a key feature of postmodernism as being a rejection of the idea that there can be a univocal relation between forms of representation and an objective external world. Following from this, a task for postmodern writing is to acknowledge the elusive character of language without trying to create a new use for language which explains all other language forms. Postmodern writing examines how language produces an effect that appears real by recognising that our ‘knowledge of the world is constructed as a problem of representation rather than one of factual accuracy’ (Hassard 1993: 12). This approach sees writing as a means of defining order in one’s environment through the structuring of representations and questions how different writing conventions define order differently and implicitly work to exert power over the people they explicitly purport to represent.

Language, genre and knowledge Power in research writing is embedded in conventions of research writing practice that still exist in the shadow of positivist approaches to social research. As Lather (1991) describes, these conventions are textual productions that create an appearance of transparency where ‘a found world is assumed communicable in a “clear” style in which there is no intrusion by language or an embedded researcher’ (p. 124). An important premise on which this book is written, however, is that language does intrude and, moreover, that language is central to understanding, theorising and researching social activity and institutions. Indeed the use of language to describe people at work is not innocent; it is not just about using different words to signify the same thing (Rhodes and Garrick 2001). What will be developed here is an examination of the importance of language in terms of the activities and institutions of organizations and organization theory.

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Writing Organization

Despite this centrality of writing to the practice of research, organizational theorists have ‘largely ignored questions of how we enter the lifeworlds of our subjects, how we speak about them, how much space we permit their voices in our research, and what consequences our acts of representation might hold for them’ (Prasad 1998: 32). In seeking to understand organizations, researchers have frequently emphasised the display of their own models, theories and experiences to the extent that people who populate those organizations are relegated as voiceless informants whose own representations are eschewed in favour of the researcher’s all encompassing commentary and interpretation. Additionally, writers have conventionally ignored the way that they write in favour of concentrating on what it is that is (putatively) being written about to the extent that writing strategies are naively understood as conduits of a pre-given and extra-textual meaning. This avoidance of attention to issues of writing makes it important to question the way that researchers stage authority so as to be able to understand how writing practices create images of organizations in ways that are not explicit in research texts. In working to understand research and knowledge in organizations, we can start from Richardson’s (1994) assertion that writing itself is a method of inquiry, but that in such inquiry no particular genre can claim a privileged form of authorial knowledge. Genres can be described, in this context, as ways of writing that are recognisable to readers as being of a certain kind. A genre is a type of writing that, having been reproduced many times by different writers, has become commonplace and accepted as a way of representing some phenomenon. It is a ‘system of [textual] action that has become institutionalised and is recognisable by repetition; its meaning stems from its place within symbolic systems making up literature and culture, acquiring specificity by difference from other genres’ (Czarniawska 1998: 10). Genre, then, as a conventionalised form of text, is given rise to by the functions, goals, conventions and rituals which express particular social meanings (Kress 1985) such that a genre itself has a meaning which operates alongside the overt meanings that a text aims to represent. Because genres are accepted ways of writing, they can also be seen as particular ways that authority is achieved. For Atkinson (1990), ‘readers interpret texts as being factual in so far as they encounter appropriate textual conventions which can be read in appropriate ways’ (p. 36). Textual formats, however, become taken for granted and constrain writing practices to operate within conventional forms. Texts become ‘proper’ because their genre makes them appear ‘real’ and ‘natural’. These conventional forms, or genres, are then models for writing which gain legitimacy and are plausible with particular readers. Scientific texts, such as those commonplace to organizational research, are written in a way based more on credibility than truth, as it is through generic strategies that texts become regarded both as scientific and as being an embodiment of knowledge. Brown (1987)

Introduction

proposes that genres can be understood as shared models of representation and interpretation that validate and frame experience. Genres, however, do not originate with the particular writers who employ them; they draw upon and reproduce the cultural context in which they exist. Generic representations only appear realistic when the genre used has become commonplace; a text ‘is not convincing because it is realistic; instead it is realistic because we have already been convinced’ (Brown 1987: 148). Recognising the complicity of genre in constructing plausible knowledge enables a questioning of conventional genres by suggesting new ways of reading the world, which, rather than reconstructing experience in conventional codes, aim to deconstruct convention through new forms of encoding. Following from Brown (1987), this form of expression de-realises the conventional by questioning the uses of conventions. In turn, this attempts to disrupt power by playing with the genres with which ‘truth’ is written. Whereas, textual practices are what constitute our social realities (Atkinson 1990), creating unconventional representations of ‘the world’ can disrupt and question the authority and dominance of those practices. Holquist (1986) suggests that what distinguishes different sciences and different human undertakings are the types of genre that they have claimed as their own. Each genre is an icon which fixes a particular world view and embodies a specific idea of what it means to be human (Clark and Holquist 1984). Writing conventions can only be diverse, however, to the extent that writers can play with different genres but cannot avoid being generic; the breaking of frames depends on their existence, as our lives are saturated by signs and conventions. Genres are habits that have been built up over time to interpret and evaluate the world; genre therefore mediates through convention (Morson and Emerson 1994). As explained by Swingewood (1986) no aspect of reality can be understood outside of its connection with the means through which it is represented. Bakhtin and Medvedev (1978) argue that genre is a typical form of a written work which is seen as finished and resolved such that genre refers to a particular way of constructing something that comes to be known as the ‘whole’. The use of genre is a way to control aspects of reality through particular ways of writing; it is a method for taking charge of and finalising reality. Genre, however, is not avoidable as a way in which realities are constructed and an awareness of them does not allow a writer to operate outside of them. Using genres in research and the formulation of knowledge is a way of validating particular ways of understanding; ways that are related both to the ‘what’ of the research, and to the ‘how’ of writing. This is a relation where changing the ‘how’ unavoidably changes the ‘what’. As writers use genres to represent organizations, language does not act as a mirror for reality, but rather the linguistic and discursive conventions employed by writers are inseparable from the meaning of the text. In turn, the use of genre is

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Writing Organization

related to the way that writers control the meaning of their research through the way they create textual representations of organizations and the people in them. Such control is part of a power relation between writers and those they write about which is embedded in generic practices. As Kress (1985) puts it, ‘in texts the discursive differences are negotiated, governed by differences in power, which are themselves in part encoded in and determined by discourse and by genre’ (p. 32). These practices can, however, be kept hidden in the texts that they produce by naively proposing language to be a transparent medium for expressing reality. This hides the role that writing plays in the power relations of research and knowledge when ‘each genre constructs positions or roles which the participants in the genres occupy’ (Kress 1985: 37). These constructed positions attempt to achieve a closure on the possible meanings and characterisations of the participants; they construct the reality of the people they purport to represent. Barthes (1977) proposes that reality is never anything but a pre-text for language and authorship and, as such, using language to claim to explain the world is a case of the world’s ambiguity being concealed. It is in this concealment that a researcher, as author, can stake a claim to knowledge. Knowledge represented in conventionally accepted genres is less an achievement of ‘reality’, and more the exclusion of other possible meanings.

Representation in context If writing and genre are taken as central to the way that knowledge is staged, what then are the research issues that emerge through a questioning of the relationship between representation and ‘reality’? It is the problematisation of the equivalence between representation and reality that has come to be known as the ‘crisis of representation’. This crisis asserts a ‘profound uncertainty about what constitutes an adequate description of social “reality”’ (Lather 1991: 21) and has resulted in an ‘erosion of confidence in the prevailing concepts of knowledge and truth [where] whatever the “real” is, it is discursive’ (Lather 1991: 25). This crisis challenges the belief that a person present in the world can represent his or her own experiences (Clegg and Hardy 1996) or the experience of others unequivocally. In contrast to a view that sees writing as a way of using language to represent a ‘reality’, the crisis of representation is based on the assertion that language is the process of making rather than reflecting meaning and therefore is not a straightforward way of representing others (Hatch 1996). This is a situation where ‘there is no perfectly transparent or neutral way to represent the natural or social world’ (Atkinson and Hammersley 1994: 255). Hatch (1996) comments that the notion of the crisis of representation has grown out of poststructuralist theory that challenges the idea that language operates as a mirror of the social world and instead suggests that

Introduction

language constructs the reality that is known. In turn this opens up a problematisation of the social researcher — if researchers write the social, but writing creates social reality, then what is it that is being represented? Hatch suggests that reporting research is a narrative act, a practice both of representation and of narrative performance. Accordingly, Jacobson and Jacques (1997) see that truth is then reconceptualised as something constructed rather than something discovered — but one truth story amongst many possible stories. In this view research practices operate as ‘proper’ forms of storytelling but nevertheless any particular form cannot claim to be inherently more true than other modes. These possible stories, however, are not ‘equal’ to one another in terms of their claims. Foucault (1980: 131) states that: Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourses which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true from false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true

The implication is that a ‘regime of truth’ constrains writing practices into conventional forms lest they be considered ‘untrue’ in the sense that they would be outside of the ‘system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution circulation, and operation of statements’ (Foucault 1980: 132). Some stories, therefore, have more currency in the institutional regime as only some generic coding conventions are allowed to bring representations ‘within the true’. Within these ‘regimes’, forms of writing also attempt to construct the subjectivities of others. Using these forms, writers create images of those they purport to represent based on orthodox (regimented) writing practices. It is in this way that the practice of ‘representation’ is inextricably bound with the practice of controlling the meaning and identities of others. Mumby (1993) describes the crisis of representation as a challenge to realistic epistemologies that claim that narratives can mirror an objective knowledge or truth. He adds that the crisis also relates to the politics of representation in terms of who gets to play a part in the constitution of meaning. As part of this, narrative can be employed to offer the possibility to create knowledge which destabilises dominant views of the world and creates a struggle over the way that meaning gets ‘fixed’. Mumby’s claim is that the crisis offers an opportunity to explore different ways of making knowledge claims and in turn opens up new ways of seeing the world. These news ways of seeing are then to be viewed reflexively such that they do not come merely to occupy the same space as the old. As Clifford (1986) puts it ‘the choice of a dominant rhetoric, figure or narrative mode in a text is always an imperfect attempt to impose a reading or range of readings on an interpretative process that is open-ended, a series of displaced

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meanings with no full stop’ (p.110); each mode of representation then enacts a struggle which is both questionable and powerful even if a ‘full stop’ is insinuated. Jeffcut (1994b) suggests that ‘the world we know is the world as represented’ (p. 228); further, there is no culture or organization which can be innocently and accurately represented by observers, but rather the observer creates cultural and organizational fictions through the process of their research (Riley 1991). On reflection then, so called ‘realistic’ representations become labelled as ‘true’ not because of correspondence with objects but because they conform to orthodox and regimented practices of reading and writing (Brown 1994). In terms of understanding organized work, the project must then ‘be focussed on the exploration of paradoxes of textuality in the inscription of order’ (Jeffcut 1994a: 261). Organization theory in particular may be conceived of as nothing other than a practice of representation, but the nature of this practice is contrived; it produces an effect of representation and, like the painting of an object, the representation is not the object itself (Clegg and Hardy 1996). By focussing in on the role of representations, research can be examined as ‘textwork’ (Van Maanen 1996) — the practice that produces a written piece of research. By researching in this conception, the language of research reports is of prime significance, not only as a vehicle for representing the subject matter, but as a way of actively constructing it. As a writer, the researcher fashions meaning and interpretation out of ongoing experience (Denzin 1994). Writers unavoidably intervene in the representations they create and in doing so these acts of representation are also acts of the repression of alternatives (Linstead 1993). In this repression, there are always ways of representing that are left out or ignored; in writing, reductionism is inescapable (Lather 1991: xix). More can always be written. In this process of writing, power and control become implicated in the production of knowledge through the way researchers present their findings when, as narrators, they position the research, write the text and select the voice(s) (Putnam 1996). Writing has ethical and political consequences by virtue that it constructs others and embalms transient events into a textual permanency (Clifford 1986), as well as participating in discursive strategies which resonate with orthodox and dominant positions and achieve the marginalisation of alternatives. These consequences are based in the problematics of authorship and the achievement of authority (Jeffcut 1994b). Power is played out in the production of knowledge through the way that writers/researchers present their findings and limit alternative portrayals (Putnam 1996) which are outside of the writer’s own situated versions of the realities that they describe (Denzin 1994). What becomes important then, is an examination of the tension created out of this relationship between power and the representation of others. In starting to explore this problematic, however, it is noteworthy that this power must not be considered immutable and indeed the

Introduction

explorations contained in this research are intended to disrupt that power. As Clegg (1989: 152) puts it: There is no reason to expect that representations will remain contextually and historically stable, but every reason to think that they will shift. Power will thus be implicated in attempts to fix or uncouple and change particular representational relations of meaning [where] the knowledge that is used to structure and fix representations in historical forms is the accomplishment of power.

Presentation, representation and (re)presentation James, Hockey and Dawson (1997) contend that the term ‘representation’ has multiple meanings; it can refer to interpretation, communication, visualisation, translation and advocacy. To their list perhaps could be added inscription, signification and transformation. They go on to suggest that together, these different takes on representation revolve around debates about the possibilities and problems of representing other people’s worlds. In turn, these debates have an impact on the forms and modes of representation that can be used in the context of research. In using the notion of representation in research, it is therefore important to problematise the relationship between representation and reality and to examine how texts can be seen both to represent something other than themselves as well as presenting themselves as texts. Representations are about the ways that language is used to create particular meanings — to claim to represent suggests that language is standing for something else. As Simpson (1997) explains ‘to represent carries the dual connotation of making present to the mind and the senses whilst standing for something that is not present. Acts of representation thus enable us to deal with absence as an imagined presence’ (p. 54). Representation in this sense implies a mimesis where one ‘thing’ (eg writing) is a way of presenting another ‘thing’ (eg social life) and where the task of the writer is to imitate reality for the consumption of others. To see a text as a representation, then, implies that it is presenting again something that has been presented before. In opposition to this view, representations can also be seen as social constructions that are created by a writer and within which are embedded the theories and models that the writer uses. As such, what claims to be a representation is, in some way, a presentation or a performance of a particular point of view. Such presentations exist not to mirror something else, but rather stage the performance of a text. What this highlights is an indeterminacy between whether, when trying to write about a particular phenomenon, a writer is representing that phenomenon, or is presenting and socially constructing something

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new through their own writing practice. Baudrillard’s (1983) notion of simulation highlights this point. What Baudrillard suggests is that, in postmodern culture, the relationship between signs and reality has been radically altered. In terms of writing, this implies a questioning of the relationship between representations and what they might represent. Baudrillard achieves this by introducing the concept of simulation. Where representation assumes an equivalence between the sign and the real, simulation is not referential; it creates a model of the real for which there is no origin or reality. This is what Baudrillard calls a simulacrum — an image broken with representation and which refers to nothing outside of itself. Baudrillard’s simulacra mark the edge of the concept of presentation; an edge where language and culture are an appearance which masks an absence of reality. Despite its insistence on the erasure of truth and reality, the notion of simulation still needs reality, as a concept, to define itself. In the wake of modernity, Baudrillard’s postmodernism can only define itself in terms of the real, even if it achieves this by negating that reality. Simulation is achieved conceptually by implicating reality; by theorising its absence. Looking at the implications of this for research writing, research, in its own terms, does lay a representational claim — researchers write about ‘something’ or ‘someone’. This suggests the possibility of seeing representation and simulation as being mutually constitutive; representation (as mimesis) is contestable, but it can only be contested on its own terms (ie the terms of referentiality). What is left is what will be referred to henceforth as (re)presentation. (Re)presentation is both a presentation (ie a simulacrum) and a representation (it refers to something outside of itself and is borne out of a historical critique of referentiality); the connection between the sign and its referent may be severed, but its shadow remains. (Re)presentation then enacts an approach to writing that professes a profound agnosticism towards the relationships between writing and reality. (Re)presentations can both be seen to simplify the reality that they claim to represent while at the same time any meaning derived from them is socially constructed (Wallman 1997). Reality is always implicated in (re)presentation and power exists in the balance between its representational attempts and its simulational effects.

Researching (re)presentation To conduct the research on which this book is based, a particular change program in one organization was investigated. The organization in question is the Australian operation of a multinational service corporation. At the time the research was conducted, the organization (which for the purpose of this book will be given the

Introduction

pseudonym ‘World Services’) was in the process of implementing a quality management program in all of its offices around the world. In order to explore the tensions between (re)presentation and control in research writing a research project was conducted which sought to inquire into how different people interpreted this change program and then to (re)present those interpretations through different writing genres. As will be described fully in Chapter three, the research was based on a series of interviews with three managers in the organization, as well as a review of a corporate video where the chief executive of the organization was presenting the quality program. The interview process involved working with the research participants to elicit and construct a narrative account of their experiences with, and interpretations of, the quality management program. This was achieved through an unstructured interview process where each participant was asked to recount his or her story of the quality program. In particular, the participants were asked to consider their experiences with the program and to recount them in terms of how they related to the theme of change and learning in the organization. These interviews were designed to provide the research with a variety of perspectives on a single issue embedded in a given situated organizational context. Following the interviews each participant’s story was written up in an autobiographical format. This was achieved by reviewing the interview tape and writing it up ‘as if ’ the participant were writing it themselves as part of their autobiography. The writing was done in the first person and the events described in the interview were reorganized in order to present them in a coherent narrative. This text was then returned to the participant for review and feedback. All changes recommended by the participants were incorporated into a revised version of the text. This process of review and rewriting continued until the participant accepted the text as an appropriate account of their story. In order to explore the effects of different writing practices, (re)presentations of the quality program were written using a number of different writing genres. What this meant was that the recordings of the interviews were reviewed and the stories told by the participants were re-narrated into written texts using different writing conventions. First, a (re)presentation was created based on the corporate video mentioned above. This (re)presentation is placed in contrast to the three autobiographical accounts that were developed from the recounted experiences of different members of the organization in the interviews. Next, an ethnographic (re)presentation was written by conducting an interpretive analysis of the interviews. This analysis consisted of reading through the stories provided by the interview participants and looking for common themes that emerged from them. After having identified these themes, an ‘ethnographic’ account was written; this account sought to (re)present an understanding of the meaning of the learning

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culture at World Services through a reflection on how members of the organization recounted and interpreted their organizational experience. This text is ethnographic in the sense that it describes the ‘culture’ of the organization based on an interpretation of the recounted experience of people from the organization. Finally, a fictional narrative was written which used the themes, plots, characters, and styles from the research participants’ storytelling to generate a (re)presentation of the research. This (re)presentation is based on a practice of writing which deliberately blurs the distinction between literature and critical commentary and marks a space for a critical encounter between fictions and theories (King 1994). These different writings of the research provide a mechanism through which a single set of empirical materials were (re)presented in a number of different ways based on different generic conventions. To explore the tensions between writing, (re)presentation and control, each of these (re)presentations was reviewed by examining how the different (re)presentational strategies address the roles of the researcher and the research participants in creating a particular version of the research. Specifically the focus of this review was on the different ways that genres exercise control over the people they are purporting to represent and the implications of this for researchers. In general, this book can be taken to (re)present a research project in the area of organizational storytelling. This project is based on the themes of learning and change in a change program in one organization. It explores how people tell stories which both (re)present their own learning experiences and implicate those experiences in changes in their organizations more generally. By doing this, the research is formulated in terms of its application and relevance to the sociology and ethnography of organizations and to organizational learning. The value of conducting this research is an examination into how research implicates researchers, research subjects and the readers of research in the production of research texts. As Jeffcut (1993) discusses, organization studies has marginalised ‘representation’ in research in favour of an approach that concentrates on espousing the ‘interpretations’ of the researcher. Consequently, in texts about organizations, the narrator’s voice is frequently privileged over that of the ‘informants’ and the effects of different (re)presentational strategies are backgrounded. This is achieved when the writing is seen to unproblematically represent the author’s interpretations and those interpretations are taken for granted as being meaningful. This focus highlights the researcher’s quest to understand, yet at the same time establishes his/her position as the one who is capable of both achieving and representing this understanding. It is important, therefore, to question such stagings of authority in order to understand how writing practices create images of researcher, subject and reader in ways that are not necessarily explicit in the text. This is achieved in this book by juxtaposing and contrasting different (re)presentations of one organization.

Introduction

As Clegg and Hardy (1996) suggest, by focussing on different ways that people comprise research, the position of the ‘subject’ and the ‘author’ are problematised by questioning the construction of authority by writers we can re-examine the researcher’s role in the research process and in the production of ‘knowledge’. As such, accepting different and varied writing practices will contribute to a greater pluralism of perspectives and the flexibility to avoid omniscient positions (Hatch 1996). Multiple interpretation methods have been used to good effect in organization studies. Hassard (1993), for example, used four methods based on the work of Burrell and Morgan (1979) to do concurrent studies in a single organization from a variety of research ‘paradigms’. Indeed, Lewis and Grimes (1999) suggest that multi-paradigm research such as that of Hassard, whilst still provocative, grew considerably in its use throughout the 1990s. In another example of a multiperspective approach, Alvesson (1996) interpreted a research transcript from an information meeting using three different theoretical approaches. These approaches were based sequentially on a cultural/social constructivist framework, a Foucault inspired interpretation and a Habermas inspired interpretation. Such studies draw attention to different angles, highlight the open character of social reality, and encourage readers to make their own interpretations (Alvesson 1996). Despite this use of multiple paradigms and interpretations as a response to postmodern challenges to monological forms of writing and singular views of social reality, examples of approaching organizational research from a multiplicitous approach through using different writing styles and genres are hard to find. To this extent the field of organization studies has predominantly taken for granted that a singular approach to writing and a consistent use of genre is taken as given. In questioning this assumption, the research project being presented here chooses a multi-(re)presentational strategy. This is consistent with a poststructuralist approach in that it rejects that particular forms of writing can capture inherent or fundamental aspects of the world. Instead different descriptions, or readings, provide different modes of organizing, none of which can be said to be more inherent that any others. What is left is a multiplicity of possible orderings (Turner 1983). Recognition of this multiplicity avoids ‘fixing the truth’ through privileged (re)presentational practices, but does not remove the issue of how different possible (re)presentations relate to each other, and how each one, and the spaces between them, participate in controlling what or who is being written about. As Presnell (1994) comments, attempts at representation not only reflect power interests, but are instances of power relations themselves. By exploring issues of control, as constituted through different writing practices, the intention is not to harmonise or totalise the difference, but rather to approach knowledge as being ‘fractured into incommensurable discursive practices whose genres are mixed, dialogic or polyphonic, and is

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less interested in the unity of coherence of discourse that in the way discourse produces effects’ (Tyler 1991: 83). If organization studies must adapt to the challenges posed by the crisis of representation, then this research is one attempt to explore ways to do so.

Outline of the book The following outline of the book is intended to fulfil two purposes. First, it serves as a summary of what is to come. Second, it announces the different authorial positions and generic conventions from which each chapter is written. It is therefore worth noting at this stage that each of the chapters that follow is designed to establish authority in different ways. The writing of this research in this way has been done explicitly to highlight how different forms of writing might do this. As such, the reader is ‘put on notice’ that the chapters (including this one) are written by different Is; different positions from which to write and from which to establish authority. These shifts in position, which occur from chapter to chapter, are designed to demonstrate how genres perform particular authorial subjectivities that enact power differently. Chapter two reviews the literature on which the research project is based. First, the different ways that organizational researchers have employed approaches based on storytelling and narrative are described. In order to develop a new approach to understanding narrative in organizational research, in the second part of Chapter two, the work of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin is reviewed. This review is used to develop a conceptual model within which the tension between (re)presentation and control in research writing will be explored. This chapter is written in a way that hides the author by describing the literature in a detached way that does not openly acknowledge any I. As is done here in the first chapter, this is the performance of the putatively expert author who explicitly claims to ‘know’ the field. Chapter three reviews the methodology and research process used in conducting the research. This chapter moves to a more reflexive position in which the I is that of the researcher who is telling the story of how and why I did the research. First, the research process used to create the empirical basis for the research is described. The ways in which the research engaged with the research participants in order to provide a text on the basis of which the participants and the organization could be understood are outlined. Second, the chapter describes the writing processes that were used to create (re)presentations of the research in autobiographical, ethnographic and fictional genres. Part two of the book, consisting of chapters four, five, six and seven, (re)present the empirical material from the research in different and potentially conflicting

Introduction

writing genres. Chapter four describes a corporate video in which the chief executive of the organization being studied describes the quality project; this video served as a point of entry for the investigation in the research. This is written from the authorial position of an observer who is re-narrating the chief executive’s discussion of quality. In Chapter five, three narratives, in autobiographical formats, are provided based on the output of interviews with the three participants in the research where they described their experiences with the quality program. Here the writing position shifts such that each ‘autobiography’ is written from the position of the I of the people who participated in the research. Chapter six presents an ethnographic description of the quality project. Based on the research interviews, this chapter offers an interpretation of the learning culture of the organization based on a thematic analysis of the research interviews. This ethnographic (re)presentation is written explicitly from the authorial position of an observer, interpreter and commentator who purports to understand and theorise what was taking place in the organization. Chapter seven presents a fictional (re)presentation of the research in the genre of a short story. This is done by using themes, ideas, plots and characters from the research to develop a fictional (re)presentation of the research. In this chapter, the writing is done from the position of a fictional character who lives through and reflects on his experiences with quality at World Services. The third part of the book consists of chapter eight. This chapter discusses the implications and ‘conclusions’ from the research. The effects of the different genres and the different authorial positions taken in each are explored. In particular, the main (re)presentational strategies used in this research are reviewed in terms of how different writing genres reflect differently on the relationship between power and control in research writing. This discussion is also used more generally to review how narratives and (re)presentational choices work to attempt to impose control on the people being (re)presented. What is suggested is the need for reflexive authorship that can work in recognition of the tension between (re)presentation and control. Finally, the book is closed with a post-text that comments on some of the potential achievements of this research in terms of knowledge, writing and organization. It reviewing this structure, it is worth noting that although the book has been specifically written to include multiple genres, it is simultaneously written within the broad generic framework that we call research writing. It is through the overall structure of the book that this is most notably achieved — specifically, this structure demonstrates a conservative and relatively strict division between theory and practice. Here, Part one, comprising this chapter and chapters two and three, can be seen as a description of the ‘theory’ on which the research is based (ie the purpose of the research, the literature in which it is contextualised and the methodology used to inform it). Part two of the book can then be taken as the ‘practice’ of

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the research — a writing of what happened in the research site. Finally, Part three, can be read as a discussion of the ‘practice’ in terms of the ‘theory’. In writing this way, it is not intended that this separation of theory and practice is in anyway ‘natural’ — rather it is a convention of writing that is used in order to critique research writing on its own terms and in its own genre. This genre is then active in constructing the book as belonging to the research genre, while at the same time the use of other, different, writing conventions within the book simultaneously work against this construction. The intention is then to question writing through the use of an (un)conventional network of genres — where the writing can in one way be conventionally recognised as research, but in another work to radically question those conventions.

