Discourses of Post-Bureaucratic Organization (Document Design Companion Series, 5)

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Discourses of Post-Bureaucratic Organization

Document Design Companion Series document design companion series accompanies the journal document design and focuses on internal and external communication of medium sized to multinational corporations, governmental bodies, non-profit organizations, as well as media, health care, educational and legal institutions, etc. The series promotes works that combine aspects of (electronic) discourse — written, spoken and visual — with aspects of text quality (function, institutional setting, culture). They are problem driven, methodologically innovative, and focused on effectivity of communication. All manuscripts are peer reviewed. document design is ‘designed’ for: information managers, researchers in discourse studies and organization studies, text analysts, and communication specialists.

Editors Jan Renkema

Maria Laura Pardo

Ruth Wodak

Tilburg University

University of Buenos Aires

Austrian Academy of Sciences

Editorial Address Jan Renkema Tilburg University Discourse Studies Group P.O.Box 90153 NL 5000 LE TILBURG The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected]

Volume 5 Discourses of Post-Bureaucratic Organization by Rick Iedema


Rick Iedema The University of New South Wales

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia

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TM

The 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 Iedema, Rick Discourses of Post-Bureaucratic Organization / Rick Iedema. p. cm. (Document Design Companion Series, issn 1568–1963 ; v. 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Organizational change--Social aspects. 2. Organizational change-Research. 3. Bureaucracy. I. Title. II. Series. HD58.8.I33 2003 302.3’5-dc21 isbn 90 272 3205 9 (Eur.) / 1 58811 413 9 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)

2003052291

© 2003 – 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

Acknowledgements Preface

vii ix

Chapter 1 The discourses of post-bureaucratic organization

1

Chapter 2 Approaches to studying organizational discourse

27

Chapter 3 A social semiotic view of discourse and organization

57

Chapter 4 Organizational discourse: A historical view

83

Chapter 5 Negotiating organization: A case of symbolic violence

111

Chapter 6 The dynamics of post-bureaucratic interaction: Resemiotization

133

Chapter 7 Recording the organization

149

Chapter 8 ‘Pathwaying’ as post-bureaucratic ethos

175

Chapter 9 Conclusion: Post-bureaucratic organization

193

References

205

Author index

227

Subject index

231

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges permission to draw on a number of published papers and data used therein. Some of the materials presented here were ªrst published by the NSW Department of Education in Sydney (as ‘The Literacy of Administration’, 1996). Second, I want to thank Functions of Language for permission to use data in Chapter 5 derived from an article published there under the title “The logogenesis of interactive tension”. Then I want to thank Document Design for permission to draw on an article published there under the title “The medical record as organizing discourse” and that I present a version of in Chapter 7. Finally, I want to thank Oxford University Press and Applied Linguistics for permission to use data from an article I did with Hermine Scheeres called “From doing to talking work: renegotiating knowing, doing and identity”.

Preface

This book has had a long gestation. This gestation period was mainly due to my nomadic meandering through diŸerent corners of academia, from the linguistics of literacy, to (social) semiotics, and from there to organization theory and health services research. While it started as a summary of my work on the discourse analysis of diŸerent social domains, the book ended up being something quite diŸerent. Realizing that this was my chance to have an extended say about the things that I hold dear, I used the book to short-circuit my long-standing interest in ‘meaning making’ as a way of talking about human existence, with my subsequent introduction to ‘the problem of organizing’ by being appointed at the School of Health Services Management (now the School of Public Health and Community medicine) at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. This cross-disciplinary leap took me from one academic context to another, both of which had taken on the rhetoric of multi-disciplinary theorizing and were teaching it to their students, but they themselves remained rather ªrmly planted in their own disciplinary heritages. This notwithstanding, thanks to the foresight of one person, Pieter Degeling — currently professor at Durham University in the U. K., I ended up spanning the philosophical langour of post-modern social science and the anxious and inpatient pragmatism of health services research and teaching. The logic of my appointment to the health management program can only be appreciated if you share with Pieter the insight that organization and management are constituted in meaning making. That is, things like organization and management are in fact interactive processes, organizing and managing. These processes are enacted and negotiated with others in the here-and-now, and they mean little without people actually doing or saying them into being. A professor at the then School of Health Services Management, Pieter Degeling had been teaching this for several years. I got to know him by chance, and my interest was sparked by some lecture notes I saw that said, organization is what people do and say to one another, and managing is about framing what workers can mean. If discourse is a social and self-organizing phenomenon that in many ways exceeds individual people’s powers, then management, I thought upon reading those notes, is the ‘art’ of taking charge of discourse change, by negotiating, steering or constraining what people can or feel good to mean, and by seeing that speciªc meanings gain further ‘investment’.

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While Pieter saw that organization and management are constituted in everyday interaction, he felt he was unable to analyze interaction other than in common sense and rather rough and ready terms. He sensed there are structures or characteristics that might explain in what way and why the things people said to one another took on or could propagate organization. He wanted to go beyond the notion that managing and organizing were social constructions, and see how these representations came to gather what Berger and Luckmann called ‘a massivity’ or impact on the real world. Pieter hired me, hoping I would be able to illuminate the interactive, the linguistic and the discursive speciªcs of organizational and managerial practice. We ended up working on a couple of research projects focusing on clinical and managerial work from that angle. Ironically, our early work together was more about describing the limits of managerial and organizational interaction. For example, following our ªrst project, we demonstrated how one particular organization ‘fell apart’ into several discrete discursive spaces. There was little discursive overlap or relevance between these diŸerent spaces, even if some of the players shuttled back and forth between them. That early work showed how managerial negotiation could become a practice ‘in and for itself’; a formality with limited in¶uence over those actually doing the work; a ritual concerned with issues that never quite touched on the substance of what people did ‘at the coal face’. Surprising as this may seem, there was little or no translation occurring between what employees did on a day-to-day basis and what management talked about at its weekly meetings. Taking up hours of meetings and consuming mountains of paperwork, this management enacted its own lack of relevance. In health care, Pieter reassured me, this made sense. Health professions ‘manage’ themselves, if that is the right word. Their expertise ensures their organizational autonomy, and the closest they get to acknowledging accountability to others is through the ‘mateship’ practice of peer review. Here, managing and organizing are about maintaining the delicate balance between professionals’ freedom and the appearance of organization. As Pieter used to put it, care happens. By and large, it is neither organized, nor managed. With all the questionable consequences that ¶ow on from that. It has taken me several years to come to terms with working in a research Centre with a focus on public services whose management was not management, and whose organization was not organization. In fact, I am still not quite sure if I really understand where I am and what I am doing. My move from social semiotics to organization theory was already quite a leap in itself. I had to come to terms all over again with a new ªeld that had its own intellectual histories. This new ªeld had its own particular reasons for espousing post-structuralism at a time when discourse theory had just wrangled itself out of its ‘foundationalist’ strangle-hold. My move into health services research — particularly as I started to learn more

Preface

about the area — increasingly felt like leap into quicksand. The ivory tower of theoretical sophistication I had been climbing when doing social semiotics was now attacked on a daily basis by hordes of incongruous discourses; discourses about communication, information, organization, management, learning, policy, and so on, and so on. Within health care, I felt, there was little to hold on to, beyond the mystiques created by clinicians’ knowing smiles when asked about what ‘really’ went on. A recent paper soon due out in Organization Studies captures our sense of this ‘shadow play’. Titled “It’s an interesting conversation I’m hearing”, the paper pinpoints how managing health professionals is about being able to keep multiple and contradictory discourses continuously in play across a range of fora. ‘Managing meaning’ here has nothing to do with manipulating what employees think, say or do. Rather, (health) managers have to learn to be comfortable with embodying and encompassing multiple and often contradictory voices. As the paper shows, their talk can be deeply ‘heteroglossic’. Like a hologram, these managers are in the ªrst instance ‘discourse absorbers’. Their organizational in¶uence depends less on what they can achieve, than on how well they can mask the disjunctions and chasms that separate the discourses that populate their organizations, and continue as if there is management, as if there is organization. Through writing that paper with some colleagues, I have been able to come to terms somewhat with the uncertain and heteroglossic nature of what goes on in (health) organizations. As I worked my way through these issues and questions I was fortunate enough to be able to talk about these things with Hermine Scheeres, a colleague from a neighbouring university. Hermine had been researching the workplace changes that took place at a Sydney gaming machine factory, and she was able to frame her understandings about those changes not just in discursive but in literacy terms. It was Hermine who introduced me to the work of those who were concerned to describe workplace change in terms of the rising literacy demands placed on workers. Through talking to Hermine I realized that what she was saying about her gaming machine factory was not unlike that which I had noticed in health organizations. Pieter had talked about health reform, and to me this meant that employees were increasingly pressured into talking across their traditional professional boundaries. Talking to Hermine, it became clear that organizational change generally was about people being asked to not just do their work, but to talk about their work with others from other workplace domains and professions. People were increasingly called on to participate in fora where they were to spell out the broad outlines or sequencing of their work practices, with the aim of re-designing what went on. Finally, through these involvements people were to become increasingly implicated in relationships of accountability, both to one another, to people elsewhere in the organization (such as management and administration),

xi

xii Discourses of Post-Bureaucratic Organization

and to people who were external to the organization (such as customers and government policy makers). After many discussions, Hermine and I decided to adopt a term coined by Darville in 1995 to describe these emergent conducts: textualization. For us, textualization came to encompass that collection of workplace practices through which employees make manifest what they do for and to others. Crucial to our theorization, these ‘others’ are indeed other. In the 21st century workplace, we began to think, workers are to interact increasingly frequently and intensely with people who are not their peers or trainees. They are therefore constrained in how they speak and what they say. They can’t take anything they say for granted, notwithstanding their years of training and specialization. This means that what they now talk about in the workplace is no longer just supportive of established practices, but is increasingly skewed to represent these practices across boundaries. To do so, these practices need to be put in generalizing and abstracted terms. That means, rather than frame work in the ways established professions and occupations see ªt, workers are to re¶ect on their work, invent discourses that cross professional (and organizational) boundaries; representations that translate across domains, codes that span heterogeneous understandings and multiple worldviews. In essence, we realized workers now have to invent meta-discourses, and they are now to participate in new discourse communities where they must devise, perform and conªrm the relevance and legitimacy of these meta-discourses. My discussions with Hermine brought some rhyme and reason back into the work that I had taken on several years previously. They made the various bits of research, reading and writing that I had done over the years fall into place. What I had been staring in the face — both in the organizations that I studied and in the literatures that I had been reading — was the struggle between two camps. First, there were those who sought to exclude interference from others by denying the possibility that their practices (writings) aŸorded translation into another metadiscourse. These people practised exclusion: what we do is not amenable to explanation other than in our own, original and exclusionary terms. What we do and mean can only be said in the way we say it, and we will do everything to police the orthodoxy that is our discourse(s). On the other side, there were those for whom discourse is not ªxed and forever. These people practised inclusion: what we say and how we say it are malleable, negotiable. We can say what we do and mean in innumerable ways. After all, discourse is representation. And no representation has a privileged monopoly over what it aims to represent. Now, I was back where I had started: social semiotics and discourse theory. As I had practised it, such theory promotes the view that representation — whether as linguistic sign, as painting, as medical diagnosis, or as architectural construction — is a convention whose legitimacy is contingent on the investment it receives

Preface xiii

from us in what we say and do. This does not make what we say and do arbitrary. On the contrary, our social, emotional, personal and material investments can produce real and present ‘massivity’. But the only claim to truth that meaning can make is one of communal, interactive subscription. That means, no discourse has a privileged monopoly over ‘the real’. So my semiotic insights had reappeared in organizational guise: textualization is the struggle over what can represent professional practice, it is the situated invention of a discourse that communities of practice adopt. Here, we are not concerned with people accepting discourses as truly representing the real. In the workplace as in social life more generally, people are struggling with the realization that discourse is a ‘truce’, not a ‘truth’. In the workplace as elsewhere, I thought, we are all under pressure to become semioticians, discourse theorists. Important for me is that the semiotic insight enhances our personal moral implication in what goes on rather than relativizing and leveling our discourse into meaninglessness. That is, every discourse choice we make has inclusionary and exclusionary consequences. Put in those terms, the challenge we now face is not to end theory or abandon all meta-discourse because it is too abstract. Instead, we must recognize that, as meaning makers, we are inevitably caught in co-realizing the dynamic between speciªcity and abstraction. Rather than settling on one particular formulation as the be-all-and-end-all of what we are about, we are coming to recognize that 21st century society is about dynamics, translations, tensions between discourse and meta-discourse, dialectics between ‘here-andnow’ experiences and ‘there-and-then’ understandings and knowings. It is these concerns that unite the present study. It bridges discourse theory and social semiotics, organization theory and health services research. It promotes the unsettling notion that as people and as workers we are less and less able to rely on ªxed representations and the identities that such representations confer. Modern societies and modern organizations personify change, and the implications of that for the discourses we espouse for our selves and our work are far-reaching. For the purposes of this book, I have used the notion ‘post-bureaucratic’ to capture these ideas. I also wanted to say thanks to the people I currently share the Centre for Clinical Governance with: JeŸrey Braithwaite and Ros Sorensen. The team we have got going contributes to one of the best working experiences I’ve had and am having. Then there is Sue Lowe and Arran our daughter, both of whom put up with me sneaking oŸ on Saturday and Sunday afternoons to work on this book. I feel immensely grateful to be able to share my life with them and be able to write as well. Finally, thanks to the Bronte pool. Without it my back would not be in the state it is in today.

Chapter 1

The discourses of post-bureaucratic organization

Introduction: Organizations are changing The government of a population, a national economy, an enterprise, a family, a child or even oneself becomes possible only through discursive mechanisms that represent the domain to be governed as an intelligible ªeld with speciªable limits and particular characteristics. (Rose 1999: 33)

In this study I am interested in organization, seen as a complex of ‘meaning makings’, or discourses. More speciªcally, I am interested in a particular syndrome of recent organizational developments that foreground worker interactivity around discourses about the work. I will label this syndrome (adapting Heckscher and Donnellon 1994) ‘post-bureaucratic textualization’. Finally, I am curious about how organization manages to create “lines of force across a territory spanning space and time” (Rose 1999: 50), and what this means for the discourses that populate organization. Let me ªrst turn to the notion of ‘discourse’, because this is the explanatory construct I use to understand organization and its post-bureaucratic developments. To me, the notion ‘discourse’ is not restricted to linguistic phenomena. It encompasses meaning making in general. Thus, discourse has many manifestations, ranging from ephemeral materialities such as spoken language (produced by vocal and air vibrations), to more resource-intensive materialities, such as writing and print, technologies, architectures and infra-structures. By conceptualizing discourse in this way, we are able to appreciate the continuities, the processes, the ¶ows of (materialized and rematerializing) meanings that buttress organization. By foregrounding organizational processes in this way, not in terms of ‘producing gaming machines’ or ‘servicing ill patients’, but in terms of the meanings that people make to harness or contest ‘lines of force across a territory spanning space and time’, we may gain insight not just into the substance but into the logic of their practices (Bourdieu 1990). If one concern is to talk about how organization creates ‘lines of force’, I also want to address how it is that these organizational ‘lines of force’ appear to be changing. The 21st century organization faces a very diŸerent set of contexts —

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economic, socio-cultural, political, and technological — than did the 20th century organization. This study seeks to understand the discursive dimensions of emerging forms of organization. These emergent forms have been referred in a variety of ways, including, among others, Post-Fordist organization (Harvey 1989), the ‘new work order’ (Gee et al. 1996), ‘post-bureaucratic organization’ (Heckscher and Donnellon 1994; Grey and Garsten 2001). The analyses and terminologies oŸered by these commentators point to a related set of ways in which they see organization as undergoing change. …the reduction of formal levels of hierarchy, an emphasis on ¶exibility rather than rule-following and the creation of a more permeable boundary between the inside and outside of organization — as denoted by the increased use of sub-contracting, temporary working and consultants rather than permanent and/or in-house expertise. (Grey and Garsten 2001: 230)

Heckscher and Donnellon expand on this list somewhat, oŸering nine features: worker participation through self-managing work teams; cross-functional task forces; multi-level consensus; information technology; decision-making capacity building; partnerships across boundaries; horizontal and vertical information sharing; negotiated solutions, and new managerial roles: leader, change agent, coordinator, broker, boundary-crosser. As Heckscher and Donnellon themselves suggest, many of these features are reminiscent of Burns and Stalker’s (1961) original conceptualization of the ‘organic’ organization, as opposed to their more bureaucratically constituted ‘mechanistic’ organization’. Burns and Stalker’s ‘organic’ organization (1961: 74Ÿ), however, was comprised of de-bureaucratized and team-work-based organizational arrangements that were contingent upon the nature of work and organizational context. For more recent authors like Heckscher (1994), post-bureaucratic organization is not necessarily contingent upon work and environment, but potentially exceeds traditional bureaucratic organization by being able to handle “a wider range of conditions” (Heckscher 1994: 16). This notwithstanding, far from having fully reconstituted global and local economies and organizations, post-bureaucracy is a phenomenon that is rarely realized in a ‘pure’ form. Instead, what is evident is that many organizations have adopted a post-bureaucratic rhetoric, while at the same time retaining traditional structural hierarchies, expert and specialization boundaries, and procedures and processes whose intent is top-down control rather than bottom-up facilitation. As well, this rhetoric may have translated into structural horizontalization, while eŸectively leaving work at ‘the coal face’ unaŸected. Often, then, there are tensions between post-bureaucratic aspirations and traditional work practices. These tensions are evident not merely in disjunctions between rhetoric and organizational arrangement, but also in the rhetorics themselves. In part, such rhetorical disjunctions are evident in the post-bureaucratic suspicion of bureau-

The discourse of post-bureaucratic organization

cratic rules, and in its attempt to marshall interpersonal dynamics, lateral politics, trust networks and spontaneous group associations as the primary logic for the organization and execution of work. Traditionally, bureaucracy set great store by rationality, accountability, hierarchy, and depersonalization (Heckscher 1994; Weber 1991), and each of these dimensions manifested as practices to do with rule-setting and rule-following. Post-bureaucracy, by contrast, is the pursuit of rhetorical, structural and social-interactive change away from top-down rules. In this sense, it is a rariªed space where spontaneity, initiative, involvement, enthusiasm and pragmatic decision-making converge.

A discourse view of post-bureaucratic change The purpose of the present volume is to explore how these contrasts and dynamics manifest themselves in what people do, say and write in and about organizations and work. This is a pressing task, because the claims that commentators such as Harvey and Heckscher and others have made about organizational change have only rarely been explicitly referenced to observations of what is said, done or written in organizational settings. There are some exceptions to this, notably Fairclough (1992, 1995), du Gay (1996a) to some extent, Gee, Hull and Lankshear (1996) and particularly Scheeres (1999, 2003). These authors’ research straddles organizational change and communication and interaction at work. The present study seeks to further their inquiry, with a speciªc focus on the discursive realizations of and tensions in post-bureaucratic organization. My main thesis is that post-bureaucratic organization is a complex dialectic that seeks to balance interactive participation, self-steering and self-fashioning workers, and the formalization of aspects of work. The term that Hermine Scheeres and I have adopted to describe this emerging complex of organizational discourse practices and products is ‘textualization’ (Jackson 2001; Iedema and Scheeres 2003). As I explain in detail in Chapter 8, textualization is a process of subjectiªcation where, through the enunciation of knowledge about work, worker self is organizationalized, and the organization is ‘self-ed’. Thus conceived, textualization is an interactive resolution of the opposition between private ways of thinking and feeling, and local ecologies of doing and saying on the one hand, and public ways of accounting for what transpires as a result of work on the other hand. Above, I introduced a number of abstract concepts that should now be exempliªed by means of instances of discourse. These concepts include ‘lines of force across territories spanning space and time’, ‘post-bureaucracy’, and ‘textualization’. In order to ground these concepts in discourse, and to clarify the organizational processes and arrangements just referred to, let us consider a couple of

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speciªc cases. The ªrst case concerns the writing produced by a native speaker council worker, and how this writing was ‘corrected’ by her supervisor. The second case is about a formal representation formulated by clinical workers about how they do ‘abdominal hysterectomy’. These two cases serve to highlight in diŸerent ways the discursive parameters and organizational prerogatives that contextualize work.

Regimes of appropriacy: Organizational correspondence Let us ªrst consider the case of a local council worker who was asked to draft a ministerial correspondence about some issues the Minister was required to act on. Part of this worker’s draft appears as Extract 1.1.1 Extract 1.1 Council is concerned that these policies are having a detrimental eŸect on health programs to the point that they will no longer be able to cope with the demand or provide adequate and eŸective services. Council draws the Minister’s attention to the impact on other services arising from changes within this portfolio and would appreciate advice as to what action the Minister plans to address these problems.

The council worker passed this draft on to a supervisor. This person rejected it and subsequently rewrote it (Extract 1.2). Extract 1.2 Council wishes to ensure that residents are provided with services which meet their needs and seeks your assurance that the services within your control will continue to oŸer appropriate support.

The nature of the changes suggests that some very delicate issues are at stake here. To the uninitiated, both extracts say pretty much the same thing: Council wants to hear from the Minister that s/he is addressing or is going to address the problems that are raised. Both extracts are quite indirect and impersonal, and they both construct complex relationships involving Council, the Minister, policies, health programs and services. Yet the ªrst one was judged by the supervisor to be ‘inappropriate’. If you are not a member of the ‘community of practice’ (Wenger 1998) where the writing of these ministerials is an everyday occurrence, it may be hard to see much signiªcance in the diŸerences between the two extracts. But if we dig deeper, it becomes evident that the extracts are signiªcantly diŸerent, both in the meanings deployed and the wordings used. More particularly, the supervisor’s rewrite 1. The original letter extracts could not be published. The extracts here are diŸerent from the originals but their grammar is left unaltered.


manifests a very speciªc authorial regime, in so far as it subjects the realization of inter-organizational relationships to strict and very delicate discourse rules. Let us consider what some of those discourse rules are. First, Extract 1.1 contains several negative meanings: ‘detrimental’, ‘no longer’, ‘cope’, and ‘problems’. Also, the participant ‘the Minister’ is constructed as an ordinary ‘doer’: ‘what action the Minister plans to address these problems’. The superior’s rewrite by contrast, (as well as the rest of his letter) contains no negatives. Instead, it construes the issue in terms of positives like ‘continue to oŸer appropriate support’. Most importantly, he does not construct the Minister as a ‘doer’: it is the Council that acts through ‘seek[ing] your assurance’. Finally, his use of the word ‘assurance’ implies that the results of the Minister’s work are already ‘out there’, and that to obtain it all the Council (not the Minister) needs to do is ‘seek it’. Seen from a linguistic point of view, then, this cursory analysis suggests that the relationship between Council staŸ and the Minister is to be maintained using very speciªc aspects of language, and that Council workers need to know what these are. One such aspect is to do with appropriately realizing the recognition of people’s status, and of their ‘right’, or lack of it, to impose on others. This includes referring to the Minister not as an ordinary doer, but in terms of organizational entities: ‘control’, ‘services’, ‘assurance’. Second, negative meanings should not be used or de-emphasized, and we have to phrase our concerns in positive terms. In sum, our writing is to signal that we do not impose on the person (the Minister); we phrase our desires in positive terms, and indicate conªdence in the other’s e¹ciency, interest, and helpfulness. We can relate the supervisor’s rewrite and the strategies applied to the issue of organizational ‘lines of force’ raised earlier. His writing creates ‘lines of force’ by projecting continuity, and this is construed through positivity, harmony, and unanimity: he turns negative into positive constructions; he turns doing processes into saying processes, and he turns <Subject-verb> constructions into reifying nominalizations. These changes have one thing in common: each has to do with a backgrounding of local and situated kinds of meanings and diŸerences. The supervisor’s rewrite hides or delinguistiªes (Habermas 1987) details about what speciªc people might or should do in the here-and-now. The supervisor does not say ‘we want you to do [x] now’, detailing individuals, times and places. Instead he says, ‘we seek your assurance that [x]’. This situates ‘we’ and ‘seek’ in the hereand-now, but the Minister is depersonalized as possessive ‘your’, and his/her actions have become a timeless thing ‘assurance’. By displacing people and their actions in this way, we delinguistify aspects of our relationship with them, and this construes these aspects as being taken-for-granted, as timeless, as natural. Hence, delinguistiªcation enables us to construe meanings that presume agreement, positive replies, and harmonious relationships; that is, meanings that

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project ‘lines of force’. For its part, negativity draws attention to itself because it is ‘marked’ (i.e. unusual; Halliday and James 1993), and it therefore obliges others to respond or to act. In that sense, negativity imposes; it seeks or implies the need for change. By contrast, positivity is unmarked (usual and unremarkable), and its use stabilizes the current organizational arrangement of positionings, practices, relationships and responsibilities. Positivity conªrms. Similarly, requiring the Minister to do something leaves him with fewer options than if he were asked to say something. Since the saying operates at one remove from ‘what is’ in so far as that it is about ‘what is’, it is able to partly draw attention away from its own here-and-now. This of course is a complicated way of saying: words are cheaper than actions. But in this case, the supervisor’s use of a saying process leaves the Minister with ‘room for manoeuvre’ (Clay and SchaŸer 1984), thereby emphasizing understanding and agreement rather than tension. Last, the nominalization is preferred over the <Subject-process> construction because it too leaves the Minister with some discretion, with room for manoeuvre, by obviating questions about when, where, how and who. Put more technically, nominalization backgrounds time, space and agency. In these ways, the supervisor’s rewrite “[opens] lines of force across a territory spanning space and time” (Rose 1999: 50). Each of the changes that he makes contribute to infusing the discourse with continuity, unanimity, and stability. The Council worker was not tuned in to these subtleties, and was unable to realize these ‘lines of force’. Her task now is to learn about the ways in which CouncilMinister relations are to be expressed, and about the organizational imperative to create and maintain ‘lines of force’. Failing this, she is likely to remain organizationally powerless and marginalized. Frequently those who are relatively powerless remain so because they are ignorant of the ways of power: ignorant, that is, of matters of strategy, such as assessing the resources of the antagonist, of routine procedures, rules, agenda settings, access, of informal conduits as well as formal protocols, of the style and substance of power. It is not that they do not know the rules of the game; they might not recognize the game, let alone know the rules. (Clegg 1989: 221)

As in the case of the Council ministerials just discussed, organizational communication is frequently hostage to existing ‘lines of force’ and to the imperative to maintain them. These communicational constraints arise from the complex calculi of power diŸerences, reciprocities and intimacies that we as workers ongoingly perform and verify with and in front of colleagues. As members of organizations, we tend to become ensnared in such calculi, and in the discourses through which these calculi are realized, both formally and ‘profanely’. We identify with them, and, lest we lose our job, we become inured to them.


Formalizing work As workers or ‘staŸ’, we are gradually becoming aware that there are diŸerent ways in which these socio-organizational calculi can be enacted and maintained. Gradually, the ethos around organizational interaction and communication is changing. This does not mean that ‘rules’ such as the ones formulated above no longer hold. Far from it. In some organizations the rigidity of communicative rules are being cranked up rather than relaxed; think of call centres, where telephone workers are increasingly required to speak according to pre-determined scripts, using particular kinds of voices, tones and timbres (Cameron 2000). Or think of the pressure on professionals to increasingly formalize, standardize and protocolize what they do, to facilitate public scrutiny and accountability. But at the same time, and across a range of organizational spheres, it seems workers are given responsibility for negotiating new rules in a more self-directed way. They now participate in Problem Solving meetings, for example, or special committees, working parties, or project groups where they are expected to negotiate the substance of what they do and say among themselves. While by no means ubiquitous, in many modern organizations these forms of participation are part and parcel of a more general erosion of traditional arrangements: jobs change, departments join, organizations merge or go out of business, contracts replace permanence, and so on, and so on. These changes, in turn, are said to parallel a broader set of socio-cultural changes aŸecting countries across the globe, all of which revolve around a blurring of social, cultural, organizational and professional boundaries (Bauman 1992; Barkema et al. 2002). In myriad ways, it appears people’s jobs are becoming less narrowly circumscribed, while expectations of and levels of information about what workers do are raised. Most noteworthy here is that workers no longer just do their work: they increasingly talk their work. In a recent paper, Hermine Scheeres and I have referred to this as ‘textualization’ (Scheeres and Iedema 2002; Iedema and Scheeres 2003). As indicated above, textualization is a notion that is meant to capture the phenomenon that workers across all kinds of organizations no longer just have narrowly circumscribed tasks, and that they are increasingly expected to communicate with others about what they do in generalizing and abstracting terms. This includes new forms of talk, but also new forms of writing: problem solving diaries; discussion papers; work process statements; project proposals, and so on, and so on. By way of exempliªcation, let us consider one particular textualization. A group of clinical workers in a local metropolitan teaching hospital came together to construct a ‘clinical pathway’ — a statement that sets out in generalizing terms what a particular kind of treatment requires from the diŸerent professionals involved (Iedema and Scheeres 2003). One of the ªrst things the clinicians usually

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do is download comparable pathways oŸ the web made available by other institutions. These downloaded pathways serve as models, as starting points, which the clinicians use to gain a sense of what to work towards. The ease with which these documents can be obtained from the Web, of course, is due to increasing digitization (Barkema et al. 2002). Digitization leads to ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey 1989), which in turn explains the knowledge-intensity that such speed of access now aŸords (cf. Child and McGrath 2001 on the ‘information-intensive workplace’). It is at ‘pathwaying’ meetings that the interactive dimension of textualization occurs. Here, people negotiate about what to put into the pathway, what tasks to allocate to whom, and so on. In a later chapter we will consider such team meetings in detail and discuss how ‘pathways’ are conceptualized, discussed and written up (see Chapters 4 and 8). For now, let us consider the kind of document that these meetings aim to produce. Figure 1.1 shows a fairly basic clinical pathway for abdominal hysterectomy (de-identiªed). This pathway brings together and harmonizes the views, knowledges and practices of those who are engaged in doing this particular kind of treatment. Both as interactive textualization exercise and as outcome in the shape of a formal document, pathway(ing)s aim to standardize what diŸerent clinicians (doctors, nurses, allied health clinicians) do with and for abdominal hysterectomy patients. Thus, on Day 0, the day of surgery, it was agreed that a number of things should be done or looked out for: observations must be made of the patient’s pain level and nausea; medications must be given (antibiotics and so on); ¶uids must be administered, and so on. Put in these terms, the pathway(ing) becomes a contract among those involved in the work. Such a contract constitutes a delicate balance between speciªcity and generalization. For example, one of the pathway’s ‘to do’s’ is ‘peri-care’. The term ‘pericare’ references a whole set of activities coordinated by the anaesthetist and her team that occur around the surgical operation. As piece of discourse, ‘peri-care’ construes as taken-as-known the various details that pertain to that dimension of care. In a similar way, but at a diŸerent level, the pathway not only speciªes but at the same time generalizes about the particulars of the care given to speciªc individuals: it regulates the broad outlines and sequencing of care across populations of patients and clinical disciplines. As Figure 1.1 shows, the pathway spells out the spectrum of issues that need to be taken into account when providing the care; it clariªes the sequencing of diŸerent aspects of care; and it provides explicit (discharge) criteria that are likely to govern decisions about sending patients home. But the extent to which this discourse becomes emblematic of what diŸerent clinicians do on the wards, or manages to create ‘lines of force across a [clinical] territory spanning space and


time’, depends on whether the clinicians have chosen to ‘own’ or internalize the rules that they or their colleagues have enunciated in the document. Clearly, [t]he availability of formal procedures does not directly ensure that they will be followed but it does make explicit accountability for action (or failure to act), which lead to a failure. If the action was not prescribed, the actor is not accountable and the person who wrote the procedure is. If the action was prescribed, the actor is accountable (McCarthy et al. 1997: 738, cited in Yakel 2001: 235).

Figure 1.1 Abdominal Hysterectomy Multi-Disciplinary Pathway © Lakeridge Health Organization, Canada. Reproduced with kind permission.

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In its guise as formally published and publicized document, the pathway may merely embody the potential for creating understandings and accountabilities that transcend times, spaces and people. What happens in actual practice may well be a very diŸerent matter. As some are concerned to argue, the ‘order’ created by a pathway such as this may well be counter-balanced by a new level of practical ‘disorder’ (Berg and Timmermans 2000; Berg 1996, 1997, 1998a). As is explored later in this study, other commentators have sought to control this tension between practice and representation by proposing a dynamic, ‘textualizing’ dialectic between formal document and interactive practice (see Chapter 8). These two case examples put some empirical ¶esh on a number of concepts that play a central role in this study. First, the notion of organization as ‘lines of force across a territory that spans space and time’ was exempliªed by means of the unifying and simplifying language of the council supervisor, and the standardized formulation put forward by the clinicians in the form of their abdominal hysterectomy pathway. These two examples set out in a simpliªed way the primary means through which organization is enacted. On the one hand, ‘lines of force’ are materialized as unifying kinds of discourse: here, discourse is the semiotic resource that absorbs and becomes a short-hand for aligned kinds of understanding, knowing and doing. Think of something as innocuous as the term ‘assurance’ and the continuities and permanences that it construes. On the other hand, ‘lines of force’ are materialized in the form of workers’ communications and cooperative knowledgings. Here, people interacting with each other on an increasingly frequent and re¶exive basis becomes the site for a lived enactment of ‘lines of force’. These two dimensions of organization are kept in mutual tension through textualization: workers are encouraged to become the authors of the categories and other discourse devices on the basis of which they manage and judge their work and themselves. Moreover, because these categories and discourse devices transcend (as they must) local times, places and people, these are complex discourses that at once aŸord self-management, and management by others.

Making sense of the changes As explained, the notion textualization gives expression to the idea that workers across all kinds of organizations no longer just have narrowly circumscribed tasks, but that they are increasingly expected to communicate with others about what they do, and participate in cross-organizational events, meetings, projects, task groups, and so on. As such, textualization is a notion that pinpoints an increase in discoursing across organizations. Heckscher has referred to this same phenomenon by talking about the ‘interactive organization’ (Heckscher 1994: 42). Both


textualization and the interactive organization, then, are notions that pinpoint what workers increasingly appear to be doing. A discourse analyst, Norman Fairclough (1992), has approached social and organizational changes not from the perspective of what workers in general are doing, as from the perspective of what happens to the discourses that they mobilize. Fairclough oŸers the following headings for thinking about how workplace changes and tensions aŸect communication and discourse: democratization, commodiªcation and technologization. Let us brie¶y revisit Fairclough’s analysis, and situate it in relation to the concerns of the present study. For him, democratization refers to the elimination of overt markers of hierarchy and power asymmetry in types of institutional discourse where power relations are unequal. (Fairclough 1992: 203)

Fairclough focuses here on the ways in which discourse as ‘regime of appropriacy’ is responding to or presaging changes in authority hierarchies. In Yeatman’s terms, “long and complex ‘reporting’ chains between superordinates and subordinates are ¶attened out and there is altogether much less of an authoritarian culture of command and reference” (Yeatman 1990: 23). Whether as structural reform or as rhetorical eŸect, democratization does two things: it creates more space for interactive dialogue in management-staŸ relations, and it requires new kinds of dialogic participation. The apparent equality eŸect that Fairclough points to here, then, places an onus on both management and staŸ to communicate more in a language that absorbs and neutralizes diŸerence, rather than overtly and congruently marking it. Questions have been raised about this intensiªcation of participation and communication. Correctly, of course, Yeatman sees staŸ participation in organizations as contingent upon their control of specialized discourses and literacies. This requirement leads her to wonder whether “[i]t is not, therefore, a change which beneªts all, but […] one which gives a democratic gloss to the hierarchical relations of […] domination” (Yeatman 1990: 25). Equally, Fairclough himself coins the term `synthetic personalization’, to highlight the same point, not unrelated to what others have called èmotional labour’ (Hochschild 1983) and `detached concern’ (Lief and Fox 1963). What is common here is the notion that the new forms of participation marshall what were previously considered to be forms of engagement uniquely reserved for intimate or friend-to-friend relationships. These interpersonal modes of engagement, one could say, are now rolled out to bridge the uncertainties of organizational change, rather than for the maintenance of private relationships (Fairclough 1992: 219). Transposed into the organizational sphere, social-interpersonal ways of talking and doing are unhinged from their prototypical occasions of realization. These

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ways of talking are now redeployed for and in front of people where not personal intimacy and friendship are at stake, but where shared workplace understandings, agreement about ways of doing and talking about the work, and commitment to team-based initiatives are the primary concern. Seen from this critical angle, the rhetoric of participation is not simply a freeing up of the rules, and nor does it lead to enhanced access to resources and decision-making opportunities. Principally, it recontextualizes (Bernstein 1990; Sarangi 1998) rules about ‘who can say what’ into a domain that exceeds the traditional parameters of work. Here, top-down rules about ‘who can say what’ become bottom-up initiatives of ‘who will say what’, with the multi-disciplinary meeting, the project team, or the ‘total quality circle’ as new sites of participative opportunity (Gee et al. 1996; du Gay 1996b). If before there was the possibility of doing one’s work without having to interact with other people not directly involved with one’s own tasks or outside of one’s sphere of friends, now, the new ethos of participation requires intense kinds of interaction with workers from beyond our own immediate sphere of work and sociality. Moreover, this ethos renders non-participation ‘questionable’. The new participation requirement shifts the organizational goal posts, imposes new literacy requirements, and introduces a more complex mode of management for workers and managers. One consequence of this is that the ways in which workers maintain their own organizational positions and identities now tend to be more indirect and tentative than they were in the past. as overt markers of power asymmetry become less evident, covert markers of power asymmetry become more potent, with the result that power asymmetry becomes more subtle rather than disappearing (Fairclough 1992: 203).

Crucially, then, the participation ethos radically reconstitutes work (and the worker): from being surveilled from above, work is now increasingly about surveillance from within and by itself (herself) as it (she) talks about itself (herself). Participation, on this reading, produces a discourse about work and self — that is, a meta-discourse. In producing this meta-discourse, workers come to assume and perform a ‘self-steering self’ (Rose 1990). Put simply, participation in the postbureaucratic organization transposes aspects of surveillance away from (retroactive) hierarchical control into (pro-active) team participation2 (see Chapters 5, 6 and 8). 2. Interestingly, terms used to legitimise team participation centre on expanding one’s potential as worker: multi-skilling, broad-banding, competency focusing, and the like. Yet, these terms can be read both as referring to the technical details of the work and as describing the nature of workers’ personal involvement in organizational relationships. In this latter sense, they point to a horizontalizing of interpersonal accountabilities and responsibilities, with the onus of social control and in¶uence on the worker or workers.


Seen from a diŸerent angle, the requirement to ‘participate’ and talk about one’s work other than just do it may also be empowering. In saying this, I do not want to buy into the claims about self-actualization and enhanced creativity advanced by organizational learning theorists like Peters (1992) and Senge (1990). As I suggest elsewhere (together with Hermine Scheeres), in talking about the work with others with whom we never have had to talk, we are confronted with diŸering assumptions about and practices of doing the work. The ‘diŸerences’ that arise require that we make room for others not previously part of our social and organizational universe in a discursive and interactive sense. Work participation now is a matter of making explicit what I do, how I do it, and who I am as doer and speaker. As this participative talk unfolds, I am confronted not only with others as diŸerent, but also with myself as potential source of diŸerence. The ensuing negotiation of practical and personal diŸerences may of course lead to con¶ict and contestation, but it may equally give workers a new view of their work, of others’ work, of the organization, and of themselves and others as workers. In this scenario, participation potentially confronts people with the incongruity of contradictory views, practices and values. It is in this very confrontation, Scheeres and I argue, that workers may gain not only an enhanced appreciation of others (other professions) who are diŸerent and who do things diŸerently, but also an innovative view on how things can be done, said and written. Democratization, then, is not merely about shifting the goal posts of organizational performance and subjecting workers to rising levels of participation; it is (potentially) also about engendering new ways of seeing, being and doing. To return to Fairclough’s ways in which organizational discourses are changing, his second heading is commodiªcation. Commodiªcation refers to how ways of meaning traditionally associated with very speciªc domains of production and industrial relations are beginning to be used outside of those industrial contexts. Hence, commodiªcation is the process whereby spheres of social life are being subjected to a ‘market logic’, where processes and relationships are increasingly enacted on the basis of market exchange, price, budget, and so forth. [commodiªcation is] the colonization of institutional orders of discourse, and more broadly of the societal order of discourse, by discourse types associated with commodity production. (Fairclough 1992: 207)

The discourse eŸects of commodiªcation are evident in how especially public organizations construe their internal and external relationships. Over the last ten to twenty years, public administration has assumed a managerialist or New Public Management ethos that has gone a long way towards displacing the more traditional bureaucratic ethos in favour of quasi-commercial relationships (Walsh 1995; du Gay 2000). ‘Contracting’, for example, is now a common term used in

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public services across the western world, with government departments ‘contracting’ the services of its ‘service providers’ (i.e. hospitals; prisons; schools, etc.). The relationships that used to exist between such departments have been reconstituted along market lines. More recently still, however, correctives to manageralism have started to come to the fore, and ideas about organizations’ impact on communities and the quality of their services are gaining ground in policy circles, over and above calculations of ªnancial viability and proªt-loss ratios (Chapter 8). Among other things, for traditional workers this means that the cost implications and product outcomes of what they do are no longer merely abstract concerns to be resolved at management levels. Rather, workers, through devolution of decision-making, are handed the means for re¶ecting on and to some extent manipulating the ªnancial and quality dimensions of their practices. As Scheeres’ work shows, factory workers are confronted with operational and quality control problems (Scheeres 2003). Equally, for clinical workers who participate at pathway meetings, spelling out the details of their treatment regimens is in part to facilitate resource monitoring by management, and to ensure quality of outcomes across the hospital’s services, but also to give clinicians the opportunity to spell out the parameters within which these kinds of monitoring are to be achieved (Degeling 2000). For its part, the term ‘commodiªcation’ foregrounds the managerialist and ªnance-driven nature of change at the expense of what are potentially more positive developments: programs of worker involvement and modes of public accountability. Fairclough’s third heading for how discourse is changing, technologization, refers to techniques which are seen as resources or toolkits that can be used to pursue a wide variety of strategies in many diverse contexts (Fairclough 1992: 215).

Examples here are interviewing, counselling and advertising. One other ‘technology’ which Fairclough mentions is that of casual conversation used by managers for the mediating of interpersonal relations, although this begins to transect perhaps with democratization. Issues such as ‘managing’ disagreement and rejection, ‘positive politeness’ versus ‘negative politeness’, being assertive without being aggressive, and challenging people’s assumptions by means of building solidarity through conversation are important here, and tie in with the enactment of ‘synthetic personalization’ referred to above. Together, democratization, commodiªcation and technologization not only point to but mount a critique of organizational developments that are extending or are requiring the extension of the scope of workers’ discursive repertoires in dramatic ways. Fairclough contends that the reason interpersonal relations become more and more collegial and horizontal, is that collegialities and equalities


are now the means through which accountability and control are negotiated (budgets, performance measurements, job statements and certiªcation requirements). Fairclough is right of course, in so far that the restructuring rhetoric emphasis on worker mobility and choice is contradicted in practice: promotion is becoming more demanding, entrance into the workplace is becoming harder due to increasingly speciªc and rising training and competency requirements, and work is becoming harder to do and harder to keep (Heckscher 1995; Grey and Garsten 2001). It is important, however, to acknowledge that the post-bureaucratic modality of organization is not necessarily more hegemonic and suppressive. Paradoxically perhaps, its concern with worker participation is also a quest for worker education and commitment (see Chapter 8).

Post-bureaucracy versus anti-bureaucracy So far I have addressed a number of organizational developments in terms of what they mean for employees and for the discourses that they are expected to deploy. Even if the literatures on which I have drawn are frequently critical of these postbureaucratic developments, my approach to the changes is to consider their potential beneªts as well as disadvantages for what people are, do and say. Let us brie¶y turn to another breed of commentaries on organizational change, popularly referred to as the ‘management guru’ literature. This literature takes a very diŸerent and more explicitly positive normative stance on what is happening. Another common feature of this body of literature is that it is frequently ‘anti-bureaucratic’ (du Gay 2000). Organizational change is equated with ¶attening and personalizing of organizational command hierarchies, with making production processes ¶exible, with redirecting priorities towards customer demand and quality, and with reorganizing the labour force across disciplinary specializations and boundaries into teams. In these accounts, however, the ideals of ¶exibility, innovation and personalization not just overshadow but elide from view the more formal, regimented and surveillance-oriented dimensions of postbureaucratic re-organization. In the writings at issue here, these latter more managerial issues are naturalized and rendered invisible by highlighting the social and personal beneªts that we can derive from working together, solving each others’ problems and achieving ‘team alignment’. The fundamental characteristic of the relatively unaligned team is wasted energy. Individuals may work extraordinarily hard, but their eŸorts do not e¹ciently translate to team eŸort. By contrast, when a team becomes more aligned, a commonality of direction emerges, and individuals’ energies harmonize. There is less wasted energy. In fact, a resonance or synergy develops, like the ‘coherent’ light of a laser rather than

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the incoherent and scattered light of a light bulb. There is commonality of purpose, a shared vision, and understanding of how to complement one another’s eŸorts. (Senge 1990: 234)

While Senge is predominantly concerned with describing eŸective and adaptive forms of organization, he knows that such re-structurings are contingent upon what workers in these organizations in fact do and say. To achieve eŸective organization, he claims, workers need to adopt empowering ways of conceptualizing themselves and their work. One such new way is what Senge refers to as ‘system thinking’: obtaining a meta-perspective on our role in the organization by relating (that is, relativizing) our own personal position and task to those of others. In Senge’s view, then, organizational change is contingent upon behaviour that re¶ects on itself and that learns. Senge’s work is one example where issues of worker interaction, such as team work, mutual respect, and so on are not arbitrary to the broader organization, its structure, its management, and so on. In that sense, Senge’s thinking reminds us of organization and management theories that used to focus on optimizing modes of production by improving relations of employment and sensitivity towards the worker, such as Human Relations Theory and Human Resource Management (e.g Mayo 1997 [1949]; see Morgan 1997). But commentators like Senge, Champy (1995), Peters and Waterman (1982), and the like, go much further than reinstating the concerns of Mayo and other Human Relations theorists. For them, any degree of bureaucratic organization is not just irrelevant to organizations in the 21st century, but obstructive. Bureaucracy not only unduly formalizes work relationships, but prevents workers themselves from being in charge. According to this ideology of full trust in workers’ initiatives and understandings, ordinary workers can only achieve excellence in climates where there is: …respect for the individual. That basic belief and assumption were omnipresent [in excellent companies] …what makes it live at these companies is a plethora of structural devices, systems, styles and values all re-inforcing one another so that the companies are truly unusual in their ability to achieve extraordinary results through ordinary people … These companies give people control over their destinies; they make meaning for people. They turn the average Joe or Jane into winners. They let, even insist that, people stick out. They accentuate the positive (Peters and Waterman 1982: 238/9, cited in du Gay 1996a: 61)

For the management of workers, this is said to mean: No more close supervision of workers, no more focus on data irrelevant to running the business, no more energy spent on defending turf. The role of managers becomes one of empowerment — providing workers with the information, training, authority and accountability to excel .. As workers take on more management tasks, managers must take on more leadership tasks — holding a vision of the business, articulating it


to workers and customers, and creating an environment that truly empowers workers. (Champy 1995: 17)

For these authors, the emancipation of the ordinary worker from the shackles of managerial controls and commands, and his/her self-realization and actualization as worker play an equally important and complementary role. Somehow, their rhetoric fuses ‘what is good for the organization’ with ‘what is good for me as worker’, and in the process injects managerial and organizational discourse with an emotiveness which it formerly had no access to, and which it even stood in opposition to. But what these accounts leave out is that the twin aims of self-realization and self-actualization put the worker on notice to display and pursue ‘work as enterprise’. ‘Enterprise’ brings together the ways in which organizations and employees are not only becoming increasingly reconstituted along ‘contractual’ lines (despite the worker’s emancipation from mere worker into ‘participator’), but also highlights the increasing levels of worker ‘responsibilization’, such that she is asked to take on risks, accept costs, and confront challenges previously considered to be purely the preserve of management. In keeping with the rationality of entrepreneurial governance, performance management and related techniques function as forms of ‘responsibilization’ which are held to be both economically desirable and personally ‘empowering’. This requirement that individuals become more personally exposed to the risks and costs of engaging in a particular activity is held to encourage them to build resources in themselves rather than simply to rely on others to take risks and endure uncertainties on their behalf. (du Gay 2000: 85)

This suggests that the emphasis within organizational employment is no longer merely on complying with what is required, but on displaying willingness, eagerness, commitment, initiative (Rose 1996b). Here, an important and new ªeld of gravity of organizational discourse is where workers vocalize about how they are able to rethink organizational problems, devise solutions and further organizational interests through ‘showing initiative’, ‘being self-steering’, as well as ‘formulating project proposals’ and ‘performance plans’.3 These developments mean that work is no longer a matter of just ‘turning up’, but increasingly about confronting new modes of participation and performance. As already noted by Gee et al. (1996), the ‘new work order’ requires workers not 3. Put in linguistic terms, the shift is one from Command (enacted by ‘managers’) to OŸer (enacted by workers). The shift is also what de Certeau would term ‘a tactic out of its orbit’, in so far that the spotlight no longer frames managers and what they want employees to do (compare Foucault’s pre-Enlightenment position of the King), but it frames ordinary workers and what they have to oŸer (Foucault’s [1977] bio-political shift from ‘spectacular violence’ towards ‘public control’; see Chapter 4).

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only to do their work but also to talk about it, think about it, and change it. This manifests in the kinds of things that workers increasingly talk about, in the changing objectives of their talk, and in the rising levels of interpersonal contact experienced at work. This increase in ‘interactivity’ (Heckscher 1994) does clearly not occur in and for itself only. On the contrary, the post-bureaucratic ethos increasingly requires workers to self-present in team and stakeholder settings, and to publicly enact its emerging ethos of participation, or governmentality. As I argue in more detail later, the focal point of this post-bureaucratic governmentality is the convergence of the local and the distal; of personal enactment and organizational document (see Chapter 8). This emerging nexus of enacting and inscribing is at the heart of post-bureaucratic productivity. Pace those who construe recent organizational changes purely in positive terms, then, post-bureaucracy represents a ‘bounded empowerment’ (Rundall et al. 1998). Post-bureaucratic visibility of the worker is produced by a gaze centrally concerned to enhance transparency of the work. By the same token, worker visibility must also be considered in terms of its political implications. While certainly an onus imposed on people in organizations, worker visibility does answer to a principle that in the political-governmental sphere has been talked about in terms of ‘citizen dignity’ (Taylor 1995: 200). Except if we take the view that being a citizen constitutes a right that carries no obligations, there is ground for seeing workers to be the ‘citizens’ of their organizations. As ‘organizational citizens’, workers need not be inevitably locked in an adversarial relationship with management and carry no responsibility for the outcomes of their labour. Their ‘dignity’ as social-organizational participants, as it does for citizens in governmental democracies, derives from an increased capacity of participation and an enhanced modality of political representation. In the following quote taken from Taylor’s (1995: 200) argument on this issue, I have added ‘workers’ to his ‘citizens’ and ‘management’ to his ‘government’: A society in which the citizens’ [workers’] relation to government [management] is normally adversarial, even when they manage to bend it their purposes, has not secured citizen [worker] dignity and allows only a low degree of citizen [worker] capacity. Full participation in self-rule means, at least part of the time, to have some part in forming a ruling consensus, with which one can identify along with others. To rule and be ruled in turn means that at least some of time the governors [managers] can be ‘us’, not always ‘them’. The sense of citizen [worker] capacity is seen as incompatible with our being part of an alien political [organizational] universe, which we can perhaps manipulate but never identify with. (Taylor 1995: 200)

Seen in this light, worker participation in organizational-managerial processes and their acquiescence to the peculiar nature, the limits and the constraints of both those processes and of their own positionings might become preferable to main-


taining a ‘normally adversarial’ distance. Importantly too, of course, such participation does not rule out critique and change — on the contrary, participation infuses people’s critiques and desired changes with the possibility of practical realization, if also raising the likelihood of compromise and the immediacy of failure. Clearly, enhancing the ‘civic spirit’ of workers through intensiªed organizational participation does not lead in a straight line to worker empowerment, as claimed by the management theorists reviewed above. However, and as I argue here and later in this study, neither does it necessarily embody new and more insidious kinds of suppression.