Scope of the research As has been discussed, this book will explore the tension between (re)presentation and control in research writing by conducting a research project based on a change program being implemented in one organization. In conducting this research a number of delimitations must be mentioned in order to clarify the scope of the research. First, the research is based on a small empirical sample. Only one organization was included in the research, and within that organization the empirical material used was based solely on interviews with three managers and a review of one corporate video. Despite the relatively small size of this empirical base, however, it must be noted that the intention is not to describe the organization in its ‘entirety’. More particularly, what the research attempts to achieve is a review of the use of multiple writing strategies around a single research project. As such, the focus of is much more on the use of (re)presentations than it is on providing a description of the organization based on a wide range of organizational perspectives. For this reason, the limited empirical sample, while being a boundary for the research, is not in itself a problem that will get in the way of exploring the stated research issue. In a related second point, it must be explicitly recognised that this research does not attempt to provide a full or detailed account of the organization or the change project being studied. The change project under review is in many ways secondary to the real focus of the research. Indeed, it could be questioned that any (re)presentation of an organization, irrespective of the sample size being used to inform it, cannot present a totalised picture of the organization. In this research however, no such totality is attempted or required. Instead, the central focus is on how research can be used to create different (re)presentations, each of which demonstrates a particular ‘take’ on the organization. It is not suggested that these



Introduction

(re)presentations can be evaluated on the basis of their ‘truth’, but rather what will be explored is how each one uses different ways to establish authority and to achieve power and control over those people being written about. Finally, the types of (re)presentations that have been chosen to be included also bound the scope of what the book might achieve. The choice to include autobiographical, ethnographic and fictional genres to (re)present the research inevitably means that other possible (re)presentations are not included. The list of possible writing genres that could have been adopted is wide, as writers, both academic and non-academic, have a range of writing strategies to choose from. The three main (re)presentational strategies being employed were chosen because of their applicability to a (re)presentation of narrative accounts based on interviews and because of the different positions they create for both the researcher and the research participants. In summary, the scope of the research to be (re)presented here is delimited in terms of its empirical base, its limited perspectives on the many possible realities of the organization and its choice of (re)presentational strategies. The book instead is intended to gain its innovative focus from the way that writing strategies are informed by varying uses of power through diverse practices of authorship. Based on this, the sample size and the different authorial positions assumed in the (re)presentations used remains appropriate to explore the tension between (re)presentation and control.

Moving on This chapter has laid the foundation for the book. It introduced the research problem as being the tension between (re)presentation and control that emerges from the practice of writing about others. It went on to explore how this problematic exists in the context of the ‘crisis of representation’ which problematises practices of research writing under conditions where the equivalence between (re)presentations and reality are under question. The chapter then described how the book will explore its stated problem by conducting a research project where research interviews based on the implementation of a quality management system in one organization will be written up in autobiographical, ethnographic and fictional (re)presentations. On these foundations, the writing will move on with a more detailed account of the research.

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Chapter 2

Storytelling and the heteroglossic organization

Chapter one argued that genres of writing practice power by achieving authority through convention. It was discussed how writing and research are embroiled in a ‘crisis of representation’; a crisis that foregrounds the way that power is played out in the languaging of knowledge and opens up the possibility of making knowledge claims that are acutely aware of this power. In organizational theory, one arena where these possibilities are beginning to be realised is in ‘storytelling’ and ‘narrative’ approaches to organizations. In this chapter, I will start by reviewing this literature in order to examine how power is accounted for in the language of organization theory. The chapter describes how storytelling has been used both as a way of understanding the power that operates within organizations as well as understanding the power relations that exist as researchers write about organizations. What is argued is that this research tradition suggests that an openness to the plurality of different perspectives and writing genres is a way of accounting for these power issues. In order to develop further a narrative approach to organizations that accounts for power, the chapter goes on to develop a theorisation of the ‘heteroglossic organization’. This is based on the concept of heteroglossia as developed by the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). This concept of heteroglossia refers to an understanding of the social world as comprising a multiplicity of ‘languages’ which struggle with each other to make meaning out of the world. From this standpoint, the theorisation of the ‘heteroglossic organization’ is articulated as a way of expanding on notions of storytelling and organization. This theorisation explores how different perspectives and different writing practices combine to create allusions to organization comprising both multiple stories and multiple ways of telling them.

Organization as narrative There is a growing body of organizational research which takes a ‘storytelling approach’; an approach which has highlighted the importance of narrative ways of knowing both in terms of stories told in organizations and stories told by researchers (De Cock 1998). This focus has emerged as a contemporary reaction to what

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Gabriel (1998) calls ‘narrative deskilling’ — where the modern era redefined stories from their folkloric tradition of entertainment and communication and placed them in opposition to fact and in subordination to science. This view suggests that ‘science should keep to facts and logic, leaving metaphors and stories to literature, this being a sediment of premodern times and oral societies’ (Czarniawska 1998: 7). Indeed, as Czarniawska (1999) has demonstrated, organization theory can be approached using narrative theory, literary theory, cultural studies and anthropology as a way of working outside of positivist social science. More generally, ‘postmodern’ approaches, however, have reinvented stories and questioned ‘the social and technical conditions of modernity [that] undermine the art of the storyteller; and … devalue subjective experience in favour of information’ (Gabriel 1998: 91). Such approaches have resulted in studies that ‘build on a foundation of multidisciplinary research that has shaped the understanding we have of story and storytelling’ (Boyce 1996: 5). Although Boyce points out that much of the research in storytelling does not address the orientation of the researcher and that the dynamics of power and meaning are largely unaddressed in the way that stories are positioned, there are an increasing number of studies which do directly address such issues. Witten (1993), for example, takes an approach that examines narrative as associated with unequal organizational power relations. Witten argues that narrative is a ‘singularly potent discursive form through which control can be dramatised, because it compels belief while at the same time it shields truth claims from testing’ (p. 100). This approach investigates how power and control are used to achieve the consensual ‘shared meaning’ so central to cultural approaches to organizations. This is achieved, according to Witten, because the persuasiveness of narrative can resist testing or debate. At the same time, narratives can model exemplars of preferred behaviour; exemplars that impose dominant values and oppose challenges to the status quo. This approach is consistent with Brown’s (1994) assertion that groups use myths and stories as ways to legitimate privileged power relations as coalitions of participants attempt to instil acceptable and plausible explanations which preserve their interests. Gabriel (1995) proposes that storytelling can also be a form of resistance in organizations. He suggests that in each workplace there is an un-managed organization that cannot be controlled; an organization where people engage in un-supervised and spontaneous activities. The chief force in this un-managed organization is fantasy, most markedly portrayed in stories. These narratives evolve as the un-managed spaces of organizations by infusing events with meaning founded in lived experience. Such approaches to organizational storytelling are developed further by researchers who take a narrative approach that goes beyond looking at stories as communication and examine stories as textual metaphors through which to

Storytelling and the heteroglossic organization

understand organizations. This stems from the view that societies, cultures and expressions of experience can be read as texts and that life itself is a narratively produced text (Denzin 1989). Organizations can thus be understood as socially constructed verbal systems in terms of stories, discourses and texts, where each person who is part of the organization has a voice in the text but where some voices are louder, more articulate and more powerful than others (Hazen 1993). Any practice of communication in organizations is thus viewed as a text that is read, written and interpreted. Such a textual approach sees an organization as being constantly interpreted and reinterpreted by its members and others who come in contact with it. This network of ‘text’ imposes meaning on experience, creates communication between individuals and legitimates patterns of social relationships (Phillips and Brown 1993). Boje (1991) shares the view that storytelling is a way that people individually and collectively make sense of their experience and proposes that ‘stories are the blood vessels through which changes pulsate in the heart of organizational life’ (p. 8). He develops this idea further through the notion of the ‘storytelling organization’ (Boje 1994, 1995) such that organizations themselves become metaphorically understood through a storytelling perspective. He achieves this by analysing a Hollywood play called ‘Tamara’ that he refers to as a ‘discursive metaphor for collective storytelling’ (Boje 1994: 435). In this play, ‘instead of remaining stationary, viewing a single stage, the audience fragments into small groups that chase characters from one room to the next, from one floor to the next … to chase and co-create the stories that interest them the most’ (Boje 1995: 998). The play is acted out simultaneously on twelve different stages and, depending on which characters an audience member follows, different stories are observed, but it remains impossible for one person to follow all of the stories. In a way similar to this play, organizations are embodied in a framework of simultaneously occurring stories. The storytelling organization is thus created through the telling and living of collective stories where: The storytelling organization can oppress by subordinating everyone and collapsing everything to one ‘grand narrative’ or ‘grand story’. At the other extreme, the storytelling organization can be a pluralistic construction of a multiplicity of stories, storytellers and story performance events that are like Tamara but are realised differently depending upon the stories in which one is participating (Boje 1995:1000).

In support of his metaphor, Boje (1995) argues that theories of change need to come from a multiple narrative perspective where non-official stories enter the dialogue alongside bureaucratically defended corporate stories. His interest here becomes more radical in that it addresses issues of power imbalance between organizational members as ‘people in their discourse socially construct their

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organization in a process of ongoing learning by narrating their experiences in ways that produce and reproduce dominance and submission’ (Boje 1994: 436). In an interesting example of this approach, Boje’s (1995) study of Disney enterprises as a storytelling organization focuses particularly on plurality and multiple interpretations in storytelling through the ‘Tamara-Land’ metaphor. In this analysis, Boje’s method involved gathering stories about Disney from a diversity of sources in order to ‘deconstruct’ them by looking for alternative views to the consensual official stories. The result is a postmodern and radical analysis that demonstrates the storytelling organization through its plurality of differences and its opposition to the happy tales of Walt Disney and the Magic Kingdom. Such a plurality highlights the partiality of organizational knowledge such that we can only ever engage in an understanding that accounts for the perspectives, the contexts and the temporalities that we have access to. As others similarly construct their own images, some of which we interact with and some of which we do not, organizational knowledge is understood through a plurality of potentially conflicting practices of constructing understanding (Rhodes 2000a: 228).

A similar focus on the plurality of organizational stories is taken by Salzer-Morling (1998) in her study of storytelling in the Swedish furniture company Ikea. In this study, Salzer-Morling examined the ‘corporate saga’ of Ikea, and in particular looked at how officially sanctioned versions of the story of an organization work as managerial monologues designed to enhance control. This form of official storytelling is seen as an attempt to integrate alternative realities into one coherent story ‘at the expense of the variety and multiplicity of choices in organizations’ (p. 110). By comparing the official company ‘saga’ to local stories told by Ikea’s employees, Salzer-Morling notes that although ‘managerial monologues are often loud and dominant … alternative stories are told everywhere, all the time’ (p. 113). The problem that Salzer-Morling identifies for researchers is related to how ‘traditional organizational writings tend to synthesise the different voices from the field into one coherent story’ (p. 113). In response, she suggests that researchers need to be aware of the different stories in organizations and search for new ways of representing them that do not synthesise or totalise them into a single authorial monologue. This means being aware of the multiplicity of organizational realities and their diverse narrative possibilities instead of just writing one ‘grand story’ (AaltioMarjosola 1994). What this tries to avoid is a situation where a single preferred reading of an organization ‘closes off possibilities for simultaneous alternative readings and imposes a false finality on the dynamic process of understanding’ (Rhodes 2000a: 229). Creating multiple readings from different perspectives, however, does not suggest that any of the readings contain an essential meaning but rather that each one has different consequences. A particualr reading may not be ‘the best’, but it may be better at achieving particular effects than would be

Storytelling and the heteroglossic organization

achieved by other types of readings (Rhodes 2000b). In a similar vein, Clegg and Hardy (1996) argue that organization studies can draw on narrative theory to create conversations that open up multiple narratives and that include the non-conformist and resist the conventional. In this way, as narratives produce identities, the opening up of narrative possibilities to understanding organizations resists the forcing of pre-determined and confining identities on to people. Such ‘opening up’ is not, however, apolitical and the ‘use of language to describe people is therefore not innocent. It is not just about using different words to signify the same thing. Rather, translating concepts from one signifier to another … cannot be pure, transparent or unequivocal’ (Rhodes and Garrick 2001: 7) . Law (1994) suggests that people use different narrative modes of organizing experience to create different understandings of that experience. As such, organizational experience is understood through the way that it can be told yet any single (re)presentation of an organization remains one of many competing versions. Additionally, in this process, choosing one narrative order simultaneously hides other ways of ordering: the conception of the organization is left as a collection of contrasting and unreconciled stories.

Organization theory as narrative While organizational researchers have studied organizations themselves through concepts of narrative and communication, narrative approaches have also been employed to interpret the practice of writing about organizations. This approach seeks to apply aspects of literary theory to organizational research by highlighting that not only do organizational participants tell stories, but organizational researchers tell them too. As Czarniawska (1999) suggests, ‘narrative has always played an important part in the production and distribution of human knowledge. Although not a trademark of scientific texts, the narrative is always present’ (p.64). From this perspective, rather than examining the narratives of organizations, narrative theory becomes a way of interrogating organizational research. To achieve this, organizational theory must itself be seen as a practice of storytelling. Clegg (1993) suggests that sociology, ethnography and organization studies have long been founded on the ability to tell a good story. Accordingly, he recommends a suspicion towards narrative in social research; not towards accounts of everyday life and social practices, but rather to those theories which ‘seek to subsume everyday accounts to their overwhelming narrative’ (p. 42). This suspicion is wary of narratives that try to order all experience yet is respectful of stories embedded in the sites of the social world such that theory can engage in a dialogue with the practices of everyday life.Hatch (1996) reviews organization theory and suggests

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that, rather than being a mirror of reality or experience, theorising is seen as a process through which meaning is made. She addresses representation in organization theory as a process of narration and is concerned with organizational research both as a practice of representation and as a narrative performance. By examining the relationship between organizational theory and organizational theorists she suggests that reflexive research must place the narrator within the framework of the story and that a greater diversity of organizational theory can be achieved through experimentation with varied writing forms. This requirement for greater diversity is furthered by Putnam (1996) who argues for the benefits of applying literary and narrative approaches to research. This is seen as being vested in the need for organizational researchers to open up their texts to multiple readings so as to question the authority of authors and to allow both research participants and readers to be involved in the production of research (Rhodes 2000c). The way Putnam does this is to oppose the view of the author as an agent in favour of a postmodern decentring of authorship by focussing on the dynamic multiplicity of discourse, text and interpretation. The lack of diversity in much organizational research is criticised by Jeffcut (1993) who applies a narrative analysis to organizational culture and symbolism literature by examining the ‘representational style’ that organizational interpreters use to write persuasive accounts both of their fieldwork and of their field of study. He suggests that the dominant representational style is the quest, either where practitioners achieve corporate success in the face of threats, or where researchers heroically pursue interpretations of culture and symbolism in organizational settings. These narratives, as well as depicting epic journeys, are also used to depict the creation of organizational unity and harmony. Jeffcut questions the dominance of these epic and romantic narratives as being privileged over tragic or ironic forms in that they express monological voices that aim to achieve authority by suppressing dialogue and marginalising experimentation. Such a focus on heroic Western idealism therefore imposes a textual power that refuses legitimisation to interpretations that do not fit in to the epic or romantic mould (Rhodes 1997). A number of authors have proposed that diverse (re)presentations can be achieved by writing about organizations in genres not commonplace to organization theory. Butler (1997) proposes that a dichotomy often put forward is that between stories (which emphasise particular instances) and experiments (which seek to derive generalised laws). In critique of this dichotomy, he suggests that stories and experiments coexist in social inquiry as they both work to create intersubjectivity in the joint enterprise between the inquirer, the actor and the audience. In this sense, social inquiry is not only informed by the practice of physical scientists, mathematicians and logicians, but ‘can learn from the art and craft of the novelist, dramatist, journalist, film-maker, soap opera creator’ (p. 945) and so forth.

Storytelling and the heteroglossic organization

Phillips (1995) supports the use of literary forms of representation such as novels, short stories, plays, songs, poems and films as legitimate approaches to studying management and organizations. He argues that the barriers between fact and fiction have become difficult to defend in the sense that writing practices create, rather than discover and use, rhetoric to make a point; in short, they both seek to ‘model the world’ (p. 627). Phillips advocates the benefits of using narrative fiction in organization studies as having the ability to open up new possibilities for organizing, and new ways to talk and think about organizations. This creates a space for the (re)presentation of people’s organizational worlds, the ability to include different viewpoints in the text, the provision of techniques for dealing with affect and the possibility for aesthetic (re)presentation. By using narrative fiction as a (re)presentation, ‘the surface contact between narrative fiction and traditional organizational analysis provides a new intertextual arena within which theories of organization can come to life’ (Phillips 1995: 635). Brown and Kreps (1993) suggest that gathering stories through interviews and observation can be used as evidence of organizational functioning. They go on to say that elements of these stories can be used to generate a creative narrative which ‘blends the actual dialogue told in specific stories to form a composite, interpretive narrative that relates an impressionistic account of the concept under investigation’ (p. 54). This non-fiction text uses the conventions of fictional writing to (re)present organizational culture. Pacanowsky (1995) also promotes experimentation into different forms of scholarly writing. He suggests, based on his own empirical work, that techniques such as fiction, docudrama, journalism and first-person confessionals can be used to write about the shape and texture of organizations and to help others understand them. In such texts, he proposes that ‘facts’ are the empirical grounding for plausible narratives; narratives that can generate productive scholarly discourse. Another example of this comes from Kostera (1997) who presents a series of short poems, by different writers, as a way of looking at organization and management that attests to the relationship between feelings and organizing. These poems, both lyric and narrative, ‘reflect new ways of thinking about organizations and management, grounded in very local and powerful feelings’ (p. 347); ways that treat members of organizations as legitimate authors of local knowledge. Van Maanen (1996) offers a telling parody of the influence of (re)presentational choices on the meaning of organizational research when he writes: A thesis about layoffs at IBM written by, say, a student at Harvard Business School, might read ‘Value Chain Enhancement Through Corporate Downsizing’. A Stanford student might write on the same matters and call it ‘Differential Effects of Shifting Demographic and Structural Characteristics on Productivity and Employee Satisfaction: Evidence From a Large American Firm’. A student influenced

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by the Chicago school of sociology and working in the same territory with ethnographic leanings might title the work: ‘Getting the Ax at Big Blue”’ (p. 380).

In general then, stories of different genres can be viewed both in terms of research being a process of text production (Barthes 1977) and being represented as narrative knowledge (Lyotard 1984) where knowledge is a ‘melting pot in which different linguistic games are combined’ (Kallinikos 1997). In this sense, the textual (re)presentation of organizations implies, or at least allows, diverse narrative possibilities. The ‘truths’ offered by scientific research are subject to the limitations and intricacies of narrative (re)presentation and do not stand as ‘accurate’ representations. Hassard (1993) explains that representations that attempt to present a natural order are naive and mistaken as language is not the slave to reason. The factual is replaced by the (re)presentational as the forms of language that we call knowledge should be viewed humbly in critical reflection of their own intellectual assumptions. This means that researchers are also storytellers and that, as De Cock (1998: 3) puts it: Instead of discovering enduring facts of organizational life and reporting them through neutral description, the researcher actively creates truth by assigning meaning to the phenomena he or she observes and experiences. It thus becomes difficult to conceive of any possibility of an ‘accurate’ or even ‘impartial’ representation of ‘organizational reality’. In the very act of constructing data out of experience, the researcher singles out some things as worthy of note and relegates others to the background, thus eliminating the possibility of providing ‘pure’ description, sometimes referred to light-heartedly as ‘immaculate perception’.

In their creation, organizational (re)presentations take on an ambivalent relationship with the organizations they seek to represent. An account of an organization then does not, in any realist sense, have a material referent, but rather is a practice that constructs the organization through its text. In this way, writing is a situated simulacrum of a reality that is forever beyond its reach, an abstraction without obvious referent. This is not to say that the representation is either mythic or fictitious; rather, the representation stands as a discursive or pictorial resource that may be employed at any time in an act of objectification (Gergen and Whitney 1996: 334).

Organization theory, as a set of storytelling practices, is achieved through writing.

Theorising the heteroglossic organization The previous sections of this chapter have suggested that organization theory, through its use of narrative, has demonstrated that storytelling is a way that both

Storytelling and the heteroglossic organization

members of organizations and organizational researchers (re)present organizations. It has been shown that such theory can be sensitive to issues of power and (re)presentation in research and can offer plurality, both in terms of the stories that are told and the genres in which they are told, as a way of accounting for and acknowledging that power. In conceiving of an organization as such a multitude of stories and storytelling practices it is important to develop a theorisation of organization that accounts for its different ‘tellings’. This section works to achieve this through the notion of the ‘heteroglossic organization’. This theorisation of organization is based on the work of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and in particular his concept of heteroglossia — a term he uses to describe the multiplicity of different languages that are manifested in the novel to enable different views of the world to confront each other. In the context of this research, Bakhtin’s (1981) heteroglossia is developed as a metaphor for theorising organizations as sites of both multiple stories and multiple ways of telling them, both of which are enacted together in the practice of organization. Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia literally means ‘different speech-ness’. This opposes the view that a single unified language operates in any society and focuses instead on how language is multiplanar and breaks down into different discourses. Heteroglossia refers to the difference between the various discursive strata within any language, such that any individual utterance is conceived of as a struggle between convergent and divergent meanings (Clark and Holquist 1984). Through heteroglossia, a range of competing speech practices operate at any particular point in time, these speech practices representing different points of view on the world and different ways of understanding experience (Stam 1988). As discussed by Morris (1984), Bakhtin sees the creative interaction of contradictory and differing voices as being opposed to a passive and receptive understanding. In language, which is the arena of this interaction, there apply centripetal forces which aim at centralisation and the production of shared meaning used by dominant social groups to impose their own monological and unitary perceptions of truth. Such power works to establish stabilisation on its own terms and thus the exclusion of other possible realities (Gergen 1995). Working against this is a centrifugal force that Bakhtin calls heteroglossia. By suggesting that something is so, centripetal power can only exist against the possibility of alternatives (Gergen 1995). It is the existence of these alternatives that mark heteroglossia — a breaking up of a unified image of the world into a multiplicity of linguistically created worlds (McHale 1987). Heteroglossia fragments ‘reality’ into multiple perspectives and is a perception of language that sees knowledge as being stratified into different linguistic conceptualisations of the world. Through this concept of heteroglossia all monological truth claims are relativised against other views of the world in a way that counters the dominance of single languages and absolute forms of thought. In

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this way, authoritative and persuasive social voices become ironically or parodically relativised against other voices within heteroglossia. The centrifugal force of heteroglossia invokes a multi-vocal discourse that opposes the centralising imposition of the monological word. As Gagnon (1992) puts it, ‘heteroglossia, the existence of diverse and conflicting voices, is accompanied by polysemy, the proliferation of socially uncontrolled meanings for these voices’ (p. 231). Heteroglossia highlights how the plurality of language is conceived of as a both/and instead of an either/or operation through the relation between the centrifugal forces which try to keep things separate, and the centripetal forces which strive to keep them unified (Clark and Holquist 1984). Bakhtin (1981) describes language as being stratified into multiple social discourses, each of which represents different ways of seeing the world. This multiplicity, or heteroglossia, is the site of a struggle between different social languages. In this struggle, ‘truth’ exists only in the relations between social discourses and meaning resides in an unending process where ‘centrality is displaced by heterogeneity and an adhocing through the complexities of an ever shifting sea of meaning and action’ (Gergen 1992: 223). Language, in this way, is ideologically saturated, and represents a world view rather than an abstract conceptualisation. The centripetal and centrifugal forces of language intersect in a process of both unity and diversity which is stratified; a dialogue which sees language not as a dialectic, but as a correlation of texts (Kristeva 1980). For Bakhtin, words are appropriated by individuals, not from a neutral or impersonal language, but from the language of other people. In this sense Bakhtin sees language not as being the ‘private property’ of individuals but as being an intersubjective and inter-textual practice. The discourse of others strives to control our relationship with the world; it performs authoritatively as the voice of one person is borne out of the discourse of others. In heteroglossia, however, each person operates through many languages. As Morson and Emerson (1994) describe, the insight from Bakhtin is how a language (as formally defined) is actually composed of innumerable languages which are based on different experiences and have their own way of understanding and evaluating the world. Individuals participate in a number of these languages, each of which claims a privileged view of the world. The languages of heteroglossia, however, compete with one another as the many ‘languages of truth’ participate in an unending dialogue both with each other and with the experiences they attempt to represent. Bakhtin (1986) thus argues that it is possible for consciousness to attempt to monologise by making the words of others anonymous and assimilated, such that the dialogue is transformed into one continuous text and it is only the authoritative word that evades anonymity. The challenge presented by Bakhtin, however, is to hear the different voices and to write the dialogic relations amongst them — to write the heteroglossia.

Storytelling and the heteroglossic organization

Drawing from Bakhtin, it can be conceived that organizations are also characterised by heteroglossia — a multiplicity of languages in unending dialogues of power. This heteroglossia leads us to the concept of the heteroglossic organization, a theorisation of organization which posits that knowledge is diverse and multilingual and that different (re)presentations can always be achieved from different perspectives and in different genres. In terms of research, this suggests that conventional genres of writing organization act to suppress heteroglossia by limiting alternatives — they apply a centripetal force. The power that is exercised in such writing is that which seeks to homogenise all experience into a single account or mode of (re)presentation. Such an exercise lays claim to centralising all knowledge around a particular way of understanding and writing. The concept of the heteroglossic organization rejects this centralisation and replaces it with diversity and heterogeneity. It suggests that organizations do not just comprise different stories but also different languages and ways of writing; the intersection of the stories and the tellings. The heteroglossic organization is, then, both multivocal and multi-generic. The concept of the heteroglossic organization implies that to write about organizations simultaneously informs and performs. The information that one adduces cannot be achieved without the performance and there are always different ways of performing. In order to have information about an organization, that information must be (re)presented in a symbolic form: such an act of (re)presentation is the production and the performance of a text. Without performance there is no information. What this implies is that the stories about organization do not exist outside of the storytelling and just as an organization comprises multiple stories, it also comprises multiple ways of telling them. The heteroglossic organization then exists as an indefinite matrix of stories and storytelling practices. This theorisation of organization is designed to be sensitive to the issues of language and power described in Chapter one. Deetz (1995) suggests that ‘power is present in the attempt to hold one sign value or articulation as preferable over an other. Domination occurs when one articulation is systematically, but arbitrarily, privileged through practices of suppressing alternatives’ (p.219). In an organization seen as heteroglossic, however, we are sensitised to the different ways that organization can be articulated and stay aware that (re)presentations are political rather than natural. By foregrounding the role of language in constructing organization, seeing organizations as heteroglossic attests to the instability of organizational stories and the ways that they are told. Stories, then, are not just enactments of different people’s opinions or perspectives, but rather they are part of an unknowable web of meaning that is always in flux and can never be captured and finalised in a written text. The heteroglossic organization is one that is conceivable but not representable.

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The paradox that this opens up is that organizations are always being written but at the same time are never Written. That is, a finalising representation or set of representations is always elusive — to say that such a representation has been written (in a moment of finitude) is a practice of power that closes off competing perspectives and modes of (re)presentation. Any text of organization is woven from the materials at hand into a fabric that reflects its manufacture — its fabrication as a text. This reinforces that the concept of the heteroglossic organization is one that not only accepts that organizations comprise an indefinite number of stories but also an indefinite number of ways of writing them; it suggests a writing of organization that accounts for a multiplicity of stories and a multiplicity of genres. Such an organization, thus, can never be finalised in writing. That is, writing cannot achieve the completeness of a project whose here-and-now is forever fixed, forever final, forever consigned to the past by a definitive, authoritative, retrospective glance. The heteroglossic organization is then always unfinalised; it can only be alluded to through the incorporation of unreconciled perspectives and different, possibly experimental, ways of writing. Lyotard (1984: 78) writes that ‘we have an idea of the world (the totality of what is), but we do not have the capacity to show an example of it’. Accordingly, the notion of a heteroglossic organization is such an idea of the world, but to suggest that anyone can show an example of it would be to suggest that we can represent all of the different stories and all of the ways that they are told. The heteroglossic organization is therefore unrepresentable and each new attempt to present it further demonstrates that unrepresentability. To write the heteroglossic organization is then a matter of alluding to it while accepting that the goal of representation is unachievable. Writing might then be a matter where ‘it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be represented’ (Lyotard 1984: 81) such that the power masked by the desire for a reconciliatory unity of language is no longer sought.

Writing organization The challenge that this poses for storytelling and narrative approaches to organizations is the ability to write knowledge whilst at the same time drawing attention to the fact that the knowledge is written. What a narrative approach can offer is a type of knowledge that accepts and exposes the mechanics of its own production through attention to issues of genre and language. This recognises that writing about ‘organization’ is a way of constructing and reproducing organizational knowledge through the use of textual, narrative and rhetorical practices. Writing creates the organization through the textualisation of the personal and

Storytelling and the heteroglossic organization

vicarious experience of the writer; writing is central to organization and an understanding of organization must be based on a conceptualisation of writing. In this sense, writing is the means by which people define order in their environment through particular structures of ‘representation’ (Hassard 1993) such that organizations are a symbolic product which is written (Linstead 1993) both literally and figuratively. It is this concern with writing that raises doubts about representation and interpretation and calls for a more self reflexive approach that pays attention to how texts are produced and read and leads to texts which are more open and reflect the ambiguities of both social worlds and worlds of language (Alvesson and Berg 1992). Organization is then not a noun but a verb which performs itself (Law 1994) through the stories told about it. The discourse of organization is itself an ‘organization of organization’; that is, writing about organizations is organized by, and inextricable from, the theory or methodology by which it is framed (Cooper 1990). This way that language is used to frame different ways of understanding organizations forms a problematic of (re)presentation that leads to a concern for authorship and rhetorical style in the staging of meaning effects (Jeffcut 1994b). The production and consumption of knowledge must then be concerned with the practices through which knowledge is inscribed as an order. An organization is seen thus as being textually constructed; it is a rhetorical product where ‘the understanding of organization is inseparable from the organization of understanding’ (Jeffcut 1994b: 341). As discussed by Carroll (1987), Bakhtin uses an understanding of narrative to undermine authoritative discursive practices. This understanding sees narrative as heterogeneous and unsynthesisable as various languages intersect in a social space. The goal of Bakhtin’s analysis is the development of a narrative strategy that avoids the suppression of heterogeneity and is rooted in a respect for diversity. Writing in this way creates a text which is an open and unresolvable conflict of (re)presentations where any attempt to resolve this conflict would be an attempt to deny its dialogic origins and would become authoritarian and dogmatic. For Linstead (1993) stylistic heteroglossia brings into question the authority of the author as other voices are brought in alongside. The possibility for writing about organizations is then one where ‘poetic rigour and conceptual rigour will ultimately combine in the production of an account, which will employ explicit literary and figurative devices poised in the space between “fact” and “fiction” where “truth” is manufactured’ (Linstead 1993: 70). The opportunity for writing within a concept of the heteroglossic organization is to create a text which produces what Hazen (1993) describes as an organization understood as a multiplicity of socially constructed stories, discourses and texts, manifested in simultaneously occurring dialogues where each member of the organization has a voice in the narrative. Acknowledging these ‘voices’ can be used to suggest that authorship is

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incapable of maintaining authority in an ultimately undecidable process of multivocal intertextuality (Jeffcut 1994b) where organization is produced through the interplay of vocalities, each of which is embodied multi-subjectively. It is the inherent conflict of heteroglossia that highlights the relationship between power and writing and which can situate a writer in that relationship. Research writing that adopts a monoglot (single language) form avoids heteroglossic conflict through the way that the traditions and assumptions of the researcher determine the single language style in which the text is written. In such a text, alternative languages only exist in the sense that they are suppressed as the single language fights and ignores the dialogic heteroglossia through which the research was produced. To write solely within a particular genre is to impose a system of writing on a set of experiences and to frame those experiences without acknowledging the frame; to create an effect of truth based on an authorial choice of language and genre where it is that choice which permits experience to appear textually reconstituted. Different truths can, however, be created by writing the same experience in different ways such that s/he who controls the choice of genre and language controls meaning beyond the understanding or choice of those whose experience is being written about. A reflexive authorship must then recognise its constructive appropriation of language in taking charge of others’ experience and imposing a mono-generic mode of ordering on to the (re)presentation of their experience. This reflexivity can then be creatively employed to produce multi-generic (re)presentations that operate in heteroglossic competition and create spaces between the conflicts left unfilled by the writer. The possibility is to achieve writing which does not attempt to complete monological phrases such as ‘the organization is…’, or ‘people’s experience means…’, but rather opens up competing narrative possibilities within and between which lies the heteroglossic organization.



Chapter 3

Writing the heteroglossic organization

In Chapter two it was suggested that the task of writing the heteroglossic organization is not one of creating a final and total image of heteroglossia, but rather one of alluding to heteroglossia by incorporating different perspectives and uses of language in research. This chapter describes a research project that aimed to create such an allusion. This project focussed on creating a series of textual accounts of a particular organization by taking a range of perspectives on a change program in that organization and writing them in a number of different ways. Whereas the four chapters in Part two of the book contain these different ‘writings’ of the organization, this chapter describes the practices used to create them. It is a story of how and why the (re)presentations of the research were produced. This story is told in two parts. The first describes how a series of interviews with three managers in the organization, together with a corporate video of the Chief Executive, were used to develop a range of stories, from different perspectives, on a change program that was being implemented in the organization where the research was conducted. The second moves on to address the way that these stories were used to write the research using different generic conventions. This chapter also marks a change in the ‘voice’ in which the book is written. It works from a more ‘reflexive’ position and, in doing so, tells the story of the research from the perspective of the I who is the researcher.

Appropriating research texts In order to pursue and explore the tension between (re)presentation and control that I introduced in Chapter one, my approach was to conduct an empirical research project that examined change and learning in one organization and to write it up in a number of different ways. This research could then stand as an examination of a range of perspectives and writing practices taken within a given organizational context. In order to do this, I chose to research a particular change program that was being implemented in one organization and to examine how different people in that organization told stories about the program. The organization is a multi-national company referred to here as World Services. This research was conducted in the Australian offices of World Services.

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This organization was selected for two reasons. First, I had previous contact with the organization myself and knew a number of managers who would be able to authorise me to conduct the research. Second, at the time I was setting up the research in late 1997, World Services was in the process of implementing a quality management program. I was aware of this program although I had not been personally involved in it. My interest, however, was in examining how different people understood and recounted their experiences with organizational change and how I, as a researcher, could create different written (re)presentations of those understandings. The quality program at World Services provided me with an ideal opportunity to do that. I contacted the relevant managers at World Services and asked if they would authorise and grant me access to conduct my research. Following a number of discussions, they agreed and allowed me two important points of entry. First, I was given access to a corporate video in which the Chief Executive of the organization’s parent company in New York was describing the program. Second, I was granted access to interview managers in the organization to discuss with them their experiences with the quality program. My main focus was an examination of the writing of research in different ways and incorporating the perspectives of different people; it was not on creating a totalising description of quality management, this quality project or World Services. For that reason, I decided that the best way to proceed would be to do an in-depth writing of a small amount of empirical material. To achieve this in a manageable fashion, I decided to conduct interviews with three managers in the organization and to use the corporate video that I was given access to. The video was included to provide an officially sanctioned account of the program. The three managers, who came from different divisions of the company, were selected to provide three different local perspectives on the program. Prior to conducting any of the interviews or reviewing the video, the theoretical starting point I used to inform the ‘data gathering’ in this research was that stories that people tell about others and themselves can be used as a valuable empirical base for research (Fox 1995). This starting point allowed for a research project based on the ideas of the storytelling organization described in Chapter two and enabled me to contrast different perspectives on the organization and the quality project that I was researching. To achieve this, the research was based on both the story told by the Chief Executive in the video (a story which occurred independently of the research project), and on stories gathered purposively for this research through the research interviews. It is worth noting at this point that, although the convention of using stories as a form of ‘data’ is being used here, I am not suggesting that they present themselves as such. Stories contain the interpretations, meanings and informal theories of the storytellers. Story ‘data’ is given to us already (re)presented and any ‘analysis’ of stories is a further (re)presentation of those

Writing the heteroglossic organization

(re)presentations. As a story researcher, I was not connecting with the ‘facts’ of the events of the participants’ lives, rather, I was connecting with the participants own (re)presentations and selective editing of those events. Turning to the interviews, the practice that I used was that of unstructured, theme based interviewing to gather the stories for the research. As Alvesson (1996) notes, the benefit of unstructured interviews is that they can generate rich accounts of participants’ experience which are less constrained by the researcher’s preconceptions than more structured approaches. Following Mishler (1986), I considered the responses of interview participants as stories and, in preparing to conduct the research interviews, I saw my approach to interviewing as a practice of a researcher eliciting and co-constructing a story based on the research participants’ own narrative reconstruction of the events of their past. This is a dialogic process that produces an output informed by the mixed voices of the interviewer and the participant. This assumes that interview participants do not have a fully formed version of their own histories to draw on freely and to call up and recount in a way independent of their subsequent experience, the context of the research, their relationship with the researcher or the language called forth to (re)present that experience. There is not a coherent ‘whole’ of experience from which a slice can be cut and delivered up to the researcher; rather, in the process of an interview, the past is being re-constructed in the present. In one respect this suggests that ‘the researcher is thus faced with two interlocking problems: many people interviewed will not have “a view” on an issue; but when they do, the views of different individuals are likely to be qualitatively as well as substantively different’ (Tripp 1983: 33). While recognising this issue of difference, my contention is that this scenario does not present itself as a problem but rather it is a heteroglossic and multi-vocal condition which is endemic in any research being conducted with a number of people. Additional to the diversity of views expressed by different individuals is the issue of the problematic relationship between words and experience. As Silverman (1985) puts it: ‘only by following misleading correspondence theories of truth could it have ever occurred to researchers to treat interview statements as accurate or distorted reports of reality’ (p. 176). If this ‘misleading correspondence theory’ were to be followed, then we would take the positivist assumption that realities are imperfectly represented by their accounts, and therefore that we would need to incorporate some type of process to get a truer picture. In reaction to this monologising effect, the perspective I have taken in this research is not to treat interviews as potentially accurate or distorted reports of reality but rather to treat interview accounts as compelling narratives (Silverman 1993). These are narratives that reflect a story and a way of telling a story based on the unique network of experiences and contexts in which a person operates. The differences that are assumed

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between different people then become more central to the research process as the research seeks to highlight and examine the heteroglossic character of these differences. The different interviews were not taken to correspond to some external organizational truth but rather were a way of creating accounts of some possibilities of how different organizational realities are created out of the intertwined experience of different people. Diversity in interview practice then itself reflects a heteroglossic view of social life where ‘dissimilar accounts are invaluable interpretations of both the participants’ and researcher’s understandings’ (Geist and Dreyer 1993:97). This process of linguistically constructing the events of the past through interviews sees research participants as telling ‘stories about a certain action or situation, about critical events … or about unique or even routine experience’ (Hutchinson and Wilson 1994: 307). These stories, however, reflect more than just the events in the past of the person being interviewed. The products of interviews cannot be divorced from the manner in which they were produced (Hester and Francis 1994). The interview is the result of the interaction between the researcher/ interviewer and the participant/interviewee in the context of a ‘research’ interview. The interview is not characterised by the passive interviewer recording the interview participant describing chunks of their world; it is an interactive process where information and interpretation flow between both parties. In this dialogic flow, researchers supply meaning to what they hear and what they hear is guided by the interview participant’s decisions about what they think the interviewer is interested in hearing (Gudmundsdottir 1996). The dialogue that emerges is one that sees the researcher as having an unavoidable position in the stories produced from the research interaction. Simpson (1997) suggests that stories told in research interviews are a narrative (re)presentation of a person created as they define themselves and are defined through relationships in their past. (Re)presentation, in this sense, both stands for something which is not present yet is recreated in the present — it deals with absence as an imagined presence which orders, structures and makes sense of disordered experience. The interview can then be a site where the research participant constructs and is allowed to construct a personal narrative through a storytelling performance. This must acknowledge that a storyteller is speaking to an audience in a particular social situation where text is inseparable from context and story is inseparable from storytelling (Langellier 1989). Personal narratives must be seen as situated and context-dependant performance practices which textualise experience (Peterson and Langellier 1997). Personal narratives are therefore not unproblematic and clear representations of the unique experience of an individual. As described by Langellier (1989) stories are co-narrated through conversation between a storyteller and listener. This is a conversation where although one person takes longer turns, it is still interactive and guided by recipient/researcher responses

Writing the heteroglossic organization

and the storyteller’s contextually guided perception of what the researcher will find interesting and ‘story-worthy’.

‘Ghostwriting’ research interviews Based on the conceptualisation of interviewing outlined in the previous section, this section describes the process and practice used to produce initial texts from the research interviews. In particular it deploys a notion of ‘ghostwriting’ (see Rhodes 2000c) where the researcher is seen as the author of texts that are about other people and are based on interactions with them, yet where the author’s ‘ghost’ is still present, explicitly or implicitly, in the text. The interview process that I used was employed through my interactions with three managers at World Services between April and June 1998. In constructing a research process based on interviews, the standard issue that I faced first was the selection of the interview participants. On the one hand my objective here was to ‘choose participants who possess knowledge of the subject because of their lived experiences’ (Hutchinson and Wilson 1994: 305). On the other hand, my goal was to select participants whose knowledge was likely to offer different approaches and perspectives from each other so as to allow the diversity of views that embody organizational heteroglossia to become apparent. My rationale was to examine how different people recount and describe their experience and knowledge of a particular ‘phenomenon’ based on their own ways of understanding and talking about that phenomenon. It was my expectation therefore that, though the participants would share the common organizational context and share the experience of a particular organizational change project, they would (re)present those ‘objects’ in considerably different ways. To achieve this, I selected the research participants from different departments, different levels of involvement with the program and different levels of seniority within the organization. This choice was designed to highlight the difference in the way that different people constructed their versions of what could ostensibly be called the ‘same thing’ but through the process of its linguistic reconstruction by different people it results in also being a variety of different ‘things’. Focussing on different accounts of the one change program aimed to create an image of heteroglossia. In particular this was designed to allow me to examine the similarities and the differences between the participants’ accounts in terms of the way that they embody the centrifugal and centripetal forces of language at play in World Services. In this way, I could review stories that shared descriptions and uses of language with other people’s stories (especially official stories) in terms of centripetal forces; forces that are at work to maintain a single, centralised, version

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of the organization’s story. At the same time I could review how the differences between the accounts of the program worked to demonstrate centrifugal forces as different stories and genres might fragment a single reality of the program into a heterogeneous set of (re)presentations. The idea was to enable me to demonstrate through text that ‘as much as organizations can be characterised by homogeneity, consensus and integration, they can also be characterised by heterogeneity, conflict and differentiation’ (Salzer-Morling 1998: 114). The interview process I used to gather the stories began with explaining to the participant the general nature of the research and inviting the person concerned to tell the story of their involvement with the organizational change project being studied. I briefed each participant at least one week prior to the interview in order to allow them time to consider which experiences and ideas they might like to talk about. The interviews themselves followed an open-ended process. This process started by me reiterating my area of interest to the participant and asking them to recount their experiences with the quality program in the organization. I selected this open-ended interview process because it allowed me to make full use of differences amongst people rather than constraining them with the loaded questions operating in more structured interview processes. This approach to qualitative interviewing aimed at encouraging people to recall aspects of their life story relevant to the research project at hand in a way that makes sense to the person recalling them (Tagg 1985). The interview event followed the generally accepted characteristics of ‘qualitative interviewing’ in that I used the informal style of conversation and discussion rather than a question and answer format; no structured list of questions was used; the interview was based on the discussion of the autobiographical narrative of the participant; and all of the information about that person’s experiences was gathered through interaction with them (Mason 1996). I tape-recorded each of the interviews. Following the interview, I wrote up the participant’s story in an ‘autobiographical’ format. This was done by my reviewing the interview tape and writing it up ‘as if ’ the participant were writing it as a part of their autobiography. The writing was done in the ‘first person’ (ie, from the I of the participant) and I reorganized the events described in the interview in order to present them as a coherent written narrative. I omitted no part of the story in its re-narration and, as much as possible, the choice of words and types of description used by the research participant was retained. This written story was, however, not intended to be a replica of the interview but rather it was designed to create a written narrative based on the style and content to the discussion that transpired in the interview. My first version of the story was returned to the participant for review and feedback about any recommended modifications. In each case I made all recommended changes. This process of review and re-writing continued until the

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participant accepted the text as an appropriate representation of their story. In each case this resulted in three iterations of the re-writing and reviewing process. My approach aimed to ‘produce an agreed upon account of the views of the participants rather than an agreed upon account of the discussion … [where] an accurate record of the actual words being originally spoken is of less importance that an effective transformation by the researcher of what was actually said into what the participants want written about what they said’ (Tripp 1983: 35). This cooperative research practice was one where the participant and I jointly constructed a meaningful whole which made sense to both of us and where we both have left our mark on the product and the process of the interview (Gudmundsdottir 1996). This practice addresses Mishler’s (1986) critique of standard interviewing procedures where the researcher defines the meaning of the responses and where participants do not have the opportunity to comment or contribute to these interpretations. The inclusion of participants’ self-(re)presentations and their ability to approve and modify the interview text is capitalised on by the inclusion of the full text of the ‘autobiography’ in the research (see Chapter 5). The ability to include these texts was also facilitated by the relatively small number of research participants. Alvesson (1996) notes that the tradition of using large interview samples results in only a small amount, perhaps five to ten per cent at most, of the interview ‘data’ appearing in a research book, and less than one per cent in a journal article. By writing this way, researchers apply their own selection criteria on what does appear and absorb (some of) the rest in their own generic writing. The potential for monologisation in such research writing is obviously great as the vast majority of the participants’ own (re)presentations are mediated through the commentary of the ‘author’. As a writer, my intention here was to attempt not to retain the final word, but rather to think of myself as an organizer and participant in a dialogue (Bakhtin 1984), In the interview process described above, I, as the researcher, took the role of a ‘ghostwriter’ by attempting to develop an account of another person’s experience which is sanctioned by that person. This differs from more traditional approaches that offer either transcripts of the actual interview or quotations from such transcriptions peppered through an interpretive reading of them. The danger I recognised in using such transcripts is that they obscure the constructions of the researcher/author by (re)presenting the interview in a way that appears to show a reflection of actual events. The power of the researcher to shape and construct meaning out of interviews is hidden through the sanitised output of the interview transcript. This sanitisation is achieved by using routine, precise and technical approaches to transcription that effectively hides the presence of the researcher. Such approaches imply that the research method mirrors reality and do not acknowledge that this ‘reality’ is veiled behind the ‘representational ideology’ of the

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researcher (Scheurich 1995). Transcription is further criticised by Mishler (1986) who sees it as decontextualising the interview and not accounting for the people, place and time such that the transcript detaches itself from the uncertain relationship between meaning and language. Peterson and Langellier (1997) argue that the goal of a ‘full’ or ‘complete’ transcription is based on an outmoded conception of communication that assumes an agency of the storyteller where they have the ability to reflect an uncontentious description of their experience. Instead, transcription needs to be mindful of the participatory context in which the interview was constructed as situated communication. For my purposes, the interview is thus seen as being jointly constructed by the interviewer and the participant and the questions and responses are framed by the discourse created by the two (Mishler 1986) and made available through their dialogic interaction and the availability of language(s) with which they communicate. The approach I used both recognises the researcher’s role in the co-construction by his/her adoption of the identity of a ‘ghostwriter’ while at the same time deprivileging the researcher’s role by excluding them from the outward (re)presentation of the narrative. As a researcher, I am both ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the text. The result is the ‘production of a co-authored statement…[through] a process of negotiating what the interviewee is satisfied to have written about what was said’ (Tripp 1983: 37) and where as a researcher, I am not neutral, but still I do not have a monopoly on the (re)presentation of meaning in the research process. The intended effect is a text that recognises the dialogic process of its production. The production of ghostwritten autobiographies (re)presents the interview in a way that takes advantage of the researcher/participant relationship by constructing a (re)presentation of the participants’ experience which is negotiated and coproduced from the interview conversations; a text which is dialogic and contextually embedded. It is important to note again that, although I gathered a number of stories from a single organization, it is not my intention to suggest that these stories will stand for the entire organization. What each story will stand for is how different people were able to describe and communicate their individual experience within one organization in the face of, despite, or even because of, more legitimated stories. The comparison between these stories is a comparison between what and how people choose to (re)present their experiences. My choice of stories is not based on the storytellers as the narrators of an encompassing story about the organization; but rather they were chosen because they embody aspects of organizational experience which are potentially marginalised and epiphenomenalised by official accounts of the organizational story.

Writing the heteroglossic organization

Mixing generic (re)presentations As described in Chapter one, the process I used in this research is based on a conception of research as an activity of writing and that, by writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it. Following Richardson (1994), we can see that using a particular method or theory as embodied in a genre of writing does not give us a universal representation of ‘reality’ but rather genres can act subversively to attempt to put a stranglehold on the truth. To disrupt this possibility, there is an opportunity to use different writing strategies to write about a particular research project. The methodological choice here is for ‘mixed genre’ representation (Richardson 1994) which allows the researcher to draw freely from different genres and to write different ‘takes’ on a ‘topic’ that stand as the occasion for writings whose diverse representations offer a ‘postmodern deconstruction of triangulation’ (Richardson 1994: 533). Using any particular genre both opens up possibilities and limits a writer’s choice of words (Gudmundsdottir 1996); with this in mind, in the methodology I used in this research, I employed a variety of different genres in order to see what happens when different narrative possibilities operate within the same ‘space’. This approach is used to create a ‘radical openness or indeterminacy within the intersection of language, meaning, and communication and … an advocacy for “playful” experimentation that exceeds the constraints of a determinate, knowable ordering of “reality”’ (Scheurich 1995: 239). My use of a multi-genre format is designed to avoid the reduction of social experience to a single linguistic model and allude to the concept of the heteroglossic organization. As Rapport (1997) suggests, the use of an eclecticism of narrational styles, which locates human behaviour in multiple frames of reference, can escape the misplaced notion that diversity should be resolved and integrated into a single code. This approach is informed by poststructuralist thought in that it reconceptualises ‘truth’ as ‘a construction rather than a discovery, but one “truth” story among other potentially competing ones’ (Jacobson and Jacques 1997) and where heteroglossia is apparent in the juxtaposition of these different stories. To attest to this, the research is written in different genres so as to bring attention to the narrative and textual nature of the research endeavour. By offering these different and unreconciled generic (re)presentations, I intended to emphasise that none of them really represents the ‘truth’ or even the best way of interpreting; rather they produce perspectivalised and differing images of what it is that they purport to represent. The languages available in social heteroglossia thus create difference through their ways of speaking and the use of different genres frame the (re)presentations so as to create divergent meanings based on the same empirical texts. The position here is that it is an illusion that I, as a researcher, can write in a

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way that ‘captures’ the experiences of ‘real’ people. Rather, through writing, researchers, such as myself, construct the people they write about. In light of this it is important that, in using biographical methods, researchers are sensitive to the writing strategies used in this process of construction (Denzin 1989). If a researcher wanted to create a text which appeared to truly imitate reality, it would need to be a text which ‘left no trace of the machinery of its production’ (Silverman and Torode 1980: 283). Such a text would be unrecognisable as a text — an idealised invisible text that could speak of truth without the reader noticing its linguistic and textual practice. The research I am (re)presenting here, however, seeks to disrupt the futile search for such an idealised text by offering a range of textual possibilities based on a particular research project through the use of multi-generic (re)presentation. This is intended to direct vision to the generic and linguistic machinery of production that would remain more hidden if each of these (re)presentations were to be taken alone. My use of multiple (re)presentations has also been done in reaction to the question of what should be written down and said to count as research. Jeffcut (1993) suggests that the way organizational research is represented in text is a problem ignored by the classic interpretive approach. In modernist organizational research, this representation consists of ‘the sketching of a singular set of empirical tendencies which [are] imagined to be irresistible and inevitable’ (Clegg 1990: 4). I recognise, however, that any attempt at being factual can only succeed at being (re)presentational (Hassard 1993). In light of this, the research process I am describing took a single set of empirical materials and (re)presented them in the multiple formats of autobiography, ethnography and a fictional short story. It is intended that this concurrent multi-(re)presentational approach allows for a multiplicity of ‘truth effects’ to be present in the one overall text. By creating these effects, my goal is to ‘open up multiple spaces in which interview interactions can be conducted and represented, ways that engage the indeterminate ambiguity of interviewing, practices that transgress and exceed a knowable order’ (Scheurich 1995: 250). Offering these (re)presentations as different readings of the research interviews is done as a way of disrupting the dominating effects of strategies of singular (re)presentation while writing a version of the heteroglossic organization. As Silverman and Torode (1980: 297) note: Writing/reading pays tribute to the power of signs by seeking to unravel the machinery of a text. Resisting the work of signs involves seizing and enlarging the ruptures between them and the reality of which they claim to be the appearance. The point is to denaturalise the signs and the codes that speak them by reawakening the play of the text.

None of the (re)presentations I am offering here are seeking to be better or truer than the others. They are offered precisely to awaken the heteroglossic play of the

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text and to suggest that the possibilities of finding truth in a textual (re)presentation is both naive and dangerous. ‘When we proceed as if we have “found” or “constructed” the best, or the key, or the most important representation, we are misportraying what has occurred’ (Scheurich 1995: 249) and masking our own monologic writing in a rhetoric of arrogance. This misportrayal is an act of power where a particular (re)presentation is served up as the best, if not only, way of representing a particular social phenomenon, where in fact its production is loaded with the interpretive constructs, values and interests of the researcher.

(Re)presenting in genres As described earlier in this chapter, to supplement and situate the material gathered through interviews, I used a corporate video as an account of the quality program. The idea for including this video was to balance local accounts of the quality program with an ‘official’ account. This official account came in the form of a company-authorised promotional video that was distributed globally around the company as a way of promoting and explaining the quality program. The video consisted of the Chief Executive Officer describing the quality program to a conference attended by the organization’s senior managers. This official account works to provide a context for the interview-based local accounts by describing the corporate perspective from which the quality program was being implemented. To achieve this, what is presented in Chapter four as part of the research is a renarration of this corporate video. This provides my interpretation of an account of the change from an ‘official’ perspective — an organizationally sanctioned version of the quality story. As well as creating an organizational context for the research, the value of including this video is that it contrasts with the research interviews by being a naturally occurring event that was not staged for the purpose of this research. The account of the video that appears in Chapter four is not designed to be a ‘description’ of this video per se, but rather it is my translation, re-narration and co-construction of the video ‘text’. Further, the video tells an ‘official’ story of the organization and is a demonstration of a centripetal force that seeks to define the program for its viewers. While the video does act to (re)present an official perspective on the program, I have not used it solely for that purpose. The video also functions to link the different (re)presentations; it is redescribed and reacted to in the other (re)presentations in order to provide the texts with a recurring motif which holds them together for comparison. The video is then both a referent and a reference point for the different (re)presentations and a literary device for constructing unity across the different ways that the quality story at World Services is told.