Discourse and organization So far I have discussed organizational tensions and developments surrounding the post-bureaucratic work order. I touched very brie¶y on ‘discourse’ above, but I might at this point elaborate this notion and its relationship to ‘organization’ more fully. First, I regard discourse as encompassing that domain of social life that harbours resources for making meaning. This includes language, but also gesture, posture, gaze, dress, gait, patterns of action and interaction. It comprises visual representation, but also technological devices, and infra-structural and architectural ‘productions of space’ (Lefebvre 1991). Within the perspective taken in this study, then, discourse is a broad, overarching, multi-modal concept (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). A technical term often used instead of discourse is ‘semiosis’ (Sebeok 1994), referencing all those resources that enable us to mean. Following this deªnition, people might complain that there isn’t much that falls outside of semiosis, or discourse (it is this latter term that I will use from now on). But I am not saying that ‘everything is discourse’, because discourse has strict limits. This is not only because discourse is socially (and organizationally!) policed, but also because the resources with which we can mean will always be limited in some way. We train as teachers, managers or as doctors, and each of these ‘subjectiªcations’ harbours particular kinds of meaning potentials and not others. We specialize in nursing, gardening, re¶exology or literature, or sometimes in more than just one or two of these, but ultimately we are always constrained by the meaning makings in and thanks to which we are constituted.4 Another way of saying that discourse has limits is to point to the ways in which it imposes order and disorder. By ordering, or discursively categorizing what goes on in the world (Ellis 1993; Hodge and Kress 1993; Bowker and Star 1994), things 4. Basil Bernstein has referred to these ‘limits’ as our ‘coding orientations’ (Bernstein 1973, 1975, 1987).

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and experiences become talk-about-able, or rather, mean-able. In itself, categorization is principally about setting limits, creating boundaries: this goes with that, but not with that. As ‘enabling constraint’, discourse makes meaning by setting limits. It enables by imposing meaning on experience, on self, on what is other, on what is contradictory, meaningless, and replete with meaning. Pulling back a bit to view ‘discourse’ from a more general vantage point, we can say that there are two aspects to discourse. First, there are those meanings that we make in the here and now. I will refer to this as discourse¹. These are our meaning making performances, whether as gesture, speech, writing, imaging, or building. These meaning making performances appear to draw on a ‘reservoir’ of socially and culturally available meanings. This ‘reservoir’ is by no means a logical whole, or a non-contradictory and rationally compatible set of propositions, as traditional philosophy would have it. Rather, it is ‘whatever goes’ for particular social or organizational communities of practice, and that, as Elias has pointed out, does not exclude contradiction, con¶ict, irrationality.5 Constituted cognitively, bodily as well materially or exo-somatically,6 this ‘whatever goes’ is referred to here as discourse² (cf. Gee 1990). Discourse² is the hypothetical total of possibilities for making meaning that I and others around me consider to have at our disposal, with all its (il)logics, incongruities, disjunctions, and contradictions. Acknowledging that what we say and do does not occur in and for itself only, discourse¹ actualizes, enacts, instantiates discourse². As I realize discourse² as discourse¹, I transform experience largely using the notions, categories, knowledges and other resources provided by discourse². Here, in addition to the (il)logics just referred to, coincidences, errors, and creativity always play a role, preventing me from replicating the past ‘verbatim’, and inevitably perturbing the social. Construed along these lines, discourse¹ is the socialization of experience, and discourse² is socialized experience. Discourse¹ is the cacophony of thought, words, meanings, communications, cultures, and so on. Put more philosophically, discourse¹ is the perpetuation of semiosis and the absence of ‘silence’ (James 1890; Shotter 1989). Discourse² is background knowing against the backdrop of which that cacophony can be reduced to sense and non-sense. I will continue to use the term ‘discourse’ as the superordinate term that is constituted of the interplay of discourse¹ and discourse².

5. “Civilization is not ‘reasonable’; not ‘rational’, any more than that it is ‘irrational’. It is set in motion blindly, and kept in motion by the autonomous dynamics of a web of relationships, by speciªc changes in the way people are bound to live together” (Elias 1982: 232). 6. Exo-somatic means ‘out of the human body’. I am referring here to the ways in which we make meaning by ‘in-forming’ social space through infrastructure design, architecture, technology, and so on (Iedema 1999, 2000, 2001).


I will say more about discourse as I move on, but for now I just want to make one more point. Discourse provides a means for referencing, and grounding if you like, a social (or organizational) way of doing and saying. Clearly, no discourse relates in a straightforward, natural, necessary, or one-to-one way to that which we’re talking (writing, gesturing, etc) about. I don’t mean that this relationship is arbitrary — on the contrary. But what I am saying is that the ways in which people, things, times and places are construed in discourse are ¶exible, negotiable. This discursive ¶exibility is an important concern of this study, and I hypothesize about its role in two ways. First, the less explicit discourse becomes about certain things, places or people, the more these are being presumed or construed to be taken-asgiven, known and non-negotiable (and vice versa; Hasan 1984). Second, the more presumed some things become in how we mean, the more they project ‘lines of force across territories spanning space and time’. Habermas’ notion of ‘delinguistiªcation’ (Habermas 1987) is fruitful for thinking about how language becomes increasingly presuming of particular kinds of knowledge. As the descriptions and analyses set out in this study will make clear, ‘organization’ is about transforming what goes on in the here-and-now into practices that aŸect the ‘there-and-then’. Put diŸerently and more technically, organization is a dynamic transformation of time and space. These transformations may involve complex new technologies or other kinds of ‘products’. They may also involve, and increasingly do so in the post-bureaucratic organization, engagements among workers during which they together conceptualize and enact new time-spaces: they produce new meta-discursive descriptions of their work; they relate in ways that transcend situated diŸerences, or they invent innovative approaches to doing the work or solving particular problems. I will return to how organization is talked about in greater detail in Chapters 2 and 4.

About this book This study is a discursive enquiry into the problem of organizational change. The problem that is at the centre of this discussion is this: post-bureaucratic organization appears to want to straddle two tendencies. First, it wants to create a visibility of the worker. This involves dissimulating organizational authority by reducing hierarchy, devolving decision-making power, emphasizing ¶exibility, and dissolving inside-outside boundaries and rigidities. In doing so, post-bureaucratic organization is increasingly weaving people into activities of public display and self-presentation. Second, it wants to enhance the transparency of the work. The activities that people are beginning to enact are not just about self-display, but about a display within the context of a host of knowledging and informating

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practices, particularly those that seek to set explicit procedures, benchmarks, standards, competences, guidelines, and so on. These formalizing devices, moreover, broaden the space of data production and performance comparison, of surveillance and monitoring. In this way, the post-bureaucratic organization informates itself on the back of ongoing digitization, and disperses knowledges about itself across workers while becoming less rule-bound and linear. Chapter 2 situates the present study in the literatures that inform it and that it uses as its springboards for critique. I ªrst consider work emerging from organization theory that takes an interest in discourse and representation, and then move on to discuss those domains of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse and conversation analysis whose concern is the study of organizational phenomena. I term the former ‘organizational discourse studies’ and bring the latter linguisticsbased endeavours together under the label ‘organizational discourse analysis’. Noting that these two orientations have by and large ignored one another, I set out their diŸerences and commonalities. Organizational discourse studies has sought to advance the interests of organizational change through methods involving story-telling on the one hand, and by advancing the view that the reality of events and things exceeds their ‘simple location’ and is in fact constituted in ‘what is not’. For its part, organizational discourse analysis has sought to outline the regular, patterned and predictable dimensions of organizational phenomena. Through exploring the signiªcance of notions like identity, hegemony and governmentality to emerging forms of organization, this chapter seeks to ªnd a way forward from the kinds of pre-determined normativities that impede these two endeavours. Chapter 3 elaborates in some more detail the perspective on discourse that informs the research presented here. This chapter revisits the idea that what we say and do is both enabled and constrained by a ‘meaning potential’ that we are; that is, that set of meaning making possibilities that we enact and embody as a matter of what is self, true and real. Above, I framed this contrast in terms of discourse¹ as the ‘here-and-now’ making of meaning, and discourse² as background of meaningfulness against which people’s speaking, acting and being become intelligible. Chapter 3 applies this principle not just to discourse and interaction, but also to organization. This is to say, organization is like discourse more generally: it is simultaneously constituted in the material ‘here-and-now’, and in that more abstract set of relations against the background of which the ‘here-an-now’ becomes intelligible. Moving on to show how discourse is capable of re-constructing both the ‘here-and-now’ and the abstract set of relations against which the present becomes intelligible, the chapter elaborates on a linguistic technology capable of transforming the ‘real’: ‘grammatical metaphor’. Through transforming the speciªc and particulate into the general and distal, grammatical metaphor restructures our sense of the real. The chapter not only argues that the recontextualizing


power of grammatical metaphor gives rise to abstract discourses, but that it is emblematic of the transformational logic that characterizes organization and human productivity more broadly. Central here is how grammatical metaphor helps re-distribute knowledge from speciªc and situated realizations and their understandings, towards the general and abstract nouns and the perspectives they promote and naturalize. As discursive ‘thingiªcation’, grammatical metaphor marginalizes people in favour of abstract and generalized relations, structures and processes. Chapter 4 considers the specialized discourses of organization through which organizational life has come to enact, record and plan itself. By way of starting point, I address the advent of writing and then of print and their central role in reorganizing the social. Central here is that writing and print act as storage devices for information about the past, the present, the future and about ourselves. Harbouring the potential for highly technical and abstract discourses, writing and print are technologies that have allowed us to exercise discursive control over social and material relations, as well as reify modes of coordination and alignment of organizational practices. The genre par excellence here is the procedure, or the discourse that dictates to us how to ‘procéder’, or ‘how to go on’. The chapter then moves on to say that where before people were required to produce, read and acknowledge the materialized and relatively stable order of organization, we, in the 21st century, are increasingly called on to re-materialize its order(s) through our enactments. This means that work is no longer (just) a matter of having to familiarize ourselves with procedural descriptions of work produced by others (‘management’). Rather, because our knowledge about a practice, a technology, or a set of relationships is unlikely to be ªxed for long, we are now called on to partake in complex discursive processes and interactions whose purpose is to (re)negotiate and (re)contextualize those knowledges. Because workers are becoming increasingly complicit in knowledge production, work is now no longer a matter of learning and executing procedures formulated by others. Instead, workers themselves are to refashion discourse from the particulate into the abstract using grammatical metaphor. But, over and beyond this, they also need to be able to unpack what has been rendered abstract, ‘de-knowledge’ it, and re-frame it to suit new understandings, practices and relationships. The chapter exempliªes these discursive demands by homing in on that linguistic space where the production, the unpacking and the re-knowledging of knowledge take place: the noun, or rather, the ‘nominal group’. Chapter 5 presents an empirical investigation of how knowledging is enacted in the post-bureaucratic context, given the multitude of stakeholders and their diŸerences. The particular interaction focused on here involves a female planner who tries to present the viewpoint of some stakeholders to a meeting, and who is

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challenged for doing so and gets marginalized in the course of the talk by two male o¹cials; a bureaucrat and a project manager. Nominally a process of collaborative consultation and involvement, the meeting allows no space for the female planner’s advocacy for absent others, and she gets verbally and interactively dismissed by the o¹cials. The chapter highlights what kinds of problems occur when people have to negotiate outcomes (knowledge) with others who come from very diŸerent positions and views. Chapter 6 charts what happens when a male senior planner takes charge of the meeting, involving the same people. With interpersonal skill and political dexterity, he manipulates around both the bureaucrat’s and the project manager’s expectations and conceptions of self, and creates an outcome that he knows will outlive their meeting and pass muster for those who are absent. Ultimately, his strategies enable him to construct agreements that become part of project reports and building designs. By getting stakeholders to sign oŸ on these ‘agreements’, the senior planner is able to transform what started out as a collection of disparate views into a ‘knowledge’ realized such as not to regress back into con¶ict: a three-dimensional architectural design, with commitments and technical input from engineers, suppliers, bureaucrats, architects and, of course, the future users of the site. Chapter 7 looks at another dimension of organization: record producing and keeping. This chapter focuses on the nexus between organizational interaction, what these interactions produce (knowledge or con¶ict), and cross-organizational communication or ‘transparency’. The chapter also links in with the point made in Chapter 1 about the textualization ethos of the post-bureaucratic workplace, namely that there needs to be an increasingly intimate relationship between what workers do and the meta-discursive artifacts and representations that they use to describe what they do. Central here of course are records, reports, data, and other devices through which workers represent and are encouraged to re¶ect on the nature of the work. The chapter empiricizes the discussion by analyzing diŸerent modes of (clinical) record keeping and the accounts about work that these modes create. The problem that we encounter in this particular context is that records are either (too) localizing in their aim to remain ‘true’ and relevant for those within their immediate vicinity, or they are (too) distalizing, in their attempt to represent work in ways that translate across settings, while in the process surpassing and even undermining the needs and concerns of those doing the work. Thus, the paper-based record remains highly local and therefore open to heteroglossia. By contrast, the electronic patient care information system runs the risk of becoming a technology indiŸerent to local concerns, knowledges and experiences. If Chapters 5 and 6 looked at how organization is enacted, and Chapter 7 was about how work is recorded, Chapter 8 looks at how workers’ team interactions are sites where workers — through textualizing work — are co-opted into identi-


fying with ways of talking and writing about the work. Team interactivity is thus a multi-edged sword: it gets workers to create knowledge and procedures (in this case: ‘pathways’) about the work, and it is the site where they are socialized — organizationalized — into these knowledges by enunciating them as self-creating, self-steering and self-managing subjects. The chapter argues that as they enact their new roles as knowledging workers, they ‘infold’ organization ‘into the soul’ (Rose 1996a: 143). Chapter 9 concludes the book, by setting out the complexities of post-bureaucratic discourse in general terms. This chapter revisits the main threads of the argument that weaves the book together. First, organization is a time-space reconªguring dynamic, in large part thanks to the transformative power inherent in discourse itself. Second, organization is constituted both in the material ‘hereand-now’, and in an abstract set of relations that contextualizes the ‘here-andnow’ as background of meaningfulness. This latter argument ran parallel to the one I mounted for discourse, which was said to have a foot both in the camp of abstract diŸerence and in the camp of situated enactment. Finally, post-bureaucracy constitutes an emergent organizational complexity that arises from trying to re-invent management control as individual initiative. Post-bureaucratic discourse represents the shift from commands from above into the expectation that workers (co)produce oŸers from below. It is the shift from stable knowledge produced by perculating ‘truths’ up the organizational hierarchy in summarized and generalized form, into a dynamic ªeld of knowledging and re-knowledging work. Using the latter ideas as springboard, the book concludes with some implications for and ideas about further research.

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Chapter 2

Approaches to studying organizational discourse

Introduction This chapter looks at the literature on organizational discourse and interaction. The task of an overview of the literature is a daunting one, however. The amount of published research on organizational discourse and interaction is immense (Drew & Heritage 1992a/b; Boden 1995; Grimshaw 1990; Grimshaw and Burke 1995; Firth 1995; Wodak 1996; van Dijk 1997a; Christie & Martin 1997; Drew & Sorjonen 1997; Mumby 1988; Mumby & Clair 1997; Gunnarsson et al. 1997; van Dijk 1997a/b; Iedema and Wodak 1999; Sarangi and Slembrouck 1996; Sarangi and Roberts 1999; Weigand and Dascal 2001; Grant, Keenoy and Oswick 1998 for recent overviews). To gain entry into this wealth of research, I begin by dividing this literature into two domains. First, there is the work that is oriented towards uncovering possibilities of organizational change and innovation. Here, we are concerned with organization theoretical approaches to discourse and organization, and I will refer to it as organizational discourse studies. Second, there is the work that is more analytical and critical. This latter body of work arises from sociolinguistic and discourse analytical approaches to discourse and organization, and I will refer to it as organizational discourse analysis. Accordingly, the section that follows focuses on organizational discourse studies as a kind of enquiry that tries to push the boundaries of organization. Organizational discourse studies is concerned with innovative descriptions and re¶ections, while also seeking to go beyond both conventional analytical methods and ‘typically organizational’ phenomena. Next, I elaborate on the work of some of the proponents of discourse analysis. This section argues that, in contrast to organizational discourse studies, organizational discourse analysis is an approach that seeks to outline the typicalities, the patterns and regularities, as well as the constraints and boundaries in organizations. This approach relies on and grounds its arguments in empirically derived data to make its claims; that is, recordings of interactions, organizationally-produced documentation, and so on. Finally, I want to foreground two issues central to both these two orientations: power and identiªcation, in part to seek common ground between organizational discourse studies and organization theory on the one hand, and organizational

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discourse analysis on the other hand (Iedema 2002), and to prepare the way for the remainder of the present book.

Organization theory and the study of language and discourse In the organization and management theory literature, an important concern has been to frame organization and management such that these phenomena become amenable to intervention. The discourses used to describe and analyze organization and management are therefore often revealing about the stance taken on what we can do to enhance organizational and managerial e¹ciency, improve the work environment, plan organizational direction, understand the organizational environment, and so on. As Morgan has argued, these discourses have tended to rely on a limited number of ‘metaphors’ (Morgan 1997), including the machine metaphor of Scientiªc Management Theory; the community metaphor of Human Relations Theory, and the biological organism metaphor of early Systems Theory and Population Ecology Theory. As Silverman (1970) points out, each of these metaphors projects an image of organizational coherence, and they therefore build on the assumption that, in spite of evidence about con¶ict and ‘soldiering’ (workers deliberately undermining the work process), ‘organization’ is a welloiled, well-functioning and coherent system. At the forefront of the challenge against systems theories of organization, David Silverman’s ‘social action theory’ (Silverman 1970) deconstructed the view of organization as cohesive unity, and emphasized that actors’ behaviour in organizations can deviate wildly from what managers (and researchers) think workers are doing. In emphasizing the ubiquity of challenge, con¶ict and tension, Silverman also made the point that we should not see these as pathological, but that they are inherent to organization. Moreover, he argued, they can be productive and empowering. Silverman’s work was seminal in getting organizational researchers to think not in terms of formal structures and over-arching systems, but in terms of individuals’ attitudes, beliefs and values towards work. Under in¶uence of publications like Silverman 1970 and Burrell and Morgan 1979, the 70s produced a considerable body of work that began to focus on organization as a site not deªnable on the basis of formal features or cohesive behaviours, but as one constituted on the basis of culture(s), language(s), symbolisms, myths, and the like (Daft and Wiginton 1979; Pettigrew 1979; Manning 1979; see Turner 1993).1 Two things are of note here. First, researchers’ interest in 1. On the other hand, of course, the 70’s produced a kind of organization studies that increasingly moved towards regarding organizations as ‘systems’. On the strength of this metaphor, organizations were compared to biological-organic systems (viz. ‘Contingency Theory’ for example, as well the ‘Systems Theory’ and ‘Population Ecology Theory’ referred to above;


language and symbolism and the like was fuelled in large part by their rejection of reifying macro-accounts of organization: for them, organization was about organizing, and organizing was a matter of micro-interaction. Second, there was limited cross-fertilization between organization and management studies on the one hand, and organizational discourse analysis and semiotics on the other, with the exception perhaps of authors like Barley (1983), Manning (1989) and Fiol (1989) who cross-fertilized these ªelds. Ultimately, the turn to culture, symbolism and meaning in organizational research since the 1960’s and 1970’s stood in direct opposition to systems theory — a perspective on organization that it precisely sought to challenge and delegitimate. To extricate itself from this self-limiting stance, organization theory has recently seen the ‘turn to organizational discourse’ on the one hand (for overviews see Burrell 1996; Martin and Frost 1996; Grant et al. 1998; Alvesson and Karreman 2000), and the ‘turn to representation’, on the other (Chia 1996, 1998a/b; Chai and King 2001; Cooper 1992, 1993).

The ‘turn to discourse’ in organization theory: organizations as stories At heart, the ‘turn to discourse’ in organization theory is synonymous with the post-structuralist ethos that began to pervade the social sciences in the midseventies (Bertens 1995), and which started to make a mark on organizational research in the eighties (Cooper and Burrell 1988; Burrell 1988; Cooper 1989). As banner for people’s scepticism about both the existence and the analysis of systematic and stable features of organization, ‘discourse’ appears to have become a rallying point particularly for those researchers who are trying to break free of traditional organizational theory and its concern with (formal, cultural, linguistic, semiotic) patterns and regularities. One eŸect of this shift is the emergence of a ‘neo-humanist’ organizational discourse studies, that conceptualizes organization on the basis of individual peoples’ stories and narratives (Boje 1991, 1995, 2001; Czarniawska 1997, 1998; Phillips 1995; Gabriel 1995, 1998). The ‘neo-humanist’ tendency that characterizes this branch of narrative research is especially evident in David Boje’s recent work (Boje 1991, 1995, 2001). Boje is by no means alone in promoting stories as the means to organization research, but his work is generally seen as seminal. In his work, Boje uses Tamara (a Los Angeles play) as a metaphor for thinking about organizations, and for giving a central role to the ephemeral, seemingly arbitrary, indeterminate and unpredictable nature of Young 1988). These theories were ‘macro’ in orientation: they focused (and focus) on the general structures and features of organization, and try to reason about these in objectifying terms (Donaldson 1996). As a result, these perspectives bypass more detailed studies of occupational and professional work (as was typical of Industrial Sociology in the 50’s; Barley and Kunda 2001: 80).

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individuals’ understandings of and stories about organization. Interested in people’s thoughts and views that are as yet unaŸected by discursive and organizational formalization, Boje is out to capture inchoate stories, or what he calls ‘antenarratives’ (Boje 2001). Tamara, a play with multiple scenes and innumerable ways of viewing it, presents, in Boje’s view, an appropriate image for thinking about both ante-narrative and organization more broadly. For him, organizational life is inevitably about being party only to some scenes and not others, understanding part of what is going on and never the whole, and having to rely in opportunistic ways on incoherent bits of information. It is in that sense that Tamara exempliªes organizational fragmentation and uncertainty. Boje says of Tamara: 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 ¶oor to the next, even going into bedrooms, kitchens and other chambers to chase and co-create the stories that interest them the most. If there are a dozen stages and a dozen storytellers, the number of story lines an audience could trace as it chases the wandering discourses of Tamara is 12 factorial (479,001,600).

For Boje, organizations are populated with potentially innumerable such ‘wandering discourses’ whose interpretation is inevitably and necessarily ‘plurivocal’. To me Tamara is a way to describe how storytelling … occurs in complex organizations. It is before narrative closure; it is speculative, and it is in the ¶ow of experience. The Tamara ante-narrative speculation highlights the plurivocal interpretation of organizational stories in a distributed and historically contextualized meaning network — that is, the meaning of events depends upon the locality, the prior sequence of stories and the transformation of characters in the wandering discourses. (Boje 2001: 4)

Boje’s concern to give attention to the stories of organizational members is of course important. Such stories serve to bring out the diŸerent views which members hold about their work, their colleagues, management, and the organization. While stories are ‘considered forms of response’ (Iedema et al. in press), they do help foreground the multiplicity of interpretations about what goes on in organizations.2 But Boje does not just see individuals’ stories as but one way of approaching the problematic of organization. Instead, he promotes “a theory of organization as a collective story-telling system” (Boje 1991: 106). In this view, ‘story-telling’ on its own is an explanatory device that is able to account for the kinds of complex drifts and inter-weaving transformations of time and space that characterize 2. As Foucault (1978) notes, telling one’s story is not unrelated to the catholic notion that knowledge needs to be generated about oneself upon which to base better self-management. In this sense, story-telling also informs modern practices such as psychoanalysis, as is evident from ‘the talking cure’. Both confession and psychoanalysis are regimes of self disclosure (Rose 1990, 1999). It is on grounds of these dimensions of story-telling that I use the label ‘neo-humanism’ to describe organizational story-telling research.


organizations. These drifts and transformations implicate both human and nonhuman resources, including linguistic, but also ªnancial-numerical, technological, and other semiotic resources (buildings, infra-structures, transportation and distribution networks, and so on), and they are unlikely to leave any kind of storytelling, however tentative and fragmented, unaŸected. Boje’s interest in the pluri-vocality of ‘story-telling’ may be adequate for capturing the multiplicity of workers’ views and understandings. However, it may be less suited to account for organization as a specialized complex of practices and materials, times and spaces. Given Boje’s concern with inchoate meaning making as opposed to more formal and sedimented kinds of meaning making, I suspect that he sees the study of organization not as a descriptive kind of inquiry, but as a normative pursuit of what organizing could potentially be about, dichotomizing the more mundane ‘what is’ and the potential ‘what could be’. Boje’s account, then, does not target the discursive and interactive complexities that characterize organization, but tries to shine a light on the ephemeral, the marginal, the possible and the unexpected. In short, it appears Boje’s approach to organizational inquiry is about freeing both organization and inquiry up from self-imposed constraints. Organization and work are about people telling stories, exploring possibilities, and reconªguring ‘what is’ into ‘what could be’. Here, not organizational routine and ritual, nor the regularities of work and organizational participation, but the transformation of the ordinary are the focus of inquiry. While respecting Boje’s approach as a method for exploring alternative forms of (thinking about) organization, I am of the view that his conceptualization of organization as ‘story-telling system’ under-estimates organization, and overestimates story-telling. Boje underestimates organization when he says it is a ‘story-telling system’ because organization encompasses more than what people say about it, and what people say about it is unlikely to be divorced from the material-practical regularities that characterize organization, such as technologies, ªnancial resources, architectures, and so on. Put diŸerently, the talk that goes on in organizations is not just in tension with other (more formal) talk, but also with everything that is not talk: some talk will get translated into other materialities and resources, and a lot of talk is a direct complement of all the complex and abstract relationships and technologies that organizations are able to construct and maintain (Wenger 1998), and that they deploy to produce other realities. Hence, organization is a socio-technical complex where we as “selfcreating tool-users cause new predicates to be true of ourselves whenever we create new tools with which to re-create ourselves” (Rorty 1994: 31). In such contexts, stories, whether formalized or marginalized, are but fragments of a much larger, materially complex environment that has its own logics, ¶exibilities and rigidities.

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Besides underplaying organization, Boje overplays his hand when talking about story-telling. Boje positions stories and people’s interpretations of stories as if these are free of discourse constraints, and this is evident when he raises the spectre of ‘12 factorial’ interpretations of the theatre play Tamara. In contrast to his view that personal experience embraces an inªnity of meanings, narrative research has shown that casually told stories are no less ‘structured’ and rulegoverned than are more formal, pragmatic or bureaucratic ways of speaking and doing (Labov and Waletski 1967; Plum 1988; Rothery and Stenglin 1997). The most interesting aspect of this narrative research for the purposes of my argument is that it shows the interpersonal and emotional dimensions of such discourse, considered so central to story-telling, to be far from ‘pre-social’, ‘personal’ and ‘unstructured’ (Benner 1994). On the contrary, personal narrative has been shown to embody complex socio-cultural, behavioural and emotional disciplinary regimes (Irvine 1990; Harré and Gillet 1994). This suggests Boje’s emphasis on ante-narrative, pluralism and ‘alternative interpretations’ (Boje 1991: 124) is at risk of over-emphasizing the capacity of story-telling to produce alternative and extra-ordinary versions of organizational reality. Such a claim ignores not only the discursive rules governing text production, the semantic limits of what is meaningful and the syntactic rules that govern sentence construction, however. It also loses sight of the socio-political and material restrictions that aŸect the production of meaning (Reed 1996, 1997, 1998). This is not because meaning emerges as a direct re¶ection of reiªed class- or status-based relations, or as a function of hidden social ideologies or ªxed discursive structures, but because constraint as such is meaning’s very condition of possibility (Thibault 1997; Rose 1999). This discourse theoretical point can be elaborated with reference to Tamara. On re¶ection, we realize the play is not merely about audiences milling around the 12 stages in wonder, and liberally constructing their own stories about and interpretations of what they are seeing. Tamara, whether conceptualized as a play to be enjoyed or as metaphor to be used for doing organization studies, is both about what audiences see, and about what actors, playwrights, directors, stage designers, theatre managers and so on, do. Put in those terms, Tamara has not one but at least two meta-dimensions (parallel to the two dimensions of organization and discourse explored in Chapter 1). First, there is the dimension of audience perception and appreciation. Second, there is the dimension of how Tamara is structured, organized, rendered reproducible, recognizable, and resourced, as ‘play’. Put in rather reductive terms, Tamara embodies both a ‘formal’ dimension (‘the play’) and an interpretive dimension (‘my viewing’). Neither precedes the other; both are contingent upon one another. My pluralist interpretations of Tamara would not be, if it were not for all those processes of structuring, organizing,


preparing, supervising, designing, resourcing, that go on ‘behind the scenes’ to (re)produce Tamara. On the other hand, the complexity of Tamara is interesting, if only because it raises the tension between structured and managed theatre play and the variability of audience experiences to a new level. The play is highly apt as metaphor, not for Boje’s reasons to do with multiplicity of interpretation, but because it re-plays the same contradiction that pervades the post-bureaucratic organization: the impetus behind 21st century organizations and managements to foreground worker participation and self-actualization (viz. watching the play) occurs against a backdrop of increasingly complex and demanding kinds of performativity (viz. the play; Lyotard 1984).

Organization theory and the turn to representation The turn to discourse and the turn to representation in organization theory are related developments, in so far that both emerged as post-structuralist critiques of the structuralist tenets of organizational systems theory. These structuralist tenets were evident in how systems theorists reduced organizational complexity to a small number of simple principles. For example, one ‘basic’ principle was to have ‘functional complementarity’ between parts of the organization and between the organization and its environment. Framing its discussions about organization in functionalist and technical terms meant that systems theory had relegated disorder, con¶ict, politics and multiplicity to the margins. The turn to discourse and the turn to representation also share a suspicion of theories of organizational culture, in so far as these portray organization in homogenizing and ‘integrating’ terms (Brown 1995; Martin 2002). Seen from a methodological perspective, explaining organization on the basis of a limited number of cultural characteristics is not all that diŸerent from reducing organization to sets of functionally-related systems and sub-systems; both pursuits privilege limited ‘structural’ features over the fragmentation, the diŸerences and the chaos that often prevail in organizations. Having failed to account for such diŸerences and fragmentations, structuralism increasingly becomes the target of challenges in the 1970’s and 1980’s on grounds that it ‘elides’ the individual (Caws 1988; Bertens 1994). Put diŸerently, structuralist accounts of social phenomena unduly erase from view the things that individual people do and the ways in which their actions contribute to (unexpected) social and organizational outcomes. Structuralism, it is felt, cannot explain change: its view of the world is cast in ‘foundational’ principles. In answer to this, post-structuralism dismantles the ‘foundationalist’ pretenses of structuralism by aborting the search for abstract principles and relationships. After all, if ‘grand

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theory’ is too rigid to explain social change it has no moral supremacy over diŸerent and perhaps more ordinary kinds of representation. It is at this point that the post-structuralist project splits in two. On the one hand, there are those who seek to preserve the authenticity of the ordinary and everyday in the face of abstract theory. This ‘camp’ continues to adhere to the adequacy of representation: what ordinary people say can be trusted to ‘mean what it means’. In organization theory, Boje’s work represents this neo-humanist trend. As seen above, Boje is highly conscious of the multiplicity of views and understandings that individuals embody, and he foregrounds the speaking individual with the aim to create a space for that multiplicity. On the other hand, there are those for whom the fall of ‘grand theory’ is not caused by the lack of airtime given to the ordinary everyday and the multiplicities that this dimension of social life tends to harbour. Rather, the problem is that ultimately ‘grand theory’ as well as any other kind of representation are no more than ‘discourse’. Here, the term ‘discourse’ is made short-hand for the view that no representation can claim to have a privileged or more ‘true’ relationship to ‘the real’. Seeing meaning making as inherently problematic, these commentators speak of ‘the representationist fallacy’ and ‘the crisis of representation’ (Seidman 1994). Leading the charge is Robert Cooper, who advocates the consequences of this crisis for organization theory with Derridaean fervour. For Cooper, what is at issue when thinking about organizations are not their visible ªelds or structures, their outputs and products, or their practices and discourses. Rather, what stands out for Cooper is that upon which organization is contingent. For him, inquiry into organizations is about locating the origin of ‘organizationality’. Accordingly, organization is not inherent in structures or processes per se, but in what he sees as a ‘generic methodology’ that applies across domains of social life and that becomes organizational perforce its ‘labour of division’ (Chia 1998b). At the heart of this organizing labour is the labour of representation. Approaching organization not from an ontological-material perspective (as things ‘out there’), but from this representational perspective (a process of social construction through representation), Cooper’s views on organizing parallel in some ways the semiotic perspective on organization pursued in the present book. Especially Cooper’s 1993 paper “Formal Organization as Representation: Remote Control, Displacement and Abbreviation” where he elaborates on the main dimensions of organizational representation is interesting from a discourse perspective. He argues that organization is a kind of remote control or ‘action at a distance’, which reminds us of Latour’s and Rose’s ideas about ‘lines of force across a territory spanning space and time’ discussed in Chapter 1. One example Cooper cites is that of the map that becomes a way of enacting control over a designated domain.


Displacement, another device, points to the way that representations can become highly transportable by being displaced from the here-and-now and recast in terms of the there-and-then as formalized procedures or technologies. Abbreviation, a third device, is about how organizational meanings yield ever increasingly compact and abstract, and thereby more widely deployable kinds of discourse. Cooper’s three moments of organization provide a way of categorizing organizational ‘lines of force’, and in that sense they restate the time-space distanciating dimensions of organization touched on in Chapter 1. Cooper’s moments are abstract aspects of organizational representation, however, and I am more interested in the operations that are performed on discourse itself to produce remote control, displacement and abbreviation. At the same time, my focus here is on how post-bureaucratic organization tries to reconªgure these abstract and technologized kinds of ‘lines of force’ into increasingly intense and performative kinds of worker interaction and negotiation. But there is one reason in particular why Cooper’s contribution is problematic. For Cooper, the fact that representation is grounded in diŸerence or ‘mutual relatedness’ leads him to take the normative view that “no one form can occupy a privileged position” (Cooper 1993: 185). In taking this position, the issue of whether and how organizations are changing becomes eŸectively unanswerable. This is because in Cooper’s view, to consider what real people do in real situations is to ‘essentialize’ such interactions as the be-all-and-end-all of organization, and to fall victim to the idea that ‘simple locations’ can explain organization. Citing Cooper (1998), Chia puts this as follows: “to become mesmerized by an inattentive conceptual principle of ‘simple location’ [is] the tendency to believe that reality comprises ‘clear-cut deªnite things occupying clear-cut deªnite places in space and time’” (Chia 1998b: 17). But pervading Cooper (and Chia’s) work is not only the opposition between ‘simple location’ and ‘mutual relatedness’. On the back of this opposition and the suspicion of ‘simple location’ rides their rejection of ordinary organizational reality and actuality en masse: considering what individual people do and say in organizations necessarily and means falling prey to the illusion that ‘representation can represent’. This is not only because we make the mistake of thinking that what happened can be considered in its own right, but also because we have the illusion that what happened can then be represented, and analyzed, for the consumption of others. Analyzing organizational phenomena, Cooper claims, necessarily entails reducing those phenomena to a ‘metaphysics of presence’, and forgetting that actuality is but a poor re¶ection of the potentiality that makes it possible. In actual fact, of course, by erecting such a strict boundary between potential and actual Cooper institutionalizes a neo-structuralism: it is not feasible to consider or analyze what individuals do and say as instantiations (and perturbations!)

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of a potentiality. People’s enacted ‘outcomes’ are secondary to ‘ontologically prior processes’: “the meta-language of organizing which deals with the ontologically prior processes of ªxing, forming, framing and bounding rather than […] the content or outcome of such processes” (Chia and King 2001: 326). Here, abstract principles and relations are mounted against the study of organization as empirical (mate-)reality: re-representing and analyzing organizational events and interactions is to ‘merely mimick reality’ (Cooper 1989). The logical consequence of Cooper’s privileging the idea of abstract potentiality, is that it becomes severed from lived reality and ends up as a force that lacks material logic. Cooper’s potentiality that in-forms organization is thus in fact a ‘deus ex machina’. For the discourse approach pursued here, by contrast, what is enacted is as central to organizing as are the abstract and systemic logics which we conceive to be operating behind interaction (Thibault 1997). This means, as Chapter 1 sought to make clear, that organizations are not explained by abstract representational principles alone (à la Cooper) nor by reducing them to individuals’ private interpretations (à la Boje). Organization is neither ontologically prior to what real people do in real settings (a view that is in essence ‘neo-structuralist’), and there is more to organization than individual cognition and story-telling (‘neo-humanism’). Moreover, and theoretically speaking, Cooper’s abstract and systemic logics, as are Boje’s ante-narratives, are no less representational (i.e. caught in representation) than are empirical depictions of what people do and say. While organizational discourse analysis has its own limits and blind spots, its use of the term discourse underscores the view that theory and empirics share the same representational means and ontological basis: language.

Organizational discourse analysis The discourse analytical view of organization pursued here construes organization as complex dialectic between the representational and the material; between abstract meaning relations (discourse²) and the situated realities and contexts of meaning making (discourse¹). That is, the description of organization involves accounting for how ordinary workers interact in organizational settings in their everyday ways (Barley and Kunda 2001), and describing the socio-technical contexts within which they do their work (Bijker et al. 1987; MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999). Put in more technical terms, representation is grounded in and manifested through ontology (in the way that the signiªed is grounded in the signiªer to produce a sign). Discourse analytical approaches, therefore, seek to describe how organization is ‘real-ized’ as situated discourse in so far as we as observers are able to record that, and how speciªc actors manufacture or challenge organizational dynamics through their interactions.


For its part, the label organizational discourse analysis covers quite an array of positions and methods, and the view of discourse analysis elaborated in the previous paragraph is not common for all of them. What they do have in common is that they share a focus on and concern with regularity as empirical phenomenon. Moreover, these phenomena are seen to arise at the interstice between local enactment and social-organizational convention. Hence, ‘discourse’ in this paradigm ¶ags the idea that what people do and say is, at heart, a ‘social construction’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966). There may be practical reasons for what people do and say, but whatever they do and say cannot lay claim to being ‘natural and necessary’, because it will be convention-driven. This conventional, or ‘it could be (have been) diŸerent’, approach to social phenomena, in part re¶ects Cooper’s concern to avoid making the mistake of ‘simple location’. Over and above this rather philosophical position, however, the conventionality of human interaction and communication provides discourse analysis with a starting point for doing further work: outlining the rules and regularities that characterize conduct, examining the patterns that are uncovered, and, often, using analyses to mount emancipatory critiques. Foucault’s work on the discursive constitution of social relations (Foucault 1974) provided much of the initial impetus to what later became known as discourse analysis. The most prominent proponent of this kind of analysis, Foucault considered the historical genesis of social practices surrounding mental care (Foucault 1965), health care (Foucault 1973), incarceration (Foucault 1977), and sexuality (Foucault 1978, 1986). In each of these studies, Foucault sought to uncover the representational principles that governed a ªeld of action; that is, its discourse. While his earlier work remained largely language-focused, later studies expanded this focus to include phenomena other than language: embodied practices, technologies, architecture, and so on. Foucault’s work gave rise to voluminous research into the conventional nature of social and organizational practices, with Rose (1990, 1994, 1996a/b, 1999) as one of his most devoted followers. Emerging from within more linguistics-oriented discourse studies, and inspired by Foucault’s levelling of social practices as ‘all discourse’, Lemke (1995), Thibault (1991), and van Leeuwen (1993) began to develop what they termed, after Hodge and Kress (1988), ‘social semiotics’. Social semiotics aimed to understand social processes not as technical sign operations as did formal semiotics (Sebeok 1994), but as situated meaning making practices that mobilized a range of resources: language, gesture, dress, and so on. Originating too in Halliday’s ‘systemic linguistics’ and his view of meaning as being constituted in diŸerence, social semiotics tries to describe social processes in terms of the meanings that they command and others that they proscribe. Social semiotics is applied to organizational phenomena in the work of Doyle (1991), Rose et al. (1992), Martin (1993a/

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b/c), and Iedema (1996a, 1997b). The social semiotic view of discourse will be elaborated further in Chapter 3. Other investigations into the discourse of organizations that deserve to be mentioned here include Conversation Analysis, ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis and systemic linguistics, and what I will call ‘discursive workplace studies’. Conversation Analysis (CA) focuses on very detailed aspects of interaction in so far as these are captured by and transcribed from taped recordings (Silverman 1999; Hak 1999). These detailed analyses have uncovered recurrent features of human talk, or what SchegloŸ calls ‘interactive constants’ (SchegloŸ 1984, 1996b). Such constants include speakers’ turn-taking strategies, repair strategies, sidesequencings, and so on (see the References for the details of SchegloŸ’s work). In so far as SchegloŸ’s work is concerned in particular, CA’s concern with interactive constants means it does not produce more extensive and more commonsense accounts of social-organizational processes, such as processing migration agent applications or planning new buildings (Segerdahl 1998). SchegloŸ justiªes this narrow focus by insisting that everything that is structurally or contextually relevant is manifest in the micro-sociological details of situated action (Heritage 1984; SchegloŸ 1987a). The kinds of insights CA provides into members’ performative ‘work’ are invaluable, but they need to be coupled with accounts and analyses of broader organizational processes to be able to provide insight into what these processes accomplish in organizational time over and above interactional time (see debate between SchegloŸ 1997; Wetherell 1999; Billig and SchegloŸ 1999; Iedema 2003b). Put diŸerently, some strains of CA delimit themselves to what is enacted, and discount the validity of our own (analysts’) cultural familiarity with what goes on (excepting our understanding of the language that is spoken). In this sense, CA’s concentration on the structural-technical and interactive details of short stretches of talk excludes this kind of analysis from having much to say about broader social and organizational processes and outcomes (Cicourel 1992; Segerdahl 1998). Somewhat in tension with its original edict (Sacks, SchegloŸ and JeŸerson 1976), more recent developments in CA are moving away from the strict delimitations of its paradigm by acknowledging the importance of socio-historical context to analysis: In this perspective the analysis of communicative meanings requires a description and understanding of such sociocultural features as speakers’ identities; their past history and other biographical details; the states of knowledge and expectations, manifest in their talk, that they bring to speech events; and the rights, duties, and other responsibilities which are attached to participants’ roles or positions in particular institutional events. (Drew & Sorjonen 1997: 95)


In some domains of CA, too, it is clear that interaction is not just comprised of language and spoken interaction. In the work of Heath, speech is analysed jointly with gesture, posture, and a range of other meaning making dimensions (Heath 1984). Goodwin analyzes how the speech and gesture patterns of a patient in an oldage pensioners home complement and supplement one another (Goodwin 1995, 1996). Equally interesting, Streeck’s work takes CA beyond the analysis of talk only, when he studies how a conversation between two business people is choreographed with objects on the table in front of them (Streeck 1996), or how bodily behaviours and postures add to what is said during a police interview which was ªlmed from the ceiling above (Lebaron and Streeck 1996). Venturing even further, work has begun to look at how speech is increasingly mediated, accompanied, or even displaced by diŸerent kinds of mechanical and communicational technologies, such as computers and their mostly written and graphic modes of communication (Goodwin and Goodwin 1998; Heath and LuŸ 1992, 1998). But perhaps because of its origins in traditional CA and the technical-mechanical prerogatives with which it started out, even this later work is less at ease talking about the socio-political complexities of organizational change and worker positioning. Backtracking slightly to acknowledge its importance, ethnomethodology (Garªnkel 1967) provided the original starting point for CA (Atkinson 1988). Ethnomethodology had developed views on the centrality of social enactment, or ‘performativity’ (Garªnkel 1967; Butler 1996). Ethnomethodological research began with Garªnkel’s research into clinical practices, and has since been carried over into other aspects of organizations (Boden 1995), as well as the practices of scientiªc research (Garªnkel, Lynch & Livingston 1981; Garªnkel 1986). Ethnomethodology focuses on the social (cognitive-practical) conditions that have to be fulªlled for action to turn into recognizable ritual. For example, in an article on the way meetings are enacted, Atkinson, CuŸ and Lee analyze the ‘work’ people have to do to ensure their meeting is recognizable as a meeting (Atkinson, CuŸ and Lee 1978; also CuŸ and Sharrock 1985; cf. Stubbs 1973, 1974). This ‘work’ includes the saying and doing of those things which are socially recognized and sanctioned to signal ‘meeting-ness’ (cf Boden and Zimmerman 1990). In ethnomethodology, such sayings and doings are in eŸect seen as ‘ethnomethods’; that is, social activities which are enacted in particular ways and thereby become ‘account-able’. Clearly, ethnomethodology does not view organization as a reiªed object with deterministic properties, but as a contingent accomplishment in which people locally and accountably produce and reproduce (the relevance of) settings and resources (Garªnkel 1967: 33). Judith Butler’s more recent emphasis on how the social is contingent on how we perform it — ‘performativity’ — derives from Garªnkel’s seminal insights (Butler 1990, 1993, 1996, 1997; McElhinny 1997). Another aspect of Garªnkel’s work that is important here is his

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work on practices of record keeping. Garªnkel closely analyzed how people kept records and what they wrote in them. He found that their diŸerent understandings of the record’s categories or views on what should be entered into their ªelds determined what and how they documented. This of course led to what Garªnkel called ‘bad records’, despite the ‘good reasons’ that workers had for making the entries. I will return to Garªnkel’s work when I discuss organizational record keeping in Chapter 7. A more sociologically-oriented approach, interactional sociolinguistics has shifted focus from isolating diŸerences relating to more traditional and static sociolinguistic variables like age, class and gender, towards diŸerences aŸecting speakers’ dynamic enactment of social identity. SchiŸrin (1994: 97Ÿ) sees this latter approach as “based in anthropology, sociology and linguistics, and shares the concerns of all three ªelds with culture, society and language”. For Gumperz, interactional sociolinguistics is centrally concerned with understanding the interpretive and assumptive ‘frames’ that people bring to bear on what they say and do (GoŸman 1963, 1972). Analysis focuses on conversational inference deªned as the interpretive procedure by means of which interactants assess what is communicatively intended at any one point in an exchange and on which they rely to plan and produce their responses. (Gumperz 1999: 458)

In direct contrast with CA, then, Gumperz’ interactional sociolinguistics situates people’s background assumptions, inferences and interpretations as of primary analytical importance. With the work of Gumperz having done much of the groundwork for this approach (Gumperz 1982a/b), it is the feminist linguistics of Cameron, KotthoŸ, Tannen and others (Cameron 1997; KotthoŸ and Wodak 1997; Kendall and Tannen 1997) which situates this analysis within a ‘politics of diŸerence’ framework. Here, Garªnkel’s ‘ongoing membership accomplishment’ in organizations is put in tension with feminist notions of identity, positioning and self (Wodak 1997). In contrast to the practice-focused concerns of ethnomethodology, CA, and interactional sociolinguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis (‘CDA’) is a more ‘textual’ as well as an explicitly more critical approach to organizational discourse. CDA gained in¶uence thanks to its combined assimilation of Critical Theory (Adorno and Horkheimer 1993), French discourse studies (Foucault 1974; Pêcheux 1982), Michael Halliday’s systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday 1994a), and Russian literary theory (Bakhtin 1981, 1986). The most prominent and explicit elaboration and application of CDA is found in Norman Fairclough’s work. Fairclough’s focus is on ‘language and power’ (Fairclough 1989), a concern which informed his work on the discourses of the media, those of politics, new labour, and of university bureaucracies (Fairclough 1993, 1995, 1996). Beyond


that, he has made an important contribution by describing the large-scale sociocultural changes and trends and their relevance for analyzing social and organizational discursive phenomena (Fairclough 1992; Fairclough and Wodak 1997). Straddling interactional sociolinguistics and CDA, Wodak and her colleagues focus on the dynamic realization of power structures and ideologies in individuals’ organizational performances (Hein and Wodak 1987; Wodak 1996; Wodak and Matoushek 1993; Muntigl, Weiss and Wodak 1999). What unites CDA is its critique of discourses and practices whose ‘textual trace’ becomes the object of attention and argumentation. CDA’s critique, however, is fully beholden to the critique of undue power and human emancipation (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999: 34), and this normative stance limits its scope for dealing with the interactive and contextual complexities of post-bureaucratic organization. One important source of analytical inspiration for CDA derives from Halliday’s socio-political linguistics (Halliday 1978, 1994a). Halliday’s work is concerned with revealing the diŸerential access that speakers or writers have to semiotic resources (Halliday 1973). If we could outline what people say and do as sets of options, the (hypothetical) total of options represents their ‘room for making meaning’. The main principle here then, is that whatever is said or done stands in tension with what could have been said or done. Put more technically, we make meaning by choosing (or being forced to choose) among terms whose diŸerences are ‘systemic’ in so far that they are commonly used and recognized to reference social status, intimacy, femininity, ethnicity, appropriacy, expertise, professionalism, morality, and so on. These systems are, of course, no more than analysts’ elaborations of the possibilities for saying and doing that appear to be available to us as social actors, and of which we have perhaps intuitive sense. I could, for example, make explicit to myself the syntactic and semantic options that are open to me as author, and then consider which of those options I mobilize and which I choose not to mobilize in this particular book. It is in view of this emphasis on the systemic or ‘mutually related’ (Chia 1998b: 17) nature of all aspects of representation that Halliday’s work is referred to as ‘systemic linguistics’ or ‘systemics’. The ‘systemic’ tradition has produced a variety of work on organizational discourses and interaction. First, there is the Critical linguistics of Fowler, Hodge, Trew and Kress (Fowler, Hodge, Kress & Trew 1979; Hodge & Kress 1979/1993; Fowler 1986; Kress 1995). Evolving alongside rather than from within Halliday’s work, the Critical linguistics of the 1970’s was interested in exposing the inequitable distribution of opportunities for meaning making to diŸerent groups of people in society. While Critical linguistics dealt mainly with the print media, it also produced fascinating accounts of organizational rules and regulations (Fowler and Kress 1979) and ‘identity and middle management’ (Hodge, Kress & Jones 1979). Critical linguistics became absorbed into what is now social

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semiotics, whose concern is not just with the political nature of language, but with the multi-modal delicacies of meaning making more generally (Hodge and Kress 1988; Kress and van Leeuwen 1990, 1996). Operating at the nexus of Halliday’s systemics, Critical linguistics and Social Semiotics, Rose et al. 1992 examined the discourses of Post-Fordist manufacturing; and Martin (1993b) and Iedema (1996a/b, 1998) explored bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy. This work evidences a strong interest in the linguistic regularities and grammatical technicalities of organizational discourse, with limited attention paid to the politics of organizational change. Another important in¶uence on discursive workplace research is Sarangi (Sarangi and Slembrouck 1996; Sarangi and Roberts 1999). Sarangi’s work emerges from pragmatic theory, and applies discourse analytical principles to practice-speciªc interaction, such as genetics counselling (Sarangi and Clarke 2002a/b). The work presented in the Sarangi and Roberts 1999 collection in particular provides a rich vein of discourse analytical research into workplace interaction, communication, professionalization (Hall et al. 1999), as well as a wealth of statements on the research methodologies that come into play in discourse-based organizational enquiry (Hak 1999; Gumperz 1999). While still predominantly linguistic in orientation, this work does touch on issues of organizational change (Candlin et al. 1999). In contrast to these more linguistic kinds of research, and working across sociolinguistics, adult learning and organization theory, a number of commentators are now engaging in what we could call ‘discursive workplace studies’. Prominent among these, Gee, Hull and Lankshear produced an account about the discursive implications of post-bureaucratic organization, called ‘The New Work Order’ (Gee et al. 1996). This book considers the changes that are aŸecting workplaces, and it critiques the discursive demands that are increasingly being placed on workers. Ultimately, the book defends the workers’ right to absent themselves from the performativity that is beginning to envelop them (Gee and Lankshear 1995; Gee 2000). Jackson (2001) oŸers a related critique, arguing that workers’ participatory involvement is no more than a new ‘hegemony’ (see below). Situating her research in a gaming machine factory undergoing restructuring, Scheeres provides delicate accounts of the dilemmas facing ‘new work order’ workers (Scheeres 1999, 2003; Scheeres and Iedema 2002). She argues, in contrast to Gee et al. (1996) and Jackson (2001) that the discursive implications of organizational change are not necessarily to the detriment of ordinary workers, while expectations of participation, communication and commitment are certainly being raised. Basing her argument on interviews and team meeting data, Scheeres points to the possibility of workers taking advantage of workplace change, and exploiting the opportunities given to them through workplace participation to


develop their careers (see also du Gay 1996a). Unusually, Scheeres’ work is a crossfertilization of the discourse analytical and the organization theoretical paradigm, and its interest in post-bureaucratic worker participation makes it central to the present study. I will return to Scheeres’ work later in this chapter. First, I would like to try reconciling the approaches discussed so far — organizational discourse studies and organizational discourse analysis — by exploring two notions that are quite central to both: power and identity. It is to these that I now turn.