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In writing this research, I was concerned with the issue that standard interpretive (re)presentations can foreground the researcher as the author of the meaning of the organizational experiences being studied. Silverman and Torode (1980: 310) propose that in such texts characters in diverse voices articulate the varied appearances of the world to them, but only in the context of the single reality articulated by the narrators’ voice. Authoritarian dogmatism arises in this situation, where every voice is re-interpreted by the voice of the author.

This interpretive tendency is highly problematic; the so called expert cannot be seen to have the right answers, it is just that they are in a position to act to monopolise authority (White and Taket 1994) through the use of a monological practice of writing. Such approaches do not challenge the writer’s authority to speak for the participants being studied and therefore ‘it is [this] authority that must be interrogated if narratives are to be used in interpretive research’ (Emihovich 1995:41). Interpretation is an act of authority masked in a heroic narrative which seeks to enable a researcher to apply their abstract models to a social situation resulting in a text through which the narrator’s voice is prioritised over both the informants and the readers (Jeffcut 1993) and heteroglossia is suppressed. The challenge this provides for writers is to ‘confront and take responsibility for our systematic constructions of others and of ourselves through others’ (Clifford 1986:121). One way of attempting to address this issue is for research to seek to offer options and possibilities rather than prescriptions. The way I tried to do this was to (re)present the research in a way that attempts to give direct ‘voice’ to the organizational actors who tell their stories. In making this ‘attempt’, however, it is also important to acknowledge that such accounts cannot be taken as letting the participants’ texts ‘speak for themselves’ (Hodge and McHoul 1992). My conception of (re)presenting research interviews as ‘autobiographies’ is instead a process designed to offer reports of experience that are gathered through an interview process and presented by a researcher but are ‘not collapsed together and reported as one, through the interpretation of the researcher. In doing so, the ‘multiple perspectives of the various participants are reported and differences and problems encountered are…[not] glossed over’ (Fontana and Frey 1994: 369). Such an approach challenges the ‘homogenisation [that] occurs through the suppression of individual voices’ (Richardson 1986: 517). The interviewing approach described earlier included the production of texts, in an autobiographical genre, which were reviewed and approved by their original authors. In Chapter five these texts are presented as the direct result of the research. Together, these texts are a collection of episodes in autobiographical life stories (Smith 1994). My use of autobiography is more in terms of genre rather than strictly suggest-

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ing that these texts were written solely by the person who experienced the events that they describe. In this sense, I became a ‘ghostwriter’ for the organizational actors — not just with a view of interpreting organizational stories, but also with a view of (re)presenting them as coherent narratives. Such a (re)presentation is aimed at empowering the articulation of diverse voices that allows for the ambiguity, heterogeneity and discord suppressed in the monological format of interpretive research (Jeffcut 1993). It is worth noting that, while in using this approach I recognise the issue of authorial complicity in the making of meaning in research, the writing does not achieve a ‘romanticist evasion of control’ (Hodge and McHoul 1992: 197). The process of ‘ghostwriting’ changes the text from its original occurrence in terms of the nature of the research interview, the presence of the researcher and the rewriting of the interview discussions. What results is a joint construction between the participant and I. This joint construction is evidenced in the residual trace of the ‘interview’, as a social event, in the autobiographical texts. The stories told in the interviews were addressed to me as a researcher and despite being written from the I of the research participant, there is still the residue of our dialogue. What is intended however is that the approach redefines the roles in a way that questions my role as the researcher. This is achieved by removing the I of the researcher from the text and hence bringing into question the researcher’s role as the univocal narrator of other people’s experience. By playing with this role through the use of the ‘ghostwriter’ metaphor and through the use of the autobiographical genre, the author’s prominence can be seen to be disturbed by the way that multiple voices operate through me in a multi-vocal (re)presentation. The autobiographical method that I used suggests a form of writing that focuses attention to indigenous stories told by research participants. In contrast to such (re)presentations, I also wrote the research using an interpretive approach. To achieve this, I employed the generic conventions of organizational ethnography; this (re)presentation appears in Chapter six. As Morgan (1983) notes, ethnography is a research method developed in the field of anthropology; it suggests that cultures are systems of meaning created by people who form patterns of collective activity through language, ideology, myth, ritual and other forms of symbolic action. Organizational ethnography uses this approach to study formal organizations; it employs the methods of interpretive anthropology to understand the themes and patterns of organizational life. These methods involve working with unstructured data to explore social phenomena by interpreting the meanings and functions of human interactions through verbal descriptions and explanations (Atkinson and Hammersley 1994). Ethnography and organizational interpretation are then interested in understanding the meanings of the symbolic world of the organization by writing descriptions and interpretations of that world (Phillips 1995).

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The motive behind this is to understand and write about encounters with other people in a particular cultural milieu (Presnell 1994). Ethnography is then ‘based upon achieving a conscious and systematic interpretation of the culture system operating from those the ethnographer observes to those who may eventually take in the ethnographer’s product’ (Rosen 1991 p. 1). In using the term ‘ethnography’ I also explicitly realise, following Van Maanen (1995), that the term is ‘double edged’ in that it points to both a method of study and a result of such study. As a method of study, ethnography usually refers to fieldwork conducted by a single researcher and involving ‘participant observation’. As a result of research, ethnography refers to the written (re)presentation of culture. In writing an ethnographic (re)presentation of World Services, my intention is focused specifically on ethnography as a written product of research — as a genre. In this sense ethnography is a ‘way of writing’ (Bate 1997: 1153); a way that has been dominated by the sub-genre of ‘ethnographic realism’ — it claims to interpret and describe the culture at hand. It is such a form of this realism that I have chosen as a genre for writing the ethnographic (re)presentation in this research. Although there is much narrative variety available in ethnographic writing (Van Maanen 1995), the reason for my choice is that it allows me to write in a way that focuses on my interpretations and descriptions of the organization in a way that is not evident in the other (re)presentations — it is a genre that foregrounds the subjectivity of the researcher. This foregrounding is an important way that the problematic of this research can be explored in that it allows me to focus on the researcher as an active subject in the text. It is important to note, therefore, that the ethnographic (re)presentation of this research is not intended to be an exemplar of contemporary ethnographic writing, but rather is taken as an example of writing that draws on an ethnographic tradition. In terms of the study of organizations, this ‘tradition’, has recently surfaced as a way to study organizations and there are an increasing number of examples of ethnographers studying bureaucracies, corporate cultures and occupations (Schwartzman 1993). As an interpretive approach to representing research, ethnography assumes that in order make sense of the world, it is necessary to interpret its ‘texts’. This interpretation is a process of discovery rather than a process of explanation; it is dynamic, iterative and interactive, but does not result in unitary solutions (Kets de Vries and Miller 1987). In this way, interpreting organizational stories is about the application of a hermeneutic technique such that instances of communication are viewed as texts that require interpretation. The hermeneutic provides the theory and practice of text interpretation (Phillips and Brown 1993). This practice results in an understanding of the differences in the way people choose to (re)present their own stories. Such an understanding is not posited to be a way of accurately representing or truthfully interpreting that data;

Writing the heteroglossic organization

rather, it is seen as a creative interaction between the researcher/interpreter and the decontextualised ‘data’ that is assumed to represent some image of the ‘reality’ as described and interpreted by the interviewees (Scheurich 1995). In the case of this research, the text presented in Chapter six is an ethnographic description of part of the organizational culture at World Services. Arguably, the term ‘ethnography’ could well be used to describe the entirety of this research. In specifically writing what I announce as the ethnographic (re)presentation of this research, however, I used ethnographic writing to produce an interpretive account of World Services in a descriptive format in my (‘the author’s’) voice. I achieved this ethnography by interpreting World Services using what Van Maanen (1979) calls first order and second order concepts. The first order concepts are the ‘facts’ of the organization being studied. In this case, these ‘facts’ are taken as the output of the research interviews. Second order concepts are the notions used by the researcher to explain the patterns in the first order concepts — they are ‘interpretations of interpretations’ (Van Maanen 1979 p. 541). In the ethnography in Chapter six, the second order concepts that I explicitly used are those related to organizational learning. In order to craft an interpretation of quality at World Services, the ethnography interprets quality management in World Services in terms of how and what the managers interviewed interpreted as the learning resulting from the quality program. In particular, the interpretation examines the implementation of quality management at World Services to understand how the different accounts of the program reflect on how managers in the organization learn and change as part of the implementation of official change programs such as quality management. This use of second order concepts highlights how authors of ethnographies intervene in the process of (re)presentation of the social group being studied. As Linstead (1993) puts it, ‘all ethnographic explanations are fraught with difficulties which arise from the assumptions which are implicit in the ethnographer’s way of knowledge … ethnography demands of the ethnographer that he [sic] seeks to bring his way of knowing, the world and history which he carries, with him in his language and thought, into contact with that of the other’ (p. 50). What is presented in the ethnography in Chapter six is one (re)presentation of what was happening to quality management at World Services. It is a (re)presentation that uses the ethnographic practices of ‘interpreting and representing’ (Bantz 1993). This writing practice is designed to develop an understanding of the meanings and culture of the organization and I used it to craft a (re)presentation of the part of the organizational culture of World Services related to the quality program being implemented. The ethnographic and autobiographical forms of (re)presentation that I have described are easily classified as social science writing genres. As noted by Phillips (1995), such writing practices of social scientists appear to be different from those

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of literary writers, but, on closer examination, there are a number of similarities. They both create order rather than disorder and they both seek to model the world. In fact, it is hard to say where science begins and narrative ends (Phillips 1995). In the social sciences, the interpretive perspective can actually suggest to us that we should treat our conception of organizational reality as being a useful fiction that we use to guide our understanding of activities and events. Inquiry may then be well served by (re)presenting texts deliberately as fictional rather than attempts to represent undistorted ‘facts’. In this way the binary opposition between fiction as a falsehood and non-fiction as a true story can be broken and research can imply that it is not possible to distinguish clearly between the textual representation of ‘reality’ and that of ‘other worlds’ and that fact and fiction are mutually constitutive (Gough 1994). ‘Writing up qualitative research as fiction frees the author from the constraints of science’ (Richardson 1994: 521) such that a fictional story can be written about a particular group being studied but can also be written as a product of the writer’s imagination in a way that is intended to tell a good story. By writing such a fiction as a result of and as a (re)presentation of empirical research the ‘ethnographic setting encases the story, the cultural norms are seen through the characters, but the work is understood as fiction’ (Richardson 1996: 521). Adding fictional writing to organizational analysis provides new ways to think and talk about organizations and allows room for doubt, uncertainty, contradiction and paradox (Phillips 1995). Fiction enables the forging of new relationships between ideas and experience, the testing out of new ideas and the exploration into the values on which practice is based; it allows the researcher to draw on thoughts and feelings which are not readily accessible to standard forms of research (Rowland, Rowland and Winter 1990). Fictional writing can also merge elements which may be inconvenient to ethnographic representations of ‘reality’ and may offer greater potential to question the discourses of the social (Fox 1995). The process I used in this research was designed to use narrative fiction as an alternative (re)presentation of research findings. In doing so, I wove the multiple accounts of different people’s organizational experience together into a fictional story of organizational life. This creative narrative becomes a composite of stories gathered from research participants that is used to illustrate important interpretations of organizational life (Brown and Kreps 1993). This story, which appears in Chapter seven, stands in intertextual contrast to alternative (re)presentations. Further, my use of such a fiction is based on the opening up of a narrative possibility that can create a dialogue between different conceptions of a particular organizational reality. The use of fiction allowed my research to ‘work’ because of its use of standard and expected formats of writing. This mode of expression is not based on an assumption of direct correspondence with any actual events but rather



Writing the heteroglossic organization

it is based on its use of particular narrative techniques that are common to writer and reader. As Silverman and Torode (1980: 276) explain: Fictions are possible and narrations can begin because we already know what to expect. Writer and reader have evidently ‘rehearsed several times’. Each ‘knows his [sic] part by heart’. Like ‘some properly lubricated machinery’, the codes of narration stand ready to be used, the imperceptible grounds of the fiction.

In this sense the act of fictional narration creates new possibilities as the narrative character of the fiction confuses fact and fiction and provided me with the opportunity to say things that would be unsayable in other formats. Chapter seven presents this research in the format of a short story in order to try to say some of these things. In crafting this short story, I used aspects of the characters, themes, stories, narrative and setting to write a text ‘about’ World Services. In producing this account of the research, various elements of the interviews were used to contribute to the fiction. As a result, the short story is both ‘about’ World Services as well as being fictional. In doing so it presents one take on how World Services could be written. In conclusion to the first part of the book, the methodology used in this research consists of producing a series of (re)presentations that demonstrate the notion of the heteroglossic organization. This is done by constructing and documenting a number of different generic (re)presentations of a particular change project in one organization. This construction is based on the perspectives of different people in the organization and has resulted in the different (re)presentations of the research presented in Chapters four, five, six and seven. The effects of these different perspectives and different constructions will then enable a discussion of how the (re)presentations both address and constitute the tension of (re)presentation and control in research writing.

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Part 2

(Re)presentations



Chapter 4

World Services An official story

This short chapter serves as an introduction to Chapters five, six and seven, by providing a re-narration of an ‘official’ story of quality at World Services. As discussed in Chapter three, this official story is based on a description of a corporate video where the company’s chief executive was presenting the quality program at a business planning meeting attended by management representatives from the company’s offices around the world. First, this account is designed to provide a contextual perspective of the program under study by describing how the person at the ‘top’ of the organization presented it. Second, this account provides a literary device to link together the (re)presentations appearing in Chapters five, six and seven. In each of those chapters this official story is engaged with and written about in different ways. This chapter is therefore intended to provide both an organizational context for the other stories and to serve as a motif which runs through the different (re)presentations of quality at World Services. Before commencing on this (re)presentation, it is worth noting that although the description is ‘thin’, I have not attempted to remove my own position or interpretation from the text of its narration. In choosing to include this (re)presentation, I am implicated in it and therefore have opted to (re)present it as ‘my version’ rather than obscuring myself by presenting it as a series of quotations. The result is that in re-narrating this video I am writing in a way designed to accept my intervention in it by taking on the writing position of an observer and commentator.

Jack Richards’ quality story The box of the video states its title on a strip of white paper decorated with a blue triangle: ‘World Services Strategy Conference 1997: Jack Richards on Quality’. This message is repeated on the front and side of the box as well as on the front of the cassette itself. As the tape starts rolling, electronic music provides an introductory soundtrack, as an image of a globe suspended on a black background rotates in the top left of the screen. At the bottom of the screen the names of some of the more than

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ninety countries where World Services operates roll by. Meanwhile the title flashes on to the screen: ‘The Next Stage: Performance Quality’. At the bottom, the title of the video segment about to be shown appears: ‘Jack Richards: Opening Comments’. No comment is made about what he is opening but suddenly he appears standing behind a dark blue podium marked on the front with the company logo and with a black fluffy microphone sticking out of it. He wears a black suit, which blends him into the stark black of the background. His white buttoned down collar shirt is fastened up with a dark tie peppered with a subtle design. His right arm moves up and down as he starts talking: ‘the principal theme of this conference is …’. It now becomes obvious that Jack Richards is opening a conference. His voice is slow, he has an American accent that is perhaps a tone deeper than average. His words emerge in a monotonic drawl that matches the sombre atmosphere and the curtailed nature of his gesticulations. He describes how the conference is intended to add quality as a major category through which the company will measure its performance. He states that quality problems are in fact the foundation of many of the company’s performance problems. When he talks about this, he refers to ‘our performance problems’. He suggests that we are part of an industry that has trained our customers to expect poor quality such that we don’t notice it. He counters this by stating that customer attrition rates at present mean that the organization can no longer get away with offering such poor quality service. He states that ‘customers vote with their feet and it costs us money to replace them’. He quotes quality surveys that suggest that the customer’s perception of the quality of the company’s services are much lower that we would expect. As he talks, the shot switches to the audience. They sit in rows behind long desks; some are looking forward, presumably at Jack, others look around or fidget. One person is slouched in the comfortable looking chairs they all occupy, and another pours water from the blue bottles that have been placed on the desks in front of each of the seats. Jack reiterates that we believe that quality needs to be built in as a leading indicator of business performance. He also says that as well as being an indicator, quality must be seen as an ‘embedded value’ in the organization. The next segment of the speech starts to relate quality to other areas of business performance. First, he suggests that quality is related to strategic cost management because quality problems are embedded in some of our processes and delivery systems which relates to the ‘stickiness’ of the cost structure. He explains that we need to understand quality both in terms of how it relates to the experience of the company’s customers as well as how it is built into the company’s processes and products and how this then becomes a cost and product development issue. He goes on to say that we believe that quality needs to be also built in to the people and the human resource side of the business. His explanation of this is that you can speak both of the quality of people themselves as well as speaking of how we cannot

World Services: An official story

deliver quality service unless the people who make up the corporation are skilled and empowered to provide quality service from a customer’s point of view. For the first time he uses the first person singular when he says ‘I certainly don’t claim to be the world’s expert on quality…’. He goes on to say that he knows that we collectively do, however, need to become a lot more competent and that we need to do this together. As he says this, the camera fades out. The music starts playing again and a title screen appears announcing the next segment as ‘Jack Richards: Questions and Answers’. On the screen appears the head and shoulders of Jack, sitting, almost slouched, in a chair, wearing an open neck shirt; his sleeves are rolled up and he is holding a metallic microphone in his hand. No actual question is heard, but he is saying that ‘this is a way of life’. It turns out that this means running the company for performance and constantly focusing on a defined set of business directions, embedding quality in to the people dimension, the business dimension and the strategic cost dimension and empowering our people so that they can do something about delivering quality — all this has also to become a way of life. The camera again focuses on the audience; it’s the same conference and all seats are full as people look on with what appear to be varying levels of interest. In contrast to the segment he appeared in earlier, Jack starts making a series of personal statements. Using the first person exclusively, he says that he is looking to see us move to new territory in terms of consistently delivering quality to customers all over the world every time they deal with the organization. He says that achieving quality is a matter of behavioural modification, a different vision of the business and a commitment to delivering a product that customers sense and feel as quality. He compares the need for this commitment to the existing commitment to delivering earnings per share or other such ratings. He believes that this will become a way of doing business that is permanent by expanding the definition of what constitutes acceptable business performance. He says that this is a ‘spiritual issue, not a mechanistic or a measurement issue’. Jack suggests that quality is a question of expanding our deeply held belief as to what constitutes appropriate business performance. Once more the electronic music fades in and another title fills the screen with the words ‘Jack Richards: Closing Comments’. He is standing behind the podium emblazoned with the company’s logo and is wearing a pair of half cut reading glasses on the end of his nose. He starts by stating that he wants to repeat some of the themes from the beginning. Firstly, he names the theme of continuity where, over the next two years, we need to create a transformation of the company by getting fully engaged in the business directions and the promise of performance that we have made to ourselves and to the external world. He defines being fully engaged as having embedded momentum in business activities that is solidly based on sustained performance beyond the short term. He says that he believes that ‘we

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have all said to ourselves during this conference’ that the challenge is a cultural one and a managerial one; one that requires all of us in this room to learn to work in ways that are different, towards objectives that are different, in order to produce this transformation. He states that this conference is what we are trying to get going here. The camera focuses in on a member of the audience who is looking pensively at the stage as he balances his glasses in his hand with the end of one of the sides in his mouth. Jack suggests that until recently the company did not even have the word ‘quality’ in its vocabulary, but that now they understand the central role that quality will play in our promise to the customer. He states that he believes that quality is not related to ‘financials’, but rather is related to the promise and the dynamic of that promise to the customer and that he looks at quality as error rates which relate to things going wrong vis-a-vis the customer. He says that he knows that we have a lot of errors, and that currently the customer also knows this. To accomplish the transformation he says that we need to get to work on what we need to accomplish in terms of the leading indicators. He makes the commitment that we will build quality into what constitutes normal performance rather than just as a new thing to work on. He says that our business requires it and that there is enough data to tell us that if we want the kind of business success that is required to be the best we must function in a work environment free from errors, and that if we do not do that, we will not get the kind of business success that we aspire to. This means, he says, that quality is a business requirement and not an extra; it is embodied in the commitment we make as business, and that we need to internalise that. He repeats that his commitment is not there because he thinks that it is a great thing to do, but that it is a business requirement of our business aspirations. He says that the choice is either to back down on the business aspirations, or to embrace this challenge. Rhetorically contradicting himself, he says that he does not think that we have a choice because we are not going to back down on our business aspirations and therefore we are going to have to embrace this challenge. He claims that this is a great opportunity for us to do this in a way that is superior to what other people in the market have done. He wraps up by stating that over the next three years we will be trying to make a fundamental transformation to the nature and the management of the company. This transformation, he says, will mean that we will have, by that time, solidly based established momentum against our business direction objectives so that our claim on our customers is in a class of its own. He predicts that we will be seen as the standard against which others are measured, just like if you have to sell soft drinks you have to contend with Coca-Cola because they have established the standard. He says that we are going to have to establish ourselves in that space and be global in our business. He says that we have to be the standard in the minds of our



World Services: An official story

customer, not in our minds. He suggests that it is easy to say ‘what’s Jack doing?’, or ‘why doesn’t the leadership do something different?’, but we know that the quality is not right and we’ve got to get that right and that was the theme of the conference. As Jack’s image fades out, the rotating globe re-appears in the top left of the screen and the electronic music fades back in. The words ‘The next stage: Performance Quality’ flash back on to the screen and then fade to black as the video is finished.

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Chapter 5

World Services Three autobiographical (re)presentations

Introduction As described in chapter three, this research project involved interviewing three managers from the World Services company and working with them to develop autobiographical accounts of their experience with the quality management program being implemented in that organization. The accounts developed with these three people, who have adopted the names Claudia Debussy, Joanne Wilson and David Uck, are presented sequentially in this chapter. In providing these three accounts of the quality program, it is important to note that they are not intended to be taken as the ‘data’ of the project. Although the accounts are based on the empirical research conducted, each one is offered here as re-narration of the research participants’ interpretation of the quality program at World Services, rather than being positioned as the representations of direct experience in a realist sense. The descriptive and autobiographical format that they appear in is a choice of genre through which to (re)present that program as a piece of research. In using this genre, my position as the author changes from that of the observer and commentator of the previous Chapter, to that of ‘ghostwriter’ as I adopt the I of each of the research participants.

Claudia Debussy’s story A colleague of mine who works for World Services overseas was recently telling me about an international quality conference that he went to. This was a very important global meeting held in the U. S. and attended by all of the quality directors from each of World Services’ businesses around the world. About two hundred people in total attended. The conference was opened by Jack Richards, the chairman; he started the meeting by giving them a rah, rah session designed to engender some enthusiasm and excitement. The way it was retold to me, it sounded like an AMWAY sales meeting — there was a lot of fist thrusting in the air, and backslapping, and yahooing going on. I’m told that the message he was giving went

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something like this: ‘the people in this room, at this meeting, are the most important people in the company. There is nothing else that matters as much to this business as the people in this room. Now I know you don’t believe it, I know your managers don’t believe it, and I know the business doesn’t believe it, but believe me, I believe it. You are the most important people. The reason why you are so important is because you are going to deliver quality, and quality is our future da da da da da da da’. My colleague, who was there, was going through all sorts of somersaults in his own thinking. He told me that he was saying to himself ‘why doesn’t he know that this is not the way that quality gets delivered?’ ‘How can two hundred people deliver quality to 100,000 people?’ His concern, and I believe he was mumbling and attracting some attention, was that it’s not nominated quality people who deliver quality; it’s the business delivers quality, it’s the management team, its the constructs that sit around quality, it’s all the things that happen to the customer, it’s what happens to teams. It’s all sort of things, but it’s not just two hundred people. When I was told about this, I felt that that the person at the very top of the organization was just doing a bit of box ticking; like saying: ‘Done quality. Found the two hundred people. Phew! Done that.’ It was as if this whole thing was just another tick against an external profile he was developing for darlings of the New York stock market. They’ll say ‘World Services’ going down the quality path. Thank God they finally understood that’. I have a sense that yet again World Services is using a short-term approach to what quality specialists know is a very long-term process. The very premise of quality is the long term; it knows the end in sight and it knows the journey that you have to travel to get there, but you’ve got to stick with it for a long time. What I’m interpreting at World Services is that quality is being seen in terms of identifying some immediate values that can be quickly changed. I think that they call this ‘low hanging fruit’. Picking a few low hanging fruit and doing a bit of box ticking — that’s quality at World Services! This is World Services’ view; the question for me now though is about how this will emerge in World Services here in Australia. I actually know and trust the people who are going to deal with quality here and, because of that, I think we’ll get the best of quality. But there are hundreds and hundreds of interpretations of quality and I don’t think that the one that’s communicated from the U. S. is the one that we need. When quality first hit the Japanese business community they had some very clear objectives; it was about getting high quality products to the market in rapid time through customer analysis and process change. In the main, I think that the Japanese met their quality imperative — they did deliver in rapid time and they have done outstanding things in terms of management structure, building teams and employee empowerment and all that kind of stuff. But I think that they

World Services: Three autobiographical (re)presentations

were able to do it because they have significantly different cultural norms that made things that much easier to implement. You have difficulty with this in more challenging cultures like ours. The Japanese interpreted quality in a unique cultural way that produced some impressive business results. But I don’t think that we’ve had the same success in Western organizations. There’s no doubt that the quality journey has been started very successfully by a number of organizations, and they would be able to point at very different business results because of it, but its nothing like what we saw in Japan. I think that from the moment quality arrived in the West and got interpreted by the consultants, who saw it as a business opportunity for themselves, there have been so many variations of the theme, so many different ways in which our cultural interpretation has resulted in aberrations and differences. World Services mirrors those organizations that are going to continue to have difficulty in implementing quality, because some of the basic organizational cultural values are at odds with the quality values. Quality looks to build in processes based on internal and external customer data, so it assumes that you’re going to go out and do a lot of research in order to understand what it is you are going to do differently. We’re at odds with this very first step you take with quality, which is about researching, thinking, analysing and taking time to work out what quality is. As an organization, we’re so fast paced, so agile, we so highly prize speed and quick-footedness, that we haven’t learned to value analysis. That’s my interpretation of what I see at World Services. There will be other parts of the business that will say that that’s not true, but from what I observe, I see a lot of quick-footed, agile behaviour. On the one hand this is quite impressive — these are qualities that you would not want to change in an organization, but you need to add in some capacity to have the moments of quietesce for thinking and analysis so that you can build a base on which quality can move forward. So, from the very first stage of quality, we’re in trouble and my experience is that we’re not going to slow down the organization in order to do the quality thinking. The long term is critical, from understanding what the customer is, and then working out what the end in sight is, and then mapping out the way to get there, requires a huge investment of resources — time, money and people — and we don’t like dedicating resources for long term projects. So even if we did gather the data, even if we did analyse it and understand it, would we be prepared for the five years it might take to go through the process of continuous improvement — slow steps in improving, slow steps in building constructive teams, integrating suppliers and internal teams and external customers, understanding how all of these work, taking the time to pace people and integrate all of these things, watching it, acting, planning, thinking about it and then going back to do it again? Are we an organization that would see that as a fundamental step in moving toward

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a quality environment rather than seeing it as a luxury? I don’t think that we are. I don’t think that we ‘get it’ in that sense. I think that our interpretation of quality is based on the dog-eared book on quality that talks about improving productivity in a factory rather than on how to improve a service profile for a service organization. I don’t think that we get that. In my own work, I’ve been involved in devising and implementing a performance management system here in Australia. This is one of the ways that we have tried to implement some of the ‘quality’ thinking through the way we measure performance and how this leads to employee satisfaction. The performance management that we started implementing two years ago had a lot of quality understanding in it. It came from the notion that learning is critical and that you have to provide the right time and level of learning in order for things to improve. Without that you’ll never get on to the cycle of continuous improvement. One of the things that you have to measure is how much time you give people to learn. So learning became a key focus of our performance management system. This system has been successful in small parts of the business, but many other areas did not get the point. Now, two years after we started with our own performance management, we are having a new system imposed on us by our head office in New York — that system is essentially only about rating people at the end of an annual performance cycle. It’s got a few bits of trickery in it to dress it up, but really what it’s aiming at is for people to get a number at the end of the year. A number that presumably you can use to base a whole range of decisions about salary increases, bonuses and variable pay, and about promotion and potential. So, here we are in 1998 on the very doorstep of quality, and a global performance management system is being rolled out that came straight out of the 1970s. There’s a few bits of dressing up around it — they put ‘people’ as the number one category of performance, whoopee-doo! Its trickery, it’s superficial and in many respects it’s faintly offensive. But most people won’t be offended by it, they’ll just do it because they don’t have time to think about it. Performance management is one area where I have been most disappointed in my time in this company. There was an opportunity to snatch victory from the very jaws of defeat and we’ve just tumbled back into some dog-tired thinking. We started on this path two years ago with what I thought were some good basic ingredients and now we’re in a situation where we’re about to roll out the global system that has ignored all of the good work we’ve done. I feel fairly grim about the prospects of performance management. I see it as a personal failure that I haven’t been able to convince more people to use our Australian performance management system as a start towards the quality journey. There are in fact some parts of the business that are really working with it very well and some which are modelling almost best practice, but it’s not widespread.

World Services: Three autobiographical (re)presentations

The forces of corporate values will make managers adopt the new system, because they won’t want to step outside of the normal expectations. These values are driven through a very dominating hierarchy. They come from the very apex of the organization. There are good thinkers who are working in this organization and trying to implement change, but they get frustrated with banging their heads against that apex which essentially doesn’t want to change. As I heard a very senior person say recently, this organization breeds nervous people and it is this nervousness that has led to compliance. People learn from fear. It’s like in the armed forces where you learn that it’s best to salute when you’re told to because the repercussions of not saluting are so great. People can lose their careers, they can drop off the gravy train; so compliance with the hierarchy is the way to go if you want to get ahead. And if you do end up getting ahead, it can lead to some financial returns that are extremely attractive. When people climb into the corporate jet the very values that they once challenged seduce them. The company has not caught on to why this is an unhealthy form of organizational life. World Services draws all of its confirmation internally and keeps reinforcing its own view of the world. This internal focus precludes looking at what we should be doing differently. Now, quality is being rolled out so aggressively that they collect two hundred people together in a hotel in the U.S. and have the chairman tell them how important they are so that he can tell everyone else that he’s done quality. But the values aren’t there, we need less scared people and more constructive team building; the environment needs to be de-politicised so that it can create a future for people. At the moment I see a lot of disappointed people. The number of people making a genuine contribution to a better corporate environment is minuscule. People get rewarded for playing the political game and being politically smart. We’re not an intelligent company and we don’t value intelligence. We value the smarty-pants, the smarmy public speaker who delivers politically astute presentations. The leadership that is valued here is male, white, six-foot and articulate. This results in individual players and not team builders, people who keep the spotlight on themselves, political animals who would never turn the spotlight around to acknowledge someone else’s work. Maybe quality is an excruciatingly long journey for World Services, maybe it will take ten or fifteen years. But without preparing the groundwork for change I feel quite despondent about it. Jack Richards is a masterful politician and the people underneath him are trying to mimic his behaviours.

Joanne Wilson’s story The first time I heard about the quality program was about a year ago. I attended a presentation where I and a group of other middle managers were being told that

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this program was being introduced by our head office in the U. S. The person who gave the presentation was from here in Australia, and she did not really have a lot of information at that time. What she did do, though, is take us through some of the basic statistical models and some of the reasons why we had decided to implement this program. My perception of the intention of the program was that the company now had decided that there was some value in this thing called quality, as opposed to the traditional focus on just quantity and financial results. You see we’ve always focused on management results and numbers; maybe we wanted quality, or at least we felt that we’d better say we did, but we’d never really seemed to do anything about it. This presentation seemed to be saying that Jack Richards, the chairman of the company, had decided that we were now going to really do quality, that we had to have quality and that we have to get the staff to do quality work. I was getting more and more upset the more I listened to this. It was like these people had got hold of this new invention called quality, that no one else in the company was aware of it; as if we didn’t have quality lives, that we didn’t do anything with quality, and that this was going to be the first time we would have heard about it. My frustration was that I’d been listening to a lot of people in the company saying that they were angry and frustrated about trying to do a good job but management would just not let them — they didn’t get the technology, the training or the time to do a quality job. It sometimes feels that we’re trying to do our jobs with one hand tied behind our backs and then in this presentation they had the nerve to say that we weren’t doing a quality job and that they were going to show us how to do it. In particular I felt very, very reluctant at the prospect of having to pass on these ideas to the staff. I thought that people would find it insulting. After all that the company had done to prevent people from doing a good job, how could I now present that management now think that their new idea is going to solve the problem of people’s low quality work? It had no substance. It was just saying that now the company has told them about quality they’d better get out there and do it. There was no mention of how any help or support would be given. I know that this presentation was only an introduction, but it was condescending and I eventually left, planning to refuse to get involved if anyone asked me to be one of the people who would be involved in delivering this stuff. About a month or so later I was asked to go and see a video with Jack Richards talking at a conference about the quality program. I sat there listening to Jack Richards; he was talking as if he had invented and developed the whole idea of quality. He was just saying — ‘we will now have quality’. Again I was thinking about all of the times I’d tried to do quality work and I’d been actively prevented from doing it by senior managers who just wanted me to get the work done and finished with quickly. Sometimes it actually upsets me that I’m doing work to a

World Services: Three autobiographical (re)presentations

lesser standard than I’d like to, not by choice, but the company forces me into doing it — and now they were telling me to do quality. Quite a few people attended that video presentation, but again it was just information and nothing more than people just talking about it. At some stage I guess we’re supposed to start on quality, but it’s twelve months down the track since I first heard of it and nothing seems to be being actively done other than being told that we’re all going to be going on quality training. I’ll be very interested to see how they intend to teach us how to do a quality job. I feel that I already know how to do a good job, it’s more a question of whether I’m allowed to do it. Quality takes time, it takes money, and in the end I’m sure that it would be worth it, but this company has never before taken the final step of allowing people to do it. For example, we haven’t trained people properly to be able to do a quality job. You usually learn new things from a person who is about to leave the company; they’re not interested in teaching you anything and then three to four months down the track you find that you haven’t been doing some important task. You can say that ‘nobody ever told me that’, but for four months you’ve been doing a substandard job. You feel awful and you get blamed for something that you couldn’t be expected to be responsible for. This company has never concentrated on passing on knowledge, experience and information from person to person. If you start a new job you may get one day to get some papers and a few bits and pieces but you never get any real training or support. You don’t even know if the person before you knew how to do it properly. I don’t understand how we can expect people to do a quality job when we don’t even know what quality is. The way we learn is to use the informal network; talking to people who have been here for a long time is the best way to find out how to do things. That’s the best way to do a quality job. If you ask a team leader or a manager, often they have no idea. A quality job is about knowing what to do and doing it competently, but we don’t even know what criteria to judge our work against. I know my version of quality in my personal life but that’s because I understand what quality is and I’m able to influence it. In this company, I honestly don’t know what quality is and, unless we can define it, I don’t think we’ll ever get any quality work or a quality attitude. I’m very interested in how they’re going to roll out this program and what it’s going to provide. I wonder if I’m going to get annoyed if they put it across that management and staff are just not doing the right thing or whether they will accept that we’ve just not been provided with the tools to do a quality job. The way I feel now is that they blame us for the lack of quality and that they think that they can solve the problems for us. It’s put across as if they are going to help us do quality because we currently aren’t doing it. The way I look at it is to say: ‘why aren’t people doing a quality job?’ If we have to work at a rate where we can’t make sure

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that what’s being done is right then the work standard is impinging on our ability to do quality work. People have to be given the opportunity to do a quality job, but right now we’re not being given that opportunity. I’ll give you an example. I worked on a corporate research project a couple of months ago and I bombed out completely. I’ve taken quite a few months to live with that. This was a project being sponsored by our head office in New York, but this was the first time it had been introduced in Australia. My part involved me in a series of presentations to staff as well as conducting some interviews and focus groups. It was a very formal project and it even included a written evaluation report on each of us who had participated. The evaluation report on me was not good and although that was the same for a number of other people who worked on it, what made it worse was that I came out the lowest of all of the people who were involved. I had a really difficult time accepting that, and I don’t want to make excuses but a lot of the reason for this was outside of my control. I had only had the opportunity to review the program once before I had to deliver it myself, and the material had been written overseas so it didn’t really fit in to the context of the company here in Australia. When I agreed to work on this there weren’t any meetings or discussions about how we were going to do it, we were just told to get on with it. My work on this project went for two weeks, and some of the people who had a lot of experience on similar projects had come over from the U. S. office to help us run it. Because of their experience, I organized to meet with one of them the day before my work was to begin to go through the material I had to work with. He never turned up to the meeting. He apologised when I finally saw him the next morning, but he had a full schedule so he could only spend about ten minutes with me to discuss my material. It was terrible, I was totally uncomfortable and I didn’t understand all of the information that I needed in order to do a good job. What made it worse was that a lot of the terminology was American but no one would listen to me or help me when I told them that it wouldn’t work. In the end, the evaluation results were low, even though I’d tried to do a quality job, but I could not get any help or support. The quality of work was judged as being not good on that occasion, but I asked myself time and time again whether I was responsible for that or whether it was the company that was responsible. In the end, all my management were worried about was whether our performance would make them look bad internationally. This is a prime example of where the quality of my work was low for reasons I couldn’t control, but if anyone else looks at it all they will see is that I didn’t do a very good job. Quality has got to be about preventing this sort of thing from happening to people. Another thing I find quite interesting is our focus on management information systems and reporting. In real life, a lot of our reporting is a bit like creative accounting. A lot of figures seem to get changed by every level of management,

World Services: Three autobiographical (re)presentations

which handles them. Each manager changes things around to take out the bits that don’t look favourable. When the final reports come out, a lot of people who actually are involved in the work laugh at this as if it was some sort of joke. What gets reported at the end makes things look good but in reality they’re not. We just give our management what they want to see, they go away happy and we’ve got them off our back. But this isn’t quality and it’s an irritating waste of time — the falsification and guesstimation is meaningless. At some point we’re going to have to try to do things right, not just doing what it takes to comply with someone else. As a company, we don’t deal with people honestly when talking to them about their work and we don’t let people take responsibility for what they’re doing. We don’t offer them any support, management just takes the responsibility away. The company is just not honest enough with people and in the mean time people get frustrated and the quality suffers. This is my concern with the quality training that is going to be done; are we just going to deliver this to groups of fifty or more or are we going to really try to deal with people individually and on their own terms? If the trainers are just going to stand up there and tell us what to do then I’m not interested in listening. I don’t need to be told to do a better job. It’s like on that research project — I put myself through hell because the quality of my work was down, and I’ll work to make sure that that never happens again, but what I need to know is what tangible help and support can I get. I know that a lot of people leave this organization because they feel that they can’t keep working here the way things are. People aren’t allowed to get their jobs done, the company actively hinders them from it and it frustrates people. People are pulling their hair out trying to get things done and you can see the stress and the strain in their faces. The company keeps doing this to people; we just don’t let people do a good job. I don’t mean to say that we can’t learn anything, its just that its got to be from ordinary everyday people doing their work being asked what they need to do a good job. Even if we take away the word quality, a ‘good job’ is what we’re talking about. In terms of how we go about doing things we haven’t made much progress since I’ve been in the company. The short time frames and last minute priorities always take over from the good things that have been planned. Top management decisions seem to be made at a different level from where the work is getting done. In the end, it’s individual people who can make a difference. Take my current boss, he’s an example of someone who does a quality job, but the company really tries his integrity. Although we get on well, I know that its not about whether he likes me or dislikes me, it’s just that he does things to help me and we can openly discuss things. This is a real opportunity for learning for me. A lot of people don’t take the time to help in this way, but I can see the quality in his work and how it positively influences what I’m trying to do. It’s not just about doing what I’m told, its about

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working together and taking time to do things right. This is tangible, he tells you what he’s doing and you can see him doing it. In the end though I’m cautious about how this company is going to approach quality. This terminology of buy-in and commitment, it’s just words. It’s got to be more that just saying ‘yes’ because you’re not allowed to say ‘no’. Quality has got to be more than just talk, it’s about how you deal with people and help them and coach them and teach them. We can’t just implement a program and expect everything to change in one go.

David Uck’s story The exact time escapes me, but about a year and a half ago, it became evident that the quality bug had bitten some of the senior people at the top of this global organization. Having been bitten, they decided that this was a very, very important initiative, and one that would allow us to fulfil our strategic destiny of rapid customer growth — a destiny that they had defined. The message they were sending was that delivering quality services would be a dominant theme in the way this company would grow and build its customer base. As a result of this idea, these top people started training themselves up. They also hired some other people, who had worked in quality type roles in other organizations, and put them into newly created senior quality jobs. In other words, we grunted up our level of intellectual capital in the quality arena. Here in Australia we already had a person who was our director of quality for the company, and he reported in to the most senior person in the country. That person’s skill set was reasonably consistent with the global quality initiatives that I was hearing about. Despite that, though, it’s only recently that we’ve really started to pick up quality here in Australia. A lot of this is because the previous quality director for the Asia-Pacific region was really an absolute lightweight. I’m sure that our quality director here in Australia, and others, were trying to influence him, but that took a significant amount of time, and the regional director has now been replaced. I know that it has been mandated globally that the whole company has got to do quality, but we’ve also been staving it off in order to deal with our own priorities. Basically at this stage it has had little impact, but there are things starting to happen; the question is whether they can survive in a changing organization. One of the impacts here is that we’ve been advised that it will be mandatory for everyone in the company to go to quality training of some sort and we have already trained up some internal trainers for that purpose. We’ve also trained a smaller number of people in some of the methodologies for working on performance improvement teams. Other things going on just now include changing the way that we measure our performance; we’re going to use a thing called six sigma, which I

World Services: Three autobiographical (re)presentations

was told just recently has something to do with defects per million opportunities — the jargon is DPMO. I’ve learned a lot more about the quality initiative just recently because, as part of my role as one of the business managers, I have been asked to sit in and observe what happens in a number of the training courses and process improvement sessions. My observation through this is that the primary effort is towards reducing these so called defects. My concern with the way it is being applied is that, rather than trying to understand the whole approach to quality, the senior management, on a global level, just apply the bits they like and ignore the rest. My fear is that it will be just used as a way to reduce staff numbers on the back of an ostensible reasoning that quality is improving. That’s always been my fear, that we’re just using quality to pursue the same old way of doing things without really making fundamental changes to the way we work. I know that we talk about quality here at World Services, but it seems very partial. Recently we formed a team of about twenty four people from all over the company in Australia. This team was charged with the task of reviewing the process through which we acquire new customers. This was a big project, with a trained facilitator to organize it and it was sponsored by our senior management. They ran two weeks of workshops where they reviewed the current process, and based on that review, developed a new one which they are now implementing. When I sat in as an observer to this session, I noticed that the customer was barely mentioned once. They looked at inefficiencies from an insideout perspective, but not from the perspective of the customer looking in. My fear is that we’re using this too narrowly. Another example relates to Deming’s principle that you need to drive out fear from the organization and primarily blame the system for errors rather than blaming the people. I’m not sure that our management culture here at World Services will allow us to do that. We’re too focussed on keeping staff numbers as low as possible and we’ll take any opportunity to rationalise our expenses in the short term. Another problem is that I’m not sure that our management will ever really allow themselves to manage to a methodology rather than just managing short term outputs. Take the head of our operations department. I just don’t see him as a manager who is going to coach teams to developing solutions for a quality result. We just won’t be true to the process and the outcome will be cynicism rather than a real embracing of quality. Some of the senior people in operations are, however, now admitting that a lot of their change efforts were just tampering rather than doing anything fundamental. They’ve also admitted that their tampering has solved a short-term need, but created more significant problems at other points in the process. So, some of the recent work on quality has been very instructive to people, but there is, as yet, no evidence that they will start doing things differently. I don’t

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think that World Services in Australia has any real notion of how to learn; it makes the same mistakes again and again, and it doesn’t do anything to value learning. There are pockets of the company, though, where there are people who really see the value of focussing on learning, but they’re not in the most senior positions. If you ran through the names of the top team here in Australia, you’ll find that each of them is very good at a particular technical discipline, but all of this stuff about quality and learning has just passed them by in their careers. So they just manage the way that they’ve always managed; we don’t have the mechanisms to learn, we just keep making the same mistakes. We rush things through to catch up numbers, and those of us who give warnings not to do it that way are seen as being negative and disruptive. All we’re saying is to still do it, but take some time to think about it. If we really had a quality approach, we wouldn’t try to do things so quickly — we’d just do it right — but we don’t and I’ve not seen that behaviour change in the three years that I’ve been in the company. World Services doesn’t normally attract the sort of people with a long term quality and change oriented outlook, and when it does, because someone has a brainwave that we need someone like that, then the person never stays for very long because they are driven out. My impression in that World Services has an eighteenmonth life cycle for these people. They spend the first six months bringing in whatever they have learned from the other organizations where they’ve worked and then they spend the next six months beating their heads up against a brick wall. At the end of that, depending on their tolerance for pain, they start to become numb to the system and start to ‘fit’ more, and therefore become ineffective in driving the change that they were brought in to do. When they realise this, they spend the next six months looking for a new job. We went through a cycle where a lot of good people were leaving after eighteen months. Why would they beat their heads against a wall forever when they can go to another company that might embrace their approach and their skills? At least that’s what the headhunters will tell them; the grass is always greener somewhere else. Myself, I have a fundamental belief that the best way to grow a business is to find out what the customer wants and to exceed that expectation. That may sound like a cliche, but at the end of the day, if you’re providing something for someone who will pay to buy it and you can deliver it consistently, then in our market place it would make you quite unique. So, I have always thought that there is an enormous opportunity to create a niche for a high level of focussed service. Because of this, if we can find a methodology that allows us to review and improve our processes, and to integrate them with the skills of our people, and with the technology we can put together, then we will really get somewhere. These are the three things that are fundamentally intertwined — process, technology and skill development. But it takes an investment of time and people to have a look at these



World Services: Three autobiographical (re)presentations

processes and then an investment of dollars and technology to implement them. I don’t think that we really have the appetite for this. We’re so busy being as lean and efficient as we can and this reduces our capacity for thinking time. We believe that we have to reduce staff numbers as much as we possibly can in order to control costs and remain competitive. This is a short term view, and anyone who understands quality knows that real efficiencies take a lot longer than a couple of weeks to emerge. The cause of this is the mismatch between responding to shareholder driven short-term imperatives and quality in the long term. Institutional shareholders move way from organizations that don’t create the right sort of trends every three months. Being able to invest in quality requires time and money that you don’t have the luxury of if you’re trying to appease the shareholder. In our case, we have an organization that says it has an overarching need for quality, but we still need to be accountable for short-term results. In the end, I think that quality will result in some improvements, but it won’t be the best it could possibly be because we’re not giving all we’ve got to it. Time will tell what happens, but, although quality has been in process of being implemented for quite some time, so far it has had zero impact on my job other than me being involved in some of the workshops and training sessions. It’s also had zero impact on my colleagues and the business managers who report to me. It has not yet changed anything we’re doing. The biggest opportunity to really make it work now is through the teams that are being put together to look at reviewing some of our key processes. Implemented well and with the right level of management commitment and understanding, the power of putting groups of people together and giving them genuine responsibility over changing a process is unbeatable as a way to improve morale, get an improved result and to get people to buy in to what is happening. It’s self evident that it’s a good thing to do. The danger though is that putting people into teams and only allowing them to do half of the job, or only allowing them to make recommendations rather than really make change, will have a reverse effect. It will drive out the innovators and the thinkers who want to participate. It will leave people who just come to work to park their brains. I don’t think that any organization can afford to be like that in the long term, but I don’t think a lot of our management would agree with me. The thing is that quality here at World Services is a program; we are programatically trying to change people. We’ll implement the program, and the principles of quality management will be brought in to a work force that haven’t got the time for it and that will only ever be half understood by the managers. We won’t have people’s hearts and minds. We just don’t give people the thinking time. In this company the job of management is never really about quality, it’s still always about fighting alligators in the swamp. But we will implement the program and we can’t give up until we try.

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Chapter 6

World Services An ethnographic (re)presentation

This chapter presents the research conducted at World Services in an ethnographic format. As described in Chapter three, this account of the research is based on an attempt to describe the learning culture of the organization as interpreted from the corporate video and interviews that form the empirical base of this research. In providing this (re)presentation, it must be noted that what follows in this chapter is not intended to be based on the official and autobiographical (re)representations that appeared in the two previous chapters. Instead it is another account of the research using a particular genre from ethnographic and interpretive approaches to the study of organizations. It is one generic version of the quality story at World Services. In using this genre, a different writing position is adopted; one in which I write as the I who observed and participated in the research, as well as being an I who is able to understand and theorise the learning what was taking place. The chapter starts by describing the background to the organization, the quality program and the participants of the study. Next an ‘official story’ of the program is described in terms of how it was discussed by Jack Richards, the company president, in a corporate video. This account of the program is then contrasted with the way that each of the three managers recounted their experience with the program. This is then built on by discussing the implications of these different accounts of the program in terms of learning at World Services.

An ethnographic (re)presentation Quality and learning at World Services World Services is a global organization whose head office is New York. It has been operating for over one hundred years. In that time World Services has expanded its operations from offering standard banking services in the United States to providing a full range of financial products to clients all over the world. World Services operates in over ninety countries and has more than 100,000 employees. In 1996, World Services’ top management decided to embark on a quality management program. The implementation of this program situates World

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Services in more general trends in organization and management where quality in general, and the Total Quality movement in particular, have dominated managerial thinking in the 1980s and 1990s. This approach to management has focused organizations on promoting continuous improvement and institutionalising the systematic challenging of taken for granted practices (Morgan 1997). This focus on improving the quality of both the processes and products of work is aimed at producing innovation, efficiency and responsiveness to change by ensuring that employees at all levels work to satisfy customers, monitor their work and seek continuous improvement (Watson 1995). The study here, however, is not a detailed examination of quality management, but rather it focuses on quality management as an example of a change intervention which is planned, organization wide, managed from the top and concerned with increasing effectiveness (Beech 1996). In this way, the implementation of quality management at World Services is taken to be an attempt by top management to stimulate change and learning throughout the organization. Based on this, what is presented here is a description of this program in terms of how it relates to the practice of learning at World Services. The concept of learning will be used to refer to two related aspects of planned organizational change. First, learning is understood in terms of how an organization develops and implements change programs and initiatives aimed at improving its overall learning potential. This is what I will refer to as ‘planned learning’. It is a learning that is embedded in organizational activities that aim to improve organizational performance through the exercise of improved learning capacity. The second facet of learning is what I will refer to as ‘interpreted learning’. Such learning relates to how those people to whom planned learning is targeted contextually interpret it. It is about how people understand change initiatives as reflecting real opportunities for learning from their own perspective. The nature of learning in relation to change programs is then a result of the interaction of planned learning and interpreted learning. From the perspective of the practice of organizational life, a learning culture is created which stems from this interaction; it results from the way that people interpret and create understandings of the intentions and practices of the organization in which they work (Rhodes 1997). Planned learning relates to the achievements of programmatic goals where learning is seen as an improvement of organizational practice resulting from changed management practices. This suggests that learning occurs when it results in an improved way of managing. This planned learning approach, however, is only half of the picture. In order for change efforts to result in learning, they must be interpreted as being learning. Indeed, organizationally, what one person sees as learning may well be seen by another as a form of deterioration. Learning can only exist when activities designed to create learning outcomes are imputed by organiz-

World Services: An ethnographic (re)presentation

ational members as having achieved those outcomes. To examine learning, then, means to develop an understanding of the extent to which managerial attempts to develop learning capacities in an organization are interpreted by other members of the organization as constituting learning from their point of view. The dichotomy this creates is one where the implementation of change programs can privilege planned learning such that interpretive learning is only valued when it reflects the plans. Notably, the binary concepts of planned and interpreted learning, although useful, are not stable. By planning learning, those people developing the plans (usually ‘management’) can work to privilege their own interpretations of both what needs to be learned and how it needs to be learned. A plan is thus a particular type of interpretation of what ‘should’ happen, but its status as a plan places it in a position that vies for authority. The plan then becomes an interpretation trying to achieve dominance over other interpretations. It is an exploration of this domination, in terms of learning at World Services, which will be examined in this ethnography. In conducting this examination, the concepts of planned and interpreted learning are used here in a heuristic sense — they are tools I am employing in a study of learning and change. They are not endemic either to World Services or to organizational learning; rather, I am using them to construct an understanding of the dynamics of the implementation of organizational change. In writing about organizational change and learning, it is therefore my intention to propose a particular mode of interpretation based on the concepts of planned and interpreted learning. In order to explore these forms of learning, what is included is a review of how three managers in World Services’ Australian office have understood the quality program and how they have related it to learning in their organization. This interpretation, while not claiming to describe the ‘whole’ of the organization’s culture, is designed to present the culture in terms of how these three middle managers have understood and made sense of the organization’s learning. The decision to implement this quality program was made by World Services in an attempt to rectify problems of customer service, customer retention and the quality of the processes that the company used to deliver its products to the market. The program is therefore an example of planned learning. It is an attempt to instil a learning mechanism into the organization so that it could develop new understandings of the way that it operates and to develop new and improved ways of doing business. At the time of researching, the quality program was in its inception. The decision to embark on the program had been made and the core elements of the program had been decided. In essence, the program had been conceptualised, the implementation had been planned, and the rollout of the program was about to start. The three managers who were interviewed were asked to discuss their own interpretation of the program, from what they knew of it, and to relate what it

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meant to them. What this resulted in was a description of how these managers interpreted and evaluated the organization’s attempt to implement a particular approach to learning. The information that was provided by these three managers is augmented by a description of the quality program from the company’s president, Jack Richards. This description is taken from a corporate video in which the president describes the program. This video is a key artefact in the implementation of the program as it was used as one of the main communication media to inform the company’s managers around the world of the organization’s planned quality program. As such it reflects the planned learning aspect of the program. In preface to discussing the learning planned and interpreted in this program, it is important to review the background to the four people whose explanations of the program were used in this study. The video that was reviewed contained a description of the program by Jack Richards. This description is taken here to represent the ‘official story’ of the quality program. Jack works at the very apex of the company’s hierarchy; he is the most senior manager in the organization. The way that he positions the quality program in the context of an official company video reflects the ‘company line’ on the program; it reflects the plans. The video in question was edited from presentations made to World Services’ top managers from around the world at a conference during which the quality program was being launched. The speeches and comments chosen to be included in the video were intended to represent the program to the entire organization. As noted earlier, in contrast to this ‘official story’, information about the program was gathered from three middle managers working in the Australian office of World Services. In a hierarchical sense, they are far removed from Jack Richards, with at least six or seven levels of management between Jack and them. These three people are named here as Claudia Debussy, Joanne Wilson and David Uck. Each of them participated in a series of interviews in which they described their interpretations and reflection on what the program meant to them. None of these people had ever met Jack Richards but each of them had seen the video and knew Jack in terms of his official position. The description that I will provide will examine how the four different stories about the learning program interact to produce an image of the learning culture at World Services. In particular the three narratives gained from the interviews will be compared with the official account of the program in order to contrast the planned and interpreted aspects of the management learning embedded in the quality program. These stories exist not just as the managers’ version ‘in their own words’, but rather they are also re-narrations of the official story which incorporate the individual and organizational experiences of each of the managers. Each of the people included in the study had their own story to tell, but these stories intersect around the common artefact of the program being reviewed. What results is a

World Services: An ethnographic (re)presentation

picture of the learning culture which both accounts for interpretive similarities and interpretive differences in the way that culture is narratively manifested.