Power and subjectiªcation as discourse Overall, it appears that much of organizational discourse studies and organizational discourse analysis operate on the basis of a normative stance on ‘good organization’. The former emphasizes innovation and downplays the reifying in¶uence of material, everyday organizational phenomena, privileging the potentialities that lie behind what goes on. Perhaps not surprising for authors working in the area of organization and management theory, their driving principle appears to be organizational renewal by thinking beyond ‘what is’ (Cooper 1993, 1998; Chia 1996; Boje 2001). For its part, organizational discourse analysis homes in on the regularities of organizational practice, to uncover imbalances in the positioning of organizational participants and the inequities that ¶ow forth from that. Authors like Fairclough (Fairclough 1989; Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999) and Gee (Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996; Gee and Lankshear 1995) are explicit about their emancipatory objectives. In sum, both organizational discourse studies and organizational discourse analysis take a normative-critical stance towards ‘what is’. The former challenges ‘what is’ to create space for ‘what is not’; the latter does so to create space for ‘what should be’. Another commonality that unites these two orientations is the view that worker identity is at the interstice of ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’ (Czarniawska 1997; Kress 1995; Wenger 1998). Put in these terms, identity is a precarious accomplishment and dynamic conªrmation of speciªc organizationally-negotiated and sanctioned regimes of conduct, making these appear ‘natural and necessary’, and challenging others as unnatural, unproductive, or ‘unaligned’. It is these two notions of power and identity that I want to explore further here. I do so for two reasons. First, I want to argue that power and identity, when regarded from a performative perspective (Butler 1996), are aspects of organization (thus embodying ‘lines of force’) that are more complex than either organizational discourse studies or organizational discourse analysis acknowledges. Second, I want to situate both power and identity in a framework that I will use to address the contradictions that characterize post-bureaucratic organization.

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Power as organizational-governmental dynamic Of course, even terror can be a calculated instrument of government, as can naked violence. No complex analysis is required to count the costs in lies and lives of these ways of exercising power. But the claim of the analytics of government is that the ‘modern’ regimes for the conduct of conduct that have taken shape in the West, and those strategies that contest them, are ineluctably drawn to rationalize themselves according to a value of truth. (Rose 1999: 24)

The point that Rose makes in the quote above about the power of government was captured in the earlier work by Lukes (1974). There, Lukes diŸerentiates between power as violence (‘do it or I’ll thump you’), power as reward (‘do it and there is something in it for you’), and power as commitment (‘you want to do it because you agree it is the best thing to do’). Especially in the 20th century democratic nationstate, this last kind of power has come increasingly to the fore as the means through which to engage the populace in practices and meaning makings supportive of government. Foucault coined the term ‘governmentality’ (Foucault 1976) to capture the idea that the governed come to identify with and advance the interests of prevailing rationalities, convinced of their truth: “to the extent that the governed are engaged, in their individuality, by the propositions and provisions of government, government makes its own rationality intimately their aŸair” (Gordon 1991: 48). Governmental power is not simply an eŸect of imposition of formal, prescriptive norms, but a complex interactive achievement of building consensus about what is appropriate action and what is not, what is true, and what is real. Such achievement of consensus about what is true and real was already central to Gramsci’s thinking, written up between the wars (Gramsci 1971). Gramsci elaborated his insights about how public consensus was achieved using the notion of ‘hegemony’. Hegemony foregrounds the interactive as well as the productive aspects of power. One could study in actual fact the formation of [hegemony], analyzing it in all its molecular phases … [interactions] repeated an inªnite number of times and which in their gigantic unity represent this work from which is born a collective will of a certain level of homogeneity … (Gramsci translated by and cited in Thibault 1991: 212)3 3. The full quote is as follows: “One could study in actual fact the formation of a collective historical movement, analysing it in all its molecular phases, which is not usually done because every treatment would become boring: instead we assume the currents of opinion already established around a group or a dominant personality. It is the problem that in modern times is expressed in terms of a party or a coalition of parties: how to initiate the founding of a party, how to develop its organized force and social in¶uence, and so on. It is a question of a molecular process, very detailed, of extreme analysis, extending everywhere, whose documentation is constituted by a boundless quantity of books, pamphlets, articles in journals and newspapers, conversations and oral debates which are repeated an inªnite number of times and which in


As Gramsci’s original formulation bears out (Gramsci 1971), crucial to achieving hegemony is a ‘reciprocity’ or ‘mutuality’ among those involved (Foucault 1978; Giddens 1984; Bourdieu 1991; Clegg 1993). That is, people experience a convergence in the meaning they make and identify with, such that they co-opt and are co-opted into common ways of thinking, talking and acting (Lukes 1974). It is through such convergence that power, rather than being prohibitive, restrictive and limiting, becomes positive and productive. This alternative face of power is well-captured by Foucault when he says: relations of power are not superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into eŸect. (Foucault 1978: 94)

Thus, hegemony, Lukes’ third kind of power, and Foucault’s governmentality, all capture the notion that consensus is achieved symbolically, or communicatively, but not necessarily on the strength of what Habermas would call ‘ideal speech situations’ (Habermas 1984, 1987). As just seen, Gramsci is careful to point out that hegemony comes about on the back of innumerable “molecular phases” and interactions “repeated an inªnite number of times”. These molecular interactions, in turn, produce a “gigantic unity” from which emerges a “collective will of a certain level of homogeneity” (Gramsci translated by and cited in Thibault 1991: 212). Also focusing on the legitimation of government, Rose refers to these ‘molecular processes’ as “translation processes of various sorts [through which] linkages are assembled between political agencies, public bodies, economic, legal, medical, social and technical authorities, and the aspirations, judgments and ambitions of formally autonomous entities, be these ªrms, factories, pressure groups, families or individuals” (Rose 1999: 48). Anchored in what ordinary people do and say, Gramsci’s ‘gigantic unity’ and Rose’s ‘linkages’ are not ephemeral, hypothetical, or purely cognitive phenomena, but visible, experiential, interactive ones. With the beneªt of a discourse perspective, we are able to capture glimpses of how such unities or linkages come about during dynamic interaction (discourse1). In the course of such interactions, interactants talk to ‘mobilise a bias’, thereby ensnaring others and themselves in ‘webs of commitment’ (see Chapters 6 and 8). Chapter 6 below provides a description of some of such ‘molecular phases’ and of how they move towards a ‘gigantic unity’. There, I discuss a meeting among stakeholders in the course of a collaborative planning process. their gigantic unity represent this work from which is born a collective will of a certain level of homogeneity, of that certain level that is necessary and su¹cient for determining a coordinated action that is simultaneous in time and in geographical space in which the historical fact occurs” (Gramsci 1977: 101, cited in Thibault 1991a: 212).

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Important for the present study, however, Gramsci’s hegemony does not quite capture what Foucault and Rose mean when they talk about rule and power. For its part, hegemony speciªcally highlights the business of ensnaring others. For Foucault and Rose, by contrast, the idea of people ensnaring themselves, willingly, is central. Foucault coined the concept of ‘governmentality’ to express this: “I intend this concept of ‘governmentality’ to cover the whole range of practices that constitute, deªne, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other” (Foucault 1984 interview, cited in Rose 1999: 23; Foucault 1976). Governmentality, in other words, brings to life that curious interstice between the need to govern, the need to authorize one’s authority, and the self as the primary site and locus of realization of that authority (Rose 1999: 27). If hegemony leaves the self out of the equation as if power is a conscious design performed on others, governmentality rewrites the grid of power as an emerging re¶exivity about and control of self; that is, as ‘the conduct of conduct’. As Chapter 8 demonstrates, organizational governmentality, as the ‘conduct of conduct’, is approximated through the shared and self-initiated enunciation of (new) knowledges and the enactment of (new) alliances. Here, workers not only textualize alternative ways of doing into existence, but also alternative ways of being. The ensuing intensity of workplace participation and self-display aŸords a ‘third space’ where workers author(ize) themselves and each other. But in contrast to this participative logic of governmentality, we are also able to trace the genealogy of power in discourse as evolving meaning making resource. In this latter case, power accrues to the increasingly abstract and resemiotized forms of meaning making (Iedema 1997, 2000, 2001) that interactants produce and mobilize. These new abstract and resemiotized forms commit interactants to new discourse practices, in so far that we as “self-creating tool-users cause new predicates to be true of ourselves whenever we create new tools with which to recreate ourselves” (Rorty 1994: 31). While the former ‘molecular’ processes are to do with the dynamics of interaction (Chapters 5, 6 and 8), the latter is to do with how discourse is able to ‘exceed its original referents’ as meaning making device. To take a linguistic example, we can say ‘it’s raining’, or ‘there’s heavy rainfall’, but we can also talk about ‘high levels of precipitation’. While ‘it’s raining’ remains tied to local experience and speciªc time-space, ‘high levels of precipitation’ ties us into more abstract ways of talking and seeing (lumping rain together with snow and hail), involving thingized and depersonalized constructions of reality (‘precipitation’) and sophisticated kinds of measurement (‘levels’), enabling calculation, comparison and prediction. Another example is to do with transforming human action to do with closing a door into an automatic door-closer (Latour 1986b, 1990, 1992). Here, discourse resemiotizes from talk (‘close the door!’) and situated activity into a technological device, not unlike the technical term ‘precipitation’.


In both these instances, our meaning makings become delinguistiªed (Habermas 1987). Due to this elision of speciªcs, knowledge is produced: the more abstract forms are now a short-hand that reference (for those ‘in the know’) a set of understandings. In that way, these emerging delinguistiªed meaning makings presume ways of knowing, saying, doing and being (see Chapter 3 for the linguistic details of this). As alternative constructions of the real, they unhinge us from what we see as ‘ordinary and everyday’ time, space and activity. Delinguistiªcation, then, is the creative process of producing new ‘images’ [discourses; RI] and of generating new relations through time and space that become constitutive of the self … [it] concerns the production of images of the self and images of the world that transcend [direct; RI] engagement. (Wenger 1998: 177)

These delinguistiªcations are symbols, images, or discourses that aŸord new ways of doing, being, saying and knowing. But for such symbols, images, or discourses to persist, communities of practice need to crowd around them to maintain their viability. For Wenger, “a more abstract formulation will require more intense and speciªc participation to remain meaningful, not less” (Wenger 1998: 67). These delinguistiªed formulations, then, harbour the possibility (or the expectation) that social, organisational and spatial relations are extended over time. Giddens has referred to this stretching of bases and principles of people’s practices as timespace distanciation (Giddens 1984).4 Thus deªned, delinguistiªcation and time-space distanciation are two faces of the same coin: a social-cum-semiotic process that ‘stores’ meaning away. Meaning becomes ‘stored away’ when discourse shifts from localizing expressions such as ‘there are ªfteen of us employed here’, to ones that create a generalizing viewpoint and gloss over the individuals involved; think of the term ‘our workplace’. These new kinds of language (e.g. the term ‘workplace’) ‘store meaning away’, and are thus the markers of socially and practically grounded ‘knowledge’. Moreover, this knowledge is a ‘knowing how’ and a ‘knowing as’, as much as a ‘knowing about’. 4. Complementing time-space distanciation, time-space compression brings disparate practices and people together with relative immediacy (Harvey 1989). Important here are emergent technologies in transport, tele-communication, and economic exchange. Other examples include email and teleconferencing, and related means whose eŸect is to increase the pace of communication. Thus, if time-space distanciation is about stability, time-space compression is about ‘turn-around’. When considered from a discursive-semiotic perspective, time-space distanciation and compression are closely related, and perhaps even inter-dependent. Both point to the increasingly mediated and technologized nature of social relationships, and both are contingent upon and enable a ‘dense’ and close-knit functioning of social-organizational networks. In short, time-space distanciation and time-space compression are two sides of the same (semiotic) coin: distanciation as the extension and stabilization of meanings across time and space, and compression as the communicative pace at which they are made to travel.

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Put diŸerently, these alternative and more abstract constructions of the real are not just abstract, theoretical representations: they tie us to diŸerent ways of doing, being and saying, just as does Latour’s automatic door-closing device. Delinguistiªed meaning making, then, has the potential to tie “together practices through diŸerent spaces and time, creating equivalences through disciplining disparate entities” (Berg and Timmermans 2000: 38). For this reason, delinguistiªcation is particularly evident and powerful in expert practices and procedures, interactive regimes, techniques and technologies, but also in interior spaces and buildings, technologies, machines and objects. Each of these time-space distanciates by naturalizing kinds of practices and sets of conditions that obtain for all kinds of people across all kinds of time and place. Hence, its applicability across people and settings means that delinguistiªed discourse is contingent upon socially stabilizing relationships and practices.5 As noted above, delinguistiªed discourse requires highly dense forms of human interaction, in the sense that “a more abstract formulation will require more intense and speciªc participation to remain meaningful, not less” (Wenger 1998: 67). Apart from the example given earlier, what does such delinguistiªed discourse look like? Let us consider the following extract (Extract 2.1), taken from a training document on Accrual Accounting made available to managers of educational institutions by the NSW Department of Education. This extract shows how not only words (the semantics), but also the grammar of organizational documents delinguistiªes. In Extract 2.1, the language is at once formal and classiªcatory (Treasury; Inner Budget Sector entities), and impersonal and hortatory (‘it is now appropriate to provide further impetus’). Extract 2.1 ‘Treasury believes that it is now appropriate to provide further impetus to the reform of ªnancial and resource management practices within Inner Budget Sector entities by establishing awareness of and commitment to…’

The clause in Extract 2.1 (re)construes organizational time and place. It achieves this, ªrst of all, by dissimulating its ‘must-ness’ (Figure 2.1). An institutional entity (‘The Treasury’) is made Subject of the sentence, but only to become participant in a mental process (a belief ).6 Incidentally, ‘The 5. We should be careful here, of course. Delinguistiªed discourse does not of itself create homogeneous, time-space distanciated practices, and it is doubtful whether such homogeneity is possible at all (Berg and Timmermans 2000). At the same time, it is clear that there was a whole array of discursive in¶uences on people’s everyday practices that contributed to ‘the civilising process’ as described by Elias (1982) and Foucault (1977), and that the time-space distanciating power of bureaucratizing and controlling discourses played a central role in this. 6. “The Treasury believes …” may be seen as agnate to “I believe/think…”, an interpersonal metaphor meaning “probably” (cf Halliday 1994a: 354).


Treasury believes

it is appropriate

to provide further impetus to

the reform of management practices

by estabishing an awareness of and commitment to …

Treasury believes

managers must

continue

to change the way they work

and become aware and committed to …

Figure 2.1 The original Command and a more commonsense rewrite

Treasury’ is not the entity that issues the command — the ‘commander’ is the Department of School Education who produced the document. The foregrounding of ‘The Treasury’ here is not done to identify the source of the command, but rather, it appears, to lend legitimacy to its substance. To make matters even more complex, the entity who will ‘provide further impetus …’ is grammatically absent, and so it is not clear who is in charge of ‘establishing … an awareness of and commitment to …’. The provenance of the document, however, tells us that it is the NSW Department of Education (‘DoE’) that is likely to be in charge of ‘providing further impetus’. In sum, this sentence paints a very speciªc picture of who wants whom to do what. This picture allocates very speciªc positionings to those involved, (linguistically) reifying what categories of people can or must do. The brief analysis above shows how the sentence projects and naturalizes relations of hierarchical positioning, task responsibility, and of presence and absence. First, what ‘the Treasury’ believes is evidently important to the people who produced the document. Second, what needs to be done (by managers) is ‘reform of management practices’, but this command is phrased such as to look like an ordinary statement. Third, neither those issuing the command (DoE) nor those towards whom this command is directed (managers) are allowed to come face to face in this discourse, undoubtedly due to the sensitive and ‘face-threatening’ (Brown and Levinson 1988) nature of what is at stake here: change the ways you (ªnancially) manage schools and universities. Put in more abstract terms, the extract provides a blue-print for how to conceive of social-organizational space — where am I and where are they in this organization? — and time — what action is to follow what, and when? A sentence such as that in Extract 2.1 is productive, in the sense that it renders speciªc meanings timeless (viz. ‘the reform of management practices’), and construes spatial order by hierarchizing relations among stakeholders. Crucial for realizing this productive organizational reality, of course, is my (and your) ability to bring adequate understanding and knowledge to this discourse to implicate me (and you) in its construal of what is ‘real’.

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Organizational discourse is productive not only by eliding from discourse, and thereby construing as taken-for-granted, the details of everyday interaction. It also becomes productive by resemiotizing meaning (Iedema 1999, 2000, 2001). As Chapter 6 will show, resemiotization refers to how discourse processes chain diŸerent semiotics together: talk, writing, technology, and so on. For example, a ªle produced about a teacher’s judgment about her student’s disability serves to consolidate her original cognitive judgment; the report written following a meeting about the student further formalizes her judgment alongside that of others, and so on (Mehan 1993; also Jönsson and Linell 1991). Another example is the way an architect-planner moves from face-to-face meetings to written reports, and from there towards architectural designs. Each such step involves increasingly far-reaching and ªnancially weighty decisions (Iedema 1997a). So far, we have discussed power in terms of the sway a discourse has or construes to have over people and their actions, and how it accrues ‘weight’ as we move from the ephemeral (talk, gesture) towards the more durable (paper, walls, technologies). In addition to devices that implicate workers in taken-as-given knowledges, relationships and rituals, the post-bureaucratic organization aims to realize a more complex relationship between workers and power. As argued, the impetus in the modernist 20th century organization is towards productivity and towards obtaining worker consensus around that productivity. By contrast, the impetus in postbureaucratic organization (rhetorically, at least) is towards worker engagement or performativity and towards workers’ input into, and deªnition of, the very nature of that productivity. This means that the taken-as-given knowledges, relationships and rituals embodied in the technologized discourses of the 20th century organization are being revisited, problematized, and potentially reconªgured within the 21st century organization. It means modes of worker participation are being elaborated that overcome the rather static, predictable and linear organizational arrangements that characterize bureaucratized organizations. More particularly, worker participation is encouraged as the means to engender ¶exibility with regard to social diŸerence and organizational task deªnition, and to inculcate a re¶exivity that will lead to responsible forms of autonomy and self-management (see Chapter 8). We will consider this post-bureaucratic performativity in more detail in a moment, after situating our discussion about hegemonic and governmental power in relation to worker identity.

Identity For Foucault, ‘governmentality’ manifests as “the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself … [and] which determines how the individual is supposed to constitute himself [sic] as a moral subject of his own actions” (Foucault 1984:


[352]). Here, power is not primarily about colonizing the capacities of innocent and neutral members, by making them ‘believe’ that what is in the interest of their organization is in their interest, since within such a formulation “it is [still] possible to liberate people and give them back their true identities” (Armstrong 1994: 23). For Foucault, there are no ‘true identities’ preceding the onset of governmental power. Instead, identities come into being through such power, and thereby inevitably embody and realize it. Nikolas Rose puts this as follows: One cannot counterpose subjectivity to power, because subjectiªcation occurs in the element of power; one cannot counterpose freedom to technology, because what we have come to understand as our freedom is the mobile outcome of a multitude of human technologies. (Rose 1999: 55)

Foucault and Rose see organization (taken in its broadest sense) as a site where people at all levels are involved in enacting and embodying power, anxiously coproducing practices and discourses that organize in the face of dis-organization, dissolution and disintegration (Cooper 1993). At the same time, these authors are careful to point out that productive power inevitably generates ‘points of resistance’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 147), and, with that, undoubtedly, confusions and ambiguities. We seek to overcome these confusions and ambiguities by confronting them with power and the order and comprehensibility it promises (Cooper 1993). Put thus, power can be read as signifying the imposition of meaning; the imposed coherence of our identity; the social and organizational relevance that we embody and project as social participants, and the productivity that we are capable of as organizational members (Hunter 1994). Closely related to identity, then, is the issue of organizational subjectiªcation (du Gay 1996a/b). Organizational subjectiªcation has been studied as aspect of people’s enactments of, among other things, team meetings (Scheeres 1999; Farrell 1999), medical case presentations (Atkinson 1999; Erickson 1999), bureaucratic decision-making (du Gay 2000) and managerial leadership (Degeling et al. forthcoming). The link between identity and organizational subjectiªcation becomes especially clear when we consider how individuals deploy and exploit the power of organizational discourse to self-present in public (GoŸman 1963). During clinical case presentations, for example, presenters (in this case student or resident doctors) derive personal satisfaction from being able to report on clearly deªnable medical conditions. Accordingly, “[w]ithout a clear diagnosis the full technical apparatus of modern medicine cannot be brought to bear on the case, and this is aesthetically, intellectually, and morally unsatisfying for physicians” (Erickson 1999: 113). The student doctor’s case presentation is thus not just a report on a patient’s condition, but an opportunity to make themselves be accepted as competent doctors, and an opportunity to enhance their professional identity by identifying with the conªrming and reassuring order of medical discourse.

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For Erickson, the novice doctor’s identiªcatory trajectory comprises responding to modeling by senior medical personnel, participating in actual conduct with such experts, and appropriating speciªc ‘linguistic registers’ (Erickson 1999: 137). In this way, the situated enactment of responses and conduct is a function of the novice’s socialization into organization-speciªc modes of meaning making. These modes of meaning making are organizational not simply because they are ªeldspeciªc; that is, about doctoring, or, say, about accrual accounting or the manufacture of gaming machines. Rather, the process of subjectiªcation centres on the novice accepting the rules about how organizational discourse recontextualizes time and space (Sorokin and Merton 1937; Giddens 1984): where they are or should be according to the demands of work, where they are in the hierarchy of work, what they should be doing and when and in what order. Crucially, of course, such knowing about, knowing as and knowing how cannot be made explicit in an exhaustive and comprehensive way (Garªnkel 1967). Inevitably, the discourses and knowledges that novices ‘make their own’ inevitably carry a “hidden baggage of (shared) assumptions” (Douglas 1975: 5, cited in Halliday 1978: 26). This ‘hidden baggage’ comprises understandings about which sayings and doings are appropriate to a ªeld and which are not, as well as agreements about who does what, when, and how. The trajectory of the novice into such discourses, knowledges and participations can be set out along a linguistic continuum. Thus, the more we identify with organizational knowledges, positions and practices, the more we are likely to delinguistify ourselves out of the discourse and construct ourselves instead in organizational terms. Kress outlines this as a hypothetical identiªcatory trajectory in which the speaker moves from saying “I…” to “The position…”, reorienting ‘doing being a person’ (Sacks 1992a) from a social-individual into an organizational enactment: ‘If I am to become the incumbent I will be responsible for…’. ‘I become/am the incumbent…’ ‘ (as the incumbent) in this position I am responsible for…’ ‘As the position, I am responsible for…’ ‘The position is responsible for…’. (Kress 1995: 124)

Kress sees this as the prototypical trajectory through which prospective institutional members achieve complicity and reciprocity with the organizational order and its abstractions: It is this sequence of steps that makes the set of [power] relations possible, not because the language is bureaucratese, but because this social and linguistic agent has come to see him or herself as this kind of subject, who has not just colluded in and ‘accepted’ this construction of him or herself, but has actively participated in his or her (re-)production, so that this is now not just a possible but an unremarkable, habitual, and ‘natural’ speaking position. (Kress 1995: 124)


This kind of subjectiªcation becomes problematic again for the accomplishment of governmentality: post-bureaucratic attitudes towards work and self are less likely to be allowed to stabilize around ‘unremarkable, habitual, and ‘natural’ speaking positions’. As noted earlier, and as will be elaborated below, post-bureaucratic organization favours more re¶exive, ¶exible and self-(re-)fashioning enactments of work and self. In traditional organizational rhetoric, subjectiªcation is also not a ‘once-oŸ’ matter. It is an incremental process of inducting oneself and being inducted into hierarchized practices and discourses (Erickson 1999; Wenger 1998). Thus, workers in higher organizational positions are formally projected (and project themselves) as more thoroughly constituted through time-space distanciated conceptualizations about both their work and themselves than those in lower positions. This is evident in an important way from the calibrated nature of ‘people descriptors’ such as competency statements, job descriptions, and performance agreements (Iedema 1998). In post-bureaucratic rhetoric, by contrast, not pre-determined tasks, linear command relationships and career trajectories, but interactive practices become the basis for subjectiªcation. An important pillar supporting this rhetoric, textualization is one of those subjectifying interactivities where knowledge, relationships and self are (and have to be) dynamically renegotiated. Now, textualization is at the heart of a post-bureaucratic trend towards the invention and enactment of the new ¶exible self, meaning that standards for what is unremarkable, natural and habitual are more openly and frequently contested. As I continue to argue in Chapter 8, the practice of textualization is the emerging site of less predictable kinds of worker subjectiªcation. Through the enunciation of knowledge about work, the self is ongoingly organizationalized, and the organization is ‘self-ed’. In this way, textualization is an interactive dynamic that seeks to resolve the opposition between self and collective. It is a form of subjectiªcation that is “simultaneously individualizing and collectivizing” (Rose 1999: 46). In textualizing and re-textualizing work, people make the interactivity of textualization the basis of their subjectiªcation, “as a subject one is simultaneously identifying oneself with a collectivized identity…” (Rose 1999: 46). Finally, the notion of governmentality and its conception of power as the basis of self and discourse cause problems for both the organizational discourse studies orientation and its denial of (material) power, and for the organizational discourse analysis orientation and its head-on challenge of power in its role as ‘praetor for the oppressed’. The involvement of both workers and critics in the recapitulation, conªrmation and perpetuation of (albeit diŸerent kinds of) organizational practices and identiªcations suggests that few of us are ever on the outside of power. For organization theory, this means that the search for innovative ways of doing or

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thinking organization is ultimately less radical than some of its writings suggest. For discourse analysis, it means that its critiques are also constituted in and through and compromised by the powers which it challenges. If we accept governmentality to be the basis of self and representation (discourse), we need to look for alternative avenues for organizational discourse research. Instead of ignoring or challenging organizational realities, the perspective of governmentality states that we are always already implicated in these realities. This suggests, instead of seeking out hypothetical multiplicities or claimed emergent kinds of meaning, hidden motives or misrecognized interests and alignments, that it may be more productive to accept and work within the inevitable limits of discourse and representation, and pursue their logics, their divisions, and collectivizations (Rose 1999: 56). Especially now that organizations appear to be seeking new ways of mobilizing the relationship between material power and enacted identity, it is important to understand the signiªcance here of the continuities and disjunctions that are at the heart of post-bureaucratic performativity.

Power, identity and post-bureaucratic governmentality While descriptions of competency, work and performance have ¶ourished since the advent of ‘the new work order’ (Gee et al. 1996), they have not rendered the process of coming to terms with ‘being a worker’ any easier. On the contrary, work is increasingly not (just) about people being or learning to be workers, managers, nurses and doctors. Recent work on workplace change suggests that ‘the new work order’ increasingly requires people to move beyond and outside of conventional positions and identiªcations (Cameron 2000; Jackson 2001; Rose 1996a/b). That is, organizations may expect workers to engage in and manage speaking positions that are not as yet sanctioned by or integrated into the more conventional deªnitions of occupation or profession. These new speaking positions are enacted to suit the recent push towards more process-oriented styles of work (Scheeres 1999), and they often clash with traditional styles of work (Grey and Garsten 2001). A central feature of these new speaking positions is that they emphasize being able to talk and write about work in addition to merely doing it (Gee and Lankshear 1995). As explained, this emphasis on talking and writing about work has been referred to as the ‘textualization’ of work. Textualization takes place not around the work as and when it is done, but in sites away from the work where workers who not normally see each other negotiate and commit to paper issues and problem resolutions. These negotiations and problem resolutions occur at one or more removes from the work — spatially, temporally, and therefore inevitably conceptually as well. As such, the current trend towards textualization at work adds to people’s work responsibilities too; textualization lies outside of


traditional deªnitions of work and worker identity. In short, textualization is achieved with others for whom what I say, and the way I say it, is (likely to be) new, diŸerent, and di¹cult, because not put in terms of discourses that are in existence around the organization. Seen from this more general vantage point, textualization problematizes traditional worker identity trajectories, because it asks workers to speak across occupational and professional boundaries. It asks workers to confront and handle occupational and professional diŸerence and otherness as they enact being project teams, working parties, interest groups, special committees, quality circles, task forces, and so on. In these situations, workers are not able to enact habitual speaking positions whose integrity and validity are contingent upon strictly circumscribed temporal-spatial geographies. These situations require from a worker that she communicates about her work in decontextualized or time-space distancing terms with other workers who have diŸerent skills, expectations and perspectives, and to do so is to put at risk the ‘natural’, habituated, and unremarkable dimensions of her workplace identity. Put diŸerently, workers are now expected to produce discourses that straddle occupational and professional boundaries, and are thus being forced to enact speaking positions that are, pace Kress, remarkable, unusual, and unnatural (Iedema et al. in press). It is important to note, then, that the new workplace is not simply about enabling the work in new ways, but that it is also about new modes of worker subjectiªcation, new kinds of organizing, new types of hegemony, and new discourses. The clinical pathway example seen in Chapter 1 (Figure 1.1) nicely encapsulates these pressures and developments. First, the pathway comes about as the newly-convened multi-disciplinary team works out how to co-organize and standardize their work in the form of a ‘pathway’ as meta-discursive statement about their work. Second, the team discusses not just what the work entails and how to put it in delinguistiªed terms, but also has to seek ways of working out interpersonal diŸerences and con¶icts. Third, in the course of their discussions and negotiations, the clinicians may gain ownership over this co-produced document and its time-space distanciating implications for practice (Timmermans et al. 1998). Last, the document transcends the limits of the here-and-now, and can be used to inform new staŸ, patients, families, and so on. In that sense, it is an ‘immutable mobile’ (Latour 1986a) that is able to cross boundaries, and it is a socio-technical product that symbolizes the communicative and practical ethics that the group now enacts (Berg 1998a). As product of workers textualizing their work, the clinical pathway is the resemiotized dimension of workplace performativity. It is a product that brings into being and anchors new ways of working and communicating, while at the same time being open to constant change and ammendation due to be digitized. In

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that sense, the kind of product-practice nexus at issue here heralds not merely diŸerent workplace identities, but more complex ones. As post-bureaucratic practice/product, and in so far as it is beginning to pervade 21st century organizations, the textualization of work not just encourages re¶ection about practice; it at the same time engenders re¶ection of self, and of the relationships between workerself, worker-other and worker-work (Chapter 8). The workplace changes we are witnessing, then, are not just about acquiring a new form of talk, or about replacing one workplace identity with another. Rather, the spirit of workplace change is about exposing workers (and their work) to themselves (to itself). Seen in these terms, the textualization of work means the worker institutes “a sort of permanent political relationship between self and self” (Foucault 1983b: 246). At the level of identity, this means the worker confronts her self not as a natural and necessary essence (viz. ‘personality’ or ‘psycho-social product’), but as a managed outcome of what she says and does.

Conclusion The purpose of this chapter was to outline research whose orientation is similar, comparable or relevant to that of the work presented here. The chapter began with addressing research that has emerged from organizational theory kinds of inquiry into discourse and representation, and it moved on to linguistic and discourse analytical kinds of inquiry into organization. I proceeded to consider two features that are central to both orientations: power and identity. I then presented a discussion of the expectations placed upon workers by workplace change, and the implications of such change for organizing discourse. The term textualization was reintroduced from Chapter 1 to ¶ag how the production and transmission of delinguistiªed discourse and time-space distanciated practice are increasingly activities engaged in by ordinary workers in teams. I noted how workplace interaction, termed textualization, is increasingly becoming the site where these new ways of being, saying and doing are negotiated. Rather than remaining the preserve of a small number of specialists in the organization who store their knowledge away in specialized discourses, technologies and mechanisms, ordinary workers are now expected to partake in formulating expert practices and procedures. Having addressed diŸerent literatures and some central notions for thinking about organization and discourse, I now want to elaborate somewhat further the analytical stance on discourse taken here. Chapter 3, then, considers in some more detail the theoretical bases of the discourse model that underpins the present study.

Chapter 3

A social semiotic view of discourse and organization

Introduction This chapter sets out the contours of a ‘social semiotic’ perspective on discourse (Halliday 1978; Hodge and Kress 1988; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). In doing so, the chapter argues, ªrst, that we can say more about meaning than that it is pluralist, intangible and elusive. In fact, I want to go call into question the poststructuralist views of meaning and discourse considered in the previous chapter. Discourse, in my view, is not dispersed across a multiplicity of ‘individual interpretations’ as Boje claims, because its structural and material constraints put limits on that multiplicity. Nor is discourse per deªnition unable to represent, as Cooper appears to suggest, because that would prevent him from making references to it in the ªrst place.1 Second, I will suggest that meaning is to a considerable extent retrievable from what people do and say and where they do so. People’s ‘meaning makings’, if you like, tell us not merely about their background knowledges and assumptions, but also about the relevance of diŸerent aspects of the material context. After all, only rarely are social and organizational life beholden to uncertainty and unpredictability to such an extent that making sense becomes totally impossible. Third, I explain that a social semiotic view of discourse steers in between simplistic views of meaning as determinism (‘meaning truthfully mirrors and represents the real’) and voluntarist views that ignore the organizational dimensions of meaning (‘meaning does not mirror or represent the real and it is open to whatever we choose to make it’). This last point is an important one, because it oŸers a way out of the theoretical divergence between organizational discourse studies and organizational discourse analysis encountered in the last chapter. There, we saw how both organizational discourse studies and organizational discourse analysis critique ‘what is’ in favour of ‘what could be’. The former’s enthusiasm, I suggest, springs from its voluntarist view of meaning making: ‘people are always able to make 1. Here, the argument that representation is about linking discourse to the world ‘out there’ and that that is the problem does not hold. Discourse is ‘out there’ as written texts or spoken language, unless our view of discourse suŸers from ‘cognitivism’ (Still and Costall 1991). Hence, saying anything about meaning and discourse inevitably means representing ‘the world out there’.

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diŸerent meanings, irrespective of where they are, who they are with, and what they are doing’. The latter’s cynicism, by contrast, is fuelled by a determinism: ‘people are the object of established practices and have little room for manoeuvre, let alone change’. Given this theoretical stalemate, this chapter aims to set out a way of thinking about meaning and meaning making that keeps our ability to mean in new ways on the one hand, and the constraints on our meaning makings on the other hand in tension, ruling neither out. This is because a social semiotic view of discourse neither privileges the individual (voluntarism) at the expense of forces that transcend the individual (determinism), nor does it overstate the role of those supra-individual forces at the expense of the individual. Instead, the social semiotic analysis of meaning making takes an empirical stance: what, in practical terms, ultimately transpires from this particular situation or interaction? How does it end up ‘enacting’ organization? This means, too, that the view of meaning advanced here is a ‘grand question’, not a ‘grand theory’. It does not position one explanation or one principle as the answer for all occurrences of meaning making, for all utterances, all situations. Its ‘grand question’ is whether and to what extent meaning is becoming pluralist, heteroglossic and dispersed (Bakhtin 1981) or ‘hard’, monologic and dediŸerentiated (Timmermans et al. 1998). By maintaining these discursive drifts and meanderings as its focus, this approach to discourse keeps complexity in play. In elaborating this social semiotic view of discourse, this chapter will ªrst focus on Halliday’s systemic theory, and his relational conceptualization of discourse and meaning. The section that follows elaborates the thesis that language and semiosis (that is, discourse) do three things simultaneously: they are about or represent the world; they enable us to enact socio-cultural relationships, and they comprise a special potential for organizing themselves such as to be re-cognizable as meaning. That is, discourse is ‘meta-functional’ (Halliday 1978, 1994a) in so far as that it answers not in the ªrst instance to what we as discourse users do with it, but to three abstract and over-arching meta-functions: representation, orientation, and organization (Lemke 1992, 1995; Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). The next section brings these analytical principles together by considering an example of post-bureaucratic discourse. Then, the third section elaborates a linguistic principle called grammatical metaphor. The chapter closes with proposing that this principle is emblematic of the kinds of delinguistifying transformations that aŸect discourse more generally.

Discourse as potential; discourse as enactment This study favours a social semiotic perspective on meaning making, and that means that we are in the ªrst instance not concerned with what people know, but


with how people deªne and guard what is possible, appropriate, or necessary in interaction. I am not going to pursue people’s cognitive ‘competence’ but their social-organizational conduct, since it is the latter that provides me with ‘evidence’ about organization and discourse. In that sense, my position runs parallel to the work emerging from the communities of practice literature (Lave and Wenger 1990; Wenger 1998), where not individual kinds of knowing, but common modes of doing are the centre of attention. The position advanced here, then, enquires into two things: a culture’s or community’s deªnition of what is possible, elicited by exploring what individuals within such a culture commonly do and say. We can study these things, and represent them as sets of social choices. These sets of choices are the hypothetical sum of doings and sayings that occur in a particular domain of social life. For example, we can set out the range of reasonings that occur in the course of mother-child interactions (Hasan 1992), or the ways in which narrative, authority and knowledge intertwine in hard news stories (White 1997). As suggested previously, such sets of behavioural possibilities may be called ‘discourse²’. They capture what is possible given the constraints bearing on people’s performances. Discourse , then, is a “meaning potential, where meaning is a form of behaving” (Halliday 1973: 55). This notion of discourse² as meaning potential ultimately derives, of course, from Saussure’s idea of langue. Also introduced in Chapter 1, the instantiation of discourse² in interaction is called discourse¹, and this parallels Saussure’s parole (Saussure 1983: 14). We can clarify the social semiotic view on meaning and discourse by rehearsing and responding to some of the criticial commentaries that have been leveled at Saussure’s original distinction between langue and parole, and thus at the kind of distinction that I make between discourse² and discourse¹. I will concentrate here on what might appear to some to be rather dated arguments and debates. I do so, however, because I see these early critiques as encompassing, lucid and sympathetic, with later critiques of de Saussure’s work (Derrida 1976; Gottdiener 1995) largely recapitulating the same issues and judgments (cf. Eco 1990; Thibault 1997). First, there is the work of J. R. Firth, much of it written in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Firth critiqued the notions of langue and parole because he understood their opposition as creating a discontinuity between what individuals said or did (‘parole’) and a broader social reservoir of meanings (‘langue’; Firth 1957: 180; Firth 1968). To some extent in¶uenced by Russian critiques but also by Wittgenstein’s work, Firth interpreted Saussure as saying that the social is categorically divorced from the individual. Firth worried that for de Saussure what individuals said and did was of no consequence for langue, or the socio-cultural dimension of discourse. In other words, Firth read de Saussure as saying that abstract, over-arching principles governed what ordinary people said and did. For him, then, Saussure was a “static mechanical structuralist” (Firth 1957: 181; Caws 1988).

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Firth shares this view with Voloshinov, a Russian critic, who also sees Saussure as creating an unbridgeable gap between individuals’ enactments of discourse and the socio-cultural ‘reservoirs’ of knowledge and resources that frame and enable those enactments. For Volosinov, the langue-parole distinction puts “language […] in opposition to utterance in the same way as […] that which is social [is opposed] to that which is individual” (Voloshinov 1973: 60). In Voloshinov’s mind, this creates a dichotomy between “the theses of individualistic subjectivism and the antitheses of abstract objectivism” (Voloshinov 1973: 63). It is evident from their critiques that both Firth and Voloshinov are clearly concerned to rescue what individuals do and say and give it greater ontological prominence. But, rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water (and the bathroom, as recommended in the post-structuralist critiques seen in Chapter 2; also see below), these commentators sought to make our understanding of over-arching phenomena such as language and discourse contingent upon individuals’ situated utterances, and displace emphasis from langue to parole. Thus, for Firth and Volosinov people’s situated enactments were the origin and source of social knowledges and assumptions about conduct. But neither Firth nor Volosinov were ready to dismiss langue as knowledge ‘space’. Volosinov makes clear that: the speech act or, more accurately, its product — the utterance, cannot under any circumstances be considered an individual phenomenon in the precise meaning of the word and cannot be explained in terms of the individual psychological or psychophysiological conditions of the speaker. The utterance is a social phenomenon (Voloshinov 1973: 82, his italics).

In critiqueing de Saussure for what might have appeared to be an undue emphasis on langue, Firth and Volosinov are in fact formulating a position that goes beyond an ‘either/or’ view of the origin of meaning as discourse. For them, meaning is inevitably both an individual and a social matter: meaning manifests through what individuals do, and it is contingent upon and is embedded in sets of abstract diŸerences and relations. Despite this, Firth and Volosinov were not able to specify very well what being embedded in sets of abstract relations in fact entailed. Clearly, both Firth and Voloshinov saw individuals’ utterances as central, and they placed great emphasis on the social dimension in individuals’ meaning making. But they also both lacked a way of conceptualizing or clarifying the exact nature of this social dimension in individuals’ utterances. Thibault (1997), commenting on Volosinov’s critique of Saussure, isolates their problem. Thibault regards both Firth and Volosinov as paying insu¹cient attention to those aspects of discourse that are highly structurally constrained: our sound system or phonology in language, for example, which admits only a limited number of linguistic sounds and sound deviations. The syntax or lexicogrammar of language is another example, since that too embodies all kinds of rules and


constraints that allow only limited play. We can also think of related kinds of structural constraints that to greater or lesser extent bear on visual meaning making (e.g. perspective), architecture (e.g. tensile strength), or music (e.g. harmony), and so on. Other aspects of meaning making may be less constrained, says Thibault, and enjoy greater ‘semiotic freedom’. But such greater freedoms are inevitably contingent upon lesser freedoms; that is, ‘play’ only becomes possible thanks to and in tension with the kinds of structural constraints just exempliªed. Thus, the relative freedom that I have in writing these sentences emerges thanks to the host of rhetorical, grammatical and graphological limitations that make my writing possible in the ªrst place (Wilden 1980). Accordingly, what someone means and what renders their meanings social are diŸerent but simultaneous and related aspects of discourse. It is important, at this point, that we do not make the mistake of dividing meaning into static and uniªed form on the one hand (‘structure’; the ‘social’ part of discourse), and unlimited, privatized content on the other (‘meaning’; the ‘individual’ part of discourse). Clearly, and this is a point that is rarely understood, both form and content are at once individual and social (Hjelmslev 1961). For instance, the way I shape my sentences and pronounce ‘discourse’ (i.e. the ‘form’ I produce) says as much about me as about the discourse(s) that I partake of. Equally, the things I write about (‘content’) do not emerge from a vacuum, or straight from my head, but from a set of discourse practices that I have participated in and have identiªed with. Thus, both the forms and contents of discourse have a social dimension (‘discourse²’), and they are collectively instantiated in what we say and do in real time (‘discourse¹’). This means we cannot dichotomize meanings that are ‘private’ and others that are not (Wittgenstein 1953): meaning is ultimately aŸorded by what we see and hear around us in the social, if perhaps enacted by us (and, often, by non-human entities!). This also explains why the ‘discourse²/discourse¹’ distinction is an important analytical principle. It provides a way of elaborating what a practice is standardly about and what resources it commonly uses (discourse²), as well as a way of studying how situated interaction replays or perturbs and changes practice (discourse¹). At the same time, this distinction is useful for emphasizing that what people say or do is never entirely divorced from what has gone before (even if it does not make much ‘sense’!). A third and ªnal beneªt is that the knowledges that we as ordinary speakers and as analysts have of discourse are grounded in actual sayings and doings, and this underscores their visible, material, empirical essence. At the risk of unduly repeating myself, meaning is not purely a matter of interpretation, but also of material, situated conduct. This view of meaning opens the door to an empirical not a hypothetical view of organization. Firth made this point well when he said:

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If we regard language as expressive or communicative we imply that it is an instrument of inner mental states. And as we know so little of inner mental states, even by the most careful introspection, the language problem becomes more mysterious the more we try to explain it by referring it to inner mental happenings that are not observable. By regarding words as acts, events, habits, we limit our enquiry to what is objective and observable … (Firth 1957: 170).

De Saussure’s work has more recently been critiqued in ways less generous and sympathetic than encountered so far. Particularly following Derrida’s (1976) attack on de Saussure and foray into C. S. Pierce’s work (1955), a trend developed across the social sciences that was concerned to promote Peirce’s ‘unlimited semiosis’ as ªrst principle, leading to the view that “[a]ll texts, including the philosopher’s or critic’s or historian’s own, are suŸused with tropes, metaphors, ªgural language that will always exceed claims to transparent truth” (Docker 1994: 143). This meant, on the one hand, that meaning making came to be seen as discourse practice: that is, as the performance of discursive conventions and protocols. This view positions meaning making as being subjugated to a hierarchy of interactive and scriptural conventions: how I talk, how I sit and wield my writing implement; how I build my sentences, my texts, my meanings, all answer in some degree to social convention. On the other hand, and in direct contrast with the claim that it is constituted in convention, meaning making also became increasingly talked about as always already sucked into the vortex of its own contradictions, heterogeneities, and indeterminacies. This, of course, raises serious doubts about our ability to have discussions or write about organizations as existing entities (cf. Hassard and Parker 1993). For some, writing is “an unexamined, taken-for-granted […] method which serves to ‘represent’ the organizational reality” (Cooper 1989: 495). ‘Routine’ approaches to the study of organization rely unre¶ectively on a conception of writing that represents an already constituted object from which the ‘construction’ function of writing is excluded. (Cooper 1989: 494)

Typical of this move is to pronounce on the total ‘undecidability’ (cf. Cooper 1989: 486) of phenomena, and on the consequent inability of writing to represent them. Ironically, this pronouncement and similar ones like it are made as if they remain entirely unaŸected by their claim that ‘writing is unable to represent’. The question that arises here, of course, is: can we proclaim that writing fails to represent, and exempt from our judgment our own ‘factual’, written claims that in eŸect represent others’ writings? The problem we espouse in writing about what goes on in organizations, we are advised, is that “we have in fact interiorized the technology of writing so deeply that we are often unable to recognize its presence and its pervasive in¶uence on the process and product of our thinking” (Chia and King 2001: 316). In saying this, of


course, Chia and King in fact represent a social — if not organizational — phenomenon, namely ‘the interiorization of writing by writers’. The argument that Chia and King fail to advance is why they do not fall victim to their own rule, and that, surely, weakens their claim. The only options that remain are twofold. Either we take the claim that writing cannot represent to its logical conclusion, and maintain our silence. Or, we make do with the language(s) and writing(s) that we have and we continue to represent organizations and organizational phenomena as best we can. ‘Represent as best we can’ here means that we write in acknowledgement of the constitutive nature of meaning making, of self, and of organization. This rules out any foundationalist stance on meaning and discourse, and instead favours what Seidman and Alexander refer to as ‘a multi-leveled type of argumentation that moves between analytical reasoning, empirical data, normative clariªcation and remains re¶ective about its own practical, social implications’: A view about social knowledge that states that we always theorize or do research from a socially situated point of view, that social interests and values shape our ideas, that our social understandings are also part of the shaping of social life. Accordingly, postfoundationalism is not a rejection of theory or rigourous social analysis but a position that defends a more complex, multi-dimensional type of argumentation. Instead of speaking of hard and fast truths, post-foundationalists might speak of credible or persuasive arguments; instead of speaking of research testing theory, they would be apt to speak of how social analysis involves a multi-leveled type of argumentation that moves between analytical reasoning, empirical data, normative clariªcation and remains re¶ective about its own practical, social implications. (Seidman and Alexander 2001: 2)

For its part, and having adopted a relational view of language, organization theory must extricate itself from replaying challenges to ‘simple location’ understandings of organizational phenomena (Cooper 1998) at the risk of essentializing and reifying its own position and critique. By turning non-representationism into recurrent, foundationalist theme, this particular domain of organization theory fails to capitalize on its turn towards representation and discourse. This is mainly because organization theory cannot accommodate and render productive that which most occupies its attention: the conventional, relational basis of discourse. Without engaging with the material realism that is at the heart of neo-Saussurean theory (here referred to as social semiotics), organization theory will continue to cut oŸ its nose to spite its face: it commits language and meaning to the abstract sphere of multiplicity and pluralism, and it relegates everything empirically organizational to the sphere of unrepresentability. Never and nowhere, it says, shall language, discourse and organization (be allowed to) meet. The next section overcomes the dilemma that the relational, systemic basis of language poses, and answers the following questions by drawing on a multi-

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dimensional view of meaning making: Can we use language to represent? Is all that we do with language to do with representation? Could it be that we do multiple things with language, and that it is a multi-dimensional phenomenon?

Discourse as social semiotic Metafunctionality In the view of discourse advanced here, meaning making is the interface between discourse¹ (the ‘making’…) and discourse² (…of ‘meaning’). But there is another dimension of meaning making, which I have not yet touched on. This dimension is about how meaning making embodies a meta-functional complexity: it simultaneously represents things and enacts social-interpersonal relationships. Put more technically, meaning making employs resources that both designate or represent material reality and that express or constitute social reality. Importantly, this formulation goes one step beyond saying that meaning making ‘constructs reality’: this is a construction of what the world is like which is enacted and realized through social performance. The view of meaning as both designating or representing the world and as expressing or enacting the social goes back to the 18th century romantics. They saw language not as a way of labeling or mirroring nature, but as an expression of our human nature. Romantic philosophers like Herder and von Humboldt argued that language “realizes man’s [sic] humanity. Man [sic] completes himself [sic] in expression” (C. Taylor 1985a: 233). The whole development, through the seventeenth-century designative theory and the Romantic expressive view, has brought language more and more to centre stage in our understanding of man [sic]; ªrst as an instrument of the typically human capacity of thinking, and then as the indispensable medium without which our typically human capacities, emotions, relations would not be. (Taylor 1985a: 235)

In Halliday’s theory of the grammar of natural language, these insights are worded as follows: The functional contexts of language fall into two major types, and the constitutive function that the grammar performs diŸers between the two types. On the one hand, language ‘constitutes’ human experience; and in this context, the grammar’s function is to construe: the grammar transforms experience into meaning, imposing order in the form of categories and their interrelations. On the other hand, language ‘constitutes’ social processes and the social order; and here the grammar’s function is to enact: the grammar brings about the processes, and the order, through meaning. (Halliday 1996: 6)


In language, it is the grammar where the fusion of these two over-arching or ‘meta’ functions is achieved: “the grammar achieves this ‘meta-functional’ synthesis of semiotic transformation and semiotic enactment (of knowledge with action…)” (Halliday 1996: 6). Other accounts of language, discourse and semiosis have adopted a similar dualist view (Habermas 1984, 1987; Harré 1991; Harré & Gillett 1994; Shotter 1993; Taylor 1985a/b, 1995). Halliday, however, takes the issue of meta-functionality one step further. Besides an ideational and interpersonal meta-function, he speaks of an enabling or ‘textual’ meta-function. This dimension of meaning, Halliday explains, is concerned with the texture of language, discourse, or semiosis itself (Halliday 1978: 48). The textual meta-function, then, governs the auto-organization of discourse as semiotic phenomenon. Important here are principles of textual organization such as beginning-middle-end, general-speciªc-general; margin versus centre; hierarchies of arrangement, and so on. Our attention is drawn to the textual structurings of language and other semiotic resources especially because of the unhinging of communication from the local ‘logic’ and unfolding of socially situated interaction. I am thinking here, of course, of print and other exo-somatic resources, all of which have their own textual-structural logics. These logics are in an important part dictated by the aŸordance(s) of the materialities through which print and the like are realized (Gumbrecht and PfeiŸer 1994). In the case of natural language, the textual meta-function came to play an important role when societies moved from using primarily spoken to also using written communication. Writing foregrounded, and thereby gradually enhanced, the independent textual structuring of language. Writing is a form of discourse in which the dominant patterns in the grammar, in the sense of those which determine primarily what options are taken up, are the textual patterns … rather than — or at least as much as — the ideational patterns … . (Halliday 1993a: 18)

This suggest, too, that the organization of meaning making cannot be dissociated from its material manifestation: do we mean through (ephemeral) talk? Through writing? Through technologies such as machines, software, and so on? Each of these diŸerent manifestations or ‘modes of meaning making’ has implications for how meaning is manifested, structured, organized, as material phenomenon.

Theorizing about discourse: From language to semiosis What I have said so far derives in large part from Halliday’s language theory. While Halliday himself has been clear about the semiotic essence of language (Halliday 1978), his work has only in passing addressed the ways in which discourse and semiosis are woven into social (or organizational) process. This section wants to make this link more explicit.

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For social semiotics, the link between language and other kinds of meaning making is central. Taking Halliday’s linguistic theory as the basis for talking about discourse or semiosis, social semiotics aims “to weave together into one discourse accounts of particular social acts, in particular contexts of situation and on particular occasions, with accounts of the dynamic processes of the social system as a whole” (Lemke 1985a: 5). In doing so, social semiotics overcomes the central problem of modernist sociology, whose macro-sociological concepts such as class, state and the like, are di¹cult to square with micro- sociological concepts such as face-to-face co-presence and turn-taking. In wielding analytical concepts that oppose the social and the individual, traditional sociology has remained unable to describe how interaction instantiates practice, sociality, or organization (cf. Knorr-Cetina & Cicourel 1981: 15; Alexander et al. 1987). The macro-social accounts remain speculative because however insightful their observations, if a macro-social discourse has no unfolding in micro-social terms, it is impossible for micro-social observations (which are ultimately the only social ‘data’) to modify and contribute directly to the reªnement of macro-social theory. It is also then impossible to use macro-social insights to guide speciªc practice in particular social situations. (Lemke 1985a: 5)

In his earlier work, Lemke formulates two ways to link the micro and macro aspects of situations. The ªrst relates speciªc situated acts to the types of activities and meaning-makings of a particular community. Here, a community is conceived in terms of practices rather than atomistic individuals (cf. Giddens 1984: 2; Wenger 1998). These practices make use of speciªc resources and manifest a particular order, and comprise the ritualized dimension of social and organizational life. Other terms used for this phenomenon include ‘typiªed constructs’ (Schutz 1962, cited in Heritage 1984: 49), ‘ethnomethods’ (Garªnkel 1967), and ‘genres’ (Bakhtin 1986: 60; Martin 1992: 546). Lemke’s second move is to interrelate these generic formations and focus on what is both typical and untypical in the culture or organization (Lemke 1985b: 292). In proposing this, Lemke transposes the systemic concept that informs Halliday’s language theory onto meaning making in general. Accordingly, the idea ‘what people say/write realizes a practice of saying/writing’ is extended to ‘people’s conduct realizes practices of behaving’. For Lemke, then, discourse practices are ultimately social semiotic practices: Semiotic formations provide an intermediate level of conceptual analysis between the microsocial (utterances, texts, particular acts and events) and the macrosocial (dialects, institutions, classes, ideologies), but more importantly, they formulate the scale from microsocial to macrosocial in terms of actions (social practices) and patterns of relations of actions (cultural formations) and not in terms of entities and aggregations of entities (individuals: corporate groups: societies). (Lemke 1993: 246, his italics; also 1985a)


Lemke makes two points here. First, our understanding of social or organizational phenomena is grounded not in beings, but in doings. We become aware of these doings as meso-social patterns; that is, social or organizational practices. The other point Lemke makes here is that the relational stance we take towards language and language use also pertains to how we think about meaning making more generally: how we walk and gesture, how we write and read, how we design, build and use technologies, architectures, infrastructures, and so on, and so on. Discourse, in this deªnition pertains to meaning making in general, or semiosis. This is an important theoretical point to which I shall return. Patterns of saying/writing and behaving become noticeable, re-cognizable and ac-countable (Garªnkel 1967) when they ‘make a diŸerence that makes a diŸerence’ (Bateson 1973). That is, the meaning of an action is not inherent to it, but arises from the extent to which it realizes diŸerence in relation to what was or what is: “a particular production of meaningful social action will take a deªnite position relative to all the others” (Lemke 1985a: 11). Two simple examples may serve to illustrate this point. First, and restricting ourselves to spoken interaction for the moment, we’ll consider the diŸerences between the resources used by two of the four speakers present at a management meeting. These two speakers say and do diŸerent things. Crucially, these diŸerences become meaningful because of their relational and complementary nature. Extract 3.1 H.: Bob Doyle, do you know Bob? We’ve had quite a bit of discussion on the phone and he wants to come out, he’s prepared to give us an hour, hour and a half to see what the problem is as long as we meet him with the appropriate forms and show him what we’re doing. He’s already got a feeling about what might work, basically keep Filemaker frontend and if you want to speed up the ledger stuŸ he’s got something that would speed up, do a lot better than Works, basically keep Filemaker running and just tune it but anyway, he said he will wait and see. That aspect might take a standard package whereas the marketing, it probably doesn’t ªt and it’s better to have your own system, anyway he is coming to talk about it. S.: Alright. H.: And from then on he’ll give us a quote, he’s already signaled what it might cost to ªx up, to take away what we’ve got and play with it, he’s saying 2 to 4 thousand dollars, so listen carefully on Tuesday. T.: What time’s this? H.: Two ªfteen. A.: Um, sorry, with regard to that, I’m not sure but I’d like to have a look at your accounts, your programs that you are running and what you are trying to get out of them because on Mac um I would suggest the right program to use without bringing him in anyway … Secondly Filemaker Pro, I can write a program or rewrite it.. H.: Well, we’ve done it ourselves now, I mean that’s what we’ve got.

The speaker identiªed as H. reports to those present at the meeting about his

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negotiations with a software expert. H. realizes commands using direct imperatives (‘so listen carefully on Tuesday’) and other rather categorical language to bolster his position (‘Well, we’ve done it ourselves now, I mean that’s what we’ve got’). The speaker identiªed as A., on the other hand, uses quite diŸerent, and more tentative resources: ‘Um sorry, with regard to that, I’m not sure but I’d like…’ and ‘um I would suggest..’. While H. has already decided that the best way to deal with the software issue is to call in the expert (and presumed that such was his right), A. contests this, but does so by positioning himself as having much less authority (Davies and Harré 1990). To give more force to the point that the meaningfulness of people’s modes of participation at this meeting is a function of the diŸerences they enact, let us conceive of the meeting as having unfolded as follows. In my re-conception of how this meeting went (Extract 3.1a), the relationship between the interactants pans out more equitably: Extract 3.1a H.: Bob Doyle, do you know Bob? We’ve had quite a bit of discussion on the phone and he wants to come out, he’s prepared to give us an hour, hour and a half to see what the problem is as long as we meet him with the appropriate forms and show him what we’re doing. He’s already got a feeling about what might work, basically keep Filemaker frontend and if you want to speed up the ledger stuŸ he’s got something that would speed up, do a lot better than Works, basically keep Filemaker running and just tune it but anyway, he said he will wait and see. That aspect might take a standard package whereas the marketing, it probably doesn’t ªt and it’s better to have your own system, anyway he is coming to talk about it. S.: Alright. H.: And from then on he’ll give us a quote, he’s already signaled what it might cost to ªx up, to take away what we’ve got and play with it, he’s saying 2 to 4 thousand dollars, so listen carefully on Tuesday. T.: What time’s this? H.: Two ªfteen. A.: Can I have a look at your accounts, your programs that you are running and what you are trying to get out of them because on Mac the right program to use without bringing him in anyway … Secondly Filemaker Pro, I can of course write a program or rewrite it. H.: Well, of course, that is another possibility…

While in the original interaction a clear status diŸerence was operating between H. and A., my reconception of the meeting omits the tentative and mitigating meanings deployed by A. By making the resources mobilized by the two speakers more similar, I have also introduced more reciprocity into the interaction; that is, less diŸerence. Unequal relationships, then, are realized by drawing on a speciªc kinds of discursive resources and enacting particular diŸerences. This means too that positioning is achieved on the basis of the discursive resources we mobilize as


speakers (writers, designers, etc.). And this deªnes the performative perspective: what transpires socially or organizationally is contingent upon the performance of speakers, not their possible thoughts or intentions. It is these performances that manifest the ‘regimes’ of meaning with which we identify ourselves, and which we performatively reconªrm. Another and ªnal point to make about this is that these regimes of meaning are not just linguistic but multi-modal (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). That is, the resources mobilized by speaker H. in Extract 3.1 above include not merely language that signals power, but also possessions (certain kinds of knowledge about Works and Filemaker Pro), embodiments (some people leaning back, away from one another, while others leaned closer to others) and relationships (with knowledgeable outsiders). On the back of these multi-modal resources, then, H. is able to perform a decision-making role in the organization. Put diŸerently, in speaking and acting the way he does, H ‘realizes organization’, even if he does so by marginalizing A. It is in this way, too, that the boundary between speaker and organization blur, in so far that the meaning making resources deployed conªrm the one on account of the other. For discourse theory, this blurring of individual and social (organizational) is a central insight: social situations and individuals each realize the other. This insight is what anchors discourse theory to a dynamic, performative view of meaning making: meaning is what transpires socially or organizationally, thanks to and against the background of human cognition and material reality. This is not to deny the ontological centrality of human cognition to social life (Deacon 1997), but it argues for an analytical balance between manifest practice and putative cognition (Still and Costall 1991; Wenger 1998). So, for discourse theory, claims about the ‘indeterminacy’ of meaning made by authors like Boje unduly privilege the putative sphere of human cognition over the manifest sphere of materialization. Moreover social semiotic discourse theory sees the multiplicities and pluralities of meaning not as a pre-theoretical given, but as an empirical question (Iedema et al. in press). How can we empiricize meaning making, and how can we recognize its potential multiplicity and plurality? Social semiotic discourse theory mobilizes the work of Bakhtin to think about these issues (Bakhtin 1981, 1986; Fairclough 1992). Bakhtin talked about the multiplicity of meaning, and the divergences between knowledges and understandings which it entails, in terms of ‘heteroglossia’ (Bakhtin 1981: 291): “all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup and therefore impossible to resolve” (Bakhtin 1981: 428). Bakhtin also claims the heteroglossic nature of meaning can be exacerbated by a ‘centrifugal’ (moving outwards) drift in what people say and do, giving rise to carnavalesque ambiguities and confusions (Bakhtin 1981: 272). By the same token, heteroglossia can become backgrounded

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as a result of a unifying or ‘centripetal’ (moving inwards) drift in what people do and say, leading to ‘monoglossia’. For Bakhtin, then, heteroglossia is ‘game-able’ because meaning and conduct stand at the crossroads of con¶icting forces: forces which can push us either towards monologic, dediŸerentiating and homogenizing meaning makings, and forces that push us out towards dialogism, multiplicity, contradiction and con¶ict. In formal discourse, of course, heteroglossia becomes dissimulated by the formality inherent in print, its standardized margins, the depersonalized authors, but especially the language that is used. O¹cial languages … all privilege oneness; the more powerful the ideology, the more totalitarian (monologic) will be the claims of its language. Extreme versions of such language would be religious systems and certain visionary forms of government that have as their end that prelapsarian condition in which words are not necessary. Speech falls away because … no mediation is necessary since everyone’s thought is in step with everyone else’s. (Holquist 1990: 52/3)

Monologism is deªned, then, as a ‘prelapsarian condition in which words are not necessary’. Deªned in those terms, Bakhtin’s monologism is a complex of processes, encompassing what Habermas called delinguistiªcation (Habermas 1987), what Giddens conceptualized as time-space distanciation (Giddens 1984), and what again others have referred to as translation (Latour 1990, 1992, 1993) and dediŸerentiation (Timmermans et al. 1998). The intent behind these notions is to capture three things. First, through interactive practice we are able to background our diŸerences (dediŸerentiation). Second, we can ‘translate’ these new understandings into rariªed, delinguistiªed forms that ‘store meaning away’ (generalizations, abstract signs, designs, technologies and buildings). Third, by storing meaning away, these practices and the discourses they deploy create spheres of obligation and authority that are unlikely to leave what individuals say and do unaŸected: these discourses align or ‘time-space distanciate’ what people do. In the course of this, the heteroglossic nature of meaning making becomes constrained as a result of the recontextualizations of meaning into resources whose aŸordances construe or mimick consensus, putting limits on what people do, say and write. These concepts are central to our understanding of the monologizing aspirations of formal organizational discourse and the tensions and contradictions that it often harbours (Chapters 7 and 8). Monologism and heteroglossia, and the centripetal and centrifugal dynamics are also crucial to my description of the positioning practices observed during the collaborative planning meetings discussed in Chapters 5 and 6.


Post-bureaucratic organization, worker participation, and heteroglossia As the previous section argued, claims about multiplicity and pluralism are often made in the abstract with little or no reference to what kinds of meaning makings cause or harbour it. Meaning is seen to be pluralist per deªnition. By considering an example of post-bureaucratic discourse (Extract 3.2), I want to try and provide an empirical description of heteroglossia. As my analysis of the following ‘minute’ aims to demonstrate, heteroglossia (and thus monoglossia) is not independent from the manifest features that characterize particular kinds of meaning makings, and it can be fuelled, or suppressed, by how we mean. This particular nonsmoking ‘Internal Minute’ was circulated in a governmental institution. Extract 3.2 Internal Minute Subject Non-smoking policy — Implications of court judgment in Scholem v Department of Health General Circular 92/5 Date 16/7/92 Most staŸ will be aware of the District Court judgment in favour of Liesel Scholem in her case against the NSW Department of Health. No appeal has been lodged. While the department has had a non-smoking policy for some time, this judgment makes it even more important for the policy to be fully complied with. Some staŸ may have been under the impression that the policy did not apply on special celebratory occasions. It must be emphasized that this is not the case and the workplace, especially if there is an air-conditioning system must be kept smoke-free at all times. In addition to highlighting the issue of the danger of passive smoking, the judgment puts everyone on notice of potential liability for passive smoking in the workplace. There are serious implications for organizations, both ªnancially and in respect of adverse publicity, including the prospect of prosecution under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, 1983. It is stressed that liability under the OHS Act can extend to employees generally (S19) and to Managers (S50). In terms of the departmental policy and the Scholem judgment, a court is unlikely to accept lack of knowledge or inability to in¶uence conduct as defences to prosecution. All staŸ are urged to ensure the non-smoking policy is observed completely and the workplace is kept entirely smoke-free. StaŸ requiring additional information or advice in terms of QUIT programs should contact the Manager Administrative Support, ….. . [name] Director

This message aims to exhort staŸ not to smoke in the building. On instruction from the Director, the message was drafted by administrative staŸ and it was later signed by the Director. In one sense, then, it is the Director who is behind the exhortation:

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‘I, the Director, ask that staŸ not smoke in the building’. But it is not quite how the memo is worded. Instead, the writer sets up a complex of legitimations justifying and supporting the request that staŸ not smoke. She accomplishes this by not construing herself as commanding the staŸ (‘I, the Director’), but by making legitimizing instruments the Subject of her sentences: ‘… this judgment makes it even more important for the policy to be complied with’. Thus, it is the judgment, not the writer, that is the entity that demands compliance. But while ‘the judgment’ makes complying important and puts everyone on notice, it does not enforce, or cause, actions to occur. Rather, ‘the judgment’ is part of a state of aŸairs: something is important, and people are put on notice. There is nobody (and nothing) that explicitly orders anybody (not) to do anything. Put again somewhat diŸerently, the message does not construe someone as making someone else (not) do something, but construes something (the judgment) as causing something to be. StaŸ is not construed as the ‘doer’ of a particular action: ‘stopper of smoking’. Instead, staŸ are talked about in mental terms: ‘Most staŸ will be aware of…’; ‘Some staŸ may have been under the impression that…’. Moreover, the action in question, ‘smoking’, is nowhere directly and simply realized in the message as an action (verb) enacted by someone (a Subject): ‘you smoke’. The oŸensive action only appears in the guise of ‘nominalizations’ (see below): ‘non-smoking’, ‘passive smoking’, ‘smoke-free’. This of course serves to bury a lot of the interpersonal and authoritative delicacies that are at stake here. Equally curious is the expression ‘staŸ are urged to ensure the non-smoking policy is observed’. This says, ‘staŸ are urged to ensure that [someone] observes the non-smoking policy’. In short, those that are to stop smoking have not in fact been named. Also, the way the message is phrased could be read as suggesting that ‘staŸ’ take on a surveillance role and become complicit in imposing the nonsmoking rule on anyone in the building. More generally, instead of saying ‘I want you to stop smoking’, this message appears to (re-)create a very delicate relationship between staŸ and management. Interestingly then, instead of the Director directly requesting staŸ to refrain from smoking cigarettes, we have a message that is extremely complex and sophisticated. Following a lot of work and redrafting, no doubt, it has been adapted to suit, and performatively realize, the interpersonal subtleties that now deªne organization, the relationship between Director and staŸ, and the sensitivities surrounding this kind of request. By not saying ‘I request staŸ not to smoke cigarettes’, the message abandons the authoritative conªdence and directness of Fordist control-and-command, and the hierarchical distance that used to be inscribed into Fordist relationships. As piece of late 20th century organizational communication, this message exempliªes the discursive complexity, and the ensuing heteroglossia (‘How are we to understand this?!’), that come into play in the


post-bureaucratic organization. Importantly, the complexity of the message ensues from the simultaneous realization and dissimulation of the staŸ-authority relationship. This complexity (and the heteroglossia it gives rise to) becomes possible thanks to speciªc discursive devices. First, there is the nominalization of what is at the heart of the problem (‘non-smoking’). Then, the message expresses must-ness and necessity by harping on the importance of formal, legal instruments (‘non-smoking policy’; legal judgement’). Finally, there is the positioning of staŸ as equals who have access to the powers of surveillance; they are observers, seers, not doers. This cursory glance at a piece of discourse demonstrates that what people say and do can be empirically studied to provide evidence of what is happening in organizations. In this particular case, it shows that the volume of heteroglossia can be turned up (as in the message above) or down (as in ‘I request that you stop smoking’, or ‘Don’t you smoke in here!’). An important principle applied in the above analysis was to do with linguistic nominalization as the means to dissimulate the delicacies and sensitivities of social and organizational relationships and practices. Linguistically speaking, nominalization is a kind of grammatical reconstruction of such relationships, or a ‘grammatical metaphor’.

Grammatical metaphor The message above deployed a number of expressions that were, if you like, at one remove from everyday understandings of and expressions about situated activity: ‘impression’, ‘judgment’, and ‘prosecution’. These elements are examples of ‘grammatical metaphor’ (Halliday 1994a): they bend the grammatical status of words, and translate speciªc meanings into delinguistiªed ones. Importantly, grammatical metaphor is discussed in this study not only to analyze particular instances of discourse. I use it too as descriptive principle for organization more broadly. By this I mean that organization itself and its particular mode of productivity can be seen as processes that bring about dediŸerentiation, delinguistiªcation and time-space distanciation. Put in these terms, organization can be understood as a dynamic that pushes knowledge, discourse and practice from the here-and-now towards the there-and-then and on to the ‘when/where/whoever’. To appreciate how organization is contingent upon processes that parallel grammatical metaphor, let us ªrst consider grammatical metaphor in more detail. Consider the sentences in Tables 3.1 and 3.2 by way of example. The sentence in Table 3.1 is a ‘clause complex’: it links two clauses (‘I returned from holidays’ and ‘because someone broke into my house’). Also, it has people in the primary

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participant roles (‘I’, ‘someone’); the processes are located in time (past), and it has quite ‘local’ indicators of circumstance (‘from holidays’, ‘my ‘house’). This sentence is quite intricate: separate clause structures are needed to accommodate all the participants, times and places, and thereby realize speciªcity (Eggins 1994). Table 3.1 Clause complex I

returned

from holidays

because

Actor

Material process

Circumstance

some- broke in one

to my house

Actor Material pr.

Circumstance

clause a

clause b

The clause simplex in Table 3.2, by contrast, is one single clause that links two participants into a causal relationship, using a single process. Moreover, the participants are rather abstract (‘my return’, ‘a break-in’), and the process construes not a situated doing, saying or a feeling/thinking, but a more abstract, causal relationship. Table 3.2 Clause simplex: Grammatical metaphor My return from holidays

was necessitated by

a break-in into my house.

Value

Relational: causal

Token

Clause simplex

The shift from the clause complex in Table 3.1 to the clause simplex in Table 3.2, and from speciªc participants to abstract participants is made possible by what Halliday (1994a) terms ‘grammatical metaphor’. Put in linguistic terms, grammatical metaphor concerns the re-distribution of meanings around the syntactic elements of the clause. Thus the verb ‘returned’ becomes the noun ‘return’; ‘because’ is turned into a relational-causal verb ‘was necessitated’; ‘from holidays’ is turned from an independent indicator of time and place into part of a noun group, and so on. Grammatical metaphor, then, concerns the shift from one grammatical role to another; from verb to noun; from conjunction to verb; from time-place indicator (Circumstance) to conjunction, and so on. An inevitable eŸect of grammatical metaphor is to alter the temporal, spatial and agentive details of what we say, and constructing a diŸerent ‘social reality’. A sub-type of grammatical metaphor, ‘nominalization’, is a concept that describes the tendency of formal discourse to especially move information into nouns or nominal groups. Resembling the impact of grammatical metaphor, but restricted in in¶uence to the noun group, nominalization is a dynamic — or the outcome of a dynamic — that de-stabilizes traditional conceptions of time, space


and agency by abstracting these so they ªt into the nominal group. In this way, nominalization helps unsettle traditional socio-cultural, interpersonal, and organizational knowledges and relations, and create a space for new ones. To illustrate this point, let us consider the extract below, taken from a document produced by the Australian federal Department of Immigration (Extract 3.3). Extract 3.3 Some of the more speciªc purposes of the Temporary Residents Sub Program are to: - enhance the Australian labour market’s skill base by enabling employers to recruit from overseas workers with skills not readily available in Australia while not disadvantaging the Australian work force … - …

In Extract 3.3, we ªnd individuals acting on other individuals (‘employers recruit overseas workers’), but the principal agent is the ‘temporary residents sub program’ which acts on a ‘labour market skill base’. While terms such as these are admittedly ‘merely’ representations, they have implications for how the people who produce, use and are in charge of realizing the intentions of this discourse think about themselves, the scope of their actions, their agency, and so on. We should note in connection with this, and as suggested in Chapter 2 in another context, that construing our agency in terms of ‘speciªc purposes’, a ‘program’, or for that matter, an ‘organizational position’, is far from innocuous. Thanks to grammatical metaphor and nominalization, we are able to radically recontextualize our worker self from a locally constituted and negotiated ‘geographic and moral locale’ (Mühlhäusler and Harré 1990) towards an organizational-abstracted locale: ‘If I am to become the incumbent I will be responsible for…’. ‘I become/am the incumbent…’ ‘ (as the incumbent) in this position I am responsible for…’ ‘As the position, I am responsible for…’ ‘The position is responsible for…’. (Kress 1995: 124)

My point here is that when we adopt grammatically metaphorical and nominalized discourse, we do not engage in a superªcial language motion that can be enacted at will, like putting on or taking oŸ clothes. By languaging in this way we do not just deploy specialized discourses, but instead we reconªgure our agency (our ability or responsibility to act), our sense and enactment of time (the duration and permanence of our responsibilities) and space (our social-organizational position). Essentially, then, metaphorical and nominalized discourse implicates us in new temporal, spatial and social orders, knowledges and relationships. Extract 3.4 (in Figure 3.3) provides another example. Here, organizational authority is dissimulated and thereby naturalized. This ‘MARS instruction’ (from

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a manual issued within the Australian federal Department of Immigration in 1992) construes some people as ‘registered agents’, and suggests that completing some form ‘will be required’. The sentence in Extract 3.4 is agnate (linguistically related) to expressions such as ‘Complete Form 932!’ In the hypothetical shift from this ‘bare imperative’ (‘Complete…!’) to the abstract command of Extract 3.4, we witness no less than four grammatically metaphorical moves. Extract 3.4 generalised “you” From 21 September 1992 all

registered agents

backgrounded “I” will be required

to complete a declaration (Form 932) in relation to every application with which they assist.

Figure 3.3

First, the sentence re-grammaticalizes the desired action (‘Complete Form 932!’) so that it becomes part of a larger verbal group: ‘to complete’. ‘Complete ..’ is turned into ‘to complete’, which means the desired action is turned from tensed verb (an expression with speciªc time-space coordinates) into an inªnitive. Second, the must-ness of the sentence or its imperative force is ideationalized as ‘required’. The force of the command is further normalized by the use of ‘will be’ (contrast this with ‘should do’ or ‘must be’). Overall, the imperative force of ‘Complete…!’ becomes both objectiªed and naturalized as a claim about an already existing reality (Halliday 1994a: 358). Third, the sentence in Extract 3.4 unhinges the person(s) doing the commanding from the command itself. In other words, the identities of those who wrote this ‘instruction’ are bleached out of the above expression, and recontextualized into an institutionalized letterhead, a logo, a coloured set of identiªers at the bottom of the document, and so on. These markers normalize the origin of the command, by signaling that the discourse derives from a resource-rich and powerful organization — not a single individual, and his or her local-situational norm system and personal views. Finally, the ‘commandee’ is not identiªed as ‘you’, but as a class or category of people: ‘all migration agents’. This kind of extension of classiªcation or ‘membership categorization’ (Psathas 1999) is crucial to organizationalizing, and depersonalizing, addressees. In these four ways, then, organizational language achieves or construes objectivity and infuses the organization’s ‘regime of truth’ with naturalness: the detemporalizing of the requested action; the ideationalization of the ‘must-ness’; the backgrounding of the commander, and the re-categorization of the commandee (Iedema 1997b). It is by combining these metaphorical strategies that organization can create a ‘front-stage’ discursive environment in which individuals’ norms,


views, values and activities appear natural, necessary, and aligned. The nett eŸect of such front-stage environment, of course, is to limit and discourage the “space for dialogue, disagreement, or diŸering points of view” (Lemke 1987: 6). Overall, grammatical metaphor is a re-distribution of verbal and nominal meanings across syntactic elements in the sentence in a way that reconªgures the time-space-agency dimensions of ordinary language. Halliday, in his research on the development of scientiªc English, has argued that ‘doing complex science’ was conditional upon this ‘metaphorical’ potential of the grammar of language (see Halliday and Martin 1993; Halliday 1993 a/b/c, 1994a). But aside from how science became increasingly technologized as discourse, the deployment of ‘grammatical metaphor’ in the emerging state bureaucracies and commercial-industrial organizations will have had an enormous impact on how people began to understand, think and talk about their everyday life, work and self. While a limited number of people would have been in contact with or engaged in scientiªc scholarship, most citizens were in some way aŸected by, and would have had some kind of contact with, the worlds of work and local or state government, their modes of regulation, control and discipline, and the new discourses by which these were realized. My contention, therefore, contra Halliday, is that the grammatically metaphorical languages of organization and government are more likely to be at the basis of people’s complex conducts than scientiªc language.

Discourse, delinguistiªcation and time-space distanciation The sample analysis of the message in the previous section shows how organizational language can shift our attention away from individuals and actions in particular times and places to entities which are dislodged from time, space and agency. Instances here are ‘policy’ and ‘judgment’: terms which are quite abstract labels for a host of social and organizational processes that were their origin, and the complex weave of practices and knowledges in which they are intertwined. As indicated in previous chapters, the shift away from speciªcs and detail, towards delinguistiªed discourse is an important feature of this study, that says that postbureaucratic organization forms a complex hybrid of delinguistifying discourses and situated performativities. Questions that are posed to illuminate the hybrid nature of this emerging kind of organization include: how, why and where do we stop speaking and writing about speciªc interests and concerns and begin speaking and writing about abstract entities and distant phenomena? The answers to these questions are sought by considering how people in organizations deploy discourse, as well as asking what is the materiality of their meaning making: are we speaking (sounding);

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writing (using paper, coloured reproductions); mobilizing resource-intensive design practices, or manipulating materialities such as paper, plastics, steel, and brick? These issues are important because the materialities that surround us are ‘socio-technical investments’ (Berg 1998, 1999) that, perforce their materialization, embody particular time-space conªgurations. They have, in that sense, become unhinged from the here-and-now, while still embodying a relevance for the here-and-now. The point about wanting to focus on the delinguistifying nature of meaning making is that it tells us a lot about the degree of knowledge and density of practice likely to be embedded in diŸerent discourses. For example, ‘the non-smoking policy’ seen earlier in Extract 3.2 frames a host of formal and more profane knowledges and practices associated with particular rules and behaviours that pertain to an organization. By contrast, the interactive exchange seen in Extract 3.1 above embodies speciªcity and detail about who shall do what, with what tools, and when. In this interaction, meanings are mobilized that manifest diŸerentiation: diŸerences in opinion; diŸerences in status, and diŸerences in language use. Accordingly, in trying to map organizational meaning making, our ªrst move is to look at the language used and describe the extent to which, and how, it realizes speciªcity and diŸerentiation on the one hand, or dediŸerentiation and time-space distanciation on the other hand. In doing so, it is important to remember that ‘here-and-now’ speciªcity and delinguistiªcation are not absolutes. Rather, they are both part of the same continuum that encompasses innumerable forms and realizations in between the local and the distal. Figure 3.5 displays an example of one such continuum: here, speciªcity is at the bottom of the diagram, realized as a command uttered in the ‘here-and-now’ between a you and an I. At the other end of the continuum, at the top of the diagram, we see some realizations that have bleached out reference to speciªc individuals, and that have infused the command with a permanence by distancing it away from the ‘here-and-now’ and from speciªc individuals: ‘It is required to be done’. In the middle of the diagram, inbetween speciªcity and delinguistiªcation, this shift from ‘here-and-now’ to ‘there-and-then’ is portrayed by moving from ªrst and second person to the third person and then on to institutional entities. Shifts from local, situated and negotiable meaning makings such as those at the bottom of Figure 3.5, towards delinguistiªed meanings at the top of the ªgure ultimately signal shifts in stakeholders’ participation. Delinguistiªed meaning makings such as those that appear at the top of Figure 3.5 (generalizing and abstracting words, writings, but also think of visual designs, buildings, infrastructures) normalize the interests, concerns, values and norms of those stakeholders who had a say in their formation. That is, usually only a limited number of


It needs to be done/It is required to be The board wants him to do delinguistification The board wants it to be done. They want him to do

He wants you to do

I want him to do

He wants him to do

they/him there/then

He wants me to do You want him to do You want me to do I want you to do it

here-and-now I/you

Figure 3.5 Delinguistifying the ‘here-and-now’

people at any time are involved in the formulation and construction of the generalizing, abstract, and technical discourses and materialities that we hear and see around us. At the same time, these delinguistiªed meaning makings harbour a signiªcant amount of ‘work’ and resources, which undergirds much of their claim to the status of social-organizational norm. In part, meaning makings can achieve this, as did the message seen above in Extract 3.4, because they will have generalized the signiªcance of the concerns and demands at stake; they will have formalized and categorized (and thereby reiªed) their audience(s); and they will have abstracted away from particular and local times and places. Put together, these discursive strategies aim (if they do not always manage!) to have the eŸect of being accepted as natural, contextual, and necessary, and of being treated as unchallengeable and authoritative. Finally, I have argued that organization is contingent on people being able to produce and reproduce these kinds of distanced meanings, whether in language, visual representation, or any other materiality. The point I have made, too, is that organizational productivity is contingent upon the extent to which people will agree to share such delinguistiªed meanings as points of departure for what they do and say. Organization and its productivity, in this sense, have to do with taking-asgiven what we mean, while aŸecting or changing how we mean. That is, productivity is inherent in our taking the content of what we mean as agreed, and put our

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resources into re-materializing it further. Grammatical metaphor can be used to think about what that productivity does: as workers, we subscribe to increasingly distal and taken-for-granted ways of representing who we are and what we do. This applies not only to language, but also to how we structure our environments, technologies, and so on.

Conclusion This chapter has set out the neo-Saussurean basis of social semiotic discourse theory. It explained how this approach to discourse does not privilege the multiplicities and indeterminacies in what people do and say, nor reduce everything to unifying social structures and meanings. Instead, the approach taken here centres meaning making in what ordinary people say and do, but it acknowledges that such sayings and doings are always already and necessarily constituted in relations of diŸerence. Without these relations of diŸerence, meaning would not be. Thus, every event, every interaction, every piece of meaning making embodies a complex dialectic and tension between the speciªc and local, and the social and relational. It is from this position that we critiqued current trends in organization theory that centralize the relational essence of meaning making to such an extent, that the empirical consideration of interaction and meaning makings is marginalized and sometimes even proscribed. I put arguments forward showing the inconsistency of such a position. I argued that the empirical study of organization remains possible and desirable, as long as it emerges from within a political acknowledgement and has a practical usefulness. I then went on to elaborate on the meta-functional nature of meaning making, with speciªc reference to language. A tri-adic phenomenon, meaning i) constructs the world through representation, and meaning making is about ii) performing such constructions as part of social and organizational enactments as orientation. Finally, meaning making as discourse iii) embodies its own logics of organization, with its beginnings, middles and endings; its centres and margins; its tops and bottoms, and so on. The ªnal part of this chapter was to do with the delinguistiªcation of discourse and the time-space distanciation of practice that this aŸords. We approached these phenomena via grammatical metaphor, as the dynamic that reshu§es grammatical relations such that informational speciªcity is lost. A central device here is nominalization, or the in¶ating of the noun group due to funneling information into it from elsewhere. I suggested that nominalization formed the basis of knowledging about organization, about new ways of ordering and enacting the social (see Chapter 4). At each point of the discussion, I tried to emphasize that


what is at stake here is not just what things mean, but what meaning resources are deployed. That is, my main concern is with outlining what I see as the empirical, manifest and material dimension of meaning making. Next, I will go back in time in Chapter 4 and oŸer a description of organization as emerging and emergent phenomenon in industrial and post-industrial society. Here, my concern will be to continue the argument that organization is intimately contingent upon the development of specialized and delinguistiªying discourses and time-space distanciating practices, and that post-bureaucratic organization represents a new modality of organizing that derives its ‘lines of force’ from people’s participation in the textualization of work.

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Chapter 4

Organizational discourse A historical view

Introduction A relationship of confrontation reaches its term, its ªnal moment … when stable mechanisms replace the free play of antagonistic reactions. Through such mechanisms one can direct, in a fairly constant manner and with reasonable certainty, the conduct of others. (Foucault 1983a: 225)

Chapter 3 ªnished with discussing a number of ‘stable mechanisms’ that discourse aŸords. I mentioned how language can come to project stability through grammatical metaphor and especially nominalization. I have also touched on how other semiotics can come to embody stabilization. As examples, I mentioned technologies, designs and buildings as types of human investment of energy and materials, and how such investment produces complex socio-technical constructs that both constrain and enable human interaction in new ways. In the present chapter, I want to trace some of these stabilizing and complexifying developments from a historical perspective. This involves asking how, over the last three to four centuries, social interaction has moved away from what Foucault termed the ‘free play of antagonistic reactions’ towards ‘stable mechanisms’. Crucial for the concerns of this study, the mechanisms Foucault has in mind here are not only social institutions and the regimes of interaction they promote (such as the family), but also more formal and more highly resourced organizations (such as bureaucracies, schools, factories, hospitals, the military, and the like). While the genesis of these institutions and organizations is of course not a linear trajectory that leads from social disorder to ever-increasing order, it is clear that there has been an unfolding that has had a ‘rationalizing’ and ‘disciplining’ in¶uence on human sociality.1 1. Again, it is not my intent to attribute rational progress here. Elias has already been encountered in Chapter 1, but the extended quote serves to emphasize my point: “Civilization is not ‘reasonable’; not ‘rational’, any more than that it is ‘irrational’. It is set in motion blindly, and kept in motion by the autonomous dynamics of a web of relationships, by speciªc changes in the way people are bound to live together. But it is by no means impossible that we can make out of it something more ‘reasonable’, something that functions better in terms of our needs and purposes. For it is precisely in conjunction with the civilizing process that the blind

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The point that this chapter makes is that this social genesis was in an important way enabled by discourses that began to construe, project and impose social regularities. One important way in which these regularities were achieved was through writing, and later print. As discursive technology, writing produced a material stability by the inscription and transcription of discourse, and through that, it helped to reconªgure social relations. In fact, writing stabilized in a double sense: as materiality (paper), and as specialized expression. That is, writing evolved a complex linguistic technology to not only speak about stability, but to embody it. This stabilizing character of writing evolved thanks to its growing capacity to represent knowledge as ‘facts’; that is, by constructing an objectifying distance between actor and action, writing at the same time created a legitimating distance between author and authored. This secured writing as ‘instrument of (social) integration’ (Elias 1982), and made it the device par excellence for achieving organization (Giddens 1984). The ªrst section of the chapter explores in some detail, then, how speciªc concepts and linguistic forms evolved enabled by the written medium, and how they came to ‘redound’ with new kinds of social organization. A prominent aspect of written discourse that will be explored here in relation to these historical developments is the procedure, a genre that serves to stabilize social and organizational processes. Also part of this discussion is another discourse that bears on social conduct and its regularization: the organization of social and organizational space. The ªnal section of this chapter is about how organization is undergoing rapid change for both managers and workers. At issue here are questions about how new work practices are reconªguring the power relations of organizing and organization, and how these changes manifest as discourse. Where the procedure is the discursive technology that aided modernist forms of organization with its topdown speciªcation of sequences of action, post-bureaucratic organization demands greater discursive sophistication and involvement from its workers. That is, the discourses now produced by workers are more complex and less predictable than those embodied in the simple procedure. Post-bureaucracy requires its workers to produce and renew knowledge, and that implicates them not just in recreating stable genres, but in inventing labels and terms for their knowledge. Now, workers do not just have to know; they need to be able to speak knowledge in and out of being. This knowledging involves a struggle over what can be rendered ‘taken-for-granted’ and what requires speciªcation. That struggle, I shall suggest, focuses on that domain of language where the tension between speciªcity and abstraction is played out: the noun, or the ‘nominal group’. dynamics of men [sic] intertwining their deeds and aims gradually leads towards greater scope for planned intervention into both the social and individual structures — intervention based on a growing knowledge of the unplanned dynamics of these structures” (Elias 1982: 232).

Organizational discourse

The becoming of organization: Towards ‘stable mechanisms’ A number of authors have described how, over the last several hundred years, social relations have moved from locally-negotiated understandings and rules, towards understandings and rules which are more encompassing and tied to norms enunciated at the level of the nation-state (Weber 1991; Elias 1982; Foucault 1977; Giddens 1985). The questions central in these discussions are why and how, over the last several hundred years, have people increasingly begun to speak, think and act in ways that acknowledge abstract and general rules and regulations handed down and enforced by governmental and other institutions ‘from a distance’. To describe this phenomenon, commentators have used terms like the ‘civilizing process’ (Elias 1982), ‘social rationalization’ (Weber 1991), and ‘social disciplining’ (Foucault 1977). Foucault’s work in particular has focused on the question of how ordinary social life came to be increasingly regulated by norms that transcended the needs, insights and relationships of the local community, and the role played in this by discourse. For one thing, this emerging normative discourse became manifest, for example, in how communities began to partake in the construction of ‘machines of morality’ (Rose 1999: 103) whose main task was to encourage pre-determined behavioural regimes: schools, hospitals, asylums, prisons. These disciplinary mechanisms were constituted in discourse that operated through the spatial organization of human beings, through the instrumentalization of institutional time, through the practical collection, classiªcation and division of persons, through materializing relations of authority in the physical relations of foreman and worker, teacher and pupil, goaler and prisoner, asylum superintendent and inmate. (Rose 1999: 103)

It was in these ‘machines of morality’ and other ‘new moral habitats’ (public parks, swimming pools, libraries, museums) that a new normativity became institutionalized: the public conduct of self as social persona, encompassing temperance, diligence, sexual propriety and the like (Rose 1999: 104). This new normativity increasingly colonized the mundane by instructing the populace on methods how to achieve it: through hand washing and other forms of hygiene; food storage, preparation and consumption; bedroom and sleeping arrangements; design of living spaces, and last but not least, work. These new norms and comportments in eŸect directed individuals away from local custom and its social and interpersonal logics, towards a scrutiny of oneself by oneself against the yardstick of emerging social ways of doing and saying. Together, these norms and comportments are the ‘techniques of the self’ (Foucault 1983b: 243) through which people came to establish “a permanent relationship to oneself” (Foucault 1983b: 246). The social rationalization discussed above,

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then, was in an important way linked to the extent to which people became able and willing to enact “inhibitions of the self by the self” (Rose 1999: 43). Histories of conduct over the nineteenth century have revealed the ways in which these techniques — in the form of injunctions to moral government formulated largely in terms of self-control — were instantiated in architecture, guidance to parents, in the work of pauper schools and the like. They were embodied in language, in knowledge, in technique, in the fabrication of spaces and of repertoires of conduct within them. What was involved here was an exercise of inhibition of the self by the self … . (Rose 1999: 43)

As indicated earlier, these ‘techniques of the self’ which enabled people to establish and maintain ‘permanent relationships between self and self’ emerged not from within a vacuum, but arose in a social environment increasingly reconªgured by institutions and organizations whose raison d’être, aside from ‘schooling’, ‘rehabilitation’, ‘cure’, or ‘training’, was the social isolation and moral foregrounding of the individual qua individual. The discourse technologies which enabled the new ‘machines of morality’ to objectify and isolate the ordinary citizen included the ªle, record-keeping, and statistics. Each of these technologies, of course, were forms of writing (and reading), and it was writing that in an important way contributed to the change processes at issue here (Ong 1992). Thus, as means to self-re¶ection, as mode of social subjection, and as social comportment, writing became central to the re-organization and dislocation of the local into the distal.

Writing and social reconªguration The disciplining process just described, then, “arose, in part, out of a labour of documentation” (Rose 1999: 113). The link between social discipline and writing dates as far back as Mesopotamian times (±3000BC), during which “the development of the cuneiform script was the result of economic necessity” (Goody 1987: 30). The majority of the oldest written documents found in the Middle East are of an administrative and thus organizational nature. The fact that administrative and organizational documents have outnumbered literary ones has led commentators to believe that the invention of writing was in the ªrst instance a function of social discipline (Driver 1976; Goody 1997, 1987). Among some of these original texts, tags have been found which contain images of the objects they were attached to and associated with. It is believed that as (written) symbolism developed and became more sophisticated, these tags took on an independent existence, separate from the objects they were initially attached to and which they helped categorize. In that way, the tags turned into ‘ledgers’: the ªrst form of organizational documentation. Jack Goody concludes:


The pictographic kind of writing that ªrst developed in Mesopotamia towards the end of the fourth millenium was mainly used for “the simplest administrative notations…” (Kramer 1956). Even in Assyrian times, it is not the main stream of tradition, either in the form of literary creations or the recording of myth and folktale, but rather the administrative and economic documents found in temples and palaces throughout Babylonia and covering a wider geographical and chronological extent than the more academic records; three quarters of all the extant cuneiform inscriptions, numbering some 150,000 in all, fall in this class, an enormous quantity compared with the epic material. (Goody 1977).

Out of a total of 508 documents excavated at Ugarit, around 350 were administrative: inventories, collections of personal and geographical names, purchases and statements of cost or value, tags, labels and other indications of ownership. These early administrative documents were mostly lists of items and concepts. Among these, Goody distinguishes three kinds of lists: – retrospective lists: lists which recorded states of aŸairs (of the past); – prospective lists: lists which contained plans for future action; – lexical (taxonomic) lists: lists which were inventories of concepts. The list “is the most elementary form of information coding, and therefore of information storing” (Giddens 1981: 95). From a discursive point of view, the list as an early form of writing was surprisingly complex in nature. Actions were abstracted so they would ªt into series which were either retrospective (constructing the past) or prospective (determining the future), and objects were generalized (to ªt into higher level categories) to suit taxonomization. These discursive strategies together enabled an inchoate state apparatus not only to sanction and stabilize — through the miracle that was writing — regimes and hierachies of ownership, status, and rule, but also social norms, knowledges, practices and rituals. In so far as texts describe ‘what went on’ plus ‘what should go on’ in a range of social situations, the ‘history’ that is written can form a consolidated part of the apparatus of power. What were once a series of customary forms of conduct, informally sanctioned in the daily practices of local communities, become in some part appropriated and administered by the state apparatus. (Giddens 1985: 45)

A considerable proportion of early writing was to do with marking or inscribing objects, by means of which they could be subjected to administrative procedures. These procedures relied not on the spoken medium (accessible by all and sundry),2 but on exclusive media, controlled by the administrations and organizations that sought to ªx relationships and ownerships. The discipline achieved through 2. Giddens notes how “[f]ew if any of these (early) documents are likely to derive from the work of literate scribes representing spoken performances and many probably have no oral equivalents at all” (Giddens 1985: 44).

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these early writings was not just due to what they were about or what they said, but also the restrictions of access that administrations and organizations imposed on the materials and skills required for writing. Put more technically, while the beneªts that institutional regimes derived from writing had to a large extent to do with the meanings that writing served to render durable, its power also derived from the absence of literacy and the scarcity of writing resources. As literacy, writing had its roots in drawing, that is, in graphic conventions, but that is not to say that its designs were transparent. As Goody notes, “any graphic repertoire (especially for a full writing system) must certainly introduce arbitrary indices, i.e. signa, if only because language itself has no one-toone link with objects and actions in the outside world, so the system cannot be purely pictorial” (Goody 1987: 6). At the same time, writing comprised a complex set of scriptural and material conventions. While scriptural conventions centred on how to write the symbols, how to hold the writing implement, when to re-ink the implement, and so on, material conventions governed the delicate techniques of paper production, making of writing implements and ink, as well as practices of storage and binding. Familiarizing oneself with these conventions required years of training and practice, and tended to equate with election to high o¹ce. Uniquely in early societies, achievement in the written word … became the criterion for eligibility to high, but not the highest, o¹ce. (Goody 1987: 37)

Ultimately though, it was because writing ‘aided’ memory; that is, bestowed mnemonic power, that it gained and was able to extend its social authority.3 Writing provides a means of coding information, which can be used to expand the range of administrative control exercised by a state apparatus over both objects and persons. As a mnemonic device, even the simplest form of the marking of signs makes possible the regular ordering of events and activities which could not be organized otherwise. (Giddens 1985: 44)

As Giddens explains, the notion of ‘authority’ harbours two senses. First, writing imparts ‘superior knowledge’ due to its seemingly ‘neutral’ capacity to store and provide information. “By isolating thought on a written surface, detached from any interlocutor, making utterance in this sense autonomous and indiŸerent to attack, writing presents utterance and thought as uninvolved with all else, somehow self-contained, complete” (Ong 1982: 132). Second, the knowledge that writing embodies gives us ‘authority’ over others. Knowledge of history becomes an interpretative device whereby separate ‘authorities’ can deªne what used to be controlled by localized custom. ‘Authority’ has a double sense which accurately expresses this, because it is possible to be both an authority on a given sphere of knowledge, and to have authority over others. (Giddens 1985: 45) 3. “Orality knows no lists or charts or ªgures” (Ong 1982: 98).


But for a long time writing remained the preserve of specialized organizations: the state, religion, and to lesser extent, the legal system. Under these circumstances, its authority remained restricted. During pre-Enlightenment or pre-modern times, people lived within communities which were not yet hugely complicated by modes of transport, public forms of government, or complex forms of production. There were few technologies (other than religious ones) to displace people’s frames of reference away from the rules and traditions of their local community and contacts. Traditional communities therefore had relatively high levels of autonomy, and a general independence from any ruling class. Here, if power operated, it was not on the basis of organized control, but on the basis of ad hoc subordination. These premodern societies have been referred to as ‘class-divided’ (Giddens 1985: 35), because contact between the diŸerent classes was both occasional and generally violent. With those in power wielding unforgiving regulative control, communities’ services and payments were often exacted without regard for personal, social or economic consequences. Writing is seen to have played an important role in ‘mediating’ these ‘immediate’ social practices and relations. Its advent has been dated to the rise of the ªrst agrarian societies (± 3/4000 B. C.), when administration made the commodiªcation of land and the control of land use possible. Written records kept track of ownerships and the collection of taxes, thereby legitimizing the subordination of peasants to feudal control. Feudalism itself, however, was still constituted in what Clegg terms ‘particulate’ or non-standardized relationships: control over peasants still mainly occurred by means of isolated instances of violent subjection (Clegg 1989: 248). This began to change when, towards the end of the Middle Ages, the legitimation and enactment of control were gradually becoming matters of a scriptural, symbolic nature. As writing began to increasingly aŸect domains of social life previously negotiated face to face, tensions arose between the traditional status of the spoken word and the new authority of the written word. For example, documents proclaiming on the meaning and interpretation of issues pertaining to everyday social life in medieval Europe were heavily contested, both in ordinary social life and in specialized professional settings (Danet and Bogoch 1994): The increasing use of documents created tension between the old methods and the new. Which was the better evidence, for example, seeing a parchment or hearing a man’s word? How was one to be evaluated if it con¶icted with the other? (Clanchy 1993: 260)

Clanchy goes on to cite an exchange in court between those who presented papal letters as legal evidence (St Anselm — archbishop of Canterbury’s monks) and those who relayed the pope’s verbal message (King Henry I’s bishops):

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Anselm’s monks: Henry’s Bishop’s: Anselm’s monks:

But what about the evidence of the letters? As we don’t accept the evidence of monks against bishops, why should we accept that of a sheepskin? Shame on you! Are not the Gospels written down on sheepskins? (Clanchy 1993: 261)

The lack of conªdence in writing expressed by Henry’s bishops had much to do with the fact that writing had established itself as informational and utilitarian practice only in specialized religious and administrative contexts. Beyond that, the ways in which written practices and information aŸected social life in medieval times remained limited, and publicly available writings occupied an illustrativeartistic rather than an administrative role. Their use was not deªned by information storage, but revolved around artistic practices including calligraphy, painting, jewellery and metalwork. During medieval times, “[w]ritings continued to be works of art, embellished in a variety of ways” (Clanchy 1993: 279). As forms of visual display, writings other than specialized state documents had not yet been granted the status of harbouring social or secular knowledge. As writing came to be increasingly used in secular contexts around the thirteenth century in western Europe, especially in the areas of law and business, it began to standardize and down-tone its visual aspects, as well as enhance its punctuation and spelling to facilitate oral rendering. It has been suggested that these kinds of standardization accompanied a cumulative regimentation of people’s reading practices. Script was made easier to follow linearly, and its ‘notarial’ marks provided systematic enunciative guidance to the reader. Clanchy likens the regularization of the visual aspects of writing to the ways in which musical notation was systematized, militating “against the habits and constraints that the performer brought to the performance” (Treitler 1982, cited in Clanchy 1993: 287). In analogue fashion, writing became a system “external to the habits and constraints which the individual reader or writer brought to the work” (Clanchy 1993: 287). Print took this development still further of course, by fully stabilizing or ‘automatizing’ (Halliday 1982) writing’s expression form,4 and diverting attention away from producer (writer) and provenance, to product and content (Müller 1994). The inventions of print and visual ‘one-point’ perspective in the 14th century heralded the beginning in the west of what Giddens (1985) calls the ‘absolutist state’. The absolutist state, an early-Enlightenment phenomenon, was ruled by monarchs whose control was anchored in increasingly elaborate modes of nota4. Elkins comments on the ‘repression of the visual’ in alphabetic scripts (Elkins 1999: 137). The serialization of shapes — which is what typiªes our alphabet in so far as that it relies on a limited number of minimal forms which together enable us to construct a set of characters — signiªes automatization; automatization of at least some levels of a code (whether as linearised print, electronic signals, or codal syntax) is necessary for the sharing of communicative creativeness.


tion, delegation and regulation. Using print, the absolutist state centrally produced and disseminated bureaucratic documentation which publicized its rules and laws. The signiªcance of print was to further legitimate and naturalize the closure and ‘ªxed point of view’ already capitalized on through handwriting (Ivins 1964 [1946]), not least due to publication levels and spreading circulations. Alongside this unfolding of the role of writing in the west, the absolutist state achieved the edifying organizational feat of maintaining a standing (French) army around 1445. Shortly after, Maurice of Orange created an army consisting of “a body of experts holding exclusive knowledge of certain essential administrative techniques, and … of a ‘de-skilled’ population of ordinary soldiery” (Giddens 1985: 113). By the 16th century, European states were able to support a standing diplomacy, consisting of paid and trained o¹cials, to supervise taxation and public control. As Giddens argues, all these (bureaucratic and military) developments were contingent upon the increasing categorization, specialization and disciplining of human practices on the one hand, and upon improved methods of information storage, information usage and ‘information-based’ action and surveillance, on the other. The majority of these developments, it appears, were contingent upon the practices and aŸordances of writing, printing, and reading. In sum, writing and print contributed in an important way to the re-texturing of social life in so far that they extended the reach of rules, laws, regulations, and state surveillance mechanisms (Lyons 1994). On the basis of administrative techniques such as the record, the ªle, and the table, social time and space became increasingly referenced to and embodied in the abstract terms of a growing ‘egalitarian’ legal system. At the same time, and as commented on above, an increasingly detailed set of techniques and practices governing behaviour in organizations such as hospitals, military, schools and workplaces began to regulate how individuals dealt with each other in everyday life. This re-texturing of social space, time and agency occurred at two levels. First, this development depended on the objectiªcation of the populace through informating people, places and things in ªles and records: “in these ‘ignoble archives’ […] the modern play of coercion over bodies, gestures and behaviour had its beginnings” (Foucault 1977: 191). Second, it was in ‘ordinary’ social contexts such as the home, the school, the workplace, and the hospital, and the like, that regimes of behaviour and truth were practiced through giving prominence to what individuals themselves did, said, and thought. This attention itself began to dislocate local and situated conducts from the dynamics and logics of their social-interpersonal origins (Rose 1999). Looking back, institutions which might be seen as representing early versions of the hospital, school, prison and workplace, had in fact been indiscriminate collections of people doing or representing quite an array of backgrounds and a¹liations, practices, and skills. During the 17th and 18th centuries, by contrast,

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time, space and human agency became (re)organized in such a way as to embed category, activity, and identity in writing (procedures; protocols), designs (of ªles and forms, but also uniforms), and spatial arrangement (machinery; architecture, infrastructure). Accordingly, the early hospital evolved into a structure comprising operating rooms, medical rooms, and specialized ‘Nightingale’ wards with nursing stations at the centre from where the patients could be scrutinized (Porter 1999). Schools became sub-divided into specialized areas before being physically divided into classrooms (Hunter 1994). Factories were modelled on military organization,5 in so far that specialized workers of diŸerent rank were housed at set distances from the supervisory centre of the workplace. In each of these cases, we ªnd diŸerent spaces being specialized to suit particular activities enacted by speciªc people and at speciªc times. The ultimate example of how time, space and agency became co-articulated in organizational structure is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (cf. Foucault 1977: 200), which provided the architectural answer to the tendency towards social surveillance not by means of violence, but by means of regimes of communication and information. This architectural principle re-appears in the centralized nursing station, the glass walls of classrooms, the open-plan design of factory and o¹ce spaces, as well as the surveillance tower at the centre of circularly arranged cells or rooms. Each provides the architectural means to optimum information about and individualized communication with subjects.6 Each of these examples bears out how, in these early organizations, the discursive re-structuring of space, time and agency contributed to the emerging texture of social and organizational life. The spatial dimension and its bearing on disciplining the populace will be further addressed below. Let us now turn to considering in greater detail the ways in which discourse contributed to texturing, regulating and disciplining social relations; that is, organizing social relations.