The official quality story: planned learning Taking the video as a starting point, the official side of the quality program is clearly stated. In describing the quality program, Jack Richards positions quality as a key element of learning that the company needs to engage in order to achieve its goals for the future. Jack states that he is trying to move the company into a ‘new territory’ and that quality is a new ‘vision for the business’. In positioning this learning potential, Jack suggests that until recently ‘learning was not part of the company’s vocabulary’, but that now, quality needs to be built into ‘everything that the company does’. Jack’s vision for quality is premised on his assertion that ‘quality problems are the basis for [the company’s] performance problems’. He believes that without the change and learning that a commitment to quality will bring, the company’s business aspirations will not be reached. His commitment to quality is justified by the fact that customers are leaving the company and that this attrition is a result of poor quality in the company’s products and processes. He states that ‘customers vote with their feet and it costs us money to replace them’. For Jack, the learning and transformation that quality will achieve is a core part of the business strategy. Learning is positioned as a way to achieve business results by modifying organizational practices. In describing these practices, Jack suggests that the learning needs to result in a fundamental change to the way that the company is managed, such that World Services will become the standard against which other organizations in the market are compared. Jack describes quality as a competency that ‘the company needs to learn together’. He qualifies this learning by stating that quality needs to become as important to the company as more traditional measures such as earnings per share. In relating quality to business performance, he clearly relates quality as being an intrinsic component of business activities such as cost management, products, processes, customers and human resources. In summary, the story that Jack Richards tells about quality is a story about how the learning encapsulated in the quality program will be the cornerstone of business performance in the future. Further, it is about how this learning will be a fundamental change in the practice of the organization such that quality will be embraced by all as a way of doing work. His story embodies the planned learning of the quality program. Local quality stories: interpreted learning The response of the three people interviewed in this research to the organization’s decision to implement a quality program can only be described as sceptical. The

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quality story told by the three managers, rather than embracing the espoused intentions of the head of the company, are resistant stories that challenge the ideas proposed in the planned learning. This resistance is manifested in the different interpretation of learning that they offer. While Jack Richards tells a story of learning as being a transformation in business performance, the three managers tell stories of learning being imposed on them by an oppressive hierarchy that demands compliance with programmatic change. In contrast to this compliant learning they each tell stories of what is to them more authentic learning, and how such authentic learning is in opposition to the learning imperatives foisted on them by their organization. The following sections examine how this perception of learning is described in the stories of each of the three managers.

Claudia Debussy In describing the quality program at World Services, Claudia Debussy interprets the focus on change at World Services as being based on compliance rather than a true questioning and intelligent application of new ideas. She describes the corporate view of learning at World Services as being about doing what you are told to do. For Claudia, however, this is a ‘hollow learning’ where ‘compliance with the hierarchy is the way to go if you want to get ahead’. She says that, for managers, this sort of compliant learning is rewarded with attractive financial returns. Her concern is that this is a form of ‘anti-learning’ which reproduces existing views of the world and precludes looking at things differently. In interpreting her experience with the quality program, Claudia is suspicious about whether the company has what it takes to truly embrace quality. She is not critical of quality management as an abstract management practice, but rather is critical of how she perceives it will be interpreted and implemented at World Services. As she puts it ‘World Services mirrors those organizations that are going to continue to have difficulty in implementing quality, because some of the basic organizational cultural values are at odds with quality’. She believes that the company is very much focused on short-term results and that it does not ‘have what it takes’ to maintain a long-term focus on a rigorous approach to quality. This lack of authenticity is highlighted by Claudia’s insistence that the drive to quality is surrounded by hype, which, while saying that things must change, masks a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of the change that she believes is needed. She suggests that quality is about what everyone does, not just about inspiring a small number of quality professionals to impose quality on the organization. She feels that Jack Richards’ focus on quality is not motivated by making real change but by creating an image of the company that will be regarded positively by the company’s external stakeholders such as the stock market. Claudia’s reading of the quality program is one that sees beyond what is said in official forums, such as

World Services: An ethnographic (re)presentation

the conference where Jack Richards presented, and is one that resists a compliant reading of the rhetoric.

Joanne Wilson Joanne Wilson’s account of the quality program at World Services is one that perceives the intentions of management as being arrogant and demeaning. In reflecting on her experience of being introduced to the program, she states that ‘it was like these people [top management] had got hold of this new invention called quality, that no one else in the company was aware of it; as if we didn’t have quality lives, that we didn’t do anything with quality, and that this was going to be the first time we would have heard anything about it’. Joanne’s concern is based on her interpretation that the program is top management’s way of saying that the work done by people in the company is not of sufficient quality to meet the organization’s needs and that the implementation of this program will result in an improvement in that quality. Her view, however, is that the lack of quality is not due to the intentions of the people doing the work, but is more related to managers who stand in their way — the very managers who are promoting the quality program. She would agree with Jack Richards that quality is a problem in the organization but disagrees that it is a problem that a quality program can fix. The real problem, in Joanne’s experience, is that management get in the way and that quality is poor because of lack of infrastructure such as technology, training and adequate time to do a good job. For Joanne, the ‘quality’ spoken of by Jack Richards is quite different to what she conceives of as quality. Quality for Joanne is not about implementing business strategies and management methods, it is about having pride in her work. An added dimension for Joanne is that, as a middle manager, she is concerned that she will be asked to be one of the people who will have to pass on the message of quality to other staff in the organization. This creates a tension where as a manager she may be compelled to speak the company line on quality, whereas in fact she is not in agreement with the rhetoric. She is concerned that she will be coerced into being another one of the people ‘just talking about it [but not being] … allowed to do it’. Her experience working at World Services backs up her claims. She recounts situations where people have been asked to take on new responsibilities without any training and are subsequently blamed for not doing it to a certain standard. She talks about times where her management had not provided her with any support to conduct a research project sponsored by the New York Office. This project was subsequently evaluated and the rating that was done on her work was particularly low. The reasons for this poor performance were, however, beyond her control, yet at the same time her managers appeared to be more worried about how this might make them look and did nothing to focus on any development or rectification of the problem. This event was considerably worrying for Joanne, yet

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she said that the same managers who were promoting quality were actively participating in this sort of managerial practice. This type of behaviour, for Joanne, marks an example of learning where managers are more concerned with creating an appearance of performance than they are with making any real changes to their managerial practice. Learning on a local level is avoided in favour of creating an appearance of learning for those people higher up the hierarchy. For Joanne, change programs such as quality are of dubious learning value in terms of her personal learning experience. Her description of the program suggests that learning is available from the real experiences of everyday organizational life; as she puts it ‘I don’t mean to say that we can’t learn anything, it’s just that it’s got to be from ordinary everyday people doing their work being asked what they need to do a good job … in the end it’s individual people who can make a difference’. The conflict then is between the officially sanctioned accounts of learning and the local realities of day-to-day practice where learning is seen to occur.

David Uck David Uck’s story about learning is a story about how the official rhetoric of the program relates to his reality of managing the day-to-day business issues — what he describes as ‘fighting alligators in the swamp’. He is concerned that, despite the polished messages and prefabricated arguments that promote quality management, the organization lacks the long-term focus to make it work. He recognises that the most apparent changes that the program has initiated have been mandates by top management to engage in quality training, process improvement workshops and the implementation of performance measurement processes. Additionally, he recognises that new people have been employed to implement quality. In reflecting on these management practices, David’s concern is about whether quality marks a new (and as he sees it required) change to the way the organization is fundamentally managed, or whether it is just a new way of implementing existing managerial imperatives. In particular, his concern is about whether quality will just be used as a way to legitimate the downsizing and cost cutting that has characterised management at World Services for many years. David’s interpretation is that, while the theory behind the drive to quality is very attractive, there is no evidence that top management are willing or able to make it work in practice. He refers to this as a key ‘learning disability’ in World Services where the organization does not have any ‘real notion of how to learn; it makes the same mistakes again and again, and it doesn’t do anything to value learning’. This suggests that the planned learning is a rhetoric which does not embody any real questioning of management practice but rather just uses a different language to reproduce existing behaviour. Where David does see learning occurring is in specific localities of the company; localities not occupied by the most senior people. His observation is that at

World Services: An ethnographic (re)presentation

the senior level ‘they just manage the way that they’ve always managed; we don’t have the mechanisms to learn, we just keep making the same mistakes’. In this conception, a program like quality will be pushed through by managers who need to ensure that the performance results they achieve are looked on favourably by the managers they report to and, as a result, the changes will be superficial. He describes a situation where those people in the organization who do focus on learning are driven out of the company after they spend considerable time ‘beating their heads against a brick wall’. David characterises the company as having a short term, management-by-numbers focus that undermines a more long term, methodical approach to improving quality. Another key learning theme that David talks about relates to worker ‘empowerment’ in terms of the authority given to employees to make improvements to their own work practices. One of the ways that World Services is implementing quality is to create workplace teams to review and make changes to key business processes. He agrees that ‘the power of putting groups of people together and giving them genuine responsibility over changing a process is an unbeatable way to improve morale, get an improved result and to get people to buy in to whatever is happening’. In terms of the way learning and change are managed in the context of World Services, however, he is sceptical that people will not be allowed to do the full job, and that they will only be able to make recommendations to management rather than instigating and taking full responsibility for any real change. The effect of this, for David, will be the antithesis of learning as ‘it will drive out the innovators and the thinkers who want to participate. It will leave people who just come to work to park their brains’.

Issues for learning in organizations Common to the stories told by the three managers is a scepticism towards the espoused messages about the program; they are interpretations that resist the plan. Jack Richards tells the story of an organization on the brink of a new era, ready to embrace the challenges of the future and armed with the renewal that quality will bring. In contrast, the three managers do not seem so convinced that this new beginning is at hand. Claudia Debussy sees the program as hyped up propagandising designed to create an attractive superfice to be observed favourably by the stock market. Joanne Wilson’s story is one where top management’s view of quality, like other management practices at World Services, is out of touch with what is happening in the organization on the ‘shop floor’. For Joanne, quality is just another example of a long string of managerially imposed programs that have made little fundamental difference to the way that the company operates. For David Uck the quality program is failing to make any real change in organizational practice as power is retained at the top of the organization. Together, the stories told by these

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managers both engage with and resist the planned learning by interpreting learning in an oppositional way. A common theme about learning that emerges across these three resistance stories is concerned with the role of hierarchy in the implementation of change programs. As such, quality, as a planned learning program, is mediated through a dominating hierarchy that tries to refuse to take no for an answer. Such an approach to organizational change is one that privileges planned learning over interpreted learning and as a result fails to account for both the creative and disruptive capacities of interpreted learning. My contention, then, is that the organizational change being implemented at World Services is one that privileges managerial plans over local interpretations and therefore diminishes the learning capacity related to the change by marginalising and attempting to ignore the learning available through these local interpretations. In particular, the three issues that this presents for organizational learning relate to the way that different people in the organization address learning based on the context within which they interpret it, the personal experiences against which they compare it and the motives they read into it. Each of these issues is described below.

Context One of the key issues highlighted by this review of the quality program in World Services is the role that the interpretive context plays in the way that planned management learning initiatives will be understood by other members of the organization. In the case here, the official descriptions of the program recognised the context of the program in purely organizational terms — these terms were described as being both the internal processes and culture of the organization and the external market in which the organization operated. As such, learning is only seen as being relevant to the organization in and of itself. The managers who commented on the program interpret the program in quite a different manner. Each of them, in their own way, interpreted the learning possibilities not only in terms of the organization per se, but also in terms of their personal experience within the organization and their experiences outside of the organization. What this points to is that the interpretation of learning programs can never be controlled by those people who are managing them. The best-laid plans can always be disrupted by interpretations taken from other perspectives. Through the process of interpretation, people bring with them their own way of making sense of the program. These processes of sense making, however, are personal and even idiosyncratic and as a result unmanageable in the sense that the designers of the change program cannot control them. A learning culture results from interpretations that exist at the intersection of different people’s shared and unique experience. To suggest that learning is a singular, planned, phenomenon fails to account

World Services: An ethnographic (re)presentation

for the creativity that people bring to their understanding of their work. The stories of the managers contain a combination of re-narrations and interpretations of the quality program as espoused officially, but they are interwoven with the personal experiences based on their individual understandings of the organization. Each of the stories contains the common intertext of the program but the resulting narratives are individual in that they contain a network of stories unavailable to each other. Together with this, the managers interviewed also share an interpretation that seeks to resist the attempts at domination of the planned approaches. The result is a pluri-contextual form of learning that resists a single description. The process whereby each of the managers told their version of the quality program demonstrated a resistance to the official version of the story. Whereas Jack Richards tells the story of learning as a process of corporate renewal through the actions of company managers, the managers themselves bring other themes into the narrative; themes which resist the company line and which allow them to make their own sense of what is going on. These stories manifest the learning culture in a way in which learning is about making personal that which is shared. The result is a culture that is constituted by competing versions of reality and is multi-centred.

Experience Closely related to the notion of context, this study demonstrates how managers will interpret the learning possibilities of planned learning in light of their previous experience with other similar programs that they have been involved in. A new program is never a clean slate, but rather it is interpreted by people as another version of something that they have seen before. It is the way that people interpret their previous experiences that will bear a significant relationship with their interpretation of current ones. In looking at how each of the four people in this study describe the learning required to implement quality, one of the biggest differences relates to the personal experience that they use to relate their understanding of quality. Although each person is ostensibly talking about the same program, each of them understands it in terms of their own company experience. As a result, the understanding of quality comprises both shared and divergent elements. Claudia Debussy, for example, understands the company’s approach to quality by relating it to her own experience in implementing a performance management system. In this experience, Claudia was involved in designing and implementing new human resource management practices in the business in Australia. As she worked to build this program, her attempts were usurped by a new process that was mandated, worldwide, by the company’s New York Office. The result of this, and other similar experiences, is that Claudia sees global corporate development programs as steamrolling over local

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initiatives such that any learning that might be achieved on a local basis is suppressed in favour of programs sanctioned by the top of the organization. This results in organizational practice that is imposed by power and hierarchy, rather than one that accounts for or even acknowledges the specificities of local experience. It exemplifies how a failure to account for interpreted learning disrupts the attempts at planned learning.

Perceived motives When interpreting the value of organizational learning programs, people do not necessarily judge a program on its outwardly manifested merits. In this study, the managers who participated each approached their understanding of the program in terms of what they perceived to be the motives of the people implementing it. These motives, however, were never overtly stated in the way that information about the program was delivered to them. Instead, the learning culture is one of suspicion where the official story of planned learning was seen as a gloss over the more authentic motives that the organization had in implementing the program. For example, Claudia Debussy believed that, rather than learning outcomes, the program was designed to meet the organization’s public relations image. In particular, Claudia stated World Services’ engagement in this project would create a positive corporate image in the view of the New York Stock exchange. What she is suggesting here, is that rather than being motivated by a true desire to improve ‘quality’, the program was really designed to create an image that would be ‘appropriate’ to the shareholders of the organization. From another perspective, Joanne Wilson saw the quality program as a reflection of management arrogance. This is a situation in which top management suggests that the program that they have sanctioned will work to solve the problems faced by the rest of the organization, problems that they are unable to solve themselves. David Uck’s interpretation is that, in its implementation, the quality program will be motivated by a legitimisation of downsizing and cost-cutting and therefore will work to reproduce existing management practices by masking them in a new managerial vocabulary. Each of these interpretations is consistent with the experiences of these managers, although they each share a resistance to the planned learning motives espoused by Jack Richards. Learning at World Services The management learning culture at World Services is one where change is implemented through a dominating hierarchy which imposes change by attempting to suppress interpretation and critique — change based on a fear of saying no to senior management. As Claudia Debussy puts it, ‘you learn that it’s best to salute when you’re told to, because the repercussions of not saluting are so great’. In a similar



World Services: An ethnographic (re)presentation

vein, Joanne Wilson states that ‘It’s got to be more than just saying yes because you’re not allowed to say no … we can’t just implement a program and expect everything to change in one go’. The result is a learning culture where interpreted learning surreptitiously resists a dominating practice of planned learning. The learning culture at World Services, then, is one then one where conceptions of learning at different hierarchical positions in the organization are in conflict. Learning, as espoused by the company president, is an activity that all of the company’s employees must engage in in order to achieve the business results for the company. On a more local level, what is demonstrated is that this vision for learning does not account for the contextual experiences of the middle managers of the organization. Learning by mandate is resisted in favour of a learning that accounts for local and personal experience; experiences which are accounted for in the stories of the middle managers. The learning that results is neither the corporate transformation espoused from the top, nor the locally relevant learning hoped for by the middle managers. It is a learning that exists at the nexus of the different interpretations of the different people. It is a learning that emerges from the multicentred relations of power that exist in the organization. For organizational change programs, this stresses the need for planned learning to account for, accept and be open to the creative and disruptive possibilities of interpreted learning in a way that did not happen at World Services. It compels those who plan learning to avoid creating narrow and restrictive plans which cannot themselves change and learn from the power and potential of interpreted learning.

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Chapter 7

World Services A fictional (re)presentation

This chapter presents the research conducted at World Services in the format of a fictional short story. As described in Chapter three, this story aims to use conventions from fictional writing to construct an account of the research. While the story is fictional, it has employed parts of the characters, themes, and plots as described by the research participants. This (re)presentation is intended to offer a contrast to the autobiographical and ethnographic accounts provided in the previous chapters by suggesting that a non-realist genre can be used to (re)present organizational research albeit with potentially different effects. In doing so, the position from which the text is written changes such that the I who narrates the story is an explicitly fictional I who does not correspond directly either to the researcher or to any of the participants.

Quality: A short story ‘Fuck’ I mumbled as I drove to work. I was alone. My frustration and anger had no obvious referent, but I’m telling you, they were there. They were real. They existed all by themselves. It was a cold Sydney day. Colder than you’d expect in Spring. I had the heater on in the car. Rain was falling. The grey asphalt roads had turned to black and the windscreen wipers on my car weren’t doing too well. They rearranged the water on the glass into different formations of opacity. What I could see kept changing but it never got clear. There was tension too; tension without any identifiable reason. I could feel the muscles in my back tightening. My breakfastless stomach burning. My eyes were tight in my face. My fists were clenched onto the steering wheel. My hands trembled slightly as I took off from the traffic lights to turn the corner into the car park of the World Services Corporation. The building loomed. As I got closer it became all that I could see. As I turned, a new song started up out of the radio. The beat was slow and rhythmic and the melody was subdued as the singer’s gruff voice tumbled across

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the words — just articulate enough so that you could make out what he was saying. The chorus repeated… What a wonderful world this could be If everyone else were just like me What a wonderful world this would be A fabulous world for you and me ‘Shit’, I whispered. I realised I didn’t have the plastic key to open the gate into the carpark. Cars were queuing up behind me wanting to get in. They were in a rush to get to work and I was getting in their way. I felt like a defect in a cyborg world with no key to the technology; locked out because I didn’t have the required object. The person in the car behind me realised what was happening and got out to plug in his key and let me in. I forced a smile and said ‘thanks’ and then drove up, thinking ‘fuck, I’m an idiot’. There is no time clock at World Services, but managers know that it’s good to be seen at work early and be seen to leave late. You earn your salary from 9 to 5 and your promotion from 5 to 9. That’s the story. It was just after 7:00 am on this particular morning as the car park filled up. Emerging from their cars into the subterranean greyness of World Services were the usual faces — all managers with managerially unique parking privileges. I wondered if any of them had been listening to the radio like me. The hand brake made a ratchety noise as I pulled it. The song broke back into chorus. What a wonderful world this could be… I switched off the car, got out, and made my way to the lifts. I saw David Wilson. I knew David, or maybe more accurately we were ‘management acquaintances’ — used to saying hello and making small talk at meetings and conferences. Not so as I’d call us friends, though. Acquaintances — that was about right. ‘Charles’, he said, ‘how are you today?’ ‘Very well thanks’, I lied, ‘how’s it going with you?’ ‘Good, thanks’. ‘Been busy?’ ‘Sure, you know what it’s like around here’. ‘Yeah, got to keep working hard’. These were the sort of things we had to say. The sort of things everyone said. David started humming to himself. I recognised the song and sang the words to myself in my head.

World Services: A fictional (re)presentation

What a wonderful world this could be If everyone else were just like me It was like an echo. We got out of the lift at our respective floors ready to face the day of managing.

It was 10:00 am when I checked my Outlook diary on the PC and realised that I’d been scheduled to go and see a corporate video. It was the last thing that I needed — some dickhead from overseas waxing lyrical about some new thing that had suddenly become important to them. Mind, I didn’t know what this particular video was going to be about. I called Dave to check out if he knew what was happening. I felt comfortable with Dave. Although we weren’t mates, we had worked together about six months previously on a corporate project that had come out of the New York Office. We had to do focus groups and interviews. My role in it was pretty small, just introducing the project at a few staff meetings. It was easy, just use the Powerpoint presentations that they provided and sound like you know what you’re talking about — no worries. Dave had a harder time of it. He was one of the main people running the groups. Dave seemed to work really hard; like he believed in something; like he might make a difference; like World Services might notice his efforts. I figure that’s why the project had been so hard for him. I remember talking to him after it was all over. The muscles around his eyes were taut. Hell, his whole face was screwed up. The focus groups he had worked on were evaluated — seriously evaluated. Forms were filled in by the other people involved. Numbers and graphs were drawn up. Management at all sort of levels conducted reviews. I know that the evaluation report on Dave was not real good. Lots of people know. In fact, it made him look like he’d really fucked it up. It must’ve been more do with the project than with him, but still the numbers were against his name and that made him ‘responsible’. He was given this shit to work with. He was given no support — just thrown in the deep end, drowning in the shit, and he came out on the wrong side of sink or swim. He’d gone out of his way to try and get background info — he told me how some of the more experienced people who were over on a junket from the US to run the project were supposed to brief him. They came over, but they never met with Dave. It must have been way down their list of priorities. He’d been cold-shouldered. Still, the show had to go on and he was out there in that cold spotlight. He told me all about how when the report on him came out there was all sort of bullshit talked about how it might make the company look bad to the overseas managers. He’d wanted to do a quality job on this. I bet he learned something.

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The phone rang a few times. Dave picked it up. His ‘hello’ startled me out of my thoughts. ‘David’, I said down the phone, ‘Charles Debussy here, how’s it going?’ ‘Good mate, good’, he answered. ‘What can I do for you today?’ ‘You going to this video this afternoon?’ ‘Yeah, I’m going. I figure we have to. Anyway, it could be interesting’ ‘Interesting?’ I thought this was a strange way of describing these things, ‘What’s it all about then?’ ‘Well, you know this quality initiative that’s been talked about? The video is about Jack Richards’ telling us what it’s all about’. ‘Oh!’ I said, ‘so you know something about it?’ He was the sort of guy who would. ‘Yeah, a bit, I went to a presentation a couple of months ago’. Dave told me about this presentation he’d been to. He told me about how the company had now decided to ‘do quality’. He sounded upset about the whole thing. It was like the people who decided to move on this project had got hold of this new idea called quality. Like no one else knew anything about it. Quality — yeah, well, both of us had heard a lot of people say that they tried to do a good job but had become angry and frustrated. World Services, with its short term approach and political shenanigans, it just wouldn’t let them. Now quality was all the go — a notion that seemed rich. The quality bug had bitten them and now it was our turn for them to bite us. Dave said that it felt like trying to work with one hand tied behind your back. Maybe the difference between Dave and me was that he kept trying to get that hand untied and I didn’t. It seemed to work for him, even if he found their new zeal for quality condescending. I hung up the phone and we both knew that we’d be at the video. So would all those other people who felt that they had to be there.

I arrived at the room where the video was set to be played. Being late, I had to sit in one of the front rows (no chance for a quick getaway!). A moment after I sat down the lights dimmed. The video must have been at least a year old to judge from the credits. It consisted of the president, Jack Richards, as a talking head about quality. Just Jack Richards talking, at us, to us, for us. The people in the room all knew who Jack Richards was, and they knew that he didn’t know them. Hey, he wasn’t even there. He couldn’t see us. We weren’t even an audience, we were just viewers. Listening to Jack — ‘jack shit’, I thought. We all knew about those compelling arguments that started with ‘but Jack said’. They were arguments that meant it doesn’t matter what you think, we’ve got to do it this way because ‘Jack said’. What

World Services: A fictional (re)presentation

words might Jack utter today? Well today it was quality. ‘Quality’ like some goddamn Messiah. You know, if you repeat a single word in your head enough times it starts to lose all meaning. Go on, try it, say quality thirty times in a row. What was this video talking about? Did Jack Richards or the people in the room really know or believe in this stuff? Were we being fed a line — surrounding the ‘work harder’ message with a lot of talk to try to make you feel good about it? Maybe quality would be a wonderful world. Maybe we’d all better say ‘yes’ because saying ‘no’ was so hard. The video was like others I’d seen. Corporate heavies walking the dogma for all the world to see. There was Jack Richards appearing charismatic, Jack appearing sincere, Jack appearing pensive, Jack appearing like he’d been trained in an acting school. Jack doing jack. But most of all it was Jack appearing like you’d better do as he said. I glanced away from the screen and saw Dave across the room. Concentrating. I looked back to the screen. Framed by a dark background contrasting with his white shirt, Jack talked ‘quality’. Quality was going to become a major part of the company’s management practice. And he used words like ‘our’ and ‘we’ a lot … ‘our performance problems’, ‘our customers’, ‘the companies service levels are much lower than we would expect’, ‘we believe that quality needs to be built in as a leading indicator’, ‘we need to do this together’. These are the bits I remember anyway. The me, the we, and the him, seemed all to be the same. But this was the message, we’d better shape up with quality or ship out. Otherwise we’d all be out of a job — we gotta change for the better. And it was quality that was going to do it. Jack remote controlling a rah-rah session with fists thrusting into the air. But we weren’t backslapping and yahooing. The fire and brimstone preacher Elmer Gantrying us about the way to the light of quality and the hell that would happen if ‘we’ did not follow that light. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah — my concentration was going in and out. Jack bleating, Jack shitting, Jack jacking off in public. The video finally ending. Jack’s image fading out. A rotating globe filling the screen. Electronic music phasing in. The music played for a minute and the screen turned to black.