Disciplining action through discourse: Procedures As the term’s etymological relationship to ‘disciple’ bears out, ‘discipline’ originally played an important role in giving form to religious comportment and co-habitation. In religious settings, discipline tended to focus on individuals’ physical, bodily 5. “..the massive projection of military methods onto industrial organization was an example of this modeling of the division of labour following the model laid down by the schemata of power.” (Foucault 1977: 221) 6. The prison at Port Arthur (Tasmania) provides a chilling example of these early disciplinary practices. Promoting the new value of hierarchical surveillance over social solidarity, the prison subjected prisoners to sensory deprivation and denied all interpersonal contact with other prisoners.


control as part of the exercise preparing them for salvation. Later military forms of discipline also focused on the bodily conformity and co-regulation of individuals. But here, discipline centred not just on the skilful handling of weaponry, but also on the coordination of multiple weapons by an army of soldiers. The target of ‘discipline’ shifted from the integration of a single individual into a behavioural regime, to the coordination of multiple individuals across complex group practices. This shift reconªgured discipline into organization. Discipline as coordinated, organized action was central to military success. Military organization was achieved by proceduralizing minute aspects of warring behaviour. This was done to ensure that large numbers of soldiers could ªght in unison without posing a mutual and often lethal risk. The organization of ªghting behaviour was contingent upon the minute detailing and choreographing of individuals’ ªghting actions. The following example is about how to hold and aim a ri¶e: Bring the weapon forward. In three stages. Raise the ri¶e with the right hand, bringing it close to the body so as to hold it perpendicular with the right knee, the end of the barrel at eye level, grasping it by striking it with the right hand, the arm held close to the body at waist height. At the second stage… . (cited in Foucault 1977: 153)

Foucault calls this the instrumental coding of the body. It consists of a breakdown of the total gesture into two parallel series: that of the parts of the body to be used (right hand, left hand, diŸerent ªngers of the hand, knee, eye, elbow, etc.) and that of the parts of the object manipulated (barrel, notch, hammer screw, etc.)… (Foucault 1977: 153).

A similar break-down of movement into its constituent ‘parts’ occurred in the contexts of schooling and work. Methods for writing, holding writing instruments and ways of sitting constituted a large part of a student’s training. Equally, ways of working with tools and machines started to be explicitly laid down in manuals and procedures, thus standardizing and thereby organizing aspects of craft production. Part of this organization of work, too, was that the deªnition of, and the locus of control over, the work moved away from the people who practised the craft to those who managed the emerging workplaces and what went on in them. In these new contexts, the individual’s bodily acumen and docility became an important criterion for acceptance and success. Enacting the procedural details of a practice was not just important in its own right (as it had been in religious settings), but was the crux of behaviour coordination across workplace communities. Thus, in addition to the proceduralization of the individual body, people were increasingly made to answer to social-organizational regimens: The workshop, the school, the army were subject to a whole micro-penality of time (lateness, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of

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zeal), of behaviour (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body (‘incorrect’ attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency). (Foucault 1977: 179)

The emerging organizations devised training programs and examinations to give prominence to these new moral-bodily enactments, and to screen those aspiring to a role in the organization. The military instituted various practices aimed at ensuring, maintaining, and supervising levels of bodily and social discipline. In the same way, guilds organized training programs which consisted of years of disciplinary practice and numerous examinations through which diŸerent aspects of conduct were scrutinized. It was only after satisfying demanding learning and testing requirements such as these that soldiers could move up in the ranks, and that craftsmen were certiªed and allowed to practice independently. Through these kinds of developments, the exercise of social organization shifted from isolated, spontaneous and opportunistic occurrences, to continuously supervised, documented and carefully co-conªgured performances. Foucault makes the point that the organization of social relations through work parallels in some ways the changing relationships in the west between populaces and their rulers. Thus, as factories, schools, barracks and hospitals began to emerge, moral priority moved away from epic heroism centred on absolutist rule and an all-powerful monarch, towards community involvement in political process in ways that sanctioned government, either through mediated contestation or co-optation into emerging bureaucratic structures and processes. Henceforth, the priority of government was to substitute for a power that is manifested through the brilliance of those who exercise it, a power that insidiously objectiªes those on whom it is applied; to form a body of knowledge about these individuals, rather than to deploy the ostentatious signs of sovereignty. (Foucault 1977: 220)

Let us now turn to consider the discourse in which this new kind of organizational discipline was framed. Above we saw a citation that provides some insight into what is at stake here: “Bring the weapon forward. In three stages. Raise the ri¶e with the right hand…”. This discourse realizes a ‘genre’ or ritualized way of speaking and writing that became central to the articulation of standardized and generalized rules: the procedure. At the same time, the procedure embodies a knowledge that is no longer the singular and exclusive possession of a ruler, but that becomes a shared resource binding populations to programs of action. As genre, the procedure embeds a series of sequential actions in a calendar of social-organizational events. In doing so, procedural documents objectify time, as well as, by extension, interpersonal and socio-spatial relations. The procedure’s objectiªcation of time exploits the already compartmentalized conceptualization of time inherent in the structure of Standard Average European languages (SAE).


Writing early in the 20th century, Whorf points to the consonance between the western calendar, the grammar of SAE languages, and the ‘conspiracy’ of meanings that western languages appear concerned to produce. He suggests that SAE grammar has rendered possible the semantics of temporal demarcation that is so central to the system of social organization: No doubt this vast system, once built, would continue to run under any sort of linguistic treatment of time; but that it should have been built at all, reaching the magnitude and particular form it has in the Western world, is a fact decidedly in consonance with the patterns of SAE languages. (Whorf 1956: 153)

The SAE conceptualization of time, Whorf notes, engenders a crucial “behavioural eŸect”: the character of monotony and regularity possessed by our image of time as an evenly scaled limitless tape measure persuades us to behave as if that monotony were more true of events than it really is. That is, it helps to routinize us. We tend to select and favour whatever bears out this view, to ‘play up to’ the routine aspect of our existence. (Whorf 1956: 153/4)

For its part, the procedure capitalizes on the way SAE objectiªes time by dissecting social activity into sets of discrete and sequential steps and by expressing these as prospective lists. The cooking recipe and the way it strings together ‘imperatives’ like ‘sift the ¶our’ and ‘add the sugar’ is the simplest example of this. As a more complex example, the following procedure (Extract 4.1) is used to address School Principals across the Australian state of New South Wales. It ‘proceduralizes’ their relations with and control over a sub-category of students, namely those who disturb the order. Extract 4.1 4 Procedures — Action to be undertaken before suspension is considered. 4.1 In all but urgent circumstances when serious behaviour or discipline problems occur, the Principal shall: a) ensure that all appropriate school student welfare strategies have been utilized; b) discuss the behaviour of the student, and its possible consequences, with the parents, guardians or care providers and with the student … c) provide a formal caution to the student, detailing the speciªc behaviour which the school considers unacceptable; d) arrange for consultation with persons involved with the welfare and guidance of the student…

The language used in Extract 4.1 shows how social tensions are recontextualized into ‘discipline problems’ and ‘student welfare strategies’. In disciplining and ‘organizing’ these tensions, the procedure imposes a logic that connects students’ behaviour to ‘consequences’, and weaves the diŸerent participants into a moral

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regime: parents, care providers, guardians. Confronting student unruliness with strict behavioural logic, the procedure contributes to organizing the temporal, spatial and agentive dimensions of interaction within the conªnes of ‘the school’. As Foucault’s early procedure already showed, its serializing of imperative forms somehow achieved a generality that transcended the ‘I order you!’ relation that had thus far put limits on the use of the imperative. The procedure eŸectively rewrote the meaning of the imperative form as part of the depersonalization of social relations that came into play with the shift from absolutist rule to the rule of bureaucratizing nation-states. As for the term ‘procedure’ itself, it had come into the English language around 1610, the time when countries in Europe were moving from feudal into absolutist rule. It is linked to the French verb procéder and the English proceed, both meaning ‘to go forward’ (cf. Wittgenstein 1953 on ‘knowing how to go on’). As rule “became increasingly universalistic, helping to de-personalize state authority from the ruler, thus providing a basis for abstract rights and duties to be conceived” (Clegg 1989: 251), the use of the procedure gathered momentum as the means to entwine people increasingly in abstract rules and rule-inscribed spatial contexts.

Discourse and the organization of space While the last section focused on a linguistic device aŸording organization, another important contribution was made by the structuring of space (Preziosi 1979a/b, 1984). As Rose notes, what accompanied the emergence of specialized language was: a whole diversity of inventions [which] entailed opening space to visibility and locking each ‘free’ individual into a play of normative gazes … [This was achieved] by placing a grid of norms of conduct over urban space and regulating behaviour according to the division of the normal and the pathological. (Rose 1999: 73)

If language gathered normative in¶uence through its mapping of and generalizing about domains of social and organizational life, physical space began to impose ‘a grid of norms of conduct’ by becoming increasingly subjected to architectural and infrastructural deªnition. Thus, space was structured to form streets, museums, parks, swimming pools, department stores, squares, but also rooms, cupboards, wardrobes, desks and couches. Each of these became inscribed with complex spatial grammars of conduct and interaction. ordinary material objects — tables, chairs, etc. — as well as more complex social forms, are constituted by socially organized responses which reªne and elaborate their uses out of the possibilities given by their sheerly physical properties … The object itself, thus constituted in its social organization, may thus also be understood as yielding sets of instructions for how to act towards it, how it may be inserted into


human programs of action. And as with occasions and situations, a failure to act within the terms provided by these instructions displays the actor as failing to recognize the object as it is for anyone else. (Smith 1990: 42)

While these new social-spatial structures left the individual ‘free’, of course, to ignore, adapt or accommodate these social grammars, the progressive production of social space (Lefebvre 1991) implicated people more and more in ‘appropriate’ categories and processes of being and doing. Here, our sensitivity to these spaces and objects and to the categories and processes they yielded was further enhanced by the visibilities that propagated through them: the factory as site where performance and specialization became visible through the allocation of place, dress and income; or the street, where the public gaze served to monitor and stabilize standards of self-presentation and social interaction; or the bar and restaurant, where new and more public social conducts were experimented with. As social performance became an increasingly visible matter thanks to these various ‘technologies of civilization’, it helped engender in people a ‘self-steering governance’ (Rose 1996a/b). In all these topographical technologies of civilization, persons were to be governed not through imposing duties, but by throwing a web of visibilities, of public codes and private embarrassments over personal conduct. (Rose 1999: 73)

It is this principle, too, of course, that is re-applied in the post-bureaucratic organization. No longer content with workers ‘being seen to be doing the work’, post-bureaucracy raises the bar by devising new sites where ‘webs of visibility’ can be enacted (perhaps rather than ‘thrown’), and where new opportunities for display and embarrassment can add further depth to workers’ sense of their governance (or shame) of self. One such site, of course, is the meeting room. As people interact in spaces away from the ‘shop ¶oor’, they gain the opportunity to be someone else, put learned conducts at risk, speak and act diŸerently, and produce diŸerent ways of knowing, being, saying, writing. It is in these new meta-spaces where work is talk, that people can (and must) reinvent themselves, by confronting the representational and interpersonal distance between experience and language, talk and writing, between work done and data about the work, between what they do and what they say and what they report, between one professional construction and another, between one socio-cultural habitus and another. As risk-rich sites, meeting spaces are ‘volatile spaces’ (Scheeres 2003). It is in the meeting room that the ‘newly freed worker’ (du Gay 2000: 101) enacts the post-bureaucratic project, and where she shows herself to either realize or fail its governmentality. To be free … is to be attached to a polity where certain civilized modes of conducting one’s existence are identiªed as normal, and simultaneously to be bound to those

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‘engineers of the human soul’ who will deªne the norm and tutor individuals as to the ways of living that will accomplish normality. (Rose 1999: 76)

Much like language, then, space requires a literacy that can decipher “seriality, repetitious actions, reproducible products, interchangeable places, behaviours and activities” (Rose 1999: 38; Preziosi 1984). Because language and space are more than objective means with which or in which we do things, they are better seen as mode of inscription: “a machine for producing conviction in others” (Rose 1999: 37). Space, as does language, embodies rules, structures and speciªcations aŸecting when particular activities will take place, who is to attend, when, and for how long.7 Both language and space have made possible new forms of organization, by bringing into being new forms of knowledge and participation. The section that follows considers how the post-bureaucratic organization appears to take these knowledges and participations into new domains.

From Fordism to post-bureaucratic organization Fordism and its discontents Whereas in 18th century France the absolutist rule of ‘le Roi Soleil’ was a last and extravagant attempt at individualizing and centralizing state power, in Prussia a highly technical form of administration had started to develop. “The existence of [a body of permanent and dependent o¹cials] increased enormously the e¹ciency of rule through ªxing standing conditions under which resources could be eŸectively garnered, delegates empowered, o¹ces authorized and state capacities increased” (Clegg 1989: 252). The eŸectiveness of the Prussian bureaucracy was due to the development of a body of administrative law. In what was to become the classic model of bureaucracy, the individuals who staŸed such administrative organs were functionaries. They did not own their posts that they occupied, nor were they supposed to sequester them or any revenues that accumulated from them. The salaries were ªxed according to a strictly determined scale. How they were to relate to superiors, subordinates, colleagues, and the public at large, was laid down and speciªed quite precisely in the administrative law. Decision-making of all sorts was to be reached through juristic reasoning, applying general legal provisions to particular circumstances. All decisions were to be recorded and transacted in 7. We can think here about the speciªcations in a hospital’s Operating Room Management Information System (or ‘ORMIS’), for example, that sets out who shall do what, when, and to whom when operations are done on patients. We can also think of the spatial structure of a lecture theatre, or an individual’s private o¹ce. Organizational space is the means for people to organize what they do, and thereby to ‘form-alize’ the time and space dimensions of their ‘organizational agency’.


writing and placed in the ªles. … Increasingly, under such a system, administration operates as the instrument not so much of the rule of the court and of the courtly society but of its own laws. (Clegg 1989: 255)

These new organizational structures and practices that reformed military and state administration were soon to be applied to organizations in the commercial sphere. There they contributed to preparing and equipping large numbers of people for industrial production. The lack of control that owners of the means of production had experienced over homeworkers brought on the development of factories. Factories enabled organizational authority, surveillance and discipline to take root. It was in factories, too, that the division of labour and the detailing of sequences of productive action found its application in the highly rationalized form of process line production as advocated in F. W. Taylor’s ”The Principles of Scientiªc Management” (Taylor 1947 [1911]). Taylor’s Scientiªc Management Theory promoted further divisions of labour, full managerial control, and systematic time studies of the production process to iron out ine¹ciencies (time-and-motion studies came a few years later, introduced by Henry Gantt). Scientiªc management theory saw the division of labour as central, leading to greater e¹ciency, and the attendant de-skilling of tasks would allow for cheaper, unskilled labour to be hired. Managers had to be in full control of all the separate compartments of the production process, and time-andmotion studies provided them with information necessary to maximize work process ¶ow and cost e¹ciency. These principles were put into practice by Henry Ford between 1908 and 1914, and gradually came to in¶uence most western, and later, non-western, forms of industrial production. Where in pre-Fordist times foremen and skilled workers decided how jobs were to be done as well as performing the physical tasks of production, Fordist modes of production involved the archetypal assembly line production system, an extensive division of labour and spatial isolation of workers engaged in repetitive tasks using limited skills (Rose et al. 1992). These modes of production also required large capital investments in ªxed plants and machinery with guarantees of long term stability in ªnancial, resource and labour markets, while also relying on centralized wage ªxing and tariŸ protection. These rigidities translated into management styles that were centralized and authority-based. This, together with limited product/service lines, made Fordist workplaces into sites that severely reduced the skills and education of ordinary workers. The Fordist system cements a total separation between ‘manual’ and ‘mental’ labour, which is re¶ected in the modern stratiªcation of educational outcomes. While those who design and manage the production systems require a tertiary education, and those who build and maintain the machines require a technical education, those who operate the machines may require barely any formal education at all. (Rose et al. 1992: 29)

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100 Discourses of Post-Bureaucratic Organization

Already in the 1920’s, at the height of Taylor’s ‘scientiªc management’, Mayo had begun to recuperate the social and community dimensions of work into management theory (Mayo 1997 [1949]). Mayo emphasized the beneªts of engaging workers in work as a form of ‘human association’, and critiqued Taylorist-Fordist principles such as the division of labour and agonistic management-labour relations (Rose 1999: 126). As Barley and Kunda (1992) argue, management discourse took up this trend towards humanist industrial democracy during a time of economic depression, only to shift attention towards more technical and systems discourses with the arrival of economic prosperity during the forties and ªfties. Towards the 1970’s, round the time of the oil crisis, the situation began to change again. Uncertain conditions arose which favoured relatively short-term investments, changing technologies and labour relations which required more ¶exible regimes of investment and capital accumulation. As a result, management discourse and attention began to shift from technical specialists (scientists, engineers) to those experienced in marketing and human relations (accountants, economists, HR managers), people who are sensitive to movements in commodities, the whims of ªnancial markets and the delicacies of worker sentiment (Barley and Kunda 1992). Referred to in a range of ways, including ‘Post-Fordism’ (Harvey 1989), ‘the new work order’ (Gee et al. 1996), and ‘post-bureaucracy’ (Heckscher and Donnellon 1994; Heckscher 1995; Grey and Garsten 2001), this more recent period in industrial and organizational design and management has seen a renewed questioning — and, at times, dismantling — of the centralizing, technicalizing and divisive premises of Fordism.

Post-bureaucracy Post- bureaucracy promotes and manifests as the ¶attening and personalizing of organizational command hierarchies, the making ¶exible of production processes, the redirecting of priorities towards customer demand and quality, and the reorganization of the labour force across disciplinary specializations and boundaries into teams and projects (Harvey 1989). The contexts which encourage these kinds of changes tend to share the following features: global expansion, intensiªed competition, changing political climates, new technologies, integrated ªnancial markets, and reductions in product life cycles (Barley and Kunda 2001). As noted in Chapter 1, one implication of this for organizations concerns the ways in which workers begin to relate not just linearly up and down the hierarchy but across networks of contacts and partnerships. A central part of this is that work in general is becoming constituted along team-lines and oriented to collections of tasks and entire projects. A central aspect of such teamwork is that workers are


expected to interact with others and be responsive to them.8 This more interactive and participative kind of organizational arrangement calls into question the centralizing and hierarchizing premises of Fordism. Fordist organizations provided relatively linear career patterns and progressions on top of stable forms of work participation and identiªcation. Post-bureaucratic organization, by contrast, is a site where there is “a blurring of the boundaries” (Clegg 1990: 11; Clegg and Hardy 1996), and where old stabilities, certainties and lines of progress and responsibility appear to be gradually displaced by more ¶uid and dynamic kinds of participation and negotiation. At the micro-level, these re-structurings translate into job rotation, multiskilling, broad-banding, and a host of other changes, ostensibly to realize higher levels of eŸectiveness, e¹ciency, and enhanced quality and outcomes. Inevitably, the shift towards job rotation, multi-skilling and team participation has important consequences for organizational discourse and communication. The emergent practices require diŸerent resources to learn, negotiate, articulate, and evaluate changing kinds of information and positioning. The complexity that results from this is re¶ected in how workers struggle with understanding their new roles and responsibilities. In her work, Hermine Scheeres reports on the confusions experienced by someone who works in a gaming machine factory in Sydney, Australia, and who was recently given the responsibility of being a ‘Team Facilitator’: …the responsibilities aren’t clear. The roles are not clear cut — perhaps they need to be a bit blurred because they are breaking down old boundaries, old strict demarcations, but it does make things di¹cult .. (Team Facilitator, cited in Scheeres 1999: 34)

This worker shows signs of confusion about where people end up when the emphasis of work shifts from clearly delineated tasks to negotiations in teams. How much time is spent on discussion, how much on facilitation? In a postbureaucratic climate, where traditional modes of management have been or are being displaced by more interactive kinds of decision-making, do people still have recourse to traditional authority and power? If yes, when, and how, does such authority and power come into force? These uncertainties come through strongly too in the following observation: I’ve got a bit of a dilemma about um how directive to be and how facilitative to be because you go in with views that you’re going to facilitate whatever comes up and it 8. These interactive demands are the obverse of what du Gay has in mind when discussing the technical risks increasingly conveyed upon employees: “individuals become more personally exposed to the risks and costs of engaging in a particular activity [which] is held to encourage them to build resources in themselves rather than simply to rely on others to take risks and endure uncertainties on their behalf” (du Gay 2000: 85).

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works well, then a lot comes up and that’s really good but if it doesn’t and they feel like at the end of three hours ‘well that was a waste of time’ …What’s a leader and what’s a facilitator [is] something that has come up … how they’re having the same sort of dilemmas as I am. I suppose in a way they’re saying how much responsibility should we take for the group. Because we’re the supervisors they tend to look to us to do the actions or get the information or to be responsible for getting the group together again. (‘Sally’ cited in Farrell 1999: 20/1)

Both ‘Sally’ and the Team Facilitator seen earlier are faced with having to mobilize meaning making resources that are not as easily outlined as those relevant to the Council staŸ who is in charge of drafting ministerials seen in Chapter 1. This is because the facilitators’ meaning makings exceed the traditional, pragmatic immediacies of their work, and because the new discourse is anchored in the sociocultural and interpersonal dynamics and complexities that come into play in team interaction and negotiation. As Fairclough notes, “where conventions can no longer be taken as given, there is a consequential need for interactants to negotiate (almost always implicitly) which discourse elements are to be drawn on” (Fairclough 1992: 223). Finally, the organizational changes that are producing teams and team facilitators do not just occur in the private, commercial sector. Scheeres’ and my work has been to argue that both blue collar and white collar, and private and public organizations are changing in related ways (Scheeres and Iedema 2002; Iedema and Scheeres 2003). Post-bureaucracy is a phenomenon that transcends traditional boundaries not just in terms of who speaks to whom, therefore, but also in terms of where it makes its in¶uence felt.

Knowledging: Post-bureaucracy in action The post-bureaucratic organization involves workers in ways other than just as readers of discourses that say what is appropriate to do for whom, where and when. As far as the procedure was concerned, it provided a technology that enabled organizational regimes to be embedded in speciªcations of series of actions, and that workers needed to read, learn and internalize. While in the context of the post-bureaucratic organization the procedure loses none of its relevance, workers are now expected to negotiate their substance with each other. This involves them in having to formulate their complex kinds of work in discourses that speak across professional boundaries. The clinical pathway seen in Chapter 1 (Figure 1.1) provides an example. Foreshadowing what will be the focus of Chapter 8, let us brie¶y contextualize the discussion with an example of how workers interact in a team setting with the aim of ‘standardizing’ their work. Extract 4.2 below shows part of a transcript of a

Organizational discourse 103

tape-recorded team meeting in a metropolitan teaching hospital in Sydney, Australia (1997). The team meeting was a multi-disciplinary clinical pathway (‘pathway’ for short) meeting, discussing the hospital’s treatment of asthma. Pathway meetings have the aim to formalize clinicians’ treatment and management of diseases into written statements, or ‘clinical pathways’. The meetings are attended by doctors, nurses, allied health and administrative staŸ who come together to discuss, make explicit and negotiate the variety of scientiªc research, standards, procedures and activities that are relevant to treating a particular disease. All across clinical care, and involving an increasing number of countries around the world, clinical work is required to be formalized in this way, for the beneªt of clinical staŸ and clinical trainees, but also management and administration, insurance and legal purposes, and, last but not least, patients and their carers. In the part of the asthma meeting shown here, three medical clinicians and a medical manager discuss the range of levels of acceptability which come into play in the administration of drug dosages to diŸerent types of asthma patients, while the nurses and others maintain respectful silence. Extract 4.2: Team Meeting Data: Asthma group [Mark = male medical manager; Michael, Mary, Mitch = medical clinician] 001 Mark There’s use that if you like we can recommend as our benchmark. There’s use that’s okay, but that’s not quite what we said, and there’s use that we’ll regard as being totally inappropriate. I wouldn’t want the second and the third to be called the same 002 Michael Hmm 003 Mark I mean it’s a bit like in gastro-enteritis, if somebody gets given clear ¶uids I mean that’s not as good as being given uh gastrolite, but it’s a hell of a lot better than being given ¶at lemonade 004 Michael Right, yeah I see what you mean about the choice of the word appropriate versus inappropriate, um, the meaning I was trying to get across was [uh 005 Mark [Per.. 006 Mary Per [per guidelines if it was in the guidelines or indication dose and handling of spacers, um I suppose by consensus we’ve kind of agreed that this was appropriate 007 Mark Well maybe you could call it, per ‘protocol’, ‘acceptable‘, and ‘dangerous’ 008 Mitch That’s true on an individual case. You might say this child weighs 12 or let’s say 15 kilograms, therefore we’ll use a 2.5 mg nebule, and yet they’re getting worse and recognizing the ine¹ciency you might actually go up to a 5mg nebule, or you might actually go up to 5mg per ml, you know on a graded management plan for the individual patient in treatment currently 009 Mary So do you feel that the dose should be left out, if it’s gonna be a kind of area of variability that’s appropriate 010 Mark No I think you gotta have something I think you have to have a protocol 011 Mary That’s right 012 Mitch Otherwise yes there’d be too much variation 013 … [inaudible]


014

Mary

But it was good to put that in for both the dose and the handling of the spacers as part of the information that will be going out to people, um as part of the guidelines

In Extract 4.2, the doctors are negotiating how to describe administering the variable amounts of nebuliser. After some discussion it is proposed that ‘Well maybe you could call it, per ‘protocol’, ‘acceptable‘, and ‘dangerous” (at turn 007). The person called Mitch in the transcript then frames this within a hypothetical example (‘this child weighs 12 or let’s say 15 kilograms’), and points to the problematic nature of this issue (‘you might actually go up to a 5mg nebule, or you might actually go up to 5mg per ml’; 008). Mitch frequently uses the tentative form ‘might’, and not ‘should’ or ‘must’, perhaps to signal concern that his knowledge is not absolute and categorical, and to leave others with ‘room for manoeuvre’. Capitalizing on the linguistic aŸordance of ‘might’ as ‘untensed’ modal verb, Mitch does not ground what he says in a speciªc experience. Instead, he creates a hypothetical situation, exemplifying the categories proposed by the previous speaker, Mark: ‘Well maybe you could call it, per ‘protocol’, ‘acceptable‘, and ‘dangerous”. For his part, Mark too uses tentative language: ‘maybe’, ‘could’. In addition, both Mark and Mitch are working to linguistify this particular domain of medical care. They worry about ‘the choice of the word’, ‘the meaning’ (both at 004), and what to ‘call it’ (at 007). These resources show they are trying to ªnd linguistic expressions for what has hitherto been allowed to remain implicit. In using discursive resources such as these, both Mark and Mitch help stretch the space of communication in a number of ways. First, their language frames medical work not in terms of ‘what is happening’ or ‘what happened’, but in prospective terms (‘you might actually go up to…’). We need to remember here that a typical feature of conventional doctoring (as well as many other kinds of work) is to speak in retrospective terms about ‘speciªc, interesting cases’9 and home in on isolated (unusual or di¹cult) patients and treatments (Atkinson 1995), rather than conceptualize itself as practice in prospective terms. By ‘colonizing the future’ in this way (Giddens 1991), the speakers throw a grid of visibility over what had been largely the preserve of autonomous, invisible and unaccountable medical judgment. Second, Mark and Mitch are busy linguistifying the particulars of work that have hitherto remained tacitly embedded in their everyday interactions, and that have never been formally proceduralized in generalizing terms. Of course, Mark’s

9. The case presentation is “a fundamental ritual of academic medicine, the narrative act of case presentation is at the centre of medical education and, indeed, at the centre of all medical communication about patients” (Montgomery Hunter 1991: 51).


and Mitch’s discourse is not impossible within the context of conventional medicine. But given the context in which their utterances were produced, the discourse points to a diŸerent and new way of being and doing. It shows willingness to move from a local-autonomy deªnition of work, to a group-centred, newly negotiated and forward-looking deªnition of work. In speaking in a way that acknowledges the interests and concerns of other stakeholders, Mark and Mitch realize a new discourse, and invent new communication rules. In addition, those present at the meeting know that their discussions are to be recorded in a formal way, written down and signed oŸ, validated at diŸerent levels of the organization, and then ‘put into practice’ as the basis of what is done and of data gathering about what is done (Meyerkort et al. 2003). Aside from the new kinds of talk that Mitch and Mark enact, therefore, there are also the new literacies to do with producing documentation and data about work.

Knowledging: Manipulating the nominal group As Mark and Mitch ‘colonize the medical future’, they are enacting a sophisticated linguistic technology. As they go about ‘knowledging’ asthma treatment into being, they are discussing what to call aspects of that treatment. One of the things they’re discussing is the use of the nebulizer, an asthma drug treatment. Rather than speaking in terms of individuals ‘using’ the nebulizer, their talk is in terms of ‘use’ as a noun: Mark: There’s use that if you like we can recommend as our benchmark (at 001)

In this talk, the practice of ‘using’ has become a ‘benchmark for use’. This ‘use’, moreover, is then calibrated in terms of ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate use’ (at 004). A little further on, this calibration becomes: ‘per protocol’, ‘acceptable’ and ‘dangerous’ (at 007). Rather than resigning themselves to the view that as doctors they are faced with an ‘area of variability’ (at 009), the ‘information that will be going out to people’ (at 014) will specify the diŸerent levels of use. What the speakers are doing here is knowledging their practice into being. But what enables them to do this is a linguistic technology that far exceeds the procedure in sophistication and complexity. Their knowledging becomes possible thanks to the expansionary potential of the linguistic nominal group. As just seen, the talk shifts from clinicians ‘using’ nebulizers, towards their ‘use’ of nebulizers, and from there to the gradation into ‘per protocol use’, ‘acceptable use’, and ‘dangerous use’. Central to this linguistiªcation of medical practice is the seemingly unlimited potential of the nominal group to accommodate their emerging knowledge. The nominal group can accommodate such knowledging for two reasons.


First, and as discussed in Chapter 3, it can distill or abstract information by losing particulars about who does the using, or when the using occurred. This was referred to as nominalization, a specialized kind of grammatical metaphor. Second, the nominal group has a seemingly unlimited capacity to expand as grammatical structure. From ‘the use’ we can move to ‘use that is appropriate’ and from there to ‘appropriate and inappropriate use’. It is these two complementary strategies that give the nominal group its extraordinary power. Together, I suggest, they form the basis of knowledge production. To explore these two knowledging strategies in some more depth, we ªrst need to look at the typical structure of the nominal group. The nominal group consists of a noun and a number of other elements. In traditional English grammar, the noun is usually understood to be the name of an object or entity. But while ‘noun’ is only a class label for such names, the term ‘Thing’ is adopted here to reference their function (Halliday 1994a). The Thing (‘model’ in Figure 4.1) is the main element of the nominal group (‘the ªnancial and resource management model of an Integrated Management System’; see Figure 4.1). As Figure 4.1 shows, aside from the Thing a nominal group may also contain a deictic (‘the’ or ‘those’ and ‘a’), one or more ‘classiªers’ to the left of the Thing (‘ªnancial’, ‘resource management’), and one or more ‘qualiªers’ to the right of the Thing (‘of an Integrated Management System’).10 the financial and resource management model of an Integrated Management System deictic

classifier

Thing

qualifier

Figure 4.1

To show how the nominal group is central to the production of organizational knowledge, I will explain, ªrst, the importance of shifting information from right to left within the nominal group. Second, I will show how, in the form of grammatical metaphor, the Thing itself is able to imbibe increasing amounts of knowledge.11 Shifting information from right to left within the nominal group means construing that information as increasingly taken-for-granted; that is, as knowledge. How does this work? We shift information from right to left in the nominal group by setting up a dynamic between two of the nominal group’s sub-elements: the classiªer and the qualiªer. While the classiªer speciªes the Thing we are talking 10. This example does not show that the nominal group can also contain epithets (e.g. ‘happy’, ‘brave’, ‘di¹cult’). 11. I mean, people’s practices evolve expressions that mark in summary ways their evolving knowledges. The Thing itself of course does not imbibe anything; it only becomes increasingly abstract and generalizing.


(or writing) about (‘what type of workers? welfare workers’), the qualiªer characterizes situations in which the Thing still is, directly or indirectly, a participant. The example in Figure 4.2 contains the qualiªer ‘working with students’. Welfare workers Thing

working with students

are called …

Qualifier Nominal Group

Figure 4.2

Important for the present argument, the classiªer and qualiªer form a dynamic dialectic, in so far that information can shift backwards and forwards between them. Knowledging relies on the shift of information from the qualiªer on the right of the Thing into the classiªer on its left. This shift from qualiªer (‘working with students’) into classiªer (‘student’ in Figure 4.3) is one that abstracts information by essentially shrinking the language used to express it. Put simply, this shift says: we now need less language for what we are talking about, because we both know what we mean. Moreover, the nominal group has the potential to incorporate a whole series of classiªers. This potential makes it a unique resource for generating highly intricate systems of classiªcation.12 Consider the word ‘worker’ in the example below (Figure 4.3). ‘Worker’ can be sub-classiªed to become ‘welfare worker’, and this can be sub-speciªed further into ‘student welfare worker’. By adding classifiers to the nominal group we can create a system of recursive categorization. This right-to-left shift of information, (that is, shifting information from ‘right of the Thing’ towards ‘left of the Thing’), is at the heart of our production of

workers welfare workers Student

Welfare workers Classifiers

Figure 4.3 12. See Martin 1988: 251 on the recursive, i.e. hypotactic, nature of the Classiªer and Qualiªer.


knowledge. The shift signals: we now presume known what ‘student welfare workers’ are: they are welfare workers working with students, and they are not students working as welfare workers. The production of social and organizational knowledge, then, hinges in an important way on how the nominal group is able to re-process information, ‘shift it towards the left’, and render it ‘presumed known’. We need to keep in mind here, of course, that while knowledging centres on shifting information from right to left, workers in the post-bureaucratic work order also need to negotiate and unpack already made-up knowledge. That means that they have to maintain not just a right-to-left dynamic, but also be able to reverse this dynamic. This is but one of the reasons why the textualization of work is linguistically demanding. Already encountered in Chapter 3, another aspect of knowledging that is linguistically demanding and that produces social and organizational knowledge is nominalization. Organizational processes (verbs) such as ‘registers’, can be turned into nominal elements (nouns). These processes become part of the nominal group by being nominalized (Figure 4.4). This scheme registers

Migration Agents

Process nominalization This scheme enables

the registration

of Migration Agents

Thing

Figure 4.4

Equally, the process ‘registers’ in ‘This scheme registers Migration Agents’ can ªrst be shifted into the qualiªer: ‘The scheme that registers Migration Agents …’. From there, ‘registers’ can be nominalized and turned into a classiªer: ‘a registration scheme’. As this example already shows, and further highlighting the productive potential of this domain of language, nominalization can be teamed with the classiªerqualiªer dialectic. For example, the nominalized process ‘registration’ can now be sub-classiªed itself. Thus, we can move from ‘This scheme registers migration agents’, to ‘A registration scheme for migration agents’, to ‘A migration agent registration scheme’. The power to classify and sub-classify is thus enshrined in the recursive grammar of the classiªer that is part of the nominal group. Together with nominalization, these grammatical resources have in the past enabled administrators and managers to particularize, describe and deªne subjects, conducts, and forms and instruments of disciplinary control. It is also these


very resources which have been responsible for dislodging (or making it possible to dislodge) people’s self and agency from ordinary time, and space, and thereby creating ‘lines of force across territories spanning space and time’ (Rose 1999: 50). In the post-bureaucratic work order, however, not just managers but workers across the board are expected to enact the literacies required for the manipulation and performance of these linguistic technologies. We are not dealing here with well-established ways of doing and saying; on the contrary, the linguistic technologies at stake here are open-ended and dynamic. While others have pointed to the centrality to organizational power of particular discursive strategies (e.g. Giddens 1984 on the ‘list’; Smith 1990 on ‘the record’), few commentators have touched on the role of English grammar in the genesis of organizational knowledges, disciplines and rituals. As technology for knowledging, the nominal group and the dynamic dialectics that it aŸords are central to the 21st century work order, and to the enhanced literacies that the textualization of work requires.

Conclusion This chapter has situated the emergence of organization in the socio-historical context of western bureaucratization and industralization on the one hand, and in speciªc linguistic and spatial resources for doing organization and (re)producing organizational knowledge, on the other hand. Without seeking to privilege either language or socio-cultural practice, I have outlined the dialectic between the stabilization of social relations and linguistic and spatial change. Central to the discussion was the role of writing and print, and how these media together came to represent people and practices in ways that objectiªed and normalized relationships and purposes. I then revisited these developments at the level of language. The procedure, capitalizing on the earlier invention of the list, on writing and print, and on the dissection of social activity into set sequences, provided the resource for co-conªguring the time, space and agency dimensions of human action. These relationships and purposes were also recognized in another guise: the design of social space, forming another backdrop against which new knowledges and enactments came to make and retain their sense. The chapter then moved on to make a further point. Now that these linguistic and spatial resources are in place and appear to have successfully reconstituted social practice and human identity (Rose 1999), organizational structures (divisions of labour) and organizational processes (modes of interaction) appear to be moving away from hierarchy and bureaucratic rule towards more ¶exible organizational structures, negotiable rules, and generically formulated and acquired (i.e.


abstracted) skills: “[u]nder team systems, even factory workers are said to require interpersonal and decision-making skills previously reserved for managers” (Barley and Kunda 2001: 77). The discourse consequences of having to enact these enterprising and knowledging conducts are self-evident. Rather than being able to conªne work to a set series of tasks, workers are now increasingly having to work and speak across social, ethnic, and cultural boundaries, and to maintain relationally sensitive types of interaction and cooperation. Their knowledging involves them in a struggle over what can be realized or expressed as if already taken-for-granted, what needs to be speciªed and particularized, and what is to remain silenced and invisible. Seen from a discourse perspective, I suggest, the intricacies of such struggles are underpinned by the structural characteristics and dynamics of the linguistic nominal group. It is here that the textualization of work comes to assume its linguistic complexity. Apart from the requirements imposed by evolving technologies, employment practices and independent tools, then, those who enter the workplace in the 21st century are likely to be in command of a very diŸerent range of skills compared to those who did so in the 20st century. On-the-job training, worker responsibilization, growing professional accountability, increased emphasis on emotional labour and continuous enhancement of our customer focus, rising expectations about speaking to others in public, all conspire to make most organizational jobs demanding and challenging. On top of that, learning the organizational ropes is still an uncertain and often solitary matter; while many know that we are to work in partnerships, few can elaborate on the complexities this poses for employees (Scheeres 2003). Organizational skills and procedures, team work and facilitative management techniques have by now become part of most training curricula, and they go a long way towards familiarizing workers with new work practices and relations, such as doing project work in teams. But there is little that can prepare workers for the increasing intensities of participation, the rising discursive complexities, and the growing need for a ¶exible and re¶exive identity that the postbureaucratic organization embodies. In the next four chapters I will bring post-bureaucracy into focus in a more empirical way. I will distinguish three main domains of organization: the domain of organizational enactment; the domain of formal records and informational data, and an emerging domain where workers’ participation and involvement are (expected to be) in ongoing dialectic with the writing, re-editing and deducing change implications from formal plans, strategies and knowledges. Chapters 5 and 6 begin by considering how interaction is complicated in post-bureaucratic contexts. Chapter 7 focuses on organizational records and record-keeping. Chapter 8 focuses on an instance of the post-bureaucratic process of textualization; a process that tries to balance discursive formalization with situated interaction and engagement.

Chapter 5

Negotiating organization A case of symbolic violence

Introduction The previous four chapters have considered a range of rather general issues: broad trends and changes aŸecting organization, the changing nature of discourse, discourse theory and its perspective on social (and organizational) life, and the genealogy of organization as specialized site of meaning making. The chapters that follow will apply these understandings and perspectives to empirical data gathered in organizations. The aim of these subsequent chapters is to exemplify how these more abstract issues discussed so far are played out ‘on the ground’, so to speak. With the help of empirical examples, we are able to point to what heteroglossia, collaboration, textualization, ‘lines of force’, post-bureaucracy, and so on, are like experientially. This chapter in particular will consider an instance of participative decisionmaking that went wrong. You will recall that the main argument of this study is that one prominent aspect of the organizational changes we are currently witnessing is the growing intensity in participation among workers. This interactive intensity is borne out by the things workers are now expected to do: organize and attend team and stakeholder meetings; actively engage in organizationally relevant discussions and negotiations, and be part of direction-setting and decision-making forums. Commentators have conceptualized this participative augmentation coining terms like the ‘knowledge-intensive workforce’ (Child and McGrath 2001) and ‘the interactive organization’ (Heckscher 1994). This chapter (and the next) considers in detail one particular instance of collaborative planning, and the kinds of tensions that are played out there. Earlier we inquired into the eŸects on workers of this emerging performativity from a theoretical vantage point. We noted that workers are being co-opted into participating in ways and at levels that engage them with responsibilities previously the preserve of middle and higher management. For example, they are now to engage in discussions and decisions about budgets and expenses, staŸ selection and recruitment, or organizational planning. In contrast with this ‘worker responsibilization’, and no doubt related to the ‘¶attening’ of organizational hierarchies,

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workers are also faced with organizational realities in which linear career progression is a thing of the past. For a number of commentators, it is plain that the postbureaucratic organization spells the end of predictable career patterns and a situation of permanently shifting employment … increased time pressures … intensiªed systems of monitoring and appraisal, for the ¶ip side of ‘empowerment’ is ‘accountability’ (Grey and Garsten 2001: 238)

Theoretically, if people are accepting greater levels of responsibility for and engagement in organizational decision-making and planning, they are acquiescing to a twofold reconªguration of work and self. First, given the higher levels of accountability and monitoring, they are expected to display higher levels of responsible autonomy and self-governance, to be realized through openness about work practices, performance target-setting and evaluation, and practice improvement. Second, given the more dynamic and less predictable nature of work and participative decision-making, people will have to accept a ‘¶exibilization’ of practices and relationships, and, as a consequence, enact a ‘¶exibilization of self’ (Grey and Garsten 2001). Potentially, then, tensions arise for those who are under pressure to generate organizational faith in their performances and interactions and to balance their ‘¶exibilized self’ with a performativity that renders them organizationally trustworthy and interactively reliable and predictable. In post-bureaucracy, predictability cannot come from organizational routines and communities, and yet, when working in organizations, individuals must be predictable in their conformity to [particular] routines and communities. Thus stated, it becomes clear that the post-bureaucratic worker, to be trustworthy, must also engage in some form of self-making which renders her potentially predictable. (Grey and Garsten 2001: 240).

I will return to this particular issue in the conclusion of this chapter. Overall, I want to give empirical scope to these three post-bureaucratic problematics: participation, ¶exibilization, and reliability. In terms of participation, the focus here is on a meeting that brings together a number of stakeholders to discuss and reach consensus about plans for a new health care facility. In this particular meeting, a junior planner ªlls in for the senior planner who had to be somewhere else. Unfortunately, her performance fails to inspire trust, and this puts into relief the limits of participants’ ¶exibility; that is, their (in)ability to handle diŸerence. The meeting in question is one of a total of six meetings, with each meeting lasting several hours, and the whole process extending over several months before the ªnal plans got signed oŸ. Stakeholder meetings like this became common in the early nineties, when the New South Wales department of health initiated a project planning guideline called the ‘Process of Facility Planning’ (NSW DoH 1993;

Negotiating organization

Healey 1999). This guideline stipulated government, community and other stakeholders’ involvement in projects over a million dollars, to avoid any people being silenced, and to obviate projects being scuttled. The new planning guideline required the presence at planning meetings of representatives from the health department and local area health service, engineers, suppliers, architects, members of the community (in this case, the clinicians and managers (but not the patients!) of the old health care facility), and, to facilitate the process, the planner. But this stakeholder engagement means having to confront organizational, socio-cultural and interpersonal diŸerences (Jordens 2000). Bringing together people who hitherto would have had little to do with one another, these meetings produce new obligations, and tensions — especially among the bureaucrats (who are keen to sign oŸ on the plans) and the users (who are keen to discuss aspects of the new building in detail). The onus is not merely on the bureaucrats to suspend notions of ‘due process’ in favour of less predictable and time-constrained kinds of participation and negotiation. The onus is also on the users and the community to express their concerns in ways that suits the ªnancial, regulatory and material constraints of architectural design and construction. Finally, the onus is on the planner not merely to produce an outcome, but to do so in a way that all stakeholders feel that they can subscribe to it. All participants, then, are to practise ¶exibility with regard to others’ and their own expectations and interpersonal enactments, as well as with respect to the nature and unfolding of the organizational process and of their own roles in it. In these public planning situations, the planner is caught in the middle, having to arbitrate stakeholder interests, manufacture an outcome, as well as build and maintain trust. The meetings focused on in this chapter and the next involved a number of people who all had their own agendas. As said, there was the area health service bureaucrat who was worried about cost, e¹ciency and timeliness. There was the project manager and his concern to please the bureaucracy and be seen to manage projects well. There were the users, whose preferences, needs and wants mostly derived from an intimate knowledge of the daily requirements of their jobs and from insight into the consequences for the way their organizational space came to be organized. There was the engineer with his technical opinions, the architect and his views on design and construction, and the supplier with his delivery constraints. Finally, there was the planner, whose interests were tied up with protecting the reputation of the ªrm to ensure future consultancies. Ultimately, however, the project was about mediating not only what individuals thought and wanted. There was also a host of formal guidelines and rules to consider, not least among which was the ‘Process of Facility Planning’. Further, there were relevant governmental regulations such as design guidelines, hospital building codes, and investigative committee reports whose recommendations

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had become legally binding with regard to particular speciªcs of health facilities design. Balancing stakeholder interests, self-perceptions, expectations, regulations, practical outcomes and having to build trust are delicate matters. It appeared, however, that in so far as the senior planner was concerned, trust had not so much to do with exhibiting predictability of conduct, as with re¶exively answering and manipulating the peculiarities, blind spots and convictions of those involved. As the senior planner said, they [stakeholders] don’t know the longer term implications of what it is they’re saying, in many cases, so those are things I can do, make sure that’s happening in meetings, and there’s people that are contrary, who just don’t really understand, and they make a lot of noise, um, and you just have to balance the people that are making a lot of noise, you know, empty vessels make a lot of noise, um, and the ones who really may not be saying something but have substance, try to get those people to say what they have to say (senior planner, 9/2/95, interview at UNSW prior to the planning project)

An important part of the planner’s task, then, is not only to alert stakeholders to planning constraints, but to co-opt them into ‘the game’: ‘to get people to say what they have to say’, not take their ‘noise’ at face value and be sensitive to their silences. Thus, the planner has to seek out what deserves attention to avoid things becoming stumbling blocks. so I listen to hear whether or not comments are being made by nurses that make sense or sound like they’re raising a legitimate concern, in other words if it’s a matter of spatial separation, or if there’s something that I know will become a problem if it isn’t dealt with, or there is a set of choices perhaps, you know between, you can run it one way or another … so if one of those triggers, like you hear somebody saying ‘yeah but what about the something’, and all the people are saying forget it forget it, we’re not worrying about that, I know that’s a problem, it’s gonna be a problem later on, if it isn’t resolved now, if we don’t come to terms dealing with this particular thing, …then what I’ll do is say right, I’ll have to make a note of that and bring it up again … (senior planner, 9/2/95)

The planner’s skill depends on how well are you able to see the hurdles … the road blocks that people, well the di¹culty people are having, they will give you cues, say things about what it is that is a problem (senior planner, 9/2/95).