Outside of the meeting room me and Dave had just missed an elevator full of people rushing away from the meeting. Together we got on the next one and we each pressed the button for the floors we wanted. The elevator began to descend. The video had been shown in the conference room — high above Sydney at the apex of World Services’ HQ. Once we’d gone down a few floors, the lift stopped abruptly. The wires holding this smallest of rooms had just decided to stop; to go on a wildcat strike — a technical hiatus, a broken instrument, a quality defect.

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‘Shit’ I said. ‘This is the last thing that I need right now’ said Dave, ‘I’ve got back to back meetings all afternoon.’ Dave pressed the red emergency button. A bell rang. ‘I hope they can get us out of here quickly’ he said, ‘this happened to me a few months ago and we we’re in for an hour’. ‘Yeah’ I said. I didn’t need this either. Trapped in a broken iron cage. It looked like we were in for a wait. ‘What did you think of the video?’ I asked. ‘Same as usual’ he replied. ‘Yeah, they take us out of our busy days to make us listen to that stuff. Do you think anyone really believes it? I mean all that talk about customer service and productivity. You know what I think … I think that it’s all a hoax, that Jack just wants us to look good for the darlings of the New York stock market. All those other American companies have done this quality thing, they must think that we look like laggards. We’ve got to look good’. ‘You think so?’ he said, ‘I mean quality seems like a serious subject. It’s just that I don’t think that we really get it. We just seem to be taking the bits we like and ignoring the rest. We still do the same old thing of managing short term costs and reducing staff numbers. There’s no discipline’. Dave’s face screwed up as he said this. There was disappointment in his face. A sadness; the sort you see in commuters. Drudgery, resignation, despondency, despair. The lift jolted. The red phone inside the little metal door rang. Dave pulled at the door. It jammed. He yanked harder. It flung open, revealing a phone. Dave picked it up, talked, and then put it down. ‘It’s the building maintenance people’, he said, ‘there’s a problem with the lift, but they should have us out of here in about ten minutes’. He sounded hopeful. I felt nothing. We waited. We sat on the floor in the two back corners of the lift. I was resigned to the wait whilst still not knowing how long it was really going to be. I started talking again. ‘Hey’, I said, ‘did you meet that consultant Carl Rhodes when he was here last month?’ ‘Sure’ said Dave as he shrugged. ‘You know he was telling me about how quality management was an American fad that was inherited from Japan and how it was a way of getting people in organizations to start managing themselves because of all the middle managers who’d been delayered out’. ‘Yeah’ Dave said. ‘Carl did an OK job when he was here. I’m not sure exactly what he was up to but he got around a lot and talked to a lot of people. He even helped me out with a report I was writing. I mean it was good to get some help. It made a difference’ I shrugged and said ‘I suppose. That academic stuff might sound good in theory,



World Services: A fictional (re)presentation

but you’ve got to bear in mind that people like him swan in and out or organizations without really getting their hands dirty. They read stuff in books. But that’s got to be different to living here every day’. ‘You could be right’ replied Dave, ‘ I mean, think about the politics in this place, like all those dumb bastards just doing what they’re told, getting on the gravy train for politicking with the right people. Brown-nosing’. The only thing I could think to say was ‘Yeah, well, are we so different?’ As I said this, we both went quiet like neither of us wanted to respond. The answer might be too scary. We were trapped. And not just in a lift. Before either of us had the chance to say anything, the lift doors were prised open. ‘Come on fellas’ a voice said. We climbed out. It was on my floor. ‘See you later’, I said to Dave. I headed back to my office, wondering if, I too, would have to start talking in all that quality management jargon. I hesitated, thinking that that maybe the question was ‘when’ rather than ‘if ’.

It was 8:45 pm, far past the notional 5 o’clock finishing time. The carpark looked even more grey than usual. It seemed like the mass of concrete had somehow expanded during the course of the day. The cloudy daylight of the morning had gone away and I knew that when I emerged through the boom gate of the car park I would enter into the dark night. At least the rain had gone away for a while. As chance would have it, my path crossed Dave’s again as we moved to our cars. Dave smiled at me. I smiled back and chuckled to myself. He always seemed so hopeful. As I started up the engine that song came back on again. What a wonderful world this could be If everyone else were just like me What a wonderful world this would be A fabulous world for you and me I started to realise that it wasn’t a very good song no matter who was singing it. I drove away knowing that I’d be back tomorrow. But not every tomorrow. I was glad I’d met David that day.

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Closing the text



Chapter 8

The politics of being conclusive Albrow (1997) describes reflexivity as the quality of an account of social activity where the account is both a description and a component part of the practices it refers to. The implication is that the character of the phenomena being investigated is dependent on the ‘constructive activity of human beings… [such that] … as we act, and give accounts of our action, we are creating society and ourselves’ (p. 47). The notion of reflexivity, then, suggests that texts construct rather than discover the world; further, this foregrounds research as a textual practice and the researcher as a ‘textual practitioner’. Law (1994b) has suggested that reflexivity leads us to consider that writing about others and institutions is interactive rather than neutral; as writing orders experience, it is therefore important to remember that ordering is a verb and that in writing we should ‘be asking how it is that we came to (try to) order in the way that we did’ (p. 17). If ‘research is not simply a matter of representing, reflecting, or reporting the world but [one] of “creating” it’ (Usher 1993: 102) then it needs to be recognised that there is always the possibility of more than one ‘creation’; more than one way of telling a story. Each way of telling is, however, a different creation; as a story is re-told, a new story is created. In this book I have worked to highlight the reflexivity of research by demonstrating some different ways that a research project could be written. This was done in order to bring into question the tension between (re)presentation and control. This is a tension where, through writing, researchers create particular images of those they research — images which attempt to represent those others while simultaneously controlling what is represented through the employment of particular textual practices. It is not enough, however, simply to evoke a pluralism that just suggests the possibility of different writings. It is also necessary to consider the potential effects of the writing and to reflect on the implications of textual practices by accounting for the part that writers play in the control over those they (re)present. This is question then of: what difference does difference make? What I have tried to play out in the book are some different (re)presentations of research. This was doen in order to foreground each one’s textuality and constructedess. My aim has been to question and problematise the power implicit in the representational claims of research writing. In addressing this aim, the issue for research is not one of examining the different generic (re)presentations as being independent, but rather it is one of comparing the different ways that they effect

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power and control through the generic conventions that they employ. The (re)presentations are not intended to be exemplary of the genres that they are written in, but rather they are produced to stage an effect of difference. The possibility for reading that this enables is one where the difference between the (re)presentations can highlight the implausibility of any one (re)presentation ever being final and at the same time suggest that any proposal of such finality could only be achieved through the power that the employment of a genre calls forth. To question the power of textuality, then, is not so much to read the different (re)presentations, but rather to read between them. It is this ‘reading between the texts’ that is made available by the multiple (re)presentations. In constructing these (re)presentations I have tried to create a space whereby such a reading might be possible. In doing so, however, I am mindful that attention to the ‘crisis of representation’ (as described in Chapter one) implies both an uncertainty about what might constitute a description of social ‘reality’ and a sensitivity to issues of power embedded in (re)presentational practices. By writing this final chapter, then, it is not my intention to conclude with some sort of metanarrative that wraps it all up by totalising my writing on your (‘the reader’s’) behalf in a neat and finished way. Instead, it is my intention to reflect on my own textual practice in terms of how it relates to my role in the (re)presentations that I have created and the different positions that I take in and between each of them. In proceeding with this, I also acknowledge that, as the nominated author of this text, I am not positioning myself as being in control of the meaning of what I say. First, any claim by me to be the exclusive and creative author of what is in the text is empirically inaccurate. This was a research project influenced by the people who participated in it and by writing traditions that transcend my own invention. The ability for this text to have been produced is a result of authorships and authorship practices that are beyond ‘me’. Second, your role as a reader is also implicated in the possibility of meaning. Surely, any meaning that is derived from this text has as much to do with its reading as it does with its writing. That is not to say that if I did write down general conclusions that you would automatically agree with me. My authority is most definitely not so pervasive, not to mention that the very existence of academic debate implies that this would never be the case. I therefore do not pretend that I am writing something that is in any way universal or conclusively final. I am not in control of the meaning of what I say and it is therefore unfitting for me to write from a position that pretends that I am. This final chapter, then, will be written as a reflection on the writing practices used in this research, and the differences between them, rather than a suggestion that a conclusion can somehow remove the veneer of the (re)presentations to reveal what is ‘really’ going on. Each chapter has its own veneer; this is another one. Furthermore, the veneer hides nothing ‘real’ beneath it.

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Reflecting on (re)presentations This research was based on interviews where the research participants discussed their involvement and interpretation on the introduction of a Quality program at World Services. It provided a range of readings of these biographical texts that were written as the (re)presentations of the research. In proposing such readings of biographical texts recounted through interviews, this research has attempted to recognise that, rather than being a story which pretends to describe a life ‘as it really happened’, a biographical representation is a knowledge claim which establishes an illusion of reality (Soderquist 1991). As Usher (1993) puts it ‘it is impossible to argue that autobiography simply and transparently reports “lived experience” — that it somehow “translates” this experience into a publicly communicable form’ (p.104). My aim in providing divergent readings of the autobiographical statements from the interviews was not to represent the real, but rather to critique realism by arguing that there is no ontologically fixed or stable reality, only textual practices of reality as reflected in particular languages and genres that purport to represent it. By addressing these practices, ‘the specific value of writing [and reading] biographies lies precisely in its ability to show the embodied character of knowledge construction’ (Soderquist 1991: 156). This embodied character, however, is not itself offered as a concrete explanation or as a representation. I take the position that meaning cannot be recovered unambiguously from text or discourse such that the only recoverable meaning is the impossibility of unambiguous meaning (Knorr-Cetina 1994); the autobiography is taken as one of many incomplete narrative possibilities. It is (re)presented in a genre and, as such, its use to portray the events and interpretations of a life does not reflect or penetrate a ‘reality’. The use of narrative, autobiographical or otherwise, may arise ‘out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness and closure of an image of life, that is and can only be imaginary’ (White 1989 p.24). The imaginary, however, can appear ‘real’ as individual narratives are modes of ordering presumed to have a meaning within the assumed shared traditions existing between the interviewer, the participant and the reader. Despite this, what I am suggesting through this research is that any generic narrative can always be relativised against different ways of (re)presenting, each of which has different potential meanings and effects. The (re)presentations of World Services that have been offered were intended to question approaches to the writing and (re)presentation of research that promote the notion that an interpreter or analyst examines a social phenomenon and, by applying scientific constructs, can use writing to unambiguously represent its meaning. This critique counters the commonplace practice in organization studies to stylise narratives as the ‘one true story’ (Czarniawska 1997: 26). Instead, what has been suggested is that any (re)presentation contains contradictions and

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elements that are textually suppressed and excluded (Cherryholmes 1993) and an exposition of the sub-text of how narratives were constructed undermines the agenda of the explicit text (Kilduff 1993); an agenda that asserts that the story is a representation of an episode of a person’s life. This sub-text reveals a tension and contradiction behind the organizing process and attests to the ambiguous nature of our understanding of organizational experience (Chia 1996). The questioning of research methods that I have sought to accomplish demonstrates how ‘the understanding of organizations is inseparable from the organization of understanding’ (Jeffcut 1994a p.241) and how attention must be paid to the ‘organization of writing rather than the writing of organization’ (Cooper 1989 p.501). This requires a suspicion of the ‘misplaced concreteness’ that sees theories as being independent of theorists and creates truth effects by confirming certain ways of thinking about research (Knights 1997). Each text used to understand the world produces new texts and new understandings as the texts dissolve into one another (Burrell 1996). In this dissolution researchers might become aware that ‘we use the same means of making sense of our world as our “subjects” use in making sense of their world, and in both our making sense of their world, and our making sense of their sense making” (Linstead and GraftonSmall 1989 p. 292). The ‘reality’ of research participants cannot be separated from the way that ‘reality’ is reconstituted as a (re)presentation (Jeffcut 1994a). In the case here, the research and writing process leaves a series of (re)presentations of organizational experience which reflect a partial heteroglossia of that organization and my interaction with it through a dialogic image of the narratively recounted and interpreted experience of a number of different people. The result is a series of narratives, none of which can claim to be an ‘accurate’ representation. Each of these narratives is a practice of writing used to create a textual effect of a plausible reality and contrasting them can therefore be used to ask questions about whether (re)presentations that claim to be grounded in ‘fact’ are different to (re)presentations grounded in ‘fiction’. As Czarniawska (1997: 19) put it ‘there are no structural differences between fictional and empirical narratives, and there respective attraction is not determined by their claim to be fact or fiction’. The (re)presentations that I have included in Chapters five, six and seven are informed in some way by the same set of interviews. They are different, however, in that they approach those interview texts with different textual strategies of language and genre. By using these multiple (re)presentations I have tried to interrupt the textual construction of reality by demonstrating that reality is created, and indeed multiple realities can be created, by using different writing genres in response to the same initial organizational ‘texts’. By doing this it is hoped that ‘the security of the narrative voice has been challenged at its heart. It now stands revealed not as the voice of reality but as a particular textual practice used to generate “reality”’

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(Silverman and Torode 1980: 260). It is the challenging of the narrative authority of mono-representations that the research method I have employed has sought to achieve. The telling of the story and the story being told are not separable and my telling the same ‘story’ in different ways has produced new and different stories. Each one is not an image of a single and holistic reality but rather a ‘product of signifying practice which, none the less mystifies the material world’ (Silverman and Torode 1980: 298). The different (re)presentations achieve their effects in different ways. Of relevance here is the way that these effects are achieved through authorship and through the position in which the writing places the author and narrator of the ‘story’. The narrator in this sense is not to be equated with a ‘living person’ but rather is a ‘paper being’ such that ‘the (material) author of the narrative is in no way to be confused with the narrator of that narrative’ (Barthes 1977: 111). The implication here is that the I who narrates a story is a function of that story rather than being an independent self who is expressing his/her own views, experience etc. Barthes (1977) also suggests that it is language rather than an author that speaks; the author too is ‘never more than an instance of writing, just like I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a “subject” not a “person”’ (p. 145). Thus, in writing, different authorial subjectivities can be created through different ways of writing; the author is conjured up by the genre. In considering an author as a function of the text, the power embedded in (re)presentational practices is not a power exerted by the ‘author as person’ but a power enacted by the employment of genre and the authors that genre creates. To assume equivalence between the ‘person’ who writes and the author, however, imputes agency into that person. Power, in writing, is thus achieved in part through the assumed equivalence between the ‘living person’ and the ‘paper author’. Further, a questioning of this power can be achieved by writing practices that rupture this equivalence. In exploring the problematic of this research, I have attempted to create such ruptures by writing in a way that employs different genres and in doing so generates a series of different authorships and a series of different ‘Is’. Each of these genres does, in its own way, impose an author through its text; it is, however, between the different texts and genres that authority is questioned. The multi-(re)presentational approach that I have used has intended to demonstrate the instability of authorship; it is a writing that allows the centrifugal forces of language (heteroglossia) to be highlighted alongside the centripetal forces. This practice of changing the Is can interrupt the narration of an organization such that the organizational reality is the text itself (Silverman and Torode 1980). The way that authorial subjectivities are created through research texts has implications for how an awareness of reflexivity might enable writers to account for the power of their (re)presentations. Chia (1996: 79) suggests that

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What constituted the initial ‘reflexive’ turn in academic theorising resulted from a heightened self-awareness associated with the increasing realisation that the researcher/theorist plays an active role in constructing the very reality he/she is attempting to investigate.

Such a reflexivity, however, still assumes an equivalence between the person who writes and the author/researcher; it assumes that it is the researcher who constructs reality. This assumption is questioned how, when ‘research is understood as writing, critical attention is drawn to the practice of textual production which is research, as opposed to the final writing of the research “results”’ (Game 1991: 28). What this leads to is the view that research, through genre, generates, rather than being generated by, an authorial subjectivity. Control is therefore created by rather than expressed through writing.

Picking the Is out of the research As Barthes (1977) puts it: ‘the I that writes the text … is never more than a paper-I’ (p. 161). In writing this research I have worked to demonstrate organizational heteroglossia through different genres and, in turn, each of these genres (including the one in this chapter) has constituted a different I. This focuses attention to how the notion of the ‘author’ does ‘not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects’ (Foucault 1984: 113). Further, this research has tried to use these different authorial positions to show that there is no possibility of fixed, final or monologically authoritative meaning. This has been done to challenge the authority on which (re)presentations are based and undermine research practices from which authoritative meanings can be derived (Marcus 1994). To examine how different authorial positions have been employed in the genres that I have used, this section reviews the changing Is that have been created through the writing practices employed in the different chapters. The first two chapters of the book were written without the employment of an explicit I. This format, which is standard in much research writing, positioned the text (internally) as being independent of a writing subject. The subject, however, despite not announcing itself in those chapters is created through the text of the book as a whole. My name (Carl Rhodes) appears on the front cover of this volume, and therefore an author is designated and named as being the creator of the text. The absence of an I, therefore, does not extinguish the author, but rather creates the author in a particular way. This creation is the ‘effect of signature’ (Derrida 1982: 328) where the writing itself does not need to refer to the author explicitly through the use of an I in order to retain an implied reference to the

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author. Instead, this reference is achieved by appending my ‘signature’ to the volume as a whole. This embodies a particular practice of power in that the absence of the I silences questions about the origin of the text through the claim of an omniscient presence (Silverman and Torode 1980); the power of an author who can write from ‘nowhere’ and with no acknowledged self. In the case of the first two chapters of this book, the author emerges as a researcher who, despite not explicitly accounting for him/herself, is able to justify his/her practice and is performing his/her expertise by describing the intellectual context of his/her practice. In Chapter three, the author changes through the appearance of a written I. In this case, it is the I who is telling the story of the research. This is a researcher who was ‘there’ and knew what s/he was doing. The change here is that authority is achieved through the ‘authenticity’ of presenting the ‘facts’ from a particular point of view (Silverman and Torode 1980). This authority is less reliant on a demonstration of intellectual expertise and more reliant on the expertise of having been in ‘the field’. The I announces ‘this is where I was, this is what I did, and this is why I did it’. The move here was a move from an ‘objective narration’, which excludes an indication of the person who narrates as if nobody is speaking, to a subjective narration, which draws attention to the narrative voice by using the pronoun I (Currie 1998). The objectivity of the texts of chapters one and two where determined by my employment of grammatical features that hide the narrative voice, whereas the subjectivity of the text in chapter three was determined through features that foreground my narrative voice. In both cases however, the author of the text (present or absent) is textually constructed as being equivalent to the ‘real person’ of the author. Whereas Chapter three described how the research was conducted, Chapters four, five, six and seven each work to describe what that research resulted in; they (re)present the Quality Management program at World Services through different genres. These chapters differ from the previous ones in that they turn their focus away from writing ‘about’ the research and towards writing the research itself. In doing so, each one employed a different genre and in the process was written from a different I. These Is add a different dimension to subjective narration in that they are written from the (textual) point of view of different characters involved in the research as well as employing explicitly fictional characters constructed as composites from the research participants. Again, the difference that this difference makes is that it brings into question the authenticity of any of the subject positions from which the research was written — whereas each (re)presentation might work to create an authenticity in and of itself, it is the textual production of difference between the (re)presentations that can be used to question the construction of that authenticity.

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In ‘describing’ the video of Jack Richards, Chapter four retained the ‘I as researcher’ from Chapter three in order to provide an account and re-narration of the Quality video. This is still the I who ‘was there’ and who is able to observe and commentate on an event to which the reader has no direct access. The I shifts in Chapter five where it becomes the I of the research participants. This is achieved through the production of ‘ghostwritten’ autobiographies that involved the participants cooperating and approving with the written accounts of their experience that I, the researcher, had written as a result of interviewing them. It would be naive, however, to assume that their involvement in this writing makes it somehow more ‘true’ in any universal way or makes this I a unique or ‘real’ I of the participants. This I does not reflect an autonomous and authentic self, it remains as that of a ‘paper being’; a being where the dialogic nature of the production of these accounts leaves its trace in the text. As an analogy, it is like two police officers ‘fitting up’ a suspect by getting their story ‘straight’ before a trial.1 I and the research participants were not defining a pre-existing truth, but rather we were agreeing on an account of it for a specific purpose. The ‘truth’ of the text is therefore based on consensus rather than universality. I, as the author, do not ‘disappear’, even though I am neither the I in the writing nor am I a character explicit in the autobiographical texts in Chapter five. My trace (as the researcher of Chapter three) is in these texts as a co-conspirator, a writer and as the person to whom they were originally addressed. The author is not apparent in the text but the ‘ghost writing’ leaves an image of the ghost and a new ‘paper I’ is created. The ethnographic (re)presentation of the research in Chapter six implicates authorship in quite a different way. While in the autobiographies, I was not explicit in the text, the ethnography invokes my role as researcher as an I who writes, an I who was there and is making a credible account of the organization. In addition, this is an I who is able to understand and make sense of what was happening. For me to write an interpretation of what I was told about Quality at World Services is to suggest that I am presenting a plausible interpretation and description of what happened; the result is a text that presents itself as both authoritative and worthy of reading as a description of what is going on. This invocation of authority foregrounds the representational qualities of the text (ie, it explicitly claims to be a valid and authentic description of World Services) and backgrounds the presentation (ie, it does not draw attention to its own textuality). Explicitly, the text is offered up as a description rather than as a piece of writing. This is reversed in the fictional (re)presentation of Chapter seven, which, by being written in a non-conventional genre (for ‘scientific’ research), foregrounds the

1.Thanks to Michael Newman for this analogy

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presentation (ie the genre) and backgrounds the representation of World Services. In many ways, this (re)presentation describes events that did not really happen as if they did. Moreover, even though the events ‘did not happen’, they are based on the stories that were recounted by the research participants. I could not have crafted that story had it not been for the research participants. In some way it does ‘represent’ them, even through its presentation implies that it does not. In doing so, the I is still a ‘paper being’ but it does not refer to any ‘real’ person — the I of the text is explicitly fictional. In writing about the Is of the preceding chapters, in this chapter a particular I is also created. This is the I who is aware of all others and who can reflect and comment on their production. This I is particularly potent as it writes from a position that subsumes and claims to understand the other Is — a superordinate I. In choosing to write a chapter which examines the research as a ‘whole’ I am ushered into this position despite a reflexive awareness that this is both what I am doing and that this is who it makes me (as the author) out to be. This is a politics of being conclusive that works to suggest that some form of conclusion (ie, making a statement that directly addresses the research ‘problem’) is possible in my writing. By making this suggestion, I am practicing a power of writing as well as being created (as an I) by this power. The conclusive I is constructed by writing a conclusion (of sorts). The different writing strategies I have used throughout this book create images of the researcher, the subject and the reader, but none of the resulting writings can claim to capture the ‘reality’ of World Services better than any other; each one is a different take on the organization and on my research practice. My argument is that the potential meanings from any of these texts are born out differently through the employment of different textual practices and that this is particularly relevant in terms of power relations both explicit and implicit in the text. My aim in writing these different (re)presentations was to juxtapose them in order to demonstrate and allow attention to be drawn to their textuality. The implication of this is that I can stage effects of representation but do not have the power to actually represent. The presentational nature of research implies that there is always a fictionality embedded in it, where to write is always to fictionalise, even if the genre in which the writing appears suggests otherwise. As Usher (1993) puts it, ‘both research and literature, as practices of writing, construct worlds and are therefore “fictional”’ (p. 102). Genres have their own potential for meaning which operates alongside what it is that is written about, but power in writing is hidden by ignoring these generic effects and by staking a claim that writing is authoritative and representational. It is an awareness of writing as (re)presentation that can interrupt that power; this awareness is one that recognises the fiction of writing and the role of writing in both generating and hiding that fictionality. Accepting this fictionality seems

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somehow a more honest way of writing; a way that ironically accepts the impossibility of representation, acknowledges the power generated through the author in crafting accounts of experience and interrogates the fictionality of those things we might call facts. ‘Once we get out of the habit of simplistically counterposing “fact” to fiction and we stop unproblematically equating fiction with “untruth” we can begin to see that research is just as “fictional” as literature’ (Usher 1993:102).

Issues for research and writing To label a text as ‘scientific’ or ‘realistic’ suggests that writing can represent the experience of others. What is ironic about this suggestion is that writing is always also an experience in itself. Writing then implicates others’ experience but does not duplicate it. The notion of heteroglossia that has been used in this research is positioned as a way of writing about organizations which accounts for the inability of writing to reflect experience. It is a way of accounting for the power that suggests that writing can achieve such a duplication. The implication of this for research writing in general is the need for a reflexive approach to writing that acknowledges that research and researchers are a product of writing and as such, they are performances of a text. To understand an organization as heteroglossic accepts that any writing of organization is controlled by the inevitably limited range of voices that are included in the text, the creativity of the writing, the generic conventions used and the perspectives that others bring to the writing. The power that writers can enact in their writing is one where such effects are made to appear neutral — where writing is seen as a conduit for a pre-given or extra-textual meaning as demonstrated by an autonomous and extra-textual author. The irony, however, is that recognising the constitution of the author through the power of writing does not eliminate that power. More importantly, a reflexive and heteroglossic approach might work to recognise the power and work within its confines. The crisis of representation does not get resolved. The intention in the writing of this research, however, has been to demonstrate that by using new theorisations and writing practices, the crisis might be incorporated into the practice of research. This has been achieved here by writing in a way that evokes heteroglossia both in terms of multiple perspectives, multiple genres and multiple Is. Such a form of (re)presentation (inevitably) still performs authorial power but at the same time, it moves to disrupt that power through the juxtaposition of different writing practices and the different subject positions of the author. In the end, what is written is an evocation of the heteroglossic organization through multiple (re)presentations. This evocation enacts the struggle over different writing practices each of which performs the organization differently.

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What has also been attempted through multiple (re)presentations is a demonstration of the significance of language and writing to research; a demonstration of how different writing practices can work to construct an organization in different ways through different forms of authorial intervention and construction. Each form enacts power, but between the forms such power can acknowledge itself in the practice of writing. To write in genres does not avoid the issue that each and all of them are written and that power is not abated by evoking perspectivalism. What might be achieved, more importantly, is a sense of irony in the writing that, while writing power, is aware of that writing and plays with it. To write in different genres also does not suggest that there could not be others and for me to write about quality at World Services in a multiplicity of ways does not mean that you and I now know multiple times as much about it. On the contrary, the different (re)presentations demonstrate that none of them can be seen as an accurate representation, but rather that each one is informed by different perspectives, positions and writing practices. Rather than assuming that we know more, it can be better suggested that we are less sure of what it means to ‘know’ anything about organizational life as portrayed in language. The texts of organizations appear then, not as representations of the real world, but rather as contested claims to speak ‘the truth’ about the world. The relationships between these different texts does not then need to be seen as exclusive or incommensurable, but rather each one produces different effects, effects that are highlighted by the juxtaposition of accounts in different genres. Moreover, to write in the different genres implies that there can always be more and different writings and therefore draws attention to the fragile construction of each one. There is then a tension between (re)presentation and control, where to write about someone else is never innocent, to write about someone else is a practice of power and to have written about someone else is an accomplishment of power.

Ending comments: Heteroglossia, writing and irony Theorising the heteroglossic organization, as has been done in this book, is an affirmation of the irony of writing. By accepting a foundationlessess where ‘any claims to transcendent or universal knowledge or irrefutable proofs are in doubt’ (Garrick and Rhodes 1998: 179), it is a writing that accepts that it can never accomplish a ‘real’ writing or a ‘true’ representation; it is a writing that is continuously relativised against the alternatives that it inevitably suppresses. The possibility for a narrative approach to organizational knowledge that this entails is one which first recognises its own play in the suppression of heterogeneity by the ways it limits alternative portrayals and second realises that such limitations are insurmountable

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— this is the irony of writing organization. Richard Rorty (1989) explores irony in terms of a person’s ‘final vocabulary’ — ‘the words in which we tell…the story of our lives’ (p. 73). Based on this, for me to write the heteroglossic organization is to position myself as an ironist who, as defined by Rorty, fulfils three conditions: (1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that arguments phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosphizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than other, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosphize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old (p. 73)

The ironist who writes organization (and writes themselves) then recognises that any (re)presentation they make is always fragile and subject to change and in the very instance of writing is aware that the knowledge being written and the selves being constructed can be relativised both against other stories and other ways of writing. Writing, then, does not hold up a mirror to the world, but rather any instance of writing is a way of ‘adhocing through the complexities of an ever shifting sea of meaning and action’ (Gergen 1992:223). The employment of Rorty’s vocabulary to writing organization is one where new writing is always possible and pursued, but is done without recourse to the goal of producing a final version of the final vocabulary from a final I. Such writing can only ever attempt to allude to its own instability by contrasting perspectives, ‘voices’ and genres in a way that acknowledges and possibly even foregrounds the irony. This then characterises the writer as being informed by what Gergen (1992) calls a sense of ‘lucid humility’ where: The view of knowledge-making as a transcendent pursuit, removed from the trivial enthrallments of daily life, pristinely rational, and transparently virtuous, becomes so much puffery. We should view the bodies of language we call knowledge in a lighter vein — as ways of putting things, some pretty and others petty — but in no sense calling for ultimate commitments, condemnations or profound consequences. We should rather be more playful in our sayings (Gergen 1992: 215)

Such writing is a way of producing what Barthes (1974) calls the ‘writerly’ text. This concept is developed through Barthes’ distinction between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts. The readerly text is one that limits the number of oppositions that it incorporates by purporting to be an unproblematic transcription of reality. The focus of the readerly text is not on itself (ie a text) but rather on what the text purports to represent; it is a text that conceals its textuality through dominant and taken for

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granted genres. The readerly text achieves closure and positions the reader as a passive consumer of its meaning. In opposition, Barthes proposes the notion of the writerly text; a text which foregrounds its nature as a textual and cultural product. Such a text highlights its incorporation of voices and generic conventions, rather than attempting to keep its production transparent. It is a text that is heterogenous and contradictory and denies the possibility of closure. To produce a writerly text is to produce a text that seeks to interrupt itself and to reveal the way that it constructs a plausible reality — to demystify the textual construction of organization. Importantly, such a text does not provide the reader with a pre-packaged meaning, but rather encourages readers to participate in the production of that meaning. To write the heteroglossic organization is then an attempt to produce a text that works to be more writerly and ironic. Accepting the possibility of a writerly account of an organization attests to the heterogenous and unsynthesisable possibilities of the narrative (re)presentations of that organization. It offers an irony that might allow a text to be open and unresolved and resists attempts to achieve the resolution of difference that would deny the multiplicity of potential (re)presentations and in doing so become authoritative and dogmatic. The possibility is for writing about organizations where ‘poetic rigour and conceptual rigour will ultimately combine in the production of an account, which will employ explicit literary and figurative devices poised in the space between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ where ‘truth’ is manufactured’ (Linstead 1993: 7). Authorship, then, is incapable of maintaining authority in an ultimately undecidable process of multi-vocal intertextuality (Jeffcut 1994b), where organization is produced through the interplay of vocalities, each of which is embodied multisubjectively. The irony of the heteroglossic organization is one that accepts that organizational knowledge can be expressed in different voices, through different stories and using different generic conventions. More especially, multiple (re)presentations demonstrate that no one of them can be seen as correct. Textual representations are not mirrors of the ‘reality’ of an organization, but rather they are contesting claims about the organization such that the writing of research moves from attempts to represent or persuade to a reflection on the relationship between texts (Fox 1995). This approach accepts the plurality of different perspectives and representational possibilities where organizational realities are many things at the same time and where theory sensitises people to those multiple realities (WalterBusch 1995). Theory and knowledge then fabricate the social that they once claimed to describe or explain (Fox 1995). The implications of this are not merely the acceptance of a naive relativism that proposes that all writings are equal, but rather an awareness and a sensitivity to the effects of writing and the power relations that produce those effects. Such awareness can lead then to an ironic

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humility of one’s own position and self-construction in the interplay of organizational texts. Like the writing that I have written about here, this book can possibly only be ended with a recognition that I cannot escape the embedded power in what I myself write and how I write myself. Roland Barthes puts it well when he states that: ‘no writer who began in a rather lonely struggle against the power of language could or can avoid being coopted by it’ (Barthes 1977/1993: 467).



Post-text Pragmatic comments on having written

I’ve been struggling with writing these final pages. I still can’t get over that the linearity of the textual format in which the book is physically constructed seems to me to infer that the final words must some how conclude. No doubt I am confined by my own conceptions of writing and genre when I feel that the structure of this written text implies an end — part of ‘a tyranny of linearity inherent in the printed word’ (Westwood 1998: 6). I may have acknowledged that there is a politics in being conclusive, but in writing I feel that this acknowledgment does not absolve me of being such a conclusive politician. To write research makes me do things that are beyond the control of my intentions — the rules of the genre of research writing are powerful and my attempts to play with this power are surely not fully realised. My choice, insofar as I have one, therefore, is to present you with this post-text. A few pages added to the end of the book and through which to make some last comments on knowledge, writing and organizations. I’ll make this a bit more concrete. One of the ideas that I have struggled with throughout the book is the relationship between writing and power. In doing this, however, I don’t think that I have really offered you a ‘theory’ of power so much as I have tried to enact it and reflect on it. In a way this has been intentional. To suggest such a theory would make me feel that I am writing in a way that I ‘know’ what power is — to wrap it all up in a distinctive and putatively final way. I do not want to claim to be able do this and I have tried to avoid temptations to do so. Instead, what I have tried to do is to demonstrate some of the ways that power might be manifested in writing and subsequently to reflect some of the things that this might mean for writing and research. This, I hope, is has not been overly conclusive — I’ve told some stories, but they’re not the only ones that could have been told. In this telling, however, I can’t say that I have avoided the political. I have made choices of what to include and what to exclude — I have chosen approaches through which to be a (re)presenter of the lived experiences of others and of myself as I crafted an identity as a writer, a researcher and an ‘advancer of organization studies’ through this text. In doing this I have focussed on taking a predominantly narrative approach; one which, as Czarniawska (1997: 11) suggests, is attractive because of ‘its pragma-

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tism rather than in any lofty ideological premises’. Such an approach is one where ‘pragmatic reflection shows that there are no grounds for assuming any correspondence between language and reality, be it iconic, symbolic or other’ (ibid: 169). This is based on an acceptance that: There can be no coherent predictive body of knowledge that is based on an independent (objective) reality. Pragmatic knowledge concentrates on understanding how rather than what laws of nature give rise to certain phenomenon, yet recognises that in taking action, individuals cannot rely on universalities to inform their behaviour (Garrick and Rhodes 1998: 180)

Attention to writing and research is pragmatic (rather than conclusive) in precisely this way — it attends to how language produces ‘realities’ rather than attempting to just produce such finalised realities. It is about how power is employed through writing to create the illusion of representation. The focus of pragmatism, is in this sense, a move away from the ‘representationalism’ that suggests that language can be a mirror that represents things the way that they are and moves towards a view that language is a set of social practices (Rorty 1991). As De Cock (2000: 590) describes it: We do not operate in some sort of aboriginal reality independent of our own minds. What is ‘given’ or assumed is neither bedrock reality out there, nor an a priori: it is always another constructed version of a world that we have taken as given for certain purposes. ‘Realities’ are the results of prolonged and intricate processes of construction and negotiation deeply embedded in a particular culture. As there is no aboriginal reality against which one can compare a possible world in order to establish some form of correspondence between it and the real world, it becomes far more important for appreciating the human condition to understand the ways human beings construct their worlds.

As De Cock goes on to discuss, this leads to a sensitivity to how narratives are not about making conclusions or deriving certainties; rather, they are about the varying perspectives that can be constructed and used to try to understand experience. It is here, in our cultural heritage of storytelling, that narrative conventions and genres are used to make reality. This is not to suggest that narratives are facts, but rather that it is through narrative that power is implicated in what is defined as a fact (Hosking 1995). I believe that approaches to research, such as the one written in this book, that use multiple ‘perspectives’ to study social phenomena can be used to illustrate that different writings can produce different socially constructed illusions. Multiple (re)presentations trace some of the possible consequences of writing — not as essential meanings in themselves but as different ways that meaning can be constructed and that power is used. As Hosking (1995: 59) suggests, by replacing a

Post-text

transcendental view of external reality with the assumption of multiple, socially constructed realities, the possibility of generalisation is substituted with the assumption that beliefs about what is real are constructed in social relational processes. Such a pragmatism denies the epistemological foundationalism that suggests that a final truth can be determined, but at the same time recognises that we must still choose strategies for understanding the world without the possibility of final knowledge of whether we are right or not (Cherryholmes 1993). What then is the use of writing in the face of such relativism? Rorty (1991: 66) observes that ‘relativism seems a threat only to those who insist in quick fixes and knock down solutions’. Indeed relativism may well be a standpoint from which a more pragmatic understanding of textuality might emerge. As I have suggested elsewhere: This lack of foundation … does not mean that texts are just black marks inscribed on white pieces of paper, rather it is our ability to read texts which enable us to make meaning out of those marks. The pragmatic issue is that multiple readings are always possible and that no criterion of truth can be used to suggest which is the ‘best’ reading. This does not mean that all readings are just as good as each other, but rather that different readings have different consequences. Any given reading may not be ‘the best’, but it may be better at achieving particular effects than would be achieved by other types of readings (Rhodes 2000b: 25)

Whilst being sensitive to such effects (some of which were written about in Chapter eight) I believe that care needs to be taken that by using multiple interpretations, multiple paradigms or (in my case) multiple genres in research, researchers do not to jump to the conclusion that they simplistically create ‘a greater breadth of understanding than possible within the bounds of a single paradigm’ (Lewis and Grimes 1999: 686). Indeed, this could be an easy line of reasoning to adopt — one that suggests that by looking at some ‘thing’ from a variety of different perspectives a more complete understanding of it can be generated. The problem with such a view, however, is that it bears the trace of a strong positivist view of knowledge. To suggest that there are different ‘perspectives’ from which to view, say, an organization, rests on the metaphorical assertion that an organization is an object that is observed externally by a subject who chooses to look at it. This subject/object dichotomy is used as the premise for such a ‘more perspectives = more knowledge’ thesis. This proposes that an organization does indeed have a finite, bounded, thing-like existence that renders it as an object of observation. In asserting this objectivity, then, an organization can be looked at from different perspectives in order to knowledge of its object-ness to become more complete. By abandoning the notion of an organization as an object, however, and seeing it as putative entity that is socially constructed yields radically different conclusions about the knowledge implications of ‘understanding’ or writing about organizations in a multiplicity of ways. As Alvesson (1996: 14) suggests, the use of multiple

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interpretations ‘acknowledges and actively draws attention to the indeterminate and open character of social reality’. Further, such indeterminacy is highlighted as being a feature of writing. Discussing this, Cooper (1990: 197) suggests that: As texts on organization they are themselves ‘organized’ according to a certain normalized criteria (often called scientific and/or academic) so that it becomes impossible to disentangle the content of organization studies from the theory or methodology that frames it.

Creating multiple texts about an organization can then highlight how the texts themselves are organized — to show that no interpretation is natural or inevitable and where rational order is always imposed through writing rather than inherent in the social. Such an approach shows a ‘sensitivity to a choice of available modes of representations and literary genres … [where] … one should demonstrate a willingness to write reflective and reflexive work that takes into account the subtle demands of making sense of others’ conduct as well as one’s own’ (Manning 1995: 249). In recognising this and attesting the possibility of multiple (re)presentations, it can also be suggested that: contemporary organizational analysis is confronted, if not confounded, by increasingly paradoxical, fluid and contradictory accounts of organizational realities … [where] … coherence, consistency or continuity — which are all intrinsically modernist constructions of intersubjective reality — appear to be a mere nostalgia (Keenoy, Oswick and Grant 1997: 147).

An issue that I have tried to work through in writing this book, however, is not just to assert that genres of writing to construct the world whose pre-existence to ‘writing’ is contentious. Rather that different (re)presentations can be used to write about what is ostensibly considered to be the same ‘thing’, yet in so doing, each of these (re)presentations creates different pragmatic effects. The (re)presentations do not mirror their ‘object’ but rather they create both sameness and difference. In order for the different (re)presentations that I have included in this book to make sense, they have worked together to construct a particular organization (World Finance) and a particular set of events (an organizational change program) — they have driven towards a centripetal force that allows them to be related to one another by including in each a set of signifiers that imply something is being ‘represented’. At the same time, however, each of the (re)presentations — through it’s use of genre — has been enabled also to draw on a centrifugal force that enabled them to ‘present’ something different. Each genre (re)presents a different take on the organization that together they have textualised into existence. It is through such an effect that presentation and representation coexist in a set of texts and that centripetal and centrifugal forces of language work to simultaneously unite and fragment those texts.

Post-text

It is here that power is at play through the implosion of the gap between sameness and difference. The belief in a single, ever-fixed (for example scientific) meaning embodied in a text can enact a power that closes off the multiplicity of meanings that such a text is possible of generating. This does not, however, mean that being open to such a multiplicity will generate a utopian, pure, liberating and democratic vision of reading and writing where power is not at play. Nor does it make an organization inherently more knowable. Cherryholmes (1988) writes that ‘we are bounced around and buffeted by the texts and discourse practices of our time, which operate to tell us what is factual and what is not and then which facts are more important than other facts’ (p. 181). One reading of what I have tried to do in this book is that I have played with and potentially interrupted some of the ‘discourse practices of our time’ in terms of how organizations are written about and understood. However, this certainly does not mean that I am somehow able to operate outside of such discourse practices or outside of the pervasiveness of textual power. A more modest achievement might be that recognising the coexistence of the textual centralising and decentralising of meaning provides a more reflexive standpoint from which to read and write texts. Adopting plurality as a place from which to write does not remove writers from a situation where they must ‘use the language of the culture of which they are a part of, both to make sense of what is before them and to talk about it’ (Watson 2000: 501). It my case, more importantly, this rest on a pragmatism that has sensitised me to how such language is used, while making me realise that I do not know how not to use it. In trying to figure out what this might mean for knowledge about organizations, I have been plagued (pleasantly) with the sound of Joni Mitchell’s singing replaying itself repeatedly in my head. The words are like this: I’ve looked at life from both sides now From win and lose and still somehow It’s life’s illusions I recall I really don’t know life I really don’t know life at all Like Joni Mitchell, perhaps one thing I’ve learned when reading and writing research is that having looked at an organization from different ‘sides’, I have not really come to ‘know’ the organization. Instead the knowledge is fleeting and leaves just an illusion of the organization, where to go forward is both to really not know organizations at all and to know how not to know — yet still, pragmatically, to go on. In some way, it seems that I am ending in an similar place to where I started. In the pre-text to this book, I performatively stated that this would be a research monograph. I drew a line around my writing and then tried to problematise that

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line in order to question what participation in the genre of research writing might mean. By doing this, I entered into what Calas and Smircich (1999) describe as a problematisation of the constitution of theory in the way it is written and the language that it uses. What they recognise is that in writing ‘we are fixing signification; excluding, including, concealing, favoring some people, some topics, some questions, some forms of representation, some values’ (p. 664). They further pose the question, however, that if a way of writing could be attempted (as indeed I have tried to do) that ‘fixes signification’ tentatively would it still be called research?. In my case, I will leave it up to you, if you so choose, to decide whether that is a question worth answering.

Regards,

Carl Rhodes



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Name index

A Aaltio-Marjosola, I. 24 Albrow, M. 99 Alvesson, M. 15, 33, 37, 41, 115 Atkinson, P. 6, 7, 8 B Bakhtin, M. M. 7, 16, 21, 28–31, 33, 40, 41 Bantz, C. R. 49 Barthes, R. 8, 28, 103, 104, 110, 112 Bate, S. P. 48 Baudrillard, J. 5, 12 Beech, N. 76 Berg, P. O. 33 Boje, D. M. 23–24 Boyce, M. E. 22 Brown, J. L. 23, 43 Brown, M. H. 27, 50 Brown, R. H. 5, 6–7, 10, 22 Burrell, G. 15, 102 Butler, R. 26 C Calas, M. B. 118 Carroll, D. 33 Cherryholmes, C. 102, 115, 117 Chia, R. 102, 103 Clark, K. 7, 29, 30 Clegg, S. R. 3, 8, 10, 11, 15, 25, 44 Clifford, J. 9, 10, 46 Cooper, R. 33, 102, 116 Currie, M. 105 Czarniawska, B. 6, 22, 25, 101, 102, 113–114. D Dawson, A. 11 De Cock, C. 21, 28, 114 Debussy, C. 61–65, 78, 80–81, 83, 85, 86

Deetz, S. 31 Denzin, N.K. 10, 23 Derrida, J. xv, 104 Dreyer, J. 38 E Emerson, C. 7, 30 Emihovich, C. 46 F Fontana, A. 46 Foucault, M. 9, 15, 104 Fox, N. J. 26, 50, 111 Francis, D. 38 Frant, D. 116 Frey, J. H. 46 Fuller, G. xii G Gabriel, Y. 22 Gagnon, J. H. 30 Game, A. 104 Garrick, J. 5, 25, 109, 114 Geertz, C. 4 Geist, P. 38 Gergen, K. J. 28, 29, 30, 110 Gough, N. 50 Grafton-Small, R. 102 Grimes, S. J. 15, 115 Gudmundsdottir, S. 38, 41, 43 H Hammersley, M. 8 Hardy, C. 3, 8, 10, 15, 25 Hassard, J. 5, 15, 28, 33, 44 Hatch, M. J. 8–9, 15, 25 Hazen, M. A. 23, 33 Hester, S. 38 Hockey, J. 11

128 Name index

Hodge, B. xiii-xiv, 3, 4, 46, 47 Holquist, H. 7, 29, 30 Hosking, D-M. 114 Hutchinson, S. 38, 39

Mumby, D. K. 9

J Jacobson, S. W. 9, 43 Jacques, R. 9, 49 James, A. 11 Jeffcut, P. 10, 14, 26, 33, 34, 44, 46, 47, 102, 111

O Oswick, C. 116

K Kallinikos, J. 28 Keenoy, T. 116 Kets de Vries, M. F. R. 48 Kilduff, M. 102 King, N. 14 Knights, D. 102 Knorr-Cetina, K. 101. Kostera, M. 27 Kreps, G. L. 27, 50 Kress, G. 6, 8 Kristeva, J. 30 L Langellier, K. M. 38, 42 Lather, P. 4, 5, 8, 10 Law, J. 25, 33, 99 Lee, A. xii Lewis, M. W. 15, 115 Linstead, S. 10, 33, 49, 102, 111 Lyotard, J-F. xiv, 28, 32 M Manning, P. K. 116 Marcus, G. E. 104 Mason, J. 40 McHale, B. 29 McHoul, A. 3, 4, 46, 47 Medvedev, P. N. 7 Miller, D. 48 Mishler, E. G. 37, 41, 42 Mitchell, J. 117 Morgan, G. 15, 47, 76 Morris, P. 29 Morson, S. 7, 30

N Newman, M. 106

P Pacanowsky, M.E. 27 Peterson, E. E. 38, 42 Phillips, N. 23, 27, 47, 48, 49–50 Prasad, P. 6 Presnell, M. 15, 48 Putnam, L. L. 4, 10, 26 R Rapport, N. 43 Rhodes, C. 5, 24, 25, 26, 39, 76, 94, 104, 109, 114, 115, 118 Richards, J. 55–59, 78, 79, 81, 83, 85, 92, 93, 106 Richardson, L. L. 3, 4, 6, 43, 46, 50 Riley, P. 10 Rorty, R. 110, 114, 115 Rosen, M. 48 Rowland, G. 50 Rowland, S. 50 S Salzer-Morling, M. 24, 40 Scheurich, J. J. 41–42, 43, 44, 45, 49 Schwartzman, H. B. 48 Silverman, D. 37, 44, 46, 51, 103, 105 Simpson, B. 11, 38 Smircich, L. 118 Smith, L. M. 46 Soderquist, T. 101 Stam, R. 29 Swingewood, A. 7 T Tagg, S. K. 40 Taket, A. 46 Torode, B. 44, 46, 51, 103, 105 Tripp D. H. 37, 41, 42 Turner, S. 15



Name index 129

Tyler, S. A. 5, 15 U Uck, D. 61, 70–73, 78, 82–82, 86 Usher, R. 99, 101, 107, 108 V Van Maanen, J. 10, 27–28, 48, 49 W Wallman, S. 12 Walter-Busch, E. 111

Watson, T. J. 76, 117 Westwood, R. 113 White, H. 101 White, L. 46 Whitney, D. 28 Wilson, H. 38, 39 Wilson, J. 61, 65–70, 78, 81–82, 83, 87 Winter, R. 50 Witten, M. 22



Subject index

A addressivity xii ambivalence 28 anthropology 47 authenticity 105 author 14–15 power of 105 authorial positions 104 subjectivity 103 authority 33, 46 and authorship 10, 111 and writing 16 authorship and power 19 decentring of 26 autobiography 13, 17, 40–41, 46–47, 61, 101 B biography 101 C communication 23, 42 compliance 80 context 84–85 corporate saga 24 crisis of representation 8, 16, 21, 100, 108 D deconstruction 24, 43 dialogue 33, 38, 41 discourse 30, 33 diversity 31, 33, 43 domination 31 downsizing 82 E empowerment 83 epistemological foundationalism 115

ethnography 13–14, 47–48, 75 experience 37–38, 85 F fact 27, 111 fear 65 fiction 14, 27, 50–51, 89, 111 G genre xi-xii, 5–8, 13, 21, 34, 43–51, 105 and control 14 and hetroglossia 104 multiple 17, 115 rules of xv, 113 ghostwriting 39–44, 47, 61, 106 H heterogeneity 31, 33, 40 suppression of 109 heteroglossia 28–32, 39, 43, 46, 103, 108 and genre 104 heteroglossic organisation 21, 28–32, 35, 108–111 hierarchy 65, 80, 84, 86 humility 110, 112 I identities 15 interpretation 14, 33, 46, 48, 77, 84, 116 multiple 15 intersubjectivity 26 intertextuality 111 interview data 41 interviewing 37–44 interviews 17 as stories 37 open ended 40 irony 109–112

132

Subject index

K knowledge transdisiplinary xiii-xiv monstrous xiii-xiv organisational 24 L language 5 and reality 4, 7–8 centripetal forces of 29, 39, 103, 116 centrifugal forces of 29, 40, 103, 116 ideologically saturated 30 plurality of 30 learning 17, 72, 76–87 authentic 80 compliant 80 culture 78, 84, 86–87 interpreted 76–78, 79–80, 86–87 local 82 planned 76–78, 79, 84, 86 linearity 113 M management information systems 68 meaning, convergent and divergent 29 metaphor 22, 29 mimesis 11 modernity 22 monologue 24 myth 22 N narrative(s) 21 and power 22 conventions 114 deskilling 22 fiction 27 heroic 46 in organisational research 16 knowledge 28 multiple 23 organisation theory as 25–28 personal 38 suspicion of 25 non-conformism 25

O organisation(s) allusion of 21 as an object 115 as a verb 33 as narrative 21–25 change and learning in 13 cultural approaches to 22 heteroglossic, see heteroglossic organisation storytelling, see storytelling organisation writing of 32 organisational culture 26, 77 P paradigms 15 performance 31 performance management 64–65 pluralism 15, 24 poetry 27 politics of being conclusive 107, 113 polysemy 30 postmodern analysis 24 culture 12 turn xiii writer xiv writing 5 writing dilemmas 3 postmodernism 5, 22 poststructuralism 5, 8, 15, 43 power 31, 45 and language 21 in writing 103 relations of xii theory of 113 pragmatism 113–118 presentation 11–12, 106–107 production xiii-xiv Q quality management 13, 26, 75–76 R reading 24 reflexive authorship 17



Subject index

reflexivity 9, 16, 33–34, 99–100, 103–104, 108, 117 relativism 111 representation 3–5, 11–12, 32–33, 106–107 and control 4, 9, 109 crisis of, see crisis of representation repression and 10 (re)presenation(s) 11–16, 31, 33–34, 38, 42, 109 and control 13, 17–19, 35, 99 autobiographical 61–73 diverse 26 ethnographic 75–87, 106 fictional 89–05, 106–107 generic 43 interpretive 46 multiple 102, 114, 116 reproduction xiii-xiv research as narrative 8 conventions 18 cooperative 41 multidisciplinary 22 researchers as textual practitioners 99 resistance 80, 85 rhetoric 27, 45 S signature 105 simulacrum 12 simulation 12 stories as data 36, 61 grand 24 official 45, 55, 78 resistance 84

storytelling 3, 16, 21–28, 31, 114 and resistance 22 organisation 23–24 organisational 36 subjectivity 104 symbolism 26 T text 44 readerly and writerly 110–111 textual collusion xii practice 44, 99, 107 textwork 10 theory and practice 17 transcription 41–42 truth 19, 43, 111 correspondence theory of 37 effects 34, 44 monological 29 regimes of 9 V voice 30, 46, 110 narrator’s 14 W writer as a function of the text 103 writing 99, 110 and knowledge xii and power 3, 34, 109, 113 and research 5–8 as a method of inquiry 6 experimental 4, 26, 32 fictional 50 strategies 43–44

133

John Benjamins Publishing Company publishes Advances in Organization Studies as a reformulated continuation of the De Gruyter Studies in Organization. 1. ZEYTINOGLU, I¸sik Urla (ed.): Developments in Changing Work Relationships in Industrialized Economies. 1999. 2. HENKE, Holger and Ian BOXILL (eds.): The End of the ‘Asian Model’? 2000. 3. QUACK, Sigrid, Glenn MORGAN and Richard WHITLEY (eds.): National Capitalisms, Global Competition, and Economic Performance. 2000. 4. MAURICE, Marc and Arndt SORGE (eds.): Embedding Organizations. Societal analysis of actors, organizations and socio-economic context. 2000. 5. CHAN, Andrew: Critically Constituting Organization. 2000. 6. BOS, René ten: Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking. 2000. 7. RHODES, Carl: Writing Organization. (Re)presentation and control in narratives at work. 2001. 8. HOSKING, Dian Marie and Sheila McNAMEE (eds.): Organization Behavior. Social constructionist approach. n.y.p.