The planner is therefore not just concerned with the ideational contents of stakeholders’ various interests, but with their potential for becoming an (interpersonal) ‘road block’. He needs to assess how much attention needs to be paid to the various interests and concerns, and what sources of power there are to contend with.


well ªrst of all it’s fairly important to understand who has the power in the system, other words, who’s gonna be somebody we really have to get approval from, not because of the title but cause of the way they exercise power in the group, other words, quite often in hospital planning exercises um you’ll ªnd that there are key individuals who may not be carrying a label, but who are in fact signiªcant in terms of their peer group and it’s very important to listen to the conversation and see who it is they’re referring to (senior planner, 9/2/95)

While the senior planner is able to negotiate an acceptable outcome out of this challenging set of circumstances (see Chapter 6), the junior planner is not so successful. She is unable to establish people’s trust in her ability to navigate through the ªeld of contesting interests and positionings. Over about ninety turns, it becomes clear that she is judged to be unduly concerned with advocating design issues on behalf of the hospital’s future ‘users’, while spending not enough time on understanding the formal requirements of the planning report and the tender. The bureaucrat and the project manager are primarily interested in ªnalizing the project as quickly as possible, and start construction. An hour into the meeting, they silence her, and none of the others present has the nerve to rescue her. In this instance, participative decision-making falls victim to established and ªxed notions of appropriacy and purpose.

Participation and symbolic violence This section will consider a meeting where a number of people come together to negotiate decisions about how to design and build a new health care facility. The unfolding of the meeting is presented in such a way as to highlight how speakers’ co-construction and development of their divergent positionings was realized in talk. To this end, I focus on the talk as situated dynamic. In the literature, the dynamic analysis of talk has been framed from within a perspective that focuses on the becoming of discourse, or a ‘logogenetic’ perspective. The literature deªnes ‘logogenesis’ as follows: there is the time frame of the act of meaning itself: the instantial construction of meaning in the form of a text. This is a stochastic process in which the potential for creating meaning is continually modiªed in the light of what has gone before; certain options are restricted or disfavoured, while others are emprobabled or opened up. We shall refer to this as the logogenetic time frame, using logo(s) in its original sense of ‘text’, or ‘discourse’ (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999)1 1. Halliday has provided few examples of how language and context ‘unfold’ logogenetically (for Halliday’s logogenetic analyses: Halliday 1973: 121, 1992a, 1993b: 86, 1994a: 368, 1994b: 197). The dynamic analyses he presents are of spoken interactions, but only Halliday 1994b considers a longer stretch of talk.

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In Halliday and Matthiessen’s deªnition, however, the theoretical assumption is that, not whether or how, past meanings constrain future meanings. In practice, this has translated into kinds of ‘logogenetic analysis’ which have presented meaning making as a more or less linear and cumulative process (O’Donnell 1990; Sefton 1995; Bateman 1989; Matthiessen & Bateman 1992; Matthiessen 1993). Unfortunately, this approach to the dynamics of meaning making does not allow for the possibility that meaning is construed not simply progressively but also retroactively, and not infrequently entirely unpredictably (Taylor & Cameron 1987: 103). A linear-recursive view on logogenesis becomes problematic when considering, for example, how during some of the meetings during the planning project questions were asked to which the answers were not immediately or at all forthcoming; questions which were not unproblematically ‘questions’ but also needed to be seen as displays of attention-setting, and questions which were repeatedly answered in prosodically ampliªed form over a considerable number of turns, by the asker himself (Iedema 1997a, 1999). These issues suggest that logogenetic analysis may beneªt from also being seen as interpretive hermeneutic (Messer et al. 1990; Sass 1990; Hiley et al. 1991) rather than simply a matter of considering subsequent and successive deployments of particular discursive resources. Such hermeneutic sense-making is better suited to deal with the full complexities of meaning making. Hermeneutically speaking, meaning does not inhere in the words or grammar of a single speaker, and neither is it straightforwardly and exhaustively evident from what ‘transpires’ in interaction (pace Conversation Analysis). In what follows, I will consider ‘meaning making’ from a dynamic and interpretative perspective. Having been a non-participant observer at the planning project in question, I bring understandings and views to bear which may be contestable. However, my interpretation is also grounded in patterns prominent in the interactive discourse, and in the processual ‘drift’ of the overall process over and beyond the individual meetings. Important here for me is not only what the process eventually produces as recognizable outcome, but what is recognized as legitimate outcome. For the purposes of the present chapter, I will focus on the logogenesis of people’s turn-taking and positioning, to tease out how the three most prominent interactants mobilize increasingly ‘divergent’ or con¶ictual meanings (cf. Maynard 1985; Grimshaw 1990; KotthoŸ 1993; Firth 1995; Muntigl and Turnbull 1998; Gruber 2001). In addition to tracing the ways in which interactants choreograph this exacerbating tension, I describe the ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu 1991: 51) that is enacted on the junior planner by the other two. As the target of this symbolic


violence, she is progressively demoted from ‘equal player’, to ‘source of disruption’, and ªnally to ‘marginalized object’. In delegitimating the female planner in this way, the two male speakers do not really divert from formal ‘health-planning discourse’, and they draw only in a very limited way on explicit expressions of discontent to realize their judgments and sentiments (e.g. ‘terrible’, ‘wrong’, ‘unacceptable’, etc.; see Martin 1997, 2000; Iedema and Degeling 2001a). This means that their rising resistance to the junior planner is largely realized in less overt ways, at the level of the grammar (negation, and the like) and turn-taking (overlaps and interruptions). Overall, though, this particular case might suggest that within the new ethos of participation and collaboration, engagement and negotiation, rules about ‘knowledge’, ‘procedure’ and ‘voice’ may not be disappearing, but are instead becoming more demanding and complex (Cedersund and Säljö 1993). As in the case of the next chapter, the meeting talk data presented here were collected as part of a study (Iedema 1997a) that centred on the description and analysis of a process of organizational negotiation. The data presented here derive from the third meeting (out of a total of six meetings) of that health planning project. The analysis covers most of the ninety odd turns which constitute the critical part of that meeting. Rather than presenting the data as one long text, I divide it into and analyze it in manageable chunks, numbered Extracts 1–20, which together comprise ninety-eight contiguous turns. Both the talk preceding these ninety turns and that which follows are not referred to here. The project from which these meeting data derive had the brief to renovate and extend a health care facility in south Sydney. The particular stage of the project from which the meeting data were taken centered on the production of the Project Deªnition Plan (referred to as the ‘PDP’ in the talk), a report that summarizes the planning options and sets out recommendations. The ‘PDP’ aimed to bring together the views, insights and agreements of all stakeholders, including those of the bureaucrats, engineers, architects, and users of the hospital, and present reasoned advice to the management of the project regarding the details of design, costing and construction (Iedema 1997a, 1999). In this instance, the female junior planner (‘JP’) meets with a government bureaucrat from the local area health service (‘GB’), and a project manager (‘PM’) hired by the state department of health to oversee the project. Also present, but largely silent, are a building consultant (‘BC’), an engineer (‘EN’), and an architect (‘AT’) who works for the same ªrm as the junior planner, but who is only involved in the re-design of the hospital, not in the planning side of it. Let us now turn to the meeting itself. The junior planner met with the users the day before the present meeting and made notes of their comments. Soon after the meeting opens, she asks if she can raise these (Extract 5.1).

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Extract 5.1 [meeting 3, introduction phase2] Turn Speaker Talk 1 PM …a consolidated, a consolidated document. 2 JP Yes, Ok, well any comments that came up yesterday, do you want me to bring that up again? 3 PM Well, if you think we should discuss them at the moment then yeah, let let let’s do it now. I just want to make sure we get everything into, you know, one document 4 JP Yeah, I haven’t updated my notes from yesterday yet 5 PM No, no, perhaps you’d just like to summarize those

The users’ ªrst query was about security alarms. Buttons on the walls were not considered a good solution, because patients often press those for ‘inappropriate’ reasons. At the same time, portable devices require a system that might be too expensive. While the project manager saw this as an engineering issue to be solved through discussion among the architects, the users and the technicians, the architect-planner and the junior planner knew that if cost was going to be an obstacle, the issue might have to be resolved ‘structurally’, i.e. by making adjustments of some sort to the layout of the building to facilitate visibility and access to the trouble. In Extract 5.2, the junior planner (JP) initiates what I have identiªed as the ªrst phase of the meeting. She starts by saying that the users ‘feel there’s no discussion’ of particular issues. It appears, in the way she takes the lead in the discussion (compare this with the senior planner in Chapter 6!), that she leaves the others with little room to move except react to what she says. Extract 5.2 [meeting 3, phase 1] turn Speaker Talk 6 JP Um, the problem issues that may have costing implications, one of them was there’s users who feel there’s no discussion of their security system if you like, 7 PM Hm 8 JP um, audio, um visual or through their duress alarm system 9 PM Right 10 JP Which is not very eŸective as it cannot isolate the site of the alarm, or who uses it, and there has been no [?] as far as I know in the brief in terms of the camera surveillance, I don’t know if [?] 11 PM Well they have, uh, sorry, my understanding is that there are references certainly in in the upgraded brief we were talking about to where they needed security

2. A phase is a stretch of talk that hangs together due to its ideational and/or interpersonal orientation (Gregory 1995: 204).


There are a number of things that characterize her talk. First, as is evident in this second extract, the junior planner positions the users as Subjects of her sentences (‘the users feel’, ‘they’re not happy’), giving them a certain prominence. Her talk does not change in this respect, right up until the point of con¶ict (phase 3, turn 95). Evidently, she sees her role in terms of user advocacy rather than mediator of contesting claims to power and control (as does the senior planner that we heard earlier). A second feature of her talk is that she uses negatives and negative polarity quite liberally: ‘no discussion’, ‘not very eŸective’, ‘there has been no…’; and in later turns in this phase: ‘they’re not happy’ ‘won’t be satisfactory’. Negatives and negative polarity are generally dispreferred and relatively rare in formal organizational contexts, and much work is generally done to avoid them (see Chapter 1; Brown and Levinson 1988; Iedema 1996a, 1997a). Having been present at the meeting, I sensed that the frequency of these negatives and the prominence accorded to the users played a big role in the onset of the tension. A third feature of the junior planner’s talk worth commenting on is her apparent ‘ambivalence’ (Extract 5.3). On the one hand, she proposes what the group should talk about, using expressions that are rather ‘categorical’ and authoritative in nature. An example of this is: ‘one of [the issues] was there’s users who feel there’s been no discussion of…’. On the other hand, and in contrast with this apparent conªdence, she does not persist with the points that she initiates, and only produces very short follow-up turns: ‘Ok’, ‘Right’, ‘Right uh…’. Extract 5.3 [meeting 3, phase 1, turns 14–22] turn Speaker Talk 14 JP Which is not very eŸective as it cannot isolate the site of the alarm, or who uses it, and there has been no [?] as far as I know in the brief in terms of the camera surveillance, I don’t know if [?] 15 PM Well they have, uh, sorry, my understanding is that there are references certainly in in the upgraded brief we were talking about to where they needed security 16 JP OK 17 PM I agree it was all a bit wishy-washy, um but certainly there was some some notation of some of the areas that they needed surveillance 18 JP Right 19 PM And I would think that we will just have to develop that into a brief which is suitable for instructing a builder. 20 JP Ok, so we thought we should talk to the uh electrical engineer to ªnd out [how … 21 PM [Ya, by all means, by all means, yeah] 22 JP Right, uh …

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Finally, as can be seen in Extract 5.4, she displays a level of ignorance about the technical details of the process, suggesting that the design brief is part of her ªnal report rather than of the tender that goes out to builders. Extract 5.4 [meeting 3, phase 1, turns 29–35] turn speaker Talk 29 JP It’s included in a speciªc section of the brief then 30 GB It is, and I really think that your sub-consultants ought to be talking to the users, and your sub-consultants ought to be preparing a brief, so that eventually it can go in a design brief 31 JP To go into a design brief that comes with the PDP? 32 GB [No no no] 33 PM [No no no] 34 GB No no, the tender document 35 JP the tender document, ok

Extract 5.4 also shows the project manager’s and the bureaucrat’s responses to her performance so far. Some, like the ‘no no no’ that is sounded in unison, manifest the beginnings of the tension (Bateson 1973; Tannen 1993). With ‘no no no’ as the ªrst manifestation of doubt and perhaps impatience on the part of PM and GB, there are three other hints of tension. The ªrst of these is that the number of nonsupportive interruptions of the junior planner’s talk by the male bureaucrats rises steadily during this part of the meeting. This is evident especially when the meeting begins to address the third issue in the course of phase 3. I will comment on this in more detail below. The second hint of tension is the incremental use by both the project manager and the bureaucrat of expressions of ‘must-ness’, many of which pertain to tasks to be done by the planner. The project manager starts the meeting on a friendly note (introduction phase, turn 3): ‘I’d like us to set up notes which we can agree on’. This is a very mitigated kind of must-ness, realized as a mental process of emotion (‘like’). This is followed by (introduction phase, turn 5) ‘and obviously I think we can then just update that’. Here, must-ness is realized as ability (‘can’) which is mitigated by (‘just’) and (‘I think’), as well as justiªed with ‘obviously’ (cf. Martin 2000). At this stage of the meeting, the project manager still spends a lot of interpersonal eŸort or ‘work’ (cf. Brown and Levinson 1988: 143) on downtoning and dissimulating the necessity of particular tasks to placate the junior planner. But by turn 23 (phase 1), the project manager produces ‘I would anticipate that…’ (a mental process of cognition), and ‘it would be up to…’ (a ‘prepositionalized’ kind of must-ness). The shift here from emotion (‘like’) to cognition (‘anticipate’) heralds a ‘hardening’ of the speaker’s stance (cf. Thibault 1993: 140).


Extract 5.5 [meeting 3, phase 1, turn 23] turn speaker Talk 23 PM I mean sorry just just to be quite clear on this, um, I would anticipate that briefs such as this would simply describe those areas that it needs to have surveillance and what sort and then it would be up to the design team to particularly the electrical engineer to construct a security brief, which would become part of the tender documents

As the meeting continues, this hardening gets progressively more pronounced. By turn 36 (phase 1), the project manager produces the following (Extract 5.6): Extract 5.6 [meeting 3, phase 1, turn 36] turn speaker Talk 36 PM There has to be, sorry, there has to be even though it’s a DNC (?) tender and what have you, there has to be su¹cient performance, information, obviously, that the builder can price and provide what we want, so for instance if uh, if we wanted to specify any of the equipments or particular types of camera or things like that, um, it might be the right thing to do, but otherwise it would be a performance speciªcation which will simply you know expand what we’re trying to achieve.

Extract 5.6 contains three instances of ‘(there) has to be’ (underlined). Here, ‘there has to be’ rounds oŸ the impression that now ‘obligation exists’. This pattern of gradual ‘ampliªcation’ of must-ness will now continue throughout phases 2 and 3, as the project manager becomes increasingly explicit about the obligations that he construes the junior planner as having to answer. The bureaucrat (‘GB’) also contributes to the growing tension. When he speaks during phase 1, he elaborates and extends what the project manager says. He ªrst speaks at some length at turn 28 (phase 1; Extract 5.7). Extract 5.7 [meeting 3, phase 1, turn 28] turn speaker Talk 28 GB Just to pick up what [PM] was saying. um, there’s probably no point in talking to the site engineer, as what we need is a statement from the users on those areas that need constant surveillance, camera surveillance, duress surveillance or, you know that type of thing

Here, the bureaucrat chimes in with the project manager by beginning to spell out what the junior planner should be doing: ‘there’s probably no point in talking to the site engineer’, and an implied command ‘we need’. Then, at turn 30, he says (Extract 5.8):

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Extract 5.8 [meeting 3, phase 1, turn 30] turn speaker Talk 30 GB It is, and I really think that your sub-consultants ought to be talking to the users, and your sub-consultants ought to be preparing a brief, so that eventually it can go in a design brief

‘I really think that your sub-consultants ought to be talking to the users’ is ampliªed (‘really’), and it institutionalizes obligation (‘ought to’). Still blunted with a conciliatory gesture, his turn also provides some reasoning in support of the point he makes: ‘so that…’. By the time we get to phase 2, all this starts to take on a very diŸerent hue. But before I develop that I will return to the junior planner’s contributions and consider her talk in more detail. The junior planner initiates phase 2 by suggesting that there had been a meeting between the users and the department the year before during which matters were discussed that had a bearing on the existing drawings. The reactions by both the project manager and the bureaucrat to this suggestion are, to put it nicely, unsupportive (Extract 5.9). Extract 5.9 [meeting 3, phase 2, turns 44–50] turn speaker Talk 44 JP Um, the other thing was there were minor things with the brief, and apparently they reviewed things with the department at the end of last year comments were made and no result … [?], since the drawing, the drawing that you last did 45 PM So you haven’t got the latest drawing, is that the [story?] 46 JP [No] 47 GB …? 8 JP The comments that I’ve got now are the same comments that there was a meeting at the end of last year that they said this happened, that uh 49 GB The only meetings at the end of last year were mid last year, probably with [name Department of Health o¹cial] to revise the design brief, but there’s never been any changes to the drawings that your referring to 50 JP Alright, that’s what I …

The bureaucrat’s and project manager’s lack of sympathy for the point she makes is no doubt due to her accusation that there is information relevant to the project which they have not given her, suggesting something has been ‘withheld’. The reaction by the project manager to this is to throw responsibility for any lack of information straight back at her, and suggest it is she who does not have the latest drawing (quite an accusation for someone who is associated with the senior architect’s o¹ce): ‘So you haven’t got the latest drawing, is that the story?’. The project manager’s ‘liberal’ use of both negative (‘haven’t’) and casual talk (‘is that the story’) shows that decorum is beginning to crack under the weight

Negotiating organization 123

of the growing tension.3 In comparison to the project manager’s response, the bureaucrat’s reaction is much more caustic. His response borders on sarcasm: ‘The only meetings at the end of last year were mid last year’. Here, the junior planner’s claim (‘comments … are comments that…’) becomes ridiculed by the bureaucrat’s point that ‘the end of last year [was] mid last year’. Clearly, the men are not impressed by the junior planner’s performance. But their strategies for dealing with her ‘diŸerence’ include no attempt to bridge the gap that is growing between them, nor, in a ‘¶exible’ way, bring her round to what they see as ‘proper procedure’. Instead, they slip away into a reactive position, and their only means for handling the situation include veiled rudeness and sarcasm. Perhaps to her detriment, the junior planner does not ‘hear’ the men’s increasingly strident responses and sarcastic remarks. Or she lacks the means to re¶ect on and salvage the unfolding situation. It can also be, of course, that she has decided to ignore that the meeting is deteriorating, and that everything is as good as it ever could be. In any case, the tension is allowed to grow. The ensuing interaction too shows increasing levels of non-supportive overlap and interruption by both sides, with the bureaucrat’s talk increasingly mirroring the junior planner’s negatively coloured language (Extract 5.10). Extract 5.10 [meeting 3, phase 2, turns 49–59] turn speaker Talk 9 GB The only meetings at the end of last year were mid last year, probably with [name Department of Health o¹cial] to revise the design brief, but there’s never been any changes to the drawings that your referring to 50 JP Alright, that’s what I 51 GB … 52 JP that’s what I meant, because what came out of the changes of design brief we haven’t got any of the documents, any of the records of those meetings, if you like as to what was decided, or what was said at the time, so somebody … 53 GB There were issues of design, the the updated design brief 54 BC [Was was…] 55 GB [Which which you…?] 56 IB …so we know that 57 JP Ok so then comments, so then some of the things they thought had been changed weren’t changed in that document, that’s all, they didn’t get all the things they asked for, basically … 58 GB No one ever does, but they all raise them again for reconsideration cause they believe [the design brief doesn’t address the issues that they] 59 JP [Yeah alright, Ok, alright], Ok, so that is the, Ok, good. 3. In a more friendly situation, this language might well carry solidary connotations, of course, rather than the negative ones they take on as part of the prosodies at work in the meeting under consideration here (cf. Tannen 1993).


In Extract 5.10, the junior planner continues to insist that ‘we [exclusive ‘we’] haven’t got any of the documents’, and that ‘they’ (the users) ‘didn’t get all the things they asked for’ (continuing the negatives she initiated in phase 1 and maintaining the users as the focus of her talk). In response, the bureaucrat mirrors and augments on the ‘us versus them’ aspect of her talk. First, there is his use of ‘you’ which probably plays oŸ against the junior planner’s exclusive ‘we’ and ‘I’. Then there is his categorical ‘no one ever does’, a reply that is marked and oppositional due to its negativity and categoricalness. Also, and perhaps due to this dynamic, the bureaucrat admits to a sceptical and distrustful attitude towards the users: ‘they [the users] all raise them [their needs] again for reconsideration cause they believe the design brief doesn’t address the issues…’. With ‘they all…’ he breathes adult life into the divergence that has spawned between him and the project manager on the one hand, and the planner and the users on the other. The junior planner’s adherence to her deªnition of the world does not abate in the face of growing tension, sarcasm and challenge. On the contrary, she interrupts the bureaucrat again (at turn 59), and takes the ¶oor to initiate yet another issue, that of ‘equipment’ (phase 3, Extract 5.11). Extract 5.11 [meeting 3, phase 2, turns 59–61] turn Speaker Talk 59 JP Yeah alright, Ok, alright, Ok, so that is the, Ok, good. [phase 3] um, the only other thing is the equipment, there, they feel the equipment will be almost um 90% replaced 60 GB I hate to say that the money is tight and that it won’t be 90% replaced, I can guarantee that 61 JP But you see the whole new section, it’s just for the, an estimate for the PDP

The bureaucrat’s reaction to her claim at turn 59 is brash: ‘I hate to say that the money is tight and that it won’t be 90% replaced, I can guarantee that’. While ‘hate to say’ may seem to mitigate ‘the money is tight’, its negative connotations undergird the con¶ict that by now pervades the talk. This negativity is further attested by ‘it won’t be 90% replaced’. At an another level, ‘I hate to say’ harks back to the sarcasm already witnessed at turn 49 (‘The only meetings at the end of last year were mid-last year’). No doubt due to the growing pressure occasioned by the project manager’s dismissiveness and the bureaucrat’s sarcasm, the junior planner’s talk is showing signs of increasing stress. This stress is especially evident when her continued authoritative self-positioning (determining the orientation of the talk, interrupting people) comes to stand in increasingly stark relief against the increasingly ‘bitty’ and grammatically incoherent nature of her turns (see Extract 5.12).


Extract 5.12 [meeting 3, phase 3, turns 61–63] turn speaker Talk 61 JP But you see the whole new section, it’s just for the, an estimate for the PDP 62 GB The new section, yes 63 JP Yes, and then in the their existing things the refurbishment would they,

At this point, the project manager takes over with a very patronizing tone of voice and with extended turns at talk. His lecturing leaves the junior planner with very little room to move in the interaction (Extract 5.13). Extract 5.13 [meeting 3, phase 3, turns 64–67] turn speaker Talk 64 PM Could I, sorry, could I could I just perhaps come in here, ehm, what we did say to them was that a) we wanted a total list of the equipment, room by room of the new building, um, and b) 65 GB For the total building 66 PM For the total building, yeah, and b) there would then need to be um a consideration as to what was transferable, uh, what wasn’t transferable, what was actually in addition to that which was existing and which would be provided by the builder, and which would be provided by other means. Now let’s, if we start with the total list of equipment, um, I’m sure that um the right sort of people will review what’s there and decide whether in fact it is re-usable or not re-usable. 67 JP Ugh

The project manager now consistently interrupts the junior planner (compare his turns 15, 23, 36 above). Also, his use of the terms ‘total (list)’ and ‘room by room’ (redounding with his lecturing intonation) further bolster the impact of his exasperation. With this, the interaction has now slid well into symbolic violence. The transition from tension into violence is marked by a change from disparaging reaction to oŸensive attack. By turn 68, the bureaucrat’s turns are becoming increasingly interruptive and overlapping. With that, the junior planner’s turns are becoming shorter (e.g. turns 67 [‘Ugh’], 71 [‘yeah’], 73 [‘Ok’], 75 [‘And in the brief…’]; Extract 5.14). Another threatening feature here is that the bureaucrat’s talk becomes increasingly explicit about chains of command, as if to establish his own authority and importance by force of implication. Referring brie¶y to this earlier, we now see him cranking up the in¶uence of formal power in face of the junior planner’s lack of acknowledgement of his role. This in fact produces a ‘syndrome’ that runs through a range of realizations, from mitigated towards assertive: – ‘I can put pressure on them’ (turn 70) – ‘we can then say to them…’ (turn 72)


– ‘we then work through what is transferable’ (turn 74) – ‘I’ll get someone to work with them’ (turn 92 below). Each of these helps underscore the bureaucrat’s organizational ‘clout’, his importance, and therefore his predominance in whatever will transpire from the present meeting (see Extract 5.14). Extract 5.14 [meeting 3, phase 3, turns 68–75] turn speaker Talk 68 GB Well, look I can 69 JP That hasn’t been done yet 70 GB I can put pressure on them. um, I’ve always found it easier that if someone gives each room a room number so that they not duplicate it 71 JP Yeah 72 GB you want it to allocate it as part of your scenario, room numbers for the existing building and room numbers for the enlarged building, we can then say to them “look, prepare an equipment list, for each room” 73 JP Ok 74 GB And as John said we then work through that to work out well what is transferable, what is new, what the builder will provide, what will we provide 75 JP And in the brief

This syndrome is noteworthy here, of course, due to the tendency in post-bureaucratic settings to background or metaphorize must-ness and the power and control that it realizes (Iedema 1996a: 134). It appears here, I suggest, because the junior planner’s behaviour is experienced as ignoring the others’ positionings and authority, and therewith their prerogative to determine the direction and the pace of unfolding of the meeting. The bureaucrat becomes increasingly control-minded, trying to contain the politics (and the budget) of the project. For his part, the project manager becomes more and more didactic in his insistence on ‘knowledge of procedure’. These stances position the junior planner now not as an equal interactant, but as a source of irritation and disruption. As the symbolic violence increases, the junior planner’s confusion and ambivalence become more and more pronounced (Extract 5.15). Extract 5.15 [meeting 3, phase 3, turns 76–82] turn speaker Talk 76 PM I mean, and, sorry we can we can put, or can arrange anyway, to have ªgures put against all that stuŸ, I mean that’s no no big deal, but you know we need the basic basic stuŸ, … 77 JP Ok, now in the brief at the moment there is a list at the end of each room, that’s…, that’s the items, just in the PDP again, just the documentation for the PDP, what’s required at this stage is for putting a more detailed


78 79

GB JP

80 81 82

GB JP PM

The Department won’t require us to go to the nth degree on this No but what I’m wondering is, what how much do I put in of the estimated percentage of the cost as being … Well they probably would like it better than that, but So we have to talk to somebody about the pricing Sorry could I, could I, ahah, sorry John, just to come back, let’s gets the list, alright, as a start,

In Extract 5.15 especially, the junior planner exhibits extreme uncertainty. She responds to the project manager’s turn in an incoherent way: ‘in the brief at the moment there is a list at the end of each room, that’s…, that’s the items, just in the PDP again, just the documentation for the PDP, what’s required at this stage is for putting a more detailed…’.

Alongside this, she proceeds to interrupt the bureaucrat (‘So we have to talk to somebody about the pricing’). Next, the project manager cuts in, turning up the lecturing intonation (‘alright’ on a falling tone). Albeit performing a diŸerent role, the project manager becomes increasingly complicit with the bureaucrat in the junior planner’s destruction. One way in which this manifests is in how he echoes the bureaucrat’s talk (turn 84, Extract 5.16). Extract 5.16 [meeting 3, phase 3, turns 82–85] turn speaker Talk 82 PM Sorry could I, could I, ahah, sorry John, just to come back, let’s gets the list, alright, as a start, 83 GB It’s up to the users to prepare that 84 PM It’s up to the users to prepare that, um, we can then jointly make the decisions from there on, we can arrange for it to be costed, computated, 85 EN Yeah, no problem

The following turn by the project manager shows to what extent he gets drawn into the developing con¶ict (turn 86; Extract 5.17). Extract 5.17 [meeting 3, phase 3, turns 85–86] turn speaker Talk 85 EN Yeah, no problem 86 PM Um, it’s not a problem with any of that, we’ve got a lot of information you know in-house here anyway in relation to pricing of equipment of various sorts, so it’s not, the actual pricing is not a great problem, um, there’s really no reason why we shouldn’t be quite accurate at this stage, there’s no need to guess, but we might as well do that job now.

In this turn (86), the project manager mobilizes no fewer than six negatives (underlined), a sure sign that the meeting has descended into struggle:


Um, it’s not a problem with any of that, we’ve got a lot of information you know inhouse here anyway in relation to pricing of equipment of various sorts, so it’s not, the actual pricing is not a great problem, um, there’s really no reason why we shouldn’t be quite accurate at this stage, there’s no need to guess, but we might as well do that job now.

In the face of this, the junior planner risks again mentioning the users’ reaction, using quite a loaded term: ‘the users … had a bit of a heart attack having to do the [equipment] list’ (turn 87). The violence now rapidly escalates (Extract 5.18). Extract 5.18 [meeting 3, phase 3, turns 86–94] turn speaker Talk 87 JP Ok, that’s the users, they had a bit of a heart attack having to do the list fully at this point, but um 88 PM Oh heavens, look [the preparation] 89 ? […] 90 PM The preparation of these lists can uh you know a day at the most, a couple of days for somebody who knows what they’re about 91 JP Yeah, yeah, is it possible to get ? 92 GB I’ll get someone to work with them 93 JP It’s just that, we’re supposed to have this PDP done tomorrow, 94 PM No, we’ll get this, we’ll get this PDP right, hah, so

In reply to the junior planner’s comment about the users (turn 87), the project manager uses an expletive (‘oh heavens’), followed by a ‘bare’ imperative (‘look!’). His turn overlaps with that by somebody else but it is unclear from the tape who is speaking. The simultaneous production of talk here signals of course that the stakes (and blood pressure levels) are rising. Moreover, in this very extract (5.18) the junior planner is interrupted three times, and indirectly realized judgements, like ‘somebody who knows what they’re about’ (suggesting ‘you don’t know’), and ‘we’ll get this PDP right’ (which could be heard as saying ‘you’re incapable’), are signs that the talk is becoming increasingly con¶ictual. Becoming more and more aware of the pressure, I presume, the junior planner now retreats into both the role of asker and oŸerer, rather than stater. In addition, her tone of voice has by now become very tentative (‘should I should I…’). It is here that the bureaucrat decides he has had ‘enough’, and delivers the ªnal blow (turn 96; Extract 5.19). Extract 5.19 [meeting 3, phase 3, turns 94–98] turn speaker Talk 94 PM No, we’ll get this, we’ll get this PDP right, hah, so 95 JP So should I should I talk to you about…, these things then, will you get back to me then or shall I communicate with you, about this, about…? 96 GB Oh, there’s too many players in this, I thought [name senior planner] was


97 98

JP GB

writing the PDP Oh sorry, I’m, I work with [name architect company] Right

At turn 96 the bureaucrat ªnishes the junior planner oŸ with: ‘Oh, there’s too many players in this, I thought [name of the senior architect-planner] was writing the [project planning document]’. The ampliªcation of ‘too many players’ caps a tension that built up from early in the meeting. The reference to the senior planner suggests that the bureaucrat thinks that the junior planner is incapable of dealing with the planning document, and that he is unwilling to deal with her any further. Most signiªcantly however, he addresses this turn to the project manager, thereby eŸectively demoting her to non-interactant. Extract 5.19 constitutes the culmination of ninety-odd turns. From this point on, the junior planner contributed very little to the meeting (Iedema 1997a). She appeared to have been beaten into submission, and the men’s ‘order’ was restored. They had mounted a verbal assault on the way in which she had tried to steer the meeting, represent the interests of the users and draw people’s attention to problems (cf. Forester 1993a/b). A victim of the bureaucrat’s and the project manager’s combined symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1991: 51), she is left to scramble around for legitimation (Extract 5.20). Extract 5.20 [meeting 3, phase 3, turn 97] turn speaker Talk 97 JP Oh sorry, I’m, I work with [name architect company]

The part of the meeting where this tension is played out covers rather little ground: a third of the whole meeting, or 106 turns out of a total of 273 turns, is spent on only three issues, up until the culmination of con¶ict in turn 94. Following turn 94, after the junior planner has been ‘symbolically silenced’, issues are dealt with at a quicker pace: the remainder of the meeting ªnalizes thirteen diŸerent issues (each issue constitutes a ‘phase’ of the meeting). But the remaining part of the meeting mainly involves the bureaucrat, the project manager and the second architect, although the junior planner does interject at times. She even initiates another phase (phase 6), but is overall not capable of in¶uencing the pace or setting the direction of the talk as she was up until phase 3. She has lost conªdence and face, and her role is reduced to administrative tasks for the rest of the project.

Post-bureaucratic participation and diŸerence The meeting discussed above brings out some of the issues that come into play in situations where people are expected to abandon expectations of ‘set lines of


responsibility’ and ‘due process’, and reposition themselves as stakeholders in a decision-making process. Aside from the particulars of the meeting just seen, we can point to a number more general problems that aŸect workers in having to participate in face to face negotiations. First, it is fairly safe to assume that few of these encounters will be ‘ideal speech situations’ (Habermas 1987: 145), and that diŸerentials in power will aŸect much of what goes on. This was evident, too, in the meeting above: the bureaucrat especially drew on his formal, legal authority to try and pull the junior planner ‘in line’. In doing so, of course, he manifested a lack of ‘social authority’, or in¶uence achieved on the strength of interpersonal relationships and understandings. Second, the meeting highlighted the likely prominence in participative organizations of issues of diŸerence. The more people from diŸerent spheres of work come together, the more likely they are to have to build commonalities, bridge worldviews and re-asses goals and targets. Importantly, diŸerence is not just an ideational or ideological matter, but also one to do with gender styles, sociocultural behaviours, and other embodied dimensions of the presentation of self. The struggle seen above was no doubt rooted in some participants’ stance on seeing diŸerence as a deªciency, even as deviance. People exhibited an inability to ‘hear’ others and show understanding for where they were coming from, and for where they were hoping to go. Third, showing such understanding has to do with people not just ‘hearing’ others, but also with ‘hearing self’. Put in other terms, acknowledging diŸerence is not just a matter of tolerating otherness, but of re¶exively listening to and dynamically reconªguring performance of self (Taylor 1995). This requirement of re¶exivity and re¶exive self-positioning, in my view, spells out most nearly the depth of the ‘¶exibilization of self’ that the post-bureaucratic organization aspires to. Instead of ¶exibilization standing in contradiction to the organizational need for trust, therefore, this ‘re¶exivization of self’ (Iedema and Scheeres 2003) is an important prerequisite for trust. Here, trust is not some abstract sentiment, hovering above what individuals do and say in the here-and-now: “trust is not just a matter of the existence of certain structures or value systems, but, simultaneously, a matter of the choices and actions of individuated subjects” (Grey and Garsten 2001: 240). In this sense, trust is crucially linked to a re¶exive performance of organizational self. In the post-bureaucratic climate, where predictability and rigidity are disfavoured, ¶exibility and re¶exivity are promoted as new bases for the performance of interaction. As the meeting above showed, the complexity of post-bureaucratic organization lies in the persistence of contradictory value frameworks, expectations, and presentations of self. Put diŸerently, organizational interaction remains shot through with contradictory requirements: participative decision-making, people’s


organizational or legal claims to power, the centrality of face-to-face engagement, increasing emphasis on modes of accountability through abstract data generation and standardized assessment, and so on, and so on. To handle these, people need new kinds of interactive ‘literacies’. The meeting discussed in the next chapter shows a diŸerent outcome to these contradictions. There, the senior planner is able to weave those present into a set of commitments and understandings that, with the help of recasting these understandings into alternative forms, soon gains momentum over and beyond the in¶uence of individuals.

Conclusion This chapter has considered an instance of participative negotiation involving a number of diŸerent stakeholders. The meeting went ‘badly’; that is, it failed to produce common views and understandings; it failed to agree on the direction of the planning process, and it failed to ªrm up tasks to be accomplished to ensure continuation. Instead, those present entered into con¶ict, and one person, the junior planner, became increasingly marginalized and ultimately dismissed. The meeting was presented as an instance of post-bureaucratic negotiation. DiŸerent stakeholders were present to partake in a decision-making process. Each was seen to be driving a diŸerent agenda, and rarely if at all did these diŸerences get acknowledged, let alone resolved. In the process, the three issues with which this chapter started — participation, ¶exibility and trust — transposed into three more over-arching ones: power, diŸerence, and re¶exivity. Each of these, however, is constituted in contradiction: power is inevitably present to provide the impetus for participation, and is the ªrst to be dissimulated. DiŸerence is the basis of negotiation and participation in the ªrst place (no diŸerence, no need to discuss), and yet its presence is also the biggest obstacle to understanding and furtherance. Finally, re¶exivity, or the ¶exibilization of self, is contingent upon a relativization of both power and diŸerence. Hence, and most challenging for ordinary workers, the post-bureaucratic ethos asks no less than a ‘frameshift’ with respect to work, other, meaning, and self (Reddy 1979). Put in discourse terms, post-bureaucratic workers are asked to conceive of work and self as socially constructed, performatively maintained, and organizationally anchored. It is in these terms, then, that the new post-bureaucratic organization may be understood. Traditionally, organizational ‘lines of force’ became signiªcantly embedded in chains of power and control and processes of production ‘outside of the individual’, somewhat reminiscent of Lévy-Strauss’ ‘hot’ societies:

131


In a ‘hot’ society, the cultural code is to a far greater extent ‘outside’ the individual …. One might say that the hot society records itself in an essential way, on the world outside — on nature, on stone, on wax, on clay, on paper, on ªlm, on tape, in its railway networks, its streets, its freeways — whereas the cool society is more nearly written on itself. (Wilden 1980: 408)

Far from wanting to classify it as ‘cool’, I am making the point that post-bureaucratic organization increasingly complements and tests, as it were, its chains of power and control and processes of production with face-to-face enactments. Here, the performativity that workers are being co-opted into is neither about empowerment nor about suppression. Rather, and in no mean degree thanks to digitization of course, post-bureaucracy represents a new modality of organizing that anchors production in the intensiªcation of communication, and through that confrontation and performative intensity of discourses, in the re¶exivization of self. Chapter 6 looks at the senior planner and how he orchestrates the unfolding of his meeting. The diŸerences between the meeting seen above and the one presented there are striking. In stark contrast to the people seen so far, he mixes interpersonal acumen and sensitivity with calculative manipulation and instrumental negotiation, to produce an outcome that ‘satisªces’ everyone.

Chapter 6

The dynamics of post-bureaucratic interaction Resemiotization

[Physical structures] embody social relations in materials more durable than those of face-to-face interaction. (Law and Mol 1995: 281)

Introduction The last chapter considered a stakeholder meeting during which things went wrong. The junior planner was side-lined by the bureaucrat and the project manager, and she was not rescued by any of the others present. In addition to that, the meeting was rather unproductive:1 considerable time was spent discussing only three issues with limited time remaining for other issues, and little transpiring overall (Iedema 1997a). Put in terms of the focal issues that emerged from our consideration of the last meeting in Chapter 5 — power, diŸerence and re¶exivity — this meant the following. First, the men asserted their claims to power in highly unre¶exive and unself-critical ways, and they were unable to handle the diŸerence that the junior planner personiªed and enacted. For her part, the junior planner paid little or no attention to the already ongoing ‘drama’ of power claims and relations that she entered into. She was unable to ‘hear’ or chose to ignore the divergences among the voices at the meeting. Put diŸerently, there was a ‘centrifugality’, or mounting heteroglossia, that neither she nor the others had the resources to address and keep in check. Meanings and interpretations proliferated, going oŸ in diŸerent and contradictory directions. Finally, in view of the unproductive outcome of that meeting for all involved, I think we can say that everyone displayed a lack of re¶exive intervention with respect to their own behaviour and positioning. All those present continued interacting as if each and everyone occupied a natural and necessary speaking position from which they needed or could not diverge.

1. “By means of the category of production it was possible to introduce a fundamental distinction between activities regarded as productive and those regarded as unproductive” (Miller and Rose 1993: 87).


In light of this, let us consider another set of interactions that are part of the same project. Prominent among these interactions is a meeting that is attended by the junior planner’s boss, the senior planner. Present too are the bureaucrat encountered in Chapter 5, again representing the local area health service; the project manager, the engineer, a secretary, and two other architects. To recap from Chapter 5, the aim of the project was to renovate and extend a hospital facility in south Sydney. This involved the hiring of a senior planner, who was to be responsible for negotiating what the facility was to contain and look like. This person was also in charge of writing up a report (the ‘Project Deªnition Plan’ or PDP), that evidences consideration of government guidelines, physical and technical constraints, user expectations, and bureaucratic procedure. The interesting thing about the interactions that the senior planner orchestrates is how he is able to dynamically, ¶exibly and ongoingly reposition himself, bouncing oŸ others’ sentiments, expectations and positionings. In that sense, his is a ‘successful’ example of post-bureaucratic negotiation. What ‘successful’ means here will be addressed in the course of the chapter. Of importance to the argument of this chapter, his ¶exible repositioning is done not only to keep heteroglossia, tensions and disagreements at bay, but also, and probably most importantly, to entwine the interactions into a chain of tangible outcomes. Apart from satisfying the general expectation of ‘adequate progress’, these outcomes serve to weave stakeholders into agreements and commitments, and discourage them from reneging on what was said, meant, or intended. In that sense, the material solidity and conspicuousness of, for example, the draft report or the two-dimensional architectural designs, are manifestations of what the face-to-face meetings have now come to mean. They are ‘evidence’ of what transpired. As material ‘(arti)facts’, they embody the potential to bind participants into common understandings of what the meetings were about. Clearly, these ‘(arti)facts’ create a new ‘real’ by transcending the parameters of the original talk. We are reminded again of Rorty’s notion of humans as toolmakers, and every time we produce a new tool (report, list, design, database) we construe new truths, realities, pathways.2 Thanks to his tactical, calculative and goal-oriented maneuvering, the senior planner is able to choreograph the meetings such that everyone who counts has a 2. For the organizational semiotician Pasquale Gagliardi (1990), ‘artifacts are pathways of action’. By this he means two things. First, the material objects that populate organizations are the outcome or the product of people’s actions. Second, these objects provide pathways for action: while enabling action in some ways, they constrain action in other ways (Bourdieu 1994). Thus, “[e]very organization over time constructs its own cultural identity, and the process of institutionalization has been thus deªned as the progressive infusion of values into an arrangement originally conceived according to a strictly instrumental logic” (Gagliardi 1990: 16). Gagliardi’s bifold conception of the relevance of artifacts for organizational action parallels Reed’s (1997, 1998) emphasis on the ‘material, generative potential of discourse’.

The dynamics of post-bureaucratic interaction

sense of having gained su¹cient ownership over the outcomes to the project to proceed without major hiccups (excepting the meeting seen in the previous chapter). In the terms of that previous chapter, the senior planner turns power, diŸerence and re¶exivity from ‘road blocks’ into ‘strategic resources’, and recontextualizes these into ‘productive outcomes’. As the discussion below demonstrates, he manages to avoid mounting heteroglossia and coax the interaction towards a monoglossia, producing a ‘successful’ instance of post-bureaucratic organizational interaction.3 The term that I propose to describe this (re)materialization of understanding and interaction into a complex practice constituted around alternative materialities is ‘resemiotization’ (Iedema 1997a, 2000, 2001, 2003c).

Post-bureaucratic interaction: Towards monoglossia The “sacred” general aim of face-to-face negotiation and participation is to achieve agreements about the substance of practice and progress (Fischer and Forester 1993; Forester 1989, 1993a/b; also Dryzek 1990; Benveniste 1989). However, when studying face-to-face interactions, it becomes clear such encounters are not simply occasions where members achieve (or fail to achieve) agreements. As Garªnkel noted, “[i]t is misleading and incorrect to think of an agreement as an actuarial device” (Garªnkel 1967: 74). Garªnkel’s remark points to insight into the practical complexity of social and organizational agreement. This complexity is due to two main factors. First, even if agreements are achieved, these are rarely entirely equitable. Generally, they re¶ect the social and power relations of those present, as well as other voices (legal, governmental) whose bearing on the outcomes was to be taken-as-given. In that sense, agreements are frequently instances of a ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu 1991; Timmermans et al. 1998). Second, the conditions, speciªcs and consequences of agreements are rarely fully understood by all stakeholders. The project that I describe here managed to progress not least because stakeholders failed to follow up concerns, question formulations, or ªnd out about details. In what follows, I focus on the interactive strategies of the senior planner, and the ways in which he moves the project towards ‘monoglossia’. Of course, to be able to attribute speciªc aspects of discourse the special status of ‘agreement’ is one of his prime objectives. By the same token, he can’t aŸord any of the stakeholders 3. As Callon and Latour note, analysts often “forget to include in their analyses the fact that ambiguity of context in human societies is partially removed by a whole gamut of tools, regulations, walls and objects of which they analyse only a part. We must now gather up what their analysis leaves out and examine with the same method the strategies which enlist bodies, materials, discourses, techniques, feelings, laws, organisations” (Callon & Latour 1981: 284).

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to feel that they did not have a (for them) reasonable, acceptable say in the shape of such agreement. Thus, the senior planner walks a ªne line: on the one hand, he needs to formulate ‘what the project is about’ in terms which acknowledge diŸerent stakeholders’ interests and concerns, while at the same time defusing and neutralizing contradicting and incommensurable views. It is not surprising that, in light of this, the meeting has a complex dynamics. Relations and positionings are established and contested, identities and tasks are negotiated and agreed, and understandings are formed and challenged. Soon into the meeting it becomes evident that the bureaucrat is anxious to get the project started and the renovation ªnished. His main concern centers around budgetary details (underlined in Extract 6.1). Extract 6.1 [Meeting 1, Phase 1] GB- Let me talk about the budget, I’m not sure [name architect] is aware of this issue, but I’m not sure about those others that might be … . Ehm, this project has a long history and we worked with the ah [name planner’s company], and in fact with [previous name of the same company] in the past and we came up with a design which at that stage the Department of Health couldn’t aŸord and had no cash ¶ow for so they put it on hold, um, and that’s the last report I think that was done which was the 4th of August at a total of 3.652 million.

The bureaucrat also shows that he has a clear idea of what he thinks the senior planner’s job should be: ‘the procedure now is to…’ (Extract 6.2). Extract 6.2 [meeting 1, phase 3] GB- When we were originally talking about it we were talking about a […] fully documented job and vetting down every design issue and then the builder priced it and then, that way, um, the procedure now is to get this thing as quick as possible now that the department has set aside this money and decision was made to do it, DDC, which is basically, that level, not a three-dimensional solution, a good clinical twodimensional solution, and then a speciªcation on the ªnishes and whatever that was necessary, um, and vetting down all the engineering issues that are necessary, and then just throwing it to the builders to um price it …

The bureaucrat does not appear to be too interested in involving all the user stakeholders as he is required to do by the Process of Facility Planning. He is more interested in doing “this thing as quick as possible now that the department has set aside this money and decision was made to do it”. This creates a tension between him and the senior planner. In his haste to get this project into the building construction stage, the bureaucrat shows that he regards the health department policy as unnecessary formality. The senior planner, by contrast, cannot aŸord to do so. He needs to make sure all stakeholders stay ‘on side’. He cannot allow them to create problems later during the project, when

The dynamics of post-bureaucratic interaction 137

the chance for re-negotiation has become absolutely minimal because prohibitively expensive. This means he must consult with all the stakeholders and give them a sense of ownership over what is going on. In this, he needs to include the users of the hospital (the nurses and doctors, as well as managers), before designs are done and resource, space and equipment allocation decisions made. This is how the senior planner raises the issue of involving stakeholders: ‘there are some other players now, in the game, is that right’ (Extract 6.3). Extract 6.3 [meeting 1, phase 2] SP- Now can I can I just John can I just ask a couple of things, one is that, at least try and ªll in some gaps in history here, um, there are some other players now, in the game, is that right, in 1992 there were diŸerent people, I’m talking about the medical side of the thing, uh, … GB- Yeah, the key to [that] SP[Um, do we] have any knowledge about their feelings with respect to the current plans and stuŸ like that GB- They love the current plan SP- Ah! [That’s … uh positive] GB[Huhuh, um,] the director of nurses, sorry the Nursing Unit Manager is consistent SP- So she is she was involved … GB- No no no, he he SP- He, sorry,

In this part of the meeting, the senior planner enacts tentativeness. He uses questions, hesitation devices and repetitions, diminuitives, and person names: ‘can I can I just [name bureaucrat] can I just ask…’; ‘um, there are some other players now, in the game, is that right…’; ‘do we have any knowledge about their feelings’. While the bureaucrat assumes the role of authority (‘let me talk about the budget’ in Extract 6.1), the senior planner assumes a much less authoritative kind of positioning. This comes out again in the following turn somewhat later: Extract 4 [meeting 1, phase 6] SP- Could I ask then I guess basically what is going to happen with this exercise it’s gonna be [name architect] and [name second architect] who are going to do the architectural part of it, I’m really coming in speciªcally to pin down the [planning report] part of that

In this extract, the senior planner raises the issue of what he is there to do: “pin down the PDP”.4 Importantly, this becomes a point of contestation. 4. The Project Deªnition Plan: a report standardly required as second stage in any health department development project (after the viability study and before implementation of the plan).


The following turn by the senior planner raises the same question that he raised in an earlier phase5 of the meeting, except that now he has abandoned his tentative tone in favour of a more assertive and expansive kind of participation: ‘so I’m really interested in knowing from you people how much you feel we need to revisit old sites as it were’. ‘Old sites’ here, of course, refers to stakeholders in the hospital: the users (Extract 6.5). Extract 5 [meeting 1, phase 7] SP- Although obviously there’s an overlap, so I’m really interested in knowing from you people how much you feel we need to revisit old sites as it were, um, the PDP would have to be, at least technically, in accordance with the guideline, the project … process guideline [?] , and it calls for things like “three options” and, you know, all that sort of stuŸ, I guess what I need to know is, to what extent … um, I mean there were options looked at presumably, at that time, um, to what extent we want to revisit all those things, do we want to go back to users and revisit them, do we want to do this thing sort of in remote mode and roam around for comment, I mean just to what extent do you guys feel we need to…, I mean there are two sides to the argument, one is that um there is a series of users who may want an opportunity who may want to look at it again, you may not want ‘em to do that, but that may be the opportunity we’ve got, in which case we’ll then go through a fairly genuine process of looking at it, if there’s a sense that um everybody is basically happy with it and they’re trying to kind of patch it up and get it into line with the agreements and then press on, which I have a sense is at least what [name bureaucrat] is anxious to do GB- hm SP- Do you have any sense at this point of which side of the fence we’re sitting on or …

The senior planner is gradually shifting positioning, and this is evident in three ways. First, his turn at talk here is longer than any of his turns so far. Second, he takes on a rather more authoritative stance: ‘I guess what I need to know is…’. Third, he expresses a judgment about what he sees as proper process: ‘a fairly genuine process’. The bureaucrat’s reaction to this is rather abrupt. He hints that the raising of these issues is not the senior planner’s domain (‘I should probably ask that’) and he changes the topic (‘originally this this [name of the hospital]’; Extract 6.6). Extract 6.6 [phase 8] GB- Oh look I probably should ask that, um, originally this this [name hospital] stands alone now and that is looked and people were looking at the deªciencies of that building and saying that they were enormous, and they looked at a diŸerent site altogether, you might remember [name second architect], and it was talking about building totally new, actually in that stage it was a 40-bed unit, on a completely greenªeld site, and that was priced, and that was the ªrst hurdle we had … the department 5. Phase here is used in accordance with Gregory 1995: 204.


said “look we can’t aŸord that, you have to go back and use, surely you’ve got a 20-bed unit there, it’s got some value, might have some deªciencies but it’s got some value”, so I guess to answer what you’re saying is, we’re constrained by the cost plan …

Providing a good deal of rather irrelevant details about the past, the bureaucrat avoids addressing the senior planner’s concern. Instead, he ªnishes by resituating the issue in relation to cost constraints again: ‘we’re constrained by the cost plan’. The implication is, of course, that the senior planner is not to ‘waste time’ on user consultation and get on with his report, his designs, so that the builders can start construction. The bureaucrat insists that there is no time to throw the whole project open for discussion again, and that we should go with the options which came out of an earlier viability study. In a very subtle way, the senior planner starts to become more assertive (Extract 6.7). Extract 6.7 [meeting 1, phase 8] SP-So, in terms of the guideline, what we would have to do then is demonstrate that of a number of ways of conªguring an addition to an existing building that is the best one GB- Yeah SP- We’d also have to look at the no-build option, which they always put into these things, which basically says ‘can we do nothing and get away with it’, and we would fairly quickly answer that’s not on ..

The ‘no-build option’ is exactly what the bureaucrat is trying to avoid: an e¹cient and eŸective bureaucrat prevents projects from stalling, because stalling creates the risk that the government re-appropriate funds not spent. Having dared raise the ‘no-build option’, the senior planner has lifted the veil on his preparedness to stand up against the priorities of the bureaucrat. Moreover, and further contributing to his eŸort to contain the bureaucrat, soon after he aligns himself with another authority, the Public Works Department, and the ‘list of things [they did] which we were to comply with’ (Extract 6.8). Extract 6.8 [meeting 1, phase 4] PM- Well it’s almost to a sort of Development Application stage plus a bit, isn’t it in a way IB- Yeah SP- Well OK D. A. stage is…, I’m just going on the original call for tenders which was put out by the Public Works Department, or whoever was involved, and it did list a set of things in there which we were to comply with

The tension comes to a head when views on what is required for the project to succeed are openly diverging. In the next exchange, the bureaucrat interrupts the senior planner saying “proof”, which, in his context, refers to ªnancial legitimation. The logic of the senior planner’s talk suggests, by contrast, that he would have


ªnished his sentence with something like ‘a fair consultative process’ (Extract 6.9). Extract 6.9 [meeting 1, phase 8] ?- … SP- And so … yeah, then we would look at whether or not there’s other genuine ways of conªguring it, [phase 9] but what I’m saying is that I, well, we don’t really want to go through a process of prolonging that exercise, but we do need to have … [phase 10] GB- Proof

Importantly, the senior planner does not respond by openly contradicting the bureaucrat on the centrality of cost. Instead, he refers to ‘people in the health department who will look at it’ and he acknowledges the bureaucrat’s concern (‘cost e¹cient way’). But he is clear that ‘there are quite speciªc things we need to do’. Again bolstering his own position by invoking exterior kinds of authority, the senior planner is able to balance the cost concern with ‘service implications’ and a ‘strategic master plan’. When he utters the encompassing and dismissive word ‘junk’, he construes a conªdent control over the ªeld of contestation: ‘we need to gather all that junk together’. In a ªnal leveling of stakeholders and interests, he says: ‘we will have to go back to the stakeholders, whatever we do, both in the department and the hospital’ (Extract 6.10). Extract 6.10 [meeting 1, phase 10] GB- Proof SP- Proof well what will happen is, people over in [health department] are going to look at it and say, “can you convince us that this is still the best way to solve the problem of adding on to an existing building, you know, cost e¹cient way”, and I think that’s really what we have to address, now as I said, there are quite speciªc things we need to do, we need to look at the service implications and since 1992 there has been a strategic master plan or something like that about the […] health services in the area, that has to be looked at I think, Maria did you ªnd anything that was there, I don’t know, [these are things] GB[I’ve, I’ve] I’ve got some ªles in my o¹ce SP- Have you, ok. So we should perhaps gather all that junk together and see what there is. [phase 11] We will have to go back to stakeholders, whatever we do, both in the Department I think and in the hospital, and at least run our ideas past, to this stage again GB- Hmhm. SP- So we’ll have to have some meetings with those people

The dynamics of post-bureaucratic interaction

Thus, going along ªrst with the bureaucrat’s assessment that we need to have (ªnancial) ‘proof’ (for the department of health hierarchy), the senior planner then steers the conversation back towards the issue of the stakeholders. Venturing into territory previously under the control of the bureaucrat, the senior planner now also speaks on behalf of the health department hierarchy (‘they’re going to look at it and say…’). In this extract, then, the senior planner eŸectively shifts his position to one of authority. His overall strategy included positioning himself ªrst as non-authority; then as authority in ideational matters (regarding government guidelines), and ªnally as social-organizational authority, when he asserts that ‘we’ll have to have some meetings with those people’. The dynamic strategy which the senior planner employs to get from nonauthority to authority comprises a subtle mobilisation of resources. This included allowing the bureaucrat to dictate the focus of the meeting (‘cost’ rather than ‘stakeholders’ as meeting topic) and not contest that focus too directly; asking questions rather than making assertions; suggesting answers to these questions without seeming too abrupt; and wearing the bureaucrat’s emphasis on costing and timing down for at least an hour before presenting a conclusion which the bureaucrat can now only contest at the risk of open con¶ict. In this last turn in Extract 6.10, the senior planner integrates both the bureaucrat’s and the users’ concerns into one sentence. Importantly, the focus of contention — that is, who is to be consulted during the project — is linguistically ‘downranked’ (Halliday 1994a: 23/188) into two chained prepositional phrases: ‘both in the department and in the hospital’. Analogous to his use of the term ‘junk’ seen above, this grammatical construction levels and puts at one remove the contesting stakeholder claims. Thus construed, the source of contestation is placed beyond negotiation in a linguistic and a social sense (cf. Halliday 1994a: 76; Martin 1992: 461; Figure 6.1). Moreover, the stakeholders are metonymised (Wilden 1987: 196): they are not named by function (e.g. ‘Dept. of Health bureaucrats’, ‘doctors’, ‘nurses’) but

Figure 6.1 Bringing two contesting voices together

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by their place of employment: ‘the department’, ‘the hospital’ (also van Leeuwen 1993). The reduction in negotiability of the issue in general (a highly contentious formulation of which would be: ‘users should be consulted’) and the metonymisation of stakeholder reference produce dediŸerentiation: the discrepancies between stakeholder positions are construed as having been resolved. The bureaucrat declined to challenge the senior planner at this stage during the project. There were other times of near-open con¶ict, but the senior planner’s subtle and dynamic positioning strategies warded oŸ total break-down. His ªnal planning report and designs were eventually signed oŸ by all stakeholders, opening the way for the ªnal stage of the project which would ªx their ‘agreements’ in stone and concrete: the physical construction of the building. The analysis shows that the senior planner’s formulation is less a ‘faithful summary of what was said’, than a deliberately and strategically construed state of dediŸerentiation. Both ‘we will have to go back to the stakeholders both in the department and in the hospital’ and ‘we will have to have some meetings with those people’ discursively detract from the particular claims to which the powerful stakeholders are committed. Through their deliberate delinguistiªcation in what the senior planner says, the speciªcs of individuals’ claims and views become erased, and tensions are construed as having given rise to equanimity. In the case of the present project, stakeholders (some grudgingly) acquiesce to this rewriting of their views and relationships into a dediŸerentiated and delinguistiªed discourse. In doing so, they agree to become engaged in exercising the new ‘truths’ that have now been created for and by them. As participants in these new practices, the stakeholders come to enact the ‘lines of force’, or the time-space distanciating dimension, of the senior planner’s discourse. Being woven into commitments surrounding the emerging discourse, they co-conªgure their communicativeinteractive space, their knowledges and their practices.

From talk to writing As argued, the senior planner’s formulations considered above (Extract 6.10) construe a state of aŸairs rather than just re¶ect one, by generalizing away from or delinguistifying particulars. Put in those terms, his interactive tactic resembles dynamics at other stages of the project where summative formulations were produced about ‘how people’s views balanced out’, ‘where the project was going’, and so on. In doing so, the senior planner construes ‘discursive landscapes’ that are calculatively and instrumentally ‘productive’: they lead to outcomes. Not an unimportant part of this discursive landscaping is that the details of the meetings are re-framed as the ‘minutes of the meeting’. But because the minutes


are typed up by the project manager’s secretary and the bureaucrat’s in¶uence on her writing is evident, the senior planner’s control over those Minutes is limited. An important dimension of the senior planner’s attendance at the meetings, then, is to do with re-interpreting those minutes (as amicably as possible) such that he is able to pursue his view of what is required for the project to achieve its ‘proper’, equitable solution. In the same way that the senior planner’s summation above (Extract 6.10) arbitrates in a particular way among contesting concerns and preferences, so do the minutes. A related discontinuity arises between those minutes and the senior planner’s subsequent planning report (Iedema 1997a). In the sphere of written communication, then, there are also contests going on. An important facet of the senior planner’s ability to smooth things over, in my view, was the way that he continued to create new framings which moved the discourse away from its loci of contestation. As seen in the previous sub-section, he deploys linguistic resources that help dediŸerentiate people’s views and put them at a remove from ‘combustable issues’. The present sub-section is concerned with how he mobilizes increasingly externalizing ways of making meaning, to again remove the discourse from the ‘here-and-now’ and ‘I versus you’. Instead of exploiting talk to do this, he draws on alternative modes of communication: writing, designing. For example, during the project’s fourth meeting there was a debate over whether the hospital needed two entrances or only one (see Figure 6.2). It shows how one bureaucrat’s (‘OH’) concern about separate entrances for dangerous and harmless patients is taken up by the users (‘U’). Both agree a separate entrance is needed, but the bureaucrat tries to limit expenses by insisting a separate door is su¹cient, and that an entirely separate reception area is unnecessary. In the senior planner’s Project Deªnition Plan report this is framed in terms of ‘allowing for discrete transfer of patients’, and the architectural design is adjusted to show separate doors (Figure 6.2). As Figure 6.2 shows, the meeting talk is speciªc and personalized (‘we do want it to be kept separately’; ‘they’ll be sharing …’). The written report, by contrast, has been depersonalized (‘The patient admission area needs to be accessible’; ‘A seclusion room should be accessible …’). Finally, the architectural drawing further schematizes these issues, while the constructed building itself ultimately spatializes these as behavioural constraints. Figure 6.2 compresses into one schema this trajectory from talk to design. The ªgure also shows schematically that the senior planner manages to move the project along towards a range of outcomes: an architectural design, and, ultimately, a building. With each step, he shifts the focal point of the process towards increasingly durable materialities. At each step reducing the diŸerences among stakeholder views and concerns, and at each step weaving them into a wider


social-organizational networks of relationships and investments, he distances the process from its social-organizational origins. Thanks to this, here-and-now, faceto-face talk is re-articulated into specialized and authoritative discourses, expert practices, technological equipments and resource-intensive spatial designs and structures. meeting 4 OH- Can I just … here because cause some of the other units were designed … have always … committing patients to come through quite separately AP- Oh I bet U- They did but we also thought of saving on having two reception areas, so we [still want a separate entrance but near the] OH- [You don’t you don’t need you don’t need] the extra staff, … U- Again we were only working off the plan OH- Right U- Um, but yes basically we do want it to be kept separately, so that eh the other patients don’t get sort of affected by people who were brought in AP2- We were briefed to have one central access point for vehicles and pedestrian traffic, um, and uh but have two reception functions, and also for the ambulances and the police cars would have an extra emergency a special where they all arrive it’s all in one area if the access is slightly separated U- Slightly separated AP2- Currently on the plan they’re right across the other side of building B- Is yours … AP2- Yes that’s right, and they’ll be sharing the interview/waiting/internment … B- I think on that original design it didn’t quite yet … what you asked for A- We’re maintaining the existing entry, here B- Yeah, and that was the problem A- So so people come into a common lobby, and then then the committed patients are immediately get taken across AP2- Yeah there’s two U- Yeah yeah so there’s a separate entrance for the committed patients, they’re separate but in the same area A- … not even a comon lobby? U- Not even a common lobby A- Oh I see OH- They actually can’t come in through a common lobby AP2- So rather than having two access points … we can have one point but separate eh doors A- Uh yeah

Figure 6.2 From talk to print to design

PDP The patient admission area needs to be accessible by vehicle and needs to be close to the secure unit to allow discrete transfer of patients. A seclusion room should be accessible from both the admission area and the secure unit

design

HO=health official B=bureaucrat AP=architect-planner AP2=assistant planner A= assistant architect U='user'

staff


I have so far argued that the planner is able to stabilize the interactions among stakeholders because he distances the language from local time, space and agency, and re-semiotizes it into modes which draw on materials that are outside and independent of everybody (i.e. they become ‘exo-somatic’). This is not to suggest, of course, that these realizations are necessarily and always less contested or heteroglossic than the original spoken utterances, facial expressions, or other embodied realizations. As Mary Douglas notes, We do not escape from the predicaments that language prepares for us by turning away from the semiotics of words to the semiotics of objects. It would be illusory to hope that objects present us with a more solid, unambiguous world. (Douglas 1992: 6–7; cf. Douglas 1994)

The point that I do want to make is that the senior planner managed to turn a di¹cult set of interactions into an organizationally ‘productive’ outcome: he has been able to produce a planning report with designs and a tender for the builders that got signed oŸ on by all stakeholders.

Conclusion This chapter has considered a kind of post-bureaucratic negotiation that led divergent stakeholder interests and concerns towards an increasingly monoglossic and rematerialized set of outcomes. In that sense, and in contrast to what we saw in Chapter 5, the interactions considered in this chapter were ‘successful’. Successful here means not that all stakeholders were entirely content with where the project was heading, but that they were placed in positions from which they felt they were able to sign oŸ on what the project produced. Their interests and concerns were given due hearing, and their diŸerences were resolved into acceptable compromises. As we saw, some of these diŸerences were scaled by ‘putting the cart before the horse’: rather than allowing stakeholders to negotiate these delicate matters among themselves and ªnd a resolution, the senior planner used discourse to balance claims and impose a resolution. In that sense, he ‘spoke the outcome into being’. Having to re-negotiate people’s commitments to particular ways of naming and framing the project’s progress as a result of how the minutes were written up, the senior planner used his draft reports to consolidate his outcomes in writing and design (Iedema 1999, 2001). Exploiting the naturalizing impact of particular linguistic expressions and of alternative semiotics such as writing and drawing, he was able to set boundaries around the space of contestation, and speak, write and design a governmentality into being. At once productive outcome, consolidation of particular ways of framing the issues, and imposition of rules of conduct, these


re-materializations (the writings and the drawings) gained considerable social and organizational prominence. This prominence was further conªrmed by their increasingly technical, expensive and durable appearance. So far, I have suggested that Chapter 5 presented a case study of an organizational negotiation that failed, and that Chapter 6 presented one that was successful. Neither negotiation, however, is successful when judged against Habermas’ ‘ideal speech situation’ (1987: 145). Chapter 5 showed how someone concerned to ‘speak truth to power’ became marginalized and interactively dismissed. A somewhat diŸerent kind of ‘symbolic violence’ was exacted in Chapter 6 (cf. Timmermans et al. 1998 on ‘dediŸerentiation’). Its case study showed how individuals’ interests and governmental rules were calculatively balanced, and how everyone and everything involved were manipulated into subscribing to an outcome and to the comportments that were implicated by that outcome. Put in those terms, this meeting manifested one person’s (the senior planner’s) mastery over a particular ‘technology of interaction’ (Scheeres 2003), rather than a more morally-grounded enactment of social-organizational relationships. In short, neither case study can be said to contain ‘ideal’ interaction.6 Moreover, the other interactions considered in this study (the management meeting in the educational institution seen in Chapter 3 and the clinical pathway meeting seen in Chapter 4) also fail to live up to Habermas’ ideal speech situation. There, too, speakers spoke and construed new ‘truths’ at the expense of others’ silence, and decisions were made that did not ‘fully’ involve all the others. Seen in that way, none of the interactions presented in this study approximate Habermas’ ‘ideal’. This may suggest that the post-bureaucratic solution to the end of bureaucratic organization — face-to-face negotiation — is not so much a solution as a recontextualization of the problem of organizing. By engaging workers into sites where they can only survive if they appropriate new ways of speaking and selfpresenting, post-bureaucratic organization appears to displace organizational criteria that stipulate what is good work from ‘doing work’ to ‘talking work’. Work performance, in this emerging climate, is thus not measured on the strength of work outcomes alone, but is assessed on the strength of workers’ ability to work, speak and self-present in ways that are demonstrably or rhetorically outcomeoriented and outcome-productive. These rhetorical outcomes are more likely to answer to the knowledging imperatives that the organization has espoused, than to a communicative ethics. 6. This analysis also suggests that it is problematic to accord heteroglossia higher moral or analytical status than monoglossia: both are socially-situated and locally-produced interactive outcomes; both are always already present in representation (language, signs), and neither can be pre-judged as to its underlying ethos.


This means that the interactive organization is a site where interest in and commitment to work are (to be) realized through the production of knowledge about the work. Due to such concern with knowledging and meta-discourse, work is unlikely to be a site where workers have the time to achieve full, mutual understanding and social emancipation. Instead, it is through this knowledging about work that interpersonal relationships are inevitably negotiated. Put in those terms, knowledging is a social performance through which employees become complicit with the emerging knowledge. In that way, knowledging produces new (meta)discourses over which workers, perforce their engaged and committed performativity, come to construe ownership and stewardship. But ethical communication remains but one means, and is unlikely to ever become the end, for knowledging. In this increasingly intense domain of organizational interaction and communication, then, interaction, communication, and the attendant production of knowledge and data, are not performed in the ªrst instance to realize an enhanced moral-ethical order. On the contrary, and as the clinical pathway example sought to demonstrate, stakeholder and team interactions are about increasing the transparency of the work. But, in the post-bureaucratic organization, this transparency of the work has become contingent upon the visibility of the worker. Put diŸerently, in stipulating that its employees produce knowledge and data and other metadiscourses, the interactive organization co-opts and entwines workers in a discursive display — or excludes them if they fail to perform appropriately. Employee visibility, here, becomes the new target of organizational monitoring and audit, by linking it into the production of organizational transparency. Moving away from the sphere of situated interaction and knowledge production, Chapter 7 discusses the eŸects of this knowledging, by considering in more detail how the organization is written (Smith 1990). Central here are the ways in which organizations store data and enact modes of record keeping. It is this business of what is put in the ªle to which Chapter 7 now turns.

Chapter 7

Recording the organization

In a famous sentence, Kant asserts that ‘we shall be rendering a service to reason should we succeed in discovering the path upon which it can securely travel’. The ‘sure path of science’, however, is, inevitably, in the construction of well-kept ªles in institutions that want to mobilize a larger number of resources on a larger scale. (Latour 1986a: 15)

Introduction This chapter moves away from situated interaction towards the documentary dimension of post-bureaucratic organization. I want to do this, because, as noted in Chapters 5 and 6, the increasingly frequent and intense kinds of organizational interactivity as enacted in stakeholder and team meetings do not occur in and for themselves only. These interactive engagements are not just (meant to be) about any kind of talk, or allow participants to just produce (more) talk. Rather, the interactions that were exempliªed in Chapters 5 and 6 are crucially about textualizing work, or producing discourse about work. I have deªned textualization in previous chapters as incorporating two aspects of human practice. First, textualization is the face-to-face negotiation of meta-discourses about work. Second, it is the translation or ‘resemiotization’ of such meta-discursive negotiations into writing, forms, tabulations, designs and perhaps even structural or architectural designs and constructions. Put concisely, textualization is a post-bureaucratic practice that requires visibility of the worker (enactment) through which it achieves transparency of the work (document). With previous chapters having privileged enactment, the present chapter turns to this second dimension of post-bureaucratic organization. But let us ªrst pursue in some more detail the relationship between the rising intensity of interaction in post-bureaucratic organization and its connection to the need for documentation. Despite its insistence on ‘the visibility of the worker’, I do not think that the post-bureaucratic organization uses the rising intensity of face-to-face interaction as merely ‘the next’ technique of organizational subjugation. In previous chapters, I argued that this intensity aŸords new and diŸerent opportunities for diŸerent kinds of people (du Gay 1996a; Scheeres 2003). While such intensity can be di¹cult for many people, I argued that it also oŸers the potential for workers to enact new kinds of relationships and produce new selves


and knowledges (Iedema and Scheeres 2003). But perforce the prominence postbureaucracy gives to individual performance, of course, the kinds of organizational interactions that go on in team and stakeholder meetings are occasions for competing, socializing, negotiating and the like, as well as for ‘public scrutiny’ (GoŸman 1963, 1972). Seen in that way, organizational face-to-face interactions are occasions and opportunities for the display of discursive and interactive acumen (Bernstein 1990). Thus, as sites where workers share new knowledges and publicly negotiate their ‘informal politics’ (Heckscher 1994: 22), these meetings induct people into complex ‘technologies of interaction’ where they perform new and sophisticated discursive displays (Scheeres 2003). We can speak here of ‘technologies of interaction’ because these interactive displays are to be translated into knowledge, and into tangible outcomes: teams are to produce ‘local’ solutions, document their decisions, and propagate their new knowledges (Hecksher and Donnellon 1994). As workers negotiate with each other to turn their talk into written problem solutions, planning reports, clinical pathways and the like, their talk as visibility transforms into writing as transparency. At the heart of this transformation is the dynamic tension between people’s personal experiences and insights, and generalizations and abstractions that are organizationally ‘meaningful’. Here, people shift “between accounts as stories, explanations and reasons for conduct one the one hand and accounts as coded representations, records, often in the form of numbers, on the other hand” (Munro 1996: 2). This very tension was addressed in Chapter 4, where the nominal group was shown to be the site where these tensions and dynamics are registered. It is at the level of the nominal group where decisions manifest themselves about whether to conªgure what we talk about as known, or as requiring more negotiation. Clearly, as they deªne, categorize, order and abstract from practice (and from talk), records fuel contestation and struggle over their interpersonal and ideational boundaries, and over the inclusions and exclusions that these boundaries create. Information in this sense is not the outcome of a neutral recording function. It is itself a way of acting upon the real, a way of devising techniques for inscribing it … in such a way as to make the domain in question susceptible to evaluation, calculation and intervention. (Miller and Rose 1993: 81)

The present chapter considers the tensions and struggles around one kind of record: the clinical patient chart, also referred to as ‘medical record’. As part of that discussion, I argue that the practices and resources that populate this domain of record production and record keeping reveal to an important extent how we ‘do organization’, or how we perform and negotiate the nexus between visibility and transparency. The way we structure our records, and the regimes of notation that we impose on workers, are indexes of how we organize our organization. On the


one hand, the records can comprise ready-made forms with pre-established categories and ‘ªelds’ to be ªlled in, which in turn are linked to carefully (pre)designed data bases, spread sheets, and so on. But records can also entail less predetermined kinds of notation and documentation, including ‘free text narrative’. I am centrally concerned here with exploring this particular tension in record and data production: the tension between notational freedom and restriction.

Record-keeping and organizational complexity The administrative power generated by the nation-state could not exist without the information base that is the means of its re¶exive self-regulation. (Giddens 1985: 180)

Records are the information base of the modern state and of the modern organization. They are both the means and result of continuous notation, summarizing, re-documentation, and information dissemination. Records are deªned here as those organizational documents which do discursive work aiming to construct and project an ideational and ‘factual’ depiction of what goes on (Smith 1990). As examples, we can think of simple lists of items; a time schedule or work roster; an inventory, or a description of an organizational incident or accident. These instances and practices of record-keeping all have their own ways of construing an (apparently) unproblematic image of (aspects of) the organization. Embedded in their ordinariness is a ‘facticity’ (cf. van Dijk 1988). This ‘facticity’ is (or may be) an eŸect of the discursive-material manifestation of the record. The planning report seen in Chapter 6 was in eŸect a record of a series of planning meetings and their decisions. The report assumed a ‘factitious’ discursive shape and material manifestation that was contingent upon the dediŸerentiation of stakeholders’ interests and concerns. This dediŸerentation, in turn, was achieved by the (partial) delinguistiªcation of the particulars to which stakeholders had drawn attention and for which they had mounted justiªcations. The end-eŸect — the formal planning report, its costings and the architectural designs — represented a metaphor that aimed to (and did) ‘satisªce’ all present. In subscribing to the planning report as metaphor of consensus, stakeholders entered into a normativity, a set of ‘lines of force’, that wove their understandings, knowledges and identities into new conceptions of what was real and true. They signaled that this was now how the world was now to be understood and known by people at one and more removes away from them in space and time: the health department, the builders, future clinical staŸ, the patients and their families. Importantly then, if we take records to be all those documents that record what people do and decide, it becomes apparent that they do not only serve those doing the work, but also and especially perhaps those at one or more removes

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from the work. That is, they serve those who use a bird’s eye view of a particular organizational domain for the purpose of assessing where the organization is up to in terms of its resources, its staŸ, its outcomes, its products, and its targets. Records, in that sense, are intimately implicated in relationships of scrutiny and accountability;1 they are “both intermediaries in the accountability process and evidence of it” (Yakel 2001: 234). As both intermediaries and evidence of accountability relationships, records have to do all kinds of boundary-crossings: from the shop ¶oor to the management ¶oor; between departments; from the organization to other organizations, and so on. A term used for objects that travel like this is ‘boundary object’ (Wenger 1998). As boundary object, the record is portable (or sendable) as ªle. But to enable this portability, the record’s discourses must answer to an economy of representation, comprising numbers, percentages, codes, visualizations, and other meta-semiotic signs2 that are not anchored to speciªc people or places. The discursive force behind their economy of representation gives rise to records often (if not always) being compiled in the spirit of ‘neutrality, objectivity, dispassion and expertise’ (van Maanen and Pentland 1994: 54), rather than in the spirit of common understanding, dialogue and re¶ection. This renders them liable, of course, to being window-dressing and ‘boundary maintaining’, rather than usefully representing the exigencies and peculiarities of what they seek to record (Power 1997: 124). At the same time, and despite the ‘construction of documentary reality’ that is inherent to them (Garªnkel 1967), records are central to the administration of complex environments. For those who understand them from within a functional(ist) perspective, records can be seen to manage the proliferation of such boundaries, ªelds and particulars. A “method for administering the accumulation of men [sic]” (Foucault 1977: 221), the record is able to 1. Put in Garªnkel’s terms (1967), “` ac-count-ability’ is people’s ability to account for something, and thereby normalize it (render it count-able). Thus, an organization “organizes its activities to make its properties as an organized environment of practical activities detectable, countable, recordable, reportable, tell-a-story-about-able, analyzable — in short accountable” (Garªnkel 1967: 33; his italics). 2. Inherent in its boundary-crossing essence and its meta-semiotic discourse is another powerful aspect of the record: its re¶exive potential. As records translate phenomena into ‘facts’, they engender representations of these phenomena. These representations are more complex than those who either revere them as ‘facts’ or those who revile them as ‘constraining constructs’ acknowledge. Perhaps thanks to the distancing normativities in which they are constituted, records and their discourses embody a re¶exive potential that is inherent in their transposition of the everyday into an ‘othering’ discourse. Such ‘othering’ discourse alters the relationships of what is represented, and foregrounds some elements at the expense of others. Often in tension with the kinds of representations with which we have identiªed, they create a space for estrangement and renewal.


‘externalize the organizational memory’ and thereby enable us to manage and maintain complexity.3 the invention of the ‘record’, the ªling cabinet and cross-referencing and indexing systems made it possible for an increasingly complex organization to ‘handle’ an increasing number of clients. Such records are highly e¹cient ‘externalized’ memories — making the continuous handling of one individual by many diŸerent organizational members possible without the need for constant face-to-face contact between those members. (Berg in press)

Here, Berg conceptualizes organization as a complex of interactive and discursive practices, and, for him, the record plays a nodal role in their structuring, their rationalizing. We could think about this role too as ‘containing’ the heteroglossia that aŸects organizations and that threatens to disperse their continuities and linearities. In that sense, records contain what the organization can mean. On the other hand, and conceptualized from within an interactive and not a functionalist perspective, records are ultimately also socio-technical constructs (Berg 1998b). That is, records emerge opportunistically, much as did the planning report seen in Chapter 6. They are an admixture of contested social and organizational claims, interests and concerns, and these antagonisms are bleached out through dediŸerentiation, delinguistiªcation and time-space distanciatiation, potentially leaving contestation and frustration in their wake. As socio-technical construct, the record is never a true and accurate representation of what happened. It is inevitably a produced and specialized economy of social-organizational representation: a collection of codes, abbreviations, numbers, visual representations, and so on that happened to ‘satisªce’ those present. But whether seen as functional container of what organization can mean, or as socio-technical accident emerging from the stochastic moleculars of interaction, records and the record-keeping practices that buttress their ‘real-ness’ do give insight into the ‘lines of force’ that organizations expect workers to sustain. This point may become clearer if we exemplify it with reference to clinical medicine as it is practised and recorded in acute care hospitals. Again, I use health care to put ¶esh on the notions put forward here, because I think that the issues pertaining to record-keeping in hospitals are emblematic of struggles over facticity construction and accountability in other spheres of work. Although some hospital sites (and

3. It was in that role that the record, or what Foucault calls ‘these ignoble ªles’, provided the origin for the complexity of the modern nation state: “[i]f the economic take-oŸ of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men [sic] made possible a political take-oŸ in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology” (Foucault 1977: 221).

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numerous primary care practitioners) now use electronic records that are linked into wider networks, record-keeping about the details of hospital care is mainly done by means of the paper-based medical record. This medical record tends to consist of a rather disorganized ªle containing a range of diŸerent things: forms, letters, test results, X-rays, and so on (Berg 1996; Berg and Bowker 1997). Some of these are written by doctors in their shorthand; others are written out in more narrative form by nurses or dietitians (Crawford et al. 1998). While the patient is in hospital, these ªles are kept near the bedside, or they are in transit from one ward to another, from the consultant’s o¹ce to hospital admission, or on their way between pharmacy and intensive care. When the patient leaves, they are stored deep in the vaults of the hospital, if they have not been mislaid. Ultimately, the paper record is the only source of information that we (those with legal access!) have for understanding what goes on in clinical-medical care. In the next section I want to take some time to look at the speciªcs of the paper-based medical record. In the course of this discussion, I will ¶esh out the suggestion I made at the start of this chapter about how a mode of record keeping can project a range of assumptions about what is organization, what is work, and what is the role of the worker as the interstice between work and organization. Important here are the degree to which records deploy distal or delinguistiªed meanings; that is, the extent to which these records require and enable workers to retrospectively monitor and prospectively address the eŸectiveness of their practices, or encourage the coordination and negotiation of that practice, and so on. The medical record, I will suggest, is problematic, because it rarely manages to satisfy the criteria just listed. It fails to construe an organizational role for itself, outside of its very limited and time-bound focus on and concern with the individual patient-clinician relationship.

The medical record In many hospitals around the world, clinical-medical practice makes use of paperbased medical records. These records generally consist of a ªle which contains a range of documents: forms, letters, test results, X-rays, and so on (Berg 1996, 1998a; Berg and Bowker 1997; Shryer 1993; Montgomery Hunter 1991). Many of the documents are hand-written and often include acronymic, numerical and visual codes and shorthand; others are written out in a more ¶owing, narrative form (especially contributions by nurses and allied health staŸ). Essentially, however, the way in which clinical practice ‘notates and informates itself’ remains limited to individuals inscribing codes and narratives on paper. The resultant rather chaotic looking ªles accumulate around the bed of the patient before being stored in the vaults of the hospital, unless they are mislaid as a result of their travels from one ward to another, from the consultant’s o¹ce to hospital admission, or


on their way between pharmacy and intensive care.4 Let us consider brie¶y some extracts from such a paper-based medical record to appreciate the linguistic dimension of its discourse. The following (anonymized) entry (Extract 7.1) derives from the record of a patient who died in Intensive Care (ICU). The entry summarizes how this patient planned her death but was found by a relative, rushed to hospital, and resuscitated. The entry begins with a thanks to the treating haematologist who wrote earlier in the record. Extract 7.1 1215 thanks for above … highly organized overdose, has organized funeral & cremation as well as ªnances left a note took [details of drugs] found by [illegible] this morning (0830) (son)

One issue of interest here is the absence (elision) of personal pronouns referring to the patient. Thus, while the patient is clearly the focus of this recount, she is ‘pronominally presumed’ (Martin 1992) as discourse participant. With that in mind, we can say the record’s discourse is doubly localizing: the patient references at the top of each page show it is ostensibly about this individual patient, and the clinicians’ writing construes her ‘textual presence’ as so natural as to obviate pronominalization (Mühlhäusler and Harré 1990). As my analysis of some of the entries in this medical record unfolds, it will become evident that this ‘localizing’ is a recurrent and persistent feature of clinical notation. Following the above brief recount shown in Extract 7.1, some other statements follow about what was done to the patient. There are drawings of the chest, and more codes and numbers. The writer in question then shifts from talking about a sequence of past events into a description of the drugs which the woman took. This is followed by: Extract 7.2 Impression: suicide attempt likely because of poor symptom control … IN THE EVENT OF CARDIO-PULMONARY ARREST NOT FOR CPR NOT FOR INTUBATION [signed]

4. Research has shown that paper medical records are on average unavailable to clinicians for 30% of the time they are needed (Coiera 1997, 1999).

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In this way, and in the case of this particular doctor, comments about the speciªc patient and the drugs taken lead to a summative conclusion (‘Impression’) which bears out this doctor’s expert medical judgment5. The individualizing notes were thus in fact arguments supporting an unfolding interpretation, culminating in a medical ‘thesis’. This thesis, in turn, is followed by a directive (‘ [this patient is] Not for cardio-pulmonary resuscitation’). In fact, the unfolding of these comments is quite common, in so far individual references serve as a starting point for the formulation of a medical opinion which incurs practical consequences (Montgomery Hunter 1991). In this way, too, the speciªc is recontextualized into the ‘organizational’, in so far as that what is written becomes important for the patient’s management. Put in medical terms, the patient’s history and the clinician’s physical examination culminate in an expert Impression that has implications for what happens to the patient. Despite this linguistic recontextualization from personal details into medical thesis, however, and despite the directive intent of the comments following such thesis (‘not for CPR’), the organizing in¶uence of the record as discourse (seen as the totality of paper materiality, language, visuals, and so on) remains limited. Its reach only extends to those who can decipher its writings, who can recognize the signatures, who can bring to bear expert knowledges on its reasoning and decision-making, and, last but not least, those who have access to the record as material phenomenon. Let us return to the record’s contents for a moment. Following on from the above notes, the record continues in a diŸerent handwriting, presumably from one of the registrars. This discourse shows a somewhat higher degree of nominalization than that of the previous author: Extract 7.3 ICU admission Deliberate MS [illegible] Known CAL MM [illegible] palliative care Smoker Allergic to penicilin Found by son with suicide note

Some of the registrar’s notes repeat what the senior doctor wrote a page earlier, except in more nominalized form (‘took [drugs]’ becomes ‘deliberate MS’). Taking into account what was said in Chapter 4 about nominalization and knowledge 5. Junior doctors are not always able to derive a clinical conclusion from the diagnostic details they record. More senior doctors look out for who signed oŸ on the comments to establish the author’s level of seniority, and the ‘credibility’ of their ‘Impressions’ and clinical acumen (paediatrician, personal communication).


making, we can read this nominalizing as a ‘settling in’ (a becoming taken-asgiven) of the meanings at stake here. The registrar again reproduces some of the chest drawings, adds more codes (‘GCS E3 M1 V1’) and numbers, and equally ªnishes with an ‘Impression’ and a directive intended for the intensive care unit’s nurses [‘to keep GCS ≥ 8’]. This note again bears out the generic structure Observation^Conclusion^Directive already commented on above. Another person, also a doctor, then adds their writing: ‘History noted’, followed by some technical remarks and observations about how the patient is doing with some more codes and numbers. This writer ªnishes with the statement: Extract 7.4 At the moment nil beds available; will pass this patient to my ‘list’, if bed comes up we’ll admit her. Meanwhile keep on [illegible] infusion. [signed]

For its part, ‘history noted’ abstracts the details noted by the previous doctors (as ‘history’). The notation then shifts back to the here-and-now of the unfolding care (‘at the moment’, ‘meanwhile’). One part is about what this author will do regarding the patient’s bed situation; the other part is about what others should do to the patient (‘keep on … infusion’). A little further on, a nurse notes in capitals: ‘Pt had bed bath this am, tolerating ¶uids as per chart, IDC removed at 100hrs. IVC tissued, now resited (r) hand…’. This comprises a combination of reporting about what the nurse did, and about how the patient was. Both the past tense (‘had’, ‘tissued’, ‘resited’) and the person reference (‘Pt’) locate the nurses’ language in the unfolding present. The next page is a ‘pain service’ page and it starts as follows: Extract 7.5 ‘Reviewed patient re pain [illegible]. Elderly lady who is quite drowsy at this time. Describes pain as dull on the middle but can be sharp when she sighs…’.

Below this a doctor comments: Extract 7.6 ‘concern about why it took so long to have pain relief before overdose — inadequate pain control’.

While our focus on individual clinicians’ notes revealed what we could call a generic pattern, these Extracts 7.4 to 7.6 contain recounts of a more varied nature. We learn about details of patient care, descriptions of drugs and of the patient’s condition, directives regarding the substance of the nursing care, prospective statements about what people plan to do (‘if bed comes up we’ll admit her’), as well as inter-professional comments (‘why it took so long’). All these elements are chained together in the record, from one page to the next, as and when the care unfolds.

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This moment-by-moment unfolding of the paper-based medical record makes it resemble what we might call a ‘multi-person diary’: an unprocessed and disparate collection of diŸerent people’s thoughts, accounts, impressions, plans. Much like a diary, too, the medical record’s principal mode of organization is chronological (the top of the pile is the most recent, unless users re-order the notes) and cumulative (the more serious the problem and the sicker the patient, the more writing). In short, in terms of its linguistic content, material arrangement as well as its visual presentation, this record’s discourse individualizes, localizes, and temporalizes. But, and as seen, the curious nature of the paper-based medical record lies not merely in the chaining together of diŸerent entries, artifacts and voices as time unfolds. We also notice that the range of communicative purposes of the entries expands as the care unfolds. Thus, the entries are not just bits of technical information about the patient for the attention of subsequent carers. The entries also include greetings between carers, and judgments (at times negative) about the care provided by those other carers. For instance, we see ICU (Intensive Care Unit) doctors not only communicating with nurses about the direction of the patient’s care (“to keep GCS ࣙ8”), but also with other specialist doctors outside ICU (the haematologist): “thanks for the above”. Then we see clinicians communicating not only with pharmacy regarding drug dosages and types, or with allied health staŸ regarding specialized care (psychological, social, physiotherapeutic), but also with pain management people about the standard of their palliative care (“why it took so long to have pain relief”). Put in these terms, the paper-based medical record embodies an intricate canvas of multi-directional and multi-functional communications. And problematically, this communicative intricacy does not appear to be ‘managed’ by the formal structure of the documentation, other than by the occasional coloured sticker announcing clinical specialization, dates scribbled in the margins, and the way the papers are arranged in the folder. Certainly, the shapes and colours of forms become more varied as the care intensiªes, but these variations do not illuminate the intricacy of the communications or counter-balance the practical complexity of the care provided. Overall, the dense and detailed weave of comments about what is happening, the ad hoc mode of documentation and ªle management, and the ‘open-ended’ nature of inscription all contribute to the paper-based medical record’s organizational peculiarity and localness. Together, it would appear that these characteristics make the paper-based medical record a highly user-, reader-, and organization-unfriendly document.

Recording the organization 159

Enhancing the organizational dimension of clinical notation Almost 40 years ago, Garªnkel commented that ‘there are good reasons for bad clinical records’ (Garªnkel 1967). The insight behind this statement was that diŸerent people have diŸerent understandings about what a record requires from them, and that its categories or ‘ªelds’ can elicit very diŸerent entries depending on who is writing. while records are taken to represent concise and even clear accounts of actions and events, they are constructed through an imperfect procedure of negotiated understanding of how to ªt the rule to its exemplars. (Cook-Gumperz and Messerman 1999: 145)

The formal parameters that are set around what goes into the record and what does not are in eŸect constraints placed on authors. How individuals interpret those constraints is often dependent on the communities of practice they are a member of; that is, people’s professional sub-cultural allegiances (Degeling et al. 1998). The paper-based medical record is peculiar, however, in that it places very few formal constraints on its authors. As noted above, the handwritten entries show variable kinds of content, various levels of legibility, and emerge from diŸerent notational attitudes towards the record.6 While clinical sites are beginning to produce guidelines about how clinicians are to use and ªll in records, generally the controls that are exerted are profession-speciªc rather than organizational-managerial (e.g. John Hunter Hospital 1999). Also, the levels of control over whether and when clinicians enter information are limited, with the result that information is often entered late, incorrectly, or not at all (Coiera 1997). Lastly, there is rarely formalized control over what those who have legitimate access to the record do with it, how or whether they (re)arrange the documents, when or whether they add or take documents away. Ironically, then, as mode of record-keeping, the current paper-based medical record solves Garªnkel’s dilemma by setting few if any limits around or entry-points for what and how those who have legitimate access to the medical record can or must write. The paperbased medical record may be ‘bad’ for several reasons, but not the ones originally outlined by Garªnkel. From an organizational perspective, the discourse of the medical record remains too close to the peculiar logic of the individual scribing clinician, and the dynamics of the unfolding disease and clinical treatment, to provide easy insight into the general patterns of the clinical work provided, the patterns of disease 6. In clinical circles it is common knowledge that for fear of litigation doctors notate minimally or not at all, while nurses notate maximally to create protective evidence (nurse clinician, personal communication).


development, or the patterns of resource usage. The paper-based medical record displays a high level of historical speciªcity, but it is precisely this authenticity that gives little away about how the diŸerent aspects of treatment for this one patient compare to those given to other patients with the same condition. While medical record research is common,7 the current record makes it di¹cult to generalize about the kinds of care and resources that are provided to multiple and migrating patients, and to understand particular episodes of treatment in terms of what generally goes on in a ward, a service, or a hospital. Were the record organized to accommodate not merely notations about the care for particular patients and particular carers, but also notations that simultaneously embodied a relevance beyond these individuals, it would be able to mediate ‘the local’ circumstances of the individual patient and carers, and the ‘distal’ perspective of clinical care delivered to a population of patients over time. The ‘local’ centres on how the patient and the care are progressing, including the diagnostic shadow play that clinicians frequently engage in tracing and linking forms of evidence. The ‘distal’ centres on the relationships between instances of disease and care, such as are reported as clinical research, as carepaths, as resource usage records, as policies and guidelines, and so on.8 One way of mediating such local and global concerns is to pre-structure the record around separate headings, such as ‘nursing notes’, ‘medical notes’, ‘allergies’, ‘relevant carepath(s)’, ‘discharge plan’, and so on. This way of organizing notation would more easily enable people to inter-relate speciªc information with generalized information. It could help link particular clinical decisions to epidemiological information about a

7. Utopianizing its use and application, Rose notes the following about the medical record: “As the medical record meticulously inscribes the details of the individual history of the patient in a stable, transferable, comparable form, it renders the suŸerings of the sick person knowable in a new way, in relation to the population of patients of which he or she forms an element. Doctors could now observe a whole series of instances of any particular condition. Observed empirical regularities could now be constructed between symptoms at diŸerent levels … . Further, one could now, for the ªrst time, observe the similarities and diŸerences between symptoms in diŸerent individuals at any one time and over time. This provided the conditions for a statisticalization and normalization of diseases: a new classiªcatory system, which would reduce the uncertainty inherent in medical diagnosis by the location of the individual facts of any particular case within a ªeld structured by norms” (Rose 1994: 60). 8. For some, the connections that we may establish between what happens in the here-and-now and these more distal discourses are overly tenuous, perhaps questionable, and a matter for people who have little insight into, interest in, or knowledge of good care such as managers, accountants and policy makers. This chapter argues that the local and the distal are inseparable, and that no situated action occurs in isolation from more distal decisions and eŸects (Latour 1996b). To deny the relevance of what happens in the here-and-now for more distal concerns and vice versa is, in eŸect, to render opaque these existing inter-dependencies.


disease; it could relate the speciªcs of patient care to the diŸerent organizational resources required (staŸ, drugs), or their appropriateness (following particular procedures, guidelines, regulations, benchmarks or plans). The current paper-based medical record’s inability to yield an easy view of the totality or of the diŸerent dimensions of care provided (especially in cases of very sick people whose records are often centimeters thick), is not generally seen as a problem by clinicians (with exceptions: e.g. Codman 1917; Feinstein 1967). Clinicians’ interest is in the immediacy and dynamics of the disease, its progressive response to treatments, the detailed and ‘real-time’ observations made by visiting doctors or responsible nurses. As experts, they continually reason about diseases and think about treatments, and recording these tentative thoughts and actions in a formal, public record is more often seen as administrative burden than as medicine’s means to studying and improving its own practices. In contrast, for those not intimately involved with clinical care and whose interest is in how the clinical work was done, how much it cost in terms of resources used, who contributed to it, how the care for this patient compared to that of others, and so on, the lack of generalization and organization that typiªes the current medical record renders it a daunting and inaccessible document. The tension, then, is between those who see value in recording their practices in their moment-to-moment unfolding, and those who are trying to develop a broader sense of what the care in a particular organization is about. Currently, the paper-based medical record favours those most closely associated with and knowledgeable about a speciªc disease problem, excluding most others: the paper record is hard to read if one hasn’t been part of the exchanges surrounding the notations; it is hard to link to speciªc people due to their illegible writing and signing; it is often hard to ªnd because often displaced around the organization or in transit as part of processes one may not know about, and it is hard to trust because one may not be familiar with the particular ethos that guides the notations. Thus, if perhaps not for those intimately involved in the care and already knowledgeable about it, the medical record is inhospitable in a number of ways to outsiders wanting to understand or re¶ect on the clinical, organizational, and managerial dimensions of patient care. Coiera puts this problem in the following terms: The amount of patient data stored around the world in this [paper medical] record system is bewilderingly large, complex and far ¶ung. Every primary care practitioner’s o¹ce contains patient records. Every hospital has dedicated professional staŸ whose main focus is to act as custodian and guide through its record store. …this information exists in a multitude of forms, sometimes unintelligible except to those who created the record, and usually not accessible to anyone except those who are caring for individual patients. Oftentimes, it is not even accessible to these individuals as records are misplaced, lost, or being used by someone else. It is also the case that one of the purposes of information is to help the growth of knowledge. With the medical

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record in such a form, it can only be a poor participant in this wider process. (Coiera 1997: 58/9)

While an increasing number of people hail the ‘ecological dexterity’ of paper and its ‘micro-mobility’ in relation to what individuals do (LuŸ and Heath 1998; Sellen and Harper 2001), the paper materiality of the medical record renders it a questionable aid to modern health care organization (Cox 1999: 148). Notwithstanding its local beneªts of adaptability and manoeuvrability, paper is notoriously bad at keeping up with the current pace of organizational and social change, with the growing number of domains of social and organizational life being ‘informated’, and with the increasing pace and complexity of ways in which kinds of information are needing to be linked, accessed and changed. Paper’s strengths are local, aŸording spatial ¶exibility (it can be spread out in front of us), materialization of individuals’ thought processes (both as scribbles on paper and as piles of paper), and as physical manifestation (through its shape) of particular real life situations or relationships. But when it comes to producing a representation of what goes on in a more abstract way, to retrieve patient or care data for example, we ªnd that crucial and often life-and-death matters are entrusted to a medium whose role is not merely to serve speciªc individuals in their work, but to systemize processes across the full complexity that is clinical care. There is now clear evidence that clinical workers routinely fail to ªnd pieces of information that they need during a patient consultation from the paper medical record … [in one case] data was searched but not found in 81% of cases. In 95% of these cases the medical record was available during the consultation. The categories of missing information were laboratory tests and procedures (3%), medications and treatments (23%), history (31%), and other (10%) … . (Coiera 1997: 64)

The answer, for Coiera, is a digital or electronic patient care information system (PCIS). Such a record would be accessible from a number of screens around the clinical setting as well as from the o¹ces of managerial staŸ. Mediating the clinician’s perspective on care with the organizational perspective on care, it arranges the incoming information under separate headings, and allows a number of ‘cuts’ at the information. Thus, diŸerent clinicians are able to contribute their narrative, numerical or visual accounts about the patient’s progress, and we can enter the record asking for everything that doctor A has contributed to it. Or we can ask for the resource expenditure that a patient, a Ward or a specialized service has incurred. In this way, the PCIS becomes the interstice, the mediator, between the continuum of a patient’s care on the one hand, and the organization of care for a population of patients by a service constituted of a population of clinicians (and non-clinicians), on the other hand. The only way the PICS can achieve this mediation, however, is by imposing generalizations about the kinds of things clinicians might want to say about their


care and about their patients, and by setting rules about what kinds of information go in and where. As noted above, such regularizing and generalizing involves pre-categorizing aspects of clinical care, thereby limiting the number of ways in which an event or action can be recorded. Categorization may diŸerentiate some things, but it blurs the distinctions between other things: categorization ‘dediŸerentiates’ (Timmermans et al. 1998). The ªeld ‘medical notes’ may not be seen to su¹ciently diŸerentiate levels of medical seniority, for example, or may not be sensitive to the increasing overlap in medical intervention of nursing and medicine. No amount of delicacy and reªnement can solve such problems, however, and they are unlikely to go away for all people who claim a stake in the information and knowledge produced.9 Ultimately, any categorization (including currently used ones) presupposes negotiation, agreement and compromise among clinicians about the relevance of categories to the care provided and to the information that is entered. The very process of creating a record in accordance with some set of rules or criteria for what makes for a suitable inclusion in such a record actually results in a restatement of the rules on a situated case by case basis. In practice this requires a process of negotiation between the categories and the personnel involved. (CookGumperz and Messerman 1999: 146)

Given the professional fragmentation of health care (Degeling et al. 1998, 2001), such negotiations are not easy and only rarely successful. It is perhaps for this reason that the ‘single-voiced’, integrated, uniªed record has been rejected by some commentators as a utopian impossibility. “The dream of the unmediated record dates from the earliest medical computing applications … and has of course never been realized” (Berg and Bowker 1997). For Berg and Bowker, the current, fragmented medical record can never be adequately recontextualized into a uniform phenomenon. Berg and Bowker go so far as to say it should never be uniform, because “the record … aŸords a highly complex temporally distributed division of labour”. On their reading, the paper-based medical record provides an important and functional lens through which organizational complexity can be maintained: “The record not only plays a generative role in the organization of the clinic, it also legitimates this organizations’ design”. So medical records do not have a single job; they have to be conªgured in such a way that a set of diŸerent organizations are serviced by them. [Thus] there is a real multiplicity of organizations produced by the records, which con¶icts with a rhetoric of singularity (the convergence of traces on … a single ideal organizational context)’. (Berg and Bowker 1997)

9. Language itself of course imposes categories with which we ‘make do’, or we change them. We do not normally reject language as an insu¹cient technology.


Berg and Bowker’s challenge to the uniform medical record with an organization-wide set of categories or ‘ªelds’ is grounded in their conviction that the current complexity of clinical practice is appropriate, that the diŸerent and at times con¶icting prerogatives of the various authors should be respected, and that the paper-based record’s re¶ection of that complexity is therefore ‘functional’. Berg and Bowker challenge the ‘integration’, the ‘mediation’, and the ‘de-diŸerentiation’ that motivate the drive towards introducing PCISs. For them, PCISs are monolithic structures whose uniformity disregards the multiplicity, the narrativity, the functional diversity and creative ¶exibility of clinical care. There are those, however, who challenge this defence of clinical pluralism and its un-organized discourse. For her part, Montgomery Hunter sees the paperbased medical record as an ‘uncommunicative’ document: mixed media — graphs, test reports, lists, and narrative entries in a strange language and in several unreadable hands — and the combination of brevity, repetition, and its narrative focus on physical phenomena render it formidably uncommunicative (Montgomery Hunter 1991: 89)

A citation used in Berg and Bowker’s paper, the following paragraph from Bleich puts it even less charitably: The medical record is an abomination. It is a disgrace to the profession that created it. More often than not, the chart is thick, tattered, disorganized, and illegible; progress notes, consultants’ notes, radiology reports, and nurses’ notes are all co-mingled in accession sequence. The charts confuse rather than enlighten; they provide a forbidding challenge to anyone who tries to understand what is happening to a patient. (Bleich 1993, cited in Berg and Bowker 1997)

The charge here is that the relationship between mode of record keeping, clinical practice, and organizational communication is far from an arbitrary one, and that the fragmentation referred to above may not be functional but problematic. Thus, it could be argued, the less accessible and transparent the medical record, the less accountable the treating clinicians for what they do, and the less organized the processes of clinical treatment. …investigation of substandard care only begins with the [paper] medical record; …in many instances the medical record even conceals substandard care; and … substandard care is not re¶ected in, or ‘discoverable’ in the medical record. (Hannan 1996: 135)

In this view, the paper-based medical record re¶ects, maintains and encourages the fragmentation of modern-day health care provision (Schryer 1993). As organizational document, it largely obviates health organizations’ access to and ‘recontextualization’ of its information into discourses which construe re¶exivity, transparency, and reach (‘lines of force’). As a result, the health care organization is unable to gain better insight into and grip on its own clinical services; it is


unable to negotiate with clinicians about standards and targets of work quality and e¹ciency (and considering the high levels of clinical error this is a serious matter; e.g Wilson et al. 1999). Organizationally speaking, then, the paper medical record has so far not arrived at the point of information gathering and dissemination and practice improvement processes that characterize most 21st century organizations. While perhaps of use to those immediately involved with the care of speciªc patients, the medical record’s discourse remains particularized, fragmented, inaccessible, un-time-space distanciated, and un-organizing.10

The electronic Patient Care Information System (PCIS) There have been proposals by hospital organizations to create a more integrated and less fragmented forms of record keeping in health care, by computerizing medical, nursing, allied health and administrative information about a patient, about their care, about resource expenditure, and so on. This shift from paper to computer (Snyder 1998) has consequences not merely for how people notate what they do, of course, but aŸects their practices more broadly. Thus, the move from paper records into the electronic or computerized medium is unlikely to leave unchanged the appearance of the information stored, of the practices that produce the organizational information, or of the social-organizational relationships that contextualize clinical notation and practice. Every technology … requires the inculcation of a form of life, the reshaping of various roles for humans, the little body techniques required to use devices, new inscription practices, the mental techniques required to think in terms of certain practices of communication, the practices of self oriented around the mobile telephone, the word processor, the World Wide Web and so forth. Even in its conventional sense, then, technologies require, for their completion, a certain shaping of conduct, and are dependent on the assembling together of lines of connection among a diversity of types of knowledges, forces, capacities, skills, dispositions and types of judgment. (Rose 1999: 52)

As Nikolas Rose points out here, technology, including writing, constitutes an ‘inculcation of a form of life’, a practice. Changes in technology entail changes in forms of life, in people’s practices. The computational initiatives at issue here, because they require considerable ‘cultural’ and practical changes in how the work is done, are particularly problematic in terms of their implementation: how will10. “Discourse presenting itself through deictics and other [localizing] devices as closely bound to the originator and to the local context of origination tends to be responded to rather than replicated. Hence, it serves less well as culture in the classical sense. In contrast, discourse marking itself as detached from the local is correspondingly more replicable and is therefore better culture” (Urban 1996: 42).


ing are people to adopt these new technologies? There are many accounts of how electronic Patient Care Information System initiatives failed due to professional sub-cultural resistance (Massaro 1989; Lehoux et al. 1999; Ash et al. 2001), but there are also infrequent successes (e.g. Piggott and Gillis 1998). We will address the implications of these issues in a moment, but let us ªrst look more closely at some of the ways in which the PCIS reconstitutes the discursive-organizational reach of the traditional paper-based medical record. As the sample page in Figure 7.1 above demonstrates, computerized kinds of record keeping embody a very diŸerent point of entry compared to that of the paper-based record discussed in the previous section of this paper. First, in contrast to the empty (lined) pages of many of the forms in the paper-based medical record, the computerized record presents a series of ‘ªelds’ which ask for and allow only particular kinds of information. In confronting the clinician with a predesigned set of entry options, the screen environment imposes an externally regulated scriptural regime.11 Importantly, rather than granting the clinician the freedom to write down whatever appears most pressing and relevant, the software requires them to distance themselves from the clinical situation and reconªgure its relevances according to the options provided within the structured environment of the screen.

Figure 7.1 Vital Signs Screen, PowerChart, © Cerner Corporation 2002, reproduced with permission 11. However, as I will note in a moment, the deªnitions of these ªelds are open to clinician input, and increasingly software comes as a shell that needs to be ¶eshed out to suit the particulars of work.


Entering structured data requires more user time than entry of free-text information. It requires the user to map the concepts into the computer’s concepts and to spend time searching for the ‘right’ computer code or phrasing. The computer often asks for a more granular representation than the user knows. (McDonald 1997: 220)

On the other hand, the diŸerent ways in which the information can be accessed provides greater visibility into the process of care, if not for the individual clinician, then certainly for her co-workers. As Figure 7.1 shows, the screen provides an overview of a range of vital signs and historical data pertaining to a speciªc patient. The screen and its visual layout ensure the identiªability of the treating clinician and the legibility of his or her notes is guaranteed. Controls governing access to the screen mean records cannot be altered by just anyone and require legitimation of the author’s identity before changes can be made or comments added. By arranging clinician-input under specialized headings or ªelds (‘Temperature’, ‘Temperature Method’, ‘Heart Rate’, and so on), and by admitting only particular kinds of input, the computerized record puts limits on both the idiosyncracies of individual clinicians’ notations and on the original, and frequently idiosyncratic, unfolding of their care. Figure 7.2 contains a grab of a task overview screen for a particular clinician. Here, again, information is arranged in a standard fashion, ranging from bed

Figure 7.2 Patient Screen, PowerChart, © Cerner Corporation 2002, reproduced with permission


number, age of patient, reason for admission, allergies, diet speciªcations, and so on. Moreover, the screen contains a column for marking test requests and the status of test results (and their urgency). Thus, the information contained in this screen is not merely that which the individual clinician enters into it, but also that which is available from the entries that others have created, and which have relevance for this speciªc person and her or his shift. In that sense, the record becomes a window on and pre-arranges in the visual ªeld notational activities of a range of people, including admissions o¹cers, lab technicians, medical and nursing clinicians, and so on. As such, this particular screen organizes the clinical work: it creates links between individuals operating in disparate parts of the organization, over and above the chronological continuity that anchored and linked the notations in the paper record. As it pre-arranges, pre-categorizes and inter-links kinds of clinical notation, the discourse of the PCIS imposes new constraints on the user. Complying with these constraints will mean, at least to some extent, that the general categories and the informational logic of the electronic record become a lens through which to observe the patient and organize their care. In privileging the generalizing lens and the integrative power of the electronic record, the clinician in eŸect enacts a ‘frameshift’ (Reddy 1979) from the particular and particularizing towards the general and generalizing. The electronic text exists independently of space and time … The contents of the electronic text can infuse an entire organization, instead of being bundled in discrete objects, like books or pieces of paper. (ZuboŸ 1988: 179–180)

In accepting the electronic record’s functions and categories, its standardized interface, and the host of other constraints and regulated enablements that it embodies, the clinician becomes complicit in creating clinical information that has the potential to exert “lines of force across a territory spanning time and space” (Rose 1999: 50). More speciªcally, such `lines of force’ potentially include: – –

– –

The integration of medical science research, nursing research, and allied health research into staŸ’s clinical practices; Greater integration of health, hospital and unit policies, multi-disciplinary protocols and guidelines into clinical practices; that is, greater in¶uence of regulation and standardization on the clinical work; More accurate retrospective reviews of clinical practice information and of variations in practice (review of ‘clinical variances’), and Greater transparency about clinical and clinicians’ performance, measured in terms of both e¹ciency and resources on the one hand, and quality and eŸectiveness on the other hand (quality, appropriateness, and access & equity; Corden and Luxmoore 2000; Degeling et al. 2000).


In view of the eŸects of these domains of integration on practice, the PCIS cannot really be regarded as merely a passive repository of information. As ZuboŸ presaged, electronic records reconstitute practice, or have the potential to reconstitute practice, in far-reaching ways. But in addition to reconstituting how we know and contextualize what we do, current generation PCISs provide many more functions than the ordinary database. In addition to those listed above, they are capable of actively monitoring and responding to clinical input. The computer-based medical record can be used passively as a repository of data, or actively by assisting with the shaping of care. Active use requires the EMR to contain models of care permitting some degree of interpretation of the data contained in the record. .. Active uses of the computer-based medical record include the generation of clinical alerts and reminders, tasks speciªc views onto clinical data, protocol guided data entry and action suggestion, and generation of codes for the classiªcation of the contents of the record. (Coiera 1997: 74)

Compared to the paper-based medical record, then, the PCIS impacts on notation not only by imposing categories (ªelds), but also by potentially checking information inputs against external kinds of information. A record, once called up on the screen, can alert the clinician to information in situations where rapid or life-threatening decisions are required; it can interpret an ECG, blood gas data or X-ray ªndings; it can assist in producing clinical orders, nursing assessments, or physical examination reports; it can critique a decision (on the basis of evidence or an established pathway); it can diagnose (linked to an ‘expert system’), and it can prospectively manage treatment in so far as it is able to sequence care (Hannan 1996). The PCIS, then, is not merely a ‘constraining regime of notation’. It also potentially embodies an agency through which it actively monitors, queries and even challenges clinicians’ notations and subsequent actions. Hence, in addition to requiring the clinician to reconceptualize their practice in the generalizing, delinguistifying and time-space distanciating terms oŸered by the software, the PCIS also challenges clinicians’ conventional self-conceptions as fully knowledgeable, autonomous and trustworthy experts. On both counts, the PCIS serves to bring about a translation of the particulars of care into a discourse that is capable of construing new ‘lines of force’ across and beyond the clinic, with consequences for the care individuals receive, the identities that clinicians experience, and the levels of participation on the part of health care, policy and consumer organizations.


Discussion This chapter has presented three main arguments. First, I argued that organizing discourse is discourse that mediates between specifying and de-diŸerentiating moments of representation, by interposing standardizing categories, inscriptions and material appearances. Only in this way is discourse able to connect the speciªc and the personalized with the general, abstract, and depersonalized. Second, I suggested that the paper-based medical record largely absolves clinicians from ‘organizing’ clinical care as it is deªned in this chapter: its discourse (content, visual appearance, rules governing authorship) remains ‘un-organizing’. Third and last, I said that the electronic PCIS is being framed in discourse that standardizes how clinical care is informated, and potentially even intervenes in the substance of that care; and while at greater risk of bringing about ‘bad records’ (Garªnkel 1967), such ‘organizing discourse’ ultimately achieves ‘lines of force’ across and beyond the clinic. As practice of clinical notation, the paper-based medical record enables the clinical professions to absent themselves from eŸorts to bring their notations within organizational reach, and, as a consequence, render opaque the organizational dimension of their work. In essence, using paper, clinical practice inscribes itself, notates itself, informates itself, only for itself (if that!). In other words, the self- and other-scrutiny which the notational practices accompanying paperbased record keeping is meant to aŸord remain limited. The PCIS, by contrast, embodies an organizing discourse, in so far as that it imposes categories (ªelds) on clinical notation; it standardizes the appearance of the notations; it identiªes the authorial origin of the notations, and it is capable of monitoring and acting on the clinical input by means of alerts and other interventionist devices. As organizing discourse, the PCIS links what is local to what is distal. The discourse produces ‘lines of force’ between diŸerent dimensions of the clinical work, of the clinic, and well beyond the clinic. Organizing discourse, then, provides a new means for referencing, and grounding if you like, a social (or organizational) way of doing and saying. This means of doing and saying is unique in that its organizing potential depends on how well it mediates between the ‘here-and-now’ and the ‘there-and-then’, privileging neither. Such a mediating role acknowledges that no discourse (neither the original paper record nor PCIS) relates in a straightforward, natural, necessary, or one-toone way to that which we are talking (writing) about. It is not that this relationship is entirely arbitrary — on the contrary. But the ways in which people, things, times and places are construed in discourse are ¶exible and dynamic in any case: they change over time following new inventions and contestations. Both inventions and contestations are ‘new voices’, and they introduce new ways of saying


and doings things, as well as new coalitions and alignments. The PCIS is such a ‘new voice’. On this reasoning, to essentialize a localizing, diŸerentiating and particularizing discourse as the only discourse suited to the framing, conduct and execution of clinical practice is less a matter of pursuing faithful representation, than of enacting political exclusion. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that to settle on a de-diŸerentiating, globalizing and depersonalizing discourse is also likely to create (new) lines of exclusion and privilege. Nevertheless, as it recontextualizes what is speciªc and local into the more general and distal, organizing discourse creates alternative commonalities and connections; it creates opportunities for alternative understandings, for alternative truths (‘truces’) and practices. Put in the terms of the descriptions and analyses set out here, organizing discourse is that which (re)transforms time, space and agency. It reconstrues events from the ‘here-and-now’ and speciªc people’s actions, into terms, forms and materialities that connect with the ‘there-and-then’ and groups of people. Put diŸerently, ‘organizing discourse’ is about transforming discrete and multi-variate phenomena into phenomena which are inter-dependent and inter-woven; that is, ‘organized’. This inter-weaving creates a complex, new inter-dependence and inter-change of knowledges and capacities between people and materials (technologies, discourses, products). As argued, such organizing discourse is crucial for keeping up with the growing complexity of health care work, the velocity of people movements, the intricacy of care trajectories, and so on. For an increasingly complex workforce to interact in increasingly complex ways with increasingly complex services, products and technologies, workers have little option other than to ongoingly re-invent the time, space and agency dimensions of their discourses and practices. This requires discourses and practices that are ¶exible in how time, space and agency are conceptualized and coordinated. We should acknowledge, too, that ¶exibly reconªguring the time, space and agency dimensions of discourse may harbour unsettling eŸects for those used to particular modalities of enunciation. People may have reservations about such recontextualizations because of the ways in which they de-diŸerentiate and newly reify known aspects of social and organizational life. Reservations may also arise from the new ‘relativity’ which these recontextualizations introduce, by mediating and shunting between the speciªc and the general, privileging neither. In the case of our clinicians, their reservations about organizing discourse might well serve to mask another concern, namely that of having one’s work recorded (or recording it oneself) in a way which opens it up to monitoring, surveillance and in¶uence by outsiders, non-professionals, or the organization. Seen in this light, clinicians’ (and especially doctors’) preference for the traditional paper record could be seen as a desire to remain ‘unrecorded’ and ‘unrecordable’, to retain their autonomy

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and legal immunity, and resist becoming accountable to those on the outside of care. resistance in the information age will take the form of gaps in the networks of communication, the ability to remain hidden and unrecorded. (Deleuze 1995, cited in Munro 2001: 160)

Resistances can also be more mundane in orientation, and derive from impracticalities in the way the new system interacts with what clinicians do ‘on the ground’, or be fuelled by the host of new computer literacies which PCISs require from clinicians. Also, we have not explored the ways in which ‘real world’ implementations of late generation PCIS systems are often made to co-exist with earlier generation systems, creating confusions, blockages, and technical problems (McDonald 1997). But those issues will have to wait.

Conclusion This chapter has considered the ways in which worker visibility is linked in with work transparency. I argued that the interactive practices that people are increasingly asked to be part of do not unfold merely in and for themselves, but are crucially linked in to the resemiotization of meaning: the production of written minutes, formalized pathways, records of action, and so on. Accountability became enacted in a dual sense: through the speaking, and through the writing or designing that the speaking gave rise to. These writings and designings, as seen in Chapter 6, embody economies of representation with a logic that unhinges them from the here-and-now. Such economy was achieved, of course, thanks to the social dediŸerentiation of individual interests and concerns, the delinguistiªcation of these issues from the discourse, and their time-space distanciation by becoming the taken-as-given knowledge background for new practices, understandings, identities, new ‘truths’, new ‘truces’. The argument then moved to a focus on organizational records as the manifestation of particular worker-work relationships. The paper-based medical record was used as example, to argue that its localizing and particularizing features eŸectively restricted its organizational reach. By remaining inscribed within the clinical present through minimal inscriptions, free text narratives, individualizing hand-written notation, and the dynamic recontextualizing logic of the patient’s unfolding disease, the paper-based medical record privileges those who are already involved and to some extent knowledgeable about the care process. Training its gaze on the clinical speciªcs in this way, the record excludes conceptualizations of the care that is provided that might inscribe it into a wider network of stakeholders. By setting its particularizing narrative up as not only adequately but exhaustively


representing the disease and its care, the medical record imposes a representational status quo. This status quo rules out alternative representations, and marginalizes additional stakeholders. The next chapter moves on to consider the broader intent in post-bureaucratic organization behind worker participation and knowledging. The intensiªcation of worker interactivity, the chapter argues, is to create a dispersal of knowledge from management to the workforce. Where in the past workers could be forgiven for not knowing local procedure, nowadays workers are inducted into kinds of workplace training and participation that set out not so much ‘who does what’ and ‘where is what’, but rather what are the protocols, the guidelines, the pathways, and the procedures that pertain to the work that is done. Thus, as discussed in the present chapter, worker interaction is a matter of translating knowledge about work into records of work that create ‘transparency’. The next chapter approaches this issue from another angle, by posing the question: to what extent and how can dediŸerentiated accounts about the work be kept relevant to the work and workers?

Chapter 8

‘Pathwaying’ as post-bureaucratic ethos

Introduction The last chapter focused on the nexus between organizational interaction, what these interactions produced (resemiotization or con¶ict), and cross-organizational communication or ‘transparency’. The chapter also linked in with the point made in Chapter 1 about the textualization of work in the post-bureaucratic workplace, namely that workers’ interactions are increasingly inseparable from the meta-discursive artifacts and representations that those interactions are to produce. Central here are records, reports, data, and a range of other devices through which workers represent, legitimize, and are encouraged to re¶ect on the nature of the work. The previous chapter empiricized the discussion by analyzing diŸerent modes of record keeping and the accounts about work that these modes created. The problem that we encountered there, was that records are either (too) localizing in their aim to remain ‘true’ and relevant for those within their immediate vicinity, or they are (too) distalizing, because they try to link in with ways of representing work that surpass (or undermine) the concerns of those doing the work. While the paper-based record remains highly local and therefore open to heteroglossia, the patient care information system runs the risk of becoming a technology indiŸerent to local concerns, knowledges and experiences. These tensions and dilemmas notwithstanding, the present study makes the point that distalizing discourse is central to organizing as such: distal discourse creates organizational ‘lines of force’. Of course, this kind of discourse also raises the likelihood or even the probability of workers producing ‘bad records’ and meaningless information, especially when the categories of distal discourse make no sense to them, and workers do not want or know how to deploy them. By the same token, to suggest that doing without generalizing information is an option, is to misrecognize the centrality of information, records, and the like, to organization. Giddens reminds us that “[a]s a mnemonic device, …the marking of signs makes possible the regular ordering of events and activities which could not be organized otherwise” (Giddens 1985: 44). And as Cooper explains, organization has to write order onto itself to keep disorder and disorganization at bay (Cooper 1993). The problem of organization, then, is to balance local and distal discourse. The challenge is to create a dialectic between ways of doing the work and ways of


informating the work, such that their mutual relevance is kept in check. For the post-bureaucratic organization this dialectic is found in the practice of textualization. As this chapter argues and demonstrates, textualization becomes the site where knowledges and informations are verbalized, performed, enacted, and thereby appropriated and even innovated. As the worker performs and verbalizes their understandings of how the work is ac-counted for, they achieve two things. First, workers re-articulate established ways of informating the work, and that rearticulation becomes the basis of their identiªcation with it and knowledge of it: speaking something ‘infolds [it] into the soul’ (Rose 1996a: 143). Second, worker talk becomes the site where new articulations can be produced pushing knowledge and information boundaries. The team or stakeholder meeting becomes the forum where these performances are displayed and surveilled, where innovations are scrutinized, and where the tensions between workers’ experiences and views of self and work are put at risk. The argument I put in the present chapter is that at the heart of the post-bureaucratic organization is a worker-centred interactive ethos precisely to narrow the gap between worker understanding, a self-steering performance of self, and organizationally useful knowledge as expressed in distal or abstract discourse categories. I contextualize this argument by returning to the clinical pathway example of Chapter 1, and the kinds of interactions that occur around such post-bureaucratic discourse.

The worker is central Chapter 1 began by outlining the kinds of changes that have been and are aŸecting 21st century organizations. One of these, and likely one of the more prominent ones, was the recent enhanced prominence given to the worker in organizational (e.g. Boje 2001) and in management discourses (e.g. Peters 1992) at the expense perhaps of more technical and systems-related issues (Barley and Kunda 1992). Post-bureaucracy, then, was deªned as comprising a worker-centred, interactiveintensive ethos. Ways of conceiving of work, management and change became increasingly in¶ected through the performative presence and interactive contribution of the worker away from the shop ¶oor. But aren’t organizations’ attempts to hand the reigns to workers antithetical to organizations’ intent to govern, even if they are only too often half-hearted gestures and highly regimented occasions (Willmott 1993)? “No more close supervision of workers…” (Champy 1995: 17), we hear. As for senior managers, “freed from the necessity of constant participation in the ¶ow of commands on a routine basis, [they] are encouraged to focus on the development of goals and strategies,

‘Pathwaying’ as post-bureaucratic ethos 177

whose day-to-day implementation they are not expected to supervise directly” (du Gay 2000: 101). Justiªcations of this ubiquitous freedom as the new basis of shared knowledge-generation (Drucker 1993), worker empowerment (Peters 1992) or team alignment (Senge 1990), do not quite explain how organizational productivity and rule are maintained, however. Moreover, they fail to account for the interactive complexity with which workers are now confronted. These ‘newly freed actors’, du Gay notes, “ªnd themselves responding to centrally determined decisions but not as they once knew them … they now have much greater direct responsibility for the success or failure of ‘outcomes’… .” (du Gay 2000: 101). Ultimately, the question that goes to the heart of post-bureaucracy, then, concerns the tension between freedom and constraint: what kinds of identiªcations and discourses can workers and managers realize in an environment where rules and rule-making appear to have become the preserve, if not the onus, of selfsteering and self-deªning groups and individuals? How are we to know what constitutes ‘doing being a [good] worker’? Does the diversity of authorities of the self in our present, the pluralization of moral codes, the apparent attenuation of the links between political government [and organizational management; RI] and the regulation of conduct, the heterogeneity of forms of life, the valorization of choices and freedom in the shaping of a style of life, the simultaneous celebration of individuality and the proliferation of techniques of group identiªcation and segmentation — does all this signify that new modes of subjectiªcation have appeared today? (Rose 1996a: 144)

In light of the ‘apparent attenuation of regulation’ that Rose refers to in the quote above, the present section wants to explore what ‘new modes of subjectiªcation’ the post-bureaucratic organization presages and envisages. Part of this discussion is the idea that workers are no longer inducted into modes of subjectiªcation that are static, self-conªrming, and linear-evolutionary logics. Rather, through the intensiªcation of interactive participation, workers are exhorted to accept self and identity as shifting, contradictory, and fragmented, in so far as that these deviate from established patterns of socialization, occupationalization, and professionalization (e.g. Erickson 1999; Atkinson 1999). Part of this might be accepting or proposing compromises that call the bases and principles of self and knowledge into question, as did those present at the meeting discussed in Chapter 6. Or it might be re-negotiating standards of professional expertise and bonds of allegiance, as occurs in the pathway meetings considered further below. Let us put some empirical ¶esh on these rather abstract considerations, then, and look at hospital reform and the practice of pathwaying clinical work as a way of exploring these ‘new modes of subjectiªcation’.


Pathwaying clinical work In the present section, I want to focus on the relationship between ‘having clinical pathway meetings’ and the formal ‘clinical pathway’ documentation that is produced. As part of this discussion, I will consider recent events as they aŸected and unfolded around and in a local metropolitan teaching hospital here in Sydney. My discussion is informed by work done during a three-year research project (1999– 2002) whose focus has been on the ways in which, and extent to which, clinicians standardize their clinical work using multi-disciplinary pathways. This research has involved attending and tape-recording meetings, interviewing clinicians, questionnaire surveys, and producing ethnographic notes about what goes on at ward level (Iedema et al. 1999; Iedema et al. in press; Meyerkort et al. 2003). First, let us consider the ensemble of external pressures that contextualize the hospital and that led to its program of reform of which the pathway initiative was a part. Hospital reform itself was set in train in Australia in the early eighties. With the end of post-war prosperity, there was a shift in policy away from forgiving kinds of health administration towards rather more stringent kinds of ªnancial management. Central to this shift was the resemiotization of medical diagnostic categories into health economic ªnancial categories such as Disease Related Groups (DRG’s) and Casemix (analysis of a hospital’s ‘mix of treatments’). Towards the late nineteen-nineties, and having exhausted economic stringency as the means to achieve workable health care reforms, policy makers began to emphasize the importance of service integration in an attempt to realize a diŸerent and more service-sensitive modality of health service intervention. Propelling much of 21st century health policy, a central concern now is to align services, people and resources, and the terms ‘continuity of care’ and ‘streamed care’ are put up as patient-centred rallying cries. Not unrelated to this concern to align diŸerent dimensions of clinical service provision, is the policy and managerial emphasis placed on the need for greater scrutiny of how clinicians and their colleagues do their work (Palmer and Short 1994; Berwick 1998a; Duckett 2000). This new accountability rhetoric comes with concepts like the measurement of clinical performance, benchmarking of outcomes and quality, integration of clinical decision-making with formal scientiªc evidence, and leadership on clinical practice improvement (Berwick 1998b). Even if none of these are necessarily antithetical to good clinical practice, their intent is to render visible and thus standardize those aspects of care that were hitherto the exclusive preserve of the individual (and primarily medical) clinician’s autonomous judgment. For that reason, and thanks to both the perceived and actual impact of these ideas on practice, their ‘metrology’ (Latour 1996a) is seen by many as insensitive to the indeterminacies and delicacies of clinical practice and diagnosis. Replaying the


struggle between 19th century physicians who defended touch medicine and those who favoured new technologies such as thermometers and ‘sphygmomanometers’ (blood pressure monitors; Porter 1999: 344), there are those intent on protecting the medical ‘art of science’ against the ‘bureaucratizing onslaught’ of those who believe in medical practice standardization. Thus, for Freidson, a staunch defender of the view that medical practitioners should be trusted to do what they think is best, policies aimed at maximizing the terms of the bureaucratic model would create a social structure (or system of governance) to solve the problem of trust by binding and organizing the behaviour of workers through the exercise of hierarchical authority and systematic institutions of formal rules and standards (Freidson 1994: 195)

In Freidson’s conceptualization, standardizing clinical practice inevitably leads to over-bureaucratization in the form of ‘hierarchical authority and systematic institutions of formal rules and standards’. Such ‘over-bureaucratization’ sti¶es people’s self-conceptions and abilities to handle volatile and unpredictable environments. Standardizing the conception of tasks and outcomes for the purpose of measuring and controlling them also standardizes the conception of people and their di¹culties. In essence, people are reduced to formally deªned categories. (Freidson 1994: 193)

Faced with a type of work that is inherently and inevitably a collection of disconnected events and decisions made by autonomous experts, Freidson’s view is that public trust and the encouragement of moral-ethical clinical practice are our only means for achieving accountability. Clearly, for commentators such as Freidson, any attempt to get (medical) clinicians to think and talk about the broad practical parameters within which they do their work is anathema. It not only reduces clinicians but also patients to ‘automatons’. Worse still, our requirement for clinicians to ac-count for what they do is asking for deceit. Substituting [bureaucratic] arrangements for trust results actually in a Hobbesian situation, in which any rational individual would be motivated to develop clever ways to evade them; it is then hard to imagine that everyday economic life [in the organisation] would not be poisoned by ever more ingenious attempts at deceit. (Granovetter cited in Freidson 1994: 195)

If the blunt ªnancial controls of the nineteen-eighties and nineties lowered the ceiling down onto what clinicians could do, the more recent calls for work standardization, clinical accountability and practice improvement all raise the ¶oor, further decreasing clinicians’ room for manoeuvre. By linking ªnancial rewards to clinical performance (as is increasingly happening in the U. K. for instance), health policy makers have shifted the stage for contestation and struggle onto the clinical shop ¶oor (Iedema et al. in press).


The dissemination of these more recent policy imperatives and practical reorientations occurs not merely in the form of ‘minutes’ and ‘guidelines’ that arrive daily via email and as paper correspondence from the health bureaucracies. There are also newsletters, conferences and information days. Then there is the funding of ‘Institutes of Clinical Excellence’, ‘Quality Branches’ whose ‘Practice Improvement Initiatives’ are about organizing training programs and research projects that seek to realize the new stance on policy and management not through lipservice appointments of ‘Quality Coordinators’ or ‘Pathway O¹cers’ (which are ‘organizational structural’ solutions without much impact for practising clinicians), but by the co-optation of precisely those people who execute the clinical work. In these respects, policy is moving the onus of the organization of health care from managers at the top of a control hierarchy to clinicians who themselves comprise a ‘distributed system’ where “control [is] distributed throughout the system, and not centered in any ‘centre’ that monopolizes power, knowledge or control” (Gee et al. 1996: 51). The focus of policy makers and managements, then, is clinicians’ involvement in thinking and talking not just about the expert-clinical aspects of care, but about the organizational, cross-disciplinary aspects of care: ªnance, logic of service, staŸ skill mixes, resource management, and so on. It is in these ‘capillary’ ways, then, that benchmarking, outcome measurement and practice improvement have begun crowding into clinical space, leaving few in the clinical population untouched. Supported by a range of discourses and practices, and anchored in a whole micro-cosmology of individuals’ moves and counter-moves, then, the success of co-opting clinicians into policy and management discourses depends on how and by whom these discourse are taken up and translated (Callon 1986), and how and by whom the distal policies are translated into organizational and clinical initiatives; how and by whom views about the centrality of clinicians to these initiatives are translated into service delivery research and clinical practice education projects; how and by whom generalizing documents and abstract technologies are translated into service-oriented clinical interactions and practices. In short, how and by whom the distal is co-opted, translated, recontextualized into the local, and vice versa. Crucially, of course, the policy and management concerns in question here collectively reference a new modality of managing and doing clinical work, and of being a manager and being a clinical worker. Ultimately, the underlying ethos of these adjustments of clinical doing, saying and thinking centres on multi-skilling clinicians becoming ‘professionals-cum-managers’ (Dent and Whitehead 2002; Hanlon 1998). Hence, in this new management-worker relationship, the manager is not the one who knows at the expense of the worker. On the contrary, theirs is now a “symbiotic relationship that is mediated and facilitated by a ‘leader’ who cannot control or fully understand the local units but can assist their learning,


organization, combination and adaptation” (Gee et al. 1996: 53). The practice that has been put forward as the means par excellence for instantiating this ethos and bringing together these diŸerent dimensions of doing being a (manager-)clinician is the ‘pathwaying’ of the clinical work, and its product the multi-disciplinary clinical pathway (‘pathway’ for short). In Chapter 1, I introduced the notion ‘clinical pathway’ as a worker-generated formulation of and documentation about the details of their work. I discussed a pathway example (Figure 1.1), and argued that this document helps standardize what diŸerent clinicians do by intertwining their knowings and understandings into a common set of self-formulated representations. As shared ac-count of their work, the pathway projects (and perhaps creates) ‘lines of force’ across times, spaces, and workers. In addition, in Chapter 4 I honed in on ‘clinical pathway meetings’ as the site where clinicians from various professional backgrounds come together to talk and write pathways (i.e. where they ‘textualize’ work). There, I spoke about an interaction among medical clinicians and the ways in which they appeared to ‘stretch’ the space of communication beyond traditionally medical discussions about interesting cases, to include generalizing and prospective descriptions of their work. Before turning to what happened in one hospital in speciªc, let us ªrst anchor the discussion in what has been written about clinical pathways. The literature deªnes clinical pathways as “… systematically developed written statements of the agreed sequence of diagnostic and therapeutic processes which, in light of available evidence and stated resource constraints, are essential for achieving nominated outcomes for speciªed clinical conditions” (Hindle and Degeling 1999: 3). Hindle and Degeling highlight four ideational domains that the clinical pathway is to cover: the broad outlines and sequencing of people’s clinical practices; the prospective resource requirements of their practices; the scientiªc evidence that informs and supports their practices, and the benchmarks governing the outcomes and quality of their practices (Degeling et al. 1998). But Hindle and Degeling’s deªnition goes further about what the pathway should comprise. For them, pathways do not just informate the work as it is expected to be done. Pathways also require workers to record deviations from agreed practice. In this conceptualization, pathways bring together best practice, inter-disciplinary agreed and complementary tasks, prospective costing (enabling management to project expenditures), without denying clinicians the opportunity for making on-the-spot judgments and decisions, and retaining doctors’ medical autonomy within a climate of accountability (Degeling et al. 1998; Degeling et al. 2000; Hindle and Degeling 1999). Another boundary-crossing feature of the pathway is that it is not dictated from above, but negotiated through interactive practice. The practice of negotiat-

181


ing and writing the pathway during ‘pathway meetings’, or ‘pathwaying’, entails doctors, nurses, and allied health staŸ coming together to seek and ªnd commonalities across their professional specialties. This happens not to ‘deepen’ their clinical expertise, but rather to network their clinical expertises. Through coming together at meetings for the purpose of pathwaying, clinicians co-negotiate crossprofessional and multi-disciplinary boundaries and continuities. That makes pathwaying a collaborative, interactive site where stakeholders in the process of care are confronted with cross-professional diŸerences, interpersonal tensions and identity challenges. Put in those terms, pathwaying is to a considerable extent beholden to people’s interactive-communicative ethos (cf. Habermas 1984, 1987). Thus conceived, the pathway brings a range of aspects of work, socialization and information management together. The pathway encompasses not only the interactive and consensual conceptualization of the pathway as more or less complex procedure for doing the work, but also the formal criteria and categories by means of which ‘variances’ from a procedure are to be recorded, the changes to practice that might need to be eŸected in light of those variances, as well as the possibility for rewriting the pathway as a consequence of emerging scientiªc, organizational, ªnancial, community, or other evidence. Here, pathway documents and their procedural mappings of the work (Figure 1.1) are not formulated by Taylorist managers in distant boardrooms. Instead they embody a dispersal of knowledge, produced and owned by workers at the coal face: they are clinicians’ self-initiated self-descriptions. Inevitably generated within sets of organizational constraints, pathway(ing)s are (meant to be) a dynamic and bi-directional dialectic between people’s practices and the discourses that they have forged to informate their practices. At the heart of ‘pathwaying’ as post-bureaucratic device, is that this shared discoursing about practices means people “come to understand their situation according to a similar language and logic” (Miller and Rose 1992: 184). Common modes of perception are formed, in which certain events and entities come to be visualized according to a particular rhetorics of image or speech. Relations are established between the nature, character and causes of problems facing various individuals or groups .. such that the problems of one and those of another seem intrinsically linked in their basis and their solution (Miller and Rose 1992: 184)

Because pathwaying involves clinicians developing a meta-discourse about their work as well as continuously updating their meta-discourse and adjusting (‘improving’) their practices, the gap between record and practice is potentially narrowed. Now, ongoing discussions about what a record’s categories and ‘ªelds’ mean or require (should) occur at pathway meetings, not during the work itself. Also, the problem of workers being displaced from the logic of the record and its


categories and producing ‘bad records’, as described in Cook-Gumperz’ and Messerman’s work, is resolved in this new space of pathway(ing) communications and interactions.1 The very process of creating a record in accordance with some set of rules or criteria for what makes for a suitable inclusion in such a record actually results in a restatement of the rules on a situated case by case basis. In practice this requires a process of negotiation between the categories and the personnel involved. (CookGumperz and Messerman 1999: 146)

Seeking to obviate this schism between ‘categories and personnel’, the new pathwaying practices realize a raft of changes: they embody the institutionalization of teams and of the participative ethos, the standardization of the work, the linking of decision-making to resource availability, and the balancing of expert autonomy with accountability to management, co-workers and the public. Ultimately, too, as people interactively practise these relations and meanings they “fold authority into the soul” (Rose 1996a: 145). As they participate in and enunciate meanings around ‘pathwaying’, workers learn and show themselves to be ‘eŸective’ team members who can ‘successfully’ perform these new activities and engagements that are being added to their job descriptions. Whether the labels ‘eŸective’ and ‘successful’ here index a beneªt purely for the organization or also for the individual workers, and whether the relationships enacted here are ‘genuine’ or display merely a “façade of trust” (Hardy et al. 1998: 71) is not at issue. My present concern is with the emerging governmentality at the heart of workers’ ‘knowledging and informating the work’. But before pursuing this more general issue, let us ªrst look at how the pathway initiative played itself out in one particular hospital. What did ‘pathwaying’ mean to people at the clinical coal face? In the words of the hospital’s Casemix Coordinator, while the local area health service (a sub-department of the state department of health) initiated the push for pathways with an eye to creating e¹ciencies, people at the hospital saw it as an opportunity ‘to support the management of care’ (Extract 8.1). 1. Whether or not clinicians are able to pathway their practices successfully is contingent upon four factors. First, fellow clinicians need to recognise the importance of negotiating and agreeing on the broad outlines of their practices as conªgurations of multi-disciplinary skills and expertise. Second, clinicians need to have access to information systems which are capable of monitoring variation from the pathway with respect to task composition, sequence, resource usage, quality and outcomes. Third, there need to be structures and practices set in place which enable clinicians to evaluate and benchmark their performance over time and come to an agreement over remedial action. Last but not least, management needs to support and respect clinicians’ initiative to pathway their clinical practices (Iedema and Degeling 2001b).


Extract 8.1: Casemix Coordinator, metropolitan teaching hospital Sydney, Australia …the idea of developing clinical pathways and guidelines as a documented tool for managing care was something that was initiated initially from an outside force, it came as a request from the, from the Area Health Service for [name hospital] to develop best practice standards… that came from a ªnancial bent… it was it was really directed towards e¹ciencies and cutting down on unnecessary testing and unnecessary utilisation of resources… [we] formed four groups as a result of that instruction from the Area to look at the high volume DRGs in the ªrst instance… asthma, gastroenteritis, tonsillectomy as a surgical DRG and … a leukemia group… very early on in the piece we decided we weren’t going to just develop these to satisfy [the] Area’s need to introduce e¹ciencies… [but that] that [the pathways we] were going to develop… were at least useful, usable locally and going to support the management of care in the hospital

Of course, the pathway initiative was by no means greeted with enthusiasm by everyone in the hospital. For many, it replayed themes that (especially) doctors routinely address in daily execution of the work: quality control, the prioritization of service to patients, a multi-disciplinary negotiation of the work. For these clinicians, pathways and the requirements to spell out what is known, done and how things are improved, constituted a challenge to the trust that they command as professional experts, and rated no better than yet another bureaucratic hoop they are made to jump through. As resisters, these clinicians are less central to the purpose of the present chapter than those who did engage with the pathway initiative. As the extracts reproduced below aim to illustrate, the dynamics presaged earlier potentially ‘aŸord’ quite delicate strategies that clinicians enact in front of one another as members of their pathway working groups. First, as they go about exchanging the details about their work and knowledge, the clinicians objectify these to people from both inside and outside of their immediate work spheres. In so doing, they put their taken-as-given knowledges and evidences at risk, and may enter new and diŸerent modes of knowing and seeing. Second, as they go about negotiating relationships with these professionals from locales in the hospitals that they have hitherto treated as taken-for-granted and perhaps even as ‘other’, they put at risk those relationships that currently buttress who and where they are in the hospital order. This may put their taken-as-given identities and practices at risk, and may bring about new and diŸerent modes of being and doing. The interactions considered below involve clinicians from diŸerent units coming together on a weekly to bi-weekly basis to talk for one to two hours about principles of clinical practice. Let us consider extracts from two such meetings, and further focus on the talk produced by two medical clinicians. Crucial here is that, as the two medical clinicians go about textualizing their work and their knowledges, they both produce kinds of talk that, at heart, go outside medicine’s comfort zone, outside of its ‘regulatory ideal’ (Butler 1993; Degeling et al. 1998). As the two clinicians deal with the ambiguities and ambivalences that this pro-


duces, they are seen to work towards new conceptions and new performances of their work and self. The ªrst extract, already encountered in Chapter 4, derives from a pathway meeting on asthma (Extract 8.2 below).2 At this meeting, doctors and nurses come together to devise a written document outlining the variety of standards, procedures and activities that are relevant to treating asthma. During the meeting, medical clinicians and a medical manager discuss the range of levels of acceptability which come into play in the administration of drug dosages to diŸerent types of asthma patients, while the nurses present maintain respectful silence. In the extract cited, medical evidence is brought to bear on decisions as to what dosages certain types of patients require. Extract 8.2: Team Meeting Data: Asthma group [Mark = male medical manager; Michael, Mary, Mitch = medical clinician] 001 Mark There’s use that if you like we can recommend as our benchmark. There’s use that’s okay, but that’s not quite what we said, and there’s use that we’ll regard as being totally inappropriate. I wouldn’t want the second and the third to be called the same 002 Michael Hmm 003 Mark I mean it’s a bit like in gastro-enteritis, if somebody gets given clear ¶uids I mean that’s not as good as being given uh gastrolite, but it’s a hell of a lot better than being given ¶at lemonade 004 Michael Right, yeah I see what you mean about the choice of the word appropriate versus inappropriate, um, the meaning I was trying to get across was [uh 005 Mark [Per.. 006 Mary Per [per guidelines if it was in the guidelines or indication dose and handling of spacers, um I suppose by consensus we’ve kind of agreed that this was appropriate 007 Mark Well maybe you could call it, per ‘protocol’, ‘acceptable‘, and ‘dangerous’ 008 Mitch That’s true on an individual case. You might say this child weighs 12 or let’s say 15 kilograms, therefore we’ll use a 2.5 mg nebule, and yet they’re getting worse and recognizing the ine¹ciency you might actually go up to a 5mg nebule, or you might actually go up to 5mg per ml, you know on a graded management plan for the individual patient in treatment currently 009 Mary So do you feel that the dose should be left out, if it’s gonna be a kind of area of variability that’s appropriate 010 Mark No I think you gotta have something I think you have to have a protocol 011 Mary That’s right 012 Mitch Otherwise yes there’d be too much variation 013 … [inaudible] 014 Mary But it was good to put that in for both the dose and the handling of the spacers as part of the information that will be going out to people, um as part of the guidelines 2. The analyses draw on those presented in Iedema and Scheeres (2003).


At risk of repeating some things said in Chapter 4 about this, the extract shows the clinicians co-negotiating how to describe administering the variable amounts of nebuliser. After some discussion it is proposed that ‘Well maybe you could call it, per ‘protocol’, ‘acceptable‘, and ‘dangerous” (at turn 007). Mitch then frames this within a hypothetical example (‘this child weighs 12 or let’s say 15 kilograms’) to point out the problematic nature of this issue (‘you might actually go up to a 5mg nebule, or you might actually go up to 5mg per ml’; 008). Focusing on Mitch for the moment, we notice that he frequently uses the form ‘might’, and not ‘should’ or ‘must’, perhaps to signal concern that his knowledge is not absolute and categorical and to leave others with room for manoeuvre. On that reading, capitalizing on the linguistic aŸordance of these ‘untensed’ modal verbs, Mitch distances the account from the clinical here-and-now, opens his account up for others’ input, and stretches the space of communication. A related and perhaps redounding3 aspect of Mitch’s discourse is that it constructs and presents medical work in prospective terms (‘you might actually go up to…’). A typical feature of conventional medicine is that it speaks in retrospective terms of ‘speciªc, interesting cases’4 and hones in on isolated (unusual or di¹cult) patients and treatments (Atkinson 1995), that is, ‘medical outliers’. Mitch’s discourse is of course not impossible within the context of such a conventional medicine. But given the context in which, and process during which, Mitch’s utterance was produced, his discourse instantiates a diŸerent and new way of medical being and doing. To me, this particular instance of discourse practice is nodal, in so far that it encapsulates a willingness to move from a medical autoexperiential concept of ‘retrospective talk about outliers’, to a group-referential concept of prospective delineation of knowledges and practices. The pathway’s prospective delineation of doctors’ tasks, and their explicit integration with what nurses, social workers, and physiotherapists do, makes what doctors do answerable not just (or not anymore) to their own privately-held expertises and experiences, but renders it in variable ways accountable to both the progressively documented ‘system of treatment’ (i.e. a formally written, re-edited and signed pathway), and to the social-interpersonal dynamics built up during these meetings. Thus, the emergence of these textualizations about the clinical 3. ‘Redounding’ here is a verb form of ‘redundancy’, a notion used by Bateson to talk about how particular signs (aspects of discourse) bestow weight and signiªcance on other signs, to the point where they are said to co-construe a syndrome of meaning (i.e. redundancy). For example, clinical diagnosis utilizes the principle of redundancy in the way it seeks to ‘accumulate’ patho-physiological evidence. 4. The case presentation is “a fundamental ritual of academic medicine, the narrative act of case presentation is at the centre of medical education and, indeed, at the centre of all medical communication about patients” (Montgomery Hunter 1991: 51).


work is central here, but equally central are the ways in which their relevance for speciªc individuals is inscribed into emerging social-organizational relations. It is on both these fronts that the local reconstrues, resemiotizes and co-opts the distal. Of course, there are clinicians who come to these pathway meetings and insist on adhering to expert power, autonomy and privilege, and who construe explicit and prospective proceduralization of what their work entails as incommensurable with the unpredictability of disease patterns, the ‘integrity’ of medical expertise, or the ‘artful’ nature of medical decision-making (Degeling et al. 2000). In contrast, for doctors like Mitch who open up to cross-organizational (going beyond medicine-centred) collegiality, the prospective formulation of clinical work becomes in part a blue-print for clinical action (Timmermans and Berg 1997), but also a means for ‘doing being a team’. More importantly, Mitch’s interactivity manifests an ‘infolding into the soul’ of a governmentality that fuses work, organization and self through textualization. Put in Rose’s terms, Mitch enacts pathwaying as an ‘advanced liberal programme of rule’ that presuppose[s] the activity of subjects, and seek[s] to act upon that activity to establish a consonance between the self-promoting endeavours of those who are the subjects of rule, and the objectives of those who are to exercise rule. …[this program has] a versatility and potency not recognized by critics … This potency lies, in part at least, in [its] relentless inventiveness, [its] ability to ªnd formulas for rule that allow subjects to recognize themselves in the practices that govern them. (Rose 1996a: 146/7)

If Mitch’s talk looks out towards the new formalized pathway, it is because he has the social, interpersonal and social implications of what he is saying under control. In cases where these latter issues are as yet unresolved, as in the extract that follows, more local and intimate kinds of tactics need to be enacted. The following extract shows an interaction centring on conceptualizing a pathway that comes from a gastro-entorology meeting (Extract 8.3). During this meeting, as in the previous one, clinicians textualize their knowledges and views on aspects of treatment with the aim of constructing a (gastro) pathway. My focus here is not on the ideational content of what is said, but rather on how interactants enact and renegotiate their interpersonal relationships. Extract 8.3: Team Meeting Data: Gastro pathway group (Medical Clinician=MC, Nurse Unit Manager=NUM, Finance administrator=FA, nutritionist=N) 099 Nina That’s right and and it might be good actually because if the paediatricians (NUM) haven’t seen it and there’s a major change to their.. their management plan then, then we’ve got a big problem with the document, but if there’s no gross changes which… 100 Ben I really don’t think there is, I mean it’s sort of>> (MC) 101 Nina I don’t see it either but till, till it’s trialled >> (NUM)


102 103 104 105

106 107 108 109 110

Ben (MC) Nina (NUM) Karen (FA) Ben (MC) Nina (NUM) Ben (MC) Karen (FA) Nina (NUM)

Yeah when you see, I mean that might be good in itself mmm mmm The um, is really the emphasis on it, is uh, is um standardizing investigations and the early treatment, and then in terms of treatment on the ward, the main thing is really introducing diet>> diet and education The pediatricians don’t really get involved in it do they, they come in and they ªnd out, they get told, the kid’s eating or the kid’s not eating (nodded agreement) umm I’m happy to take on the, if I have a list of people, to take on the circulation with draft stamped all over it and stuŸ like that That’d be great, thank you, yeah absolutely

Important for the more general point about how local interactions come to deploy and embody new and distal discourses, the speakers here discuss the social and political delicacies of imposing treatment guidelines on other, possible more senior clinicians. Ben, a medical clinician, reassures himself that there is unlikely to be too much resistance if the implications for how the doctors do their work remain limited: ‘the emphasis on it, is uh, is um standardizing investigations and the early treatment, and then in terms of treatment on the ward, the main thing is really introducing diet’ (turn 105), and ‘the paediatricians don’t really get involved in it do they’ (107). As medical clinician, Ben (as well as the others present) appears to be acutely conscious of the practical and hence interpersonal ramiªcations of how they talk about, write up and disseminate their pathway. In their diŸerent ways, Mitch in Extract 8.2 and Ben in Extract 8.3 textualize their work as a functional component of the broader system of care provided by the multi-disciplinary team. While Mitch focuses on making aspects of his work explicit in terms that beneªt the knowledge to be incorporated into the pathway, Ben enacts ‘being a team’ in a diŸerent way. His talk could be read as attaching importance to the interpersonal tensions that might arise around the dissemination of their pathway. Of course, what Ben says might well in fact reference very diŸerent stances: “I’m here to make sure the pathway does not impose too many requirements on my medical colleagues”, or “How am I going to convince my medical colleagues of the importance of this pathway?”, or somewhere in between. In any case, Ben is busy negotiating a set of understandings that centre on the tension between traditional medical territory and its taken-for-granted ‘regimes of enunciation’, and the new performativity that he is confronting and enacting as a member of the pathway team.


Folding authority into the soul Mitch’s talk in Extract 3 is in tension with medicine’s conventional concern with local, isolated (and opportunistically recorded) experiences centring around individual and unusual patients (‘case presentations’). He and the other doctors are co-producing a kind of discourse that creates generalizing and prospective — distalizing — understandings among the clinicians present about the substance of their work. As the talk comes to aŸord such understandings, it also potentially engenders (new) ‘lines of force’, in that its discourse ‘organizes’ (Iedema 2003a). For his part, and recognizing that not all of his medical colleagues are likely to be ‘on board’, Ben has to navigate around the political implications of the pathway initiative as such, and rethink his relationships with his co-workers. In their own ways, both Mitch and Ben are instantiating kinds of conduct and positioning that are participative with regard to the pathway team in ways that are unlike — and that call into question — the inter-professional relationships and boundaries, mentorships and apprenticeships, that traditionally deªne clinical education and medical practice. As organizational device and practice deployed to enhance commitment to and ownership over organization- and management-centred views of work, the ‘team’ is far from new. Teams and teamwork have long been seen as a powerful means to realize improved work relations, productivity, standardized work knowledge and proceduralized work practice (e.g. Mayo 1949/1997: 355). Important, though, is that the current modes of team work like the ones illustrated above require a (re)construction of the ‘competent worker’, to include not only diŸerent (and more generalized and systemic) kinds of knowledge,5 but also negotiating skills and attitudes that can accommodate diŸerent and often shifting social-organizational relations6 alongside those implicated in getting the original work done in the hospital ward, or in the operating theatre (or even on the production line; Iedema and Scheeres 2003). In this climate where ‘benchmarking’ and ‘performance measurement’ are increasingly de rigueur, employees are having to realize new ways of ‘being and doing’ (du Gay 1996a/b; Gee et al. 1996; Jackson 2001) as a result of being confronted with highly complex and intense kinds of talk, work relationships, and organizational commitment, or performativity (Lyotard 1984). While performativity has of course been at the basis of industrial growth generally, the present may be about a modality of commitment whose importance is being ratcheted onto a diŸerent level (Adler 2001; Child and McGrath 2001). As

5. Adler speaks about “knowledge-intensive workforces” (Adler 2001: 222). 6. “In the new forms, organization members are increasingly responsible for larger, but less well-deªned, roles” (Child and McGrath 2001: 1139).


the pathway extracts sought to make clear, workers’ textualizations become occasions where they interweave and re-weave distal (organizational-practical) and local (social-interpersonal) discourses about being and doing at work. As seen in Extract 8.3 especially, these enactments are no longer deªned, determined or stabilized by pre-established educational, occupational or professional demarcations. Rather, these textualizations are ¶uid, interpersonally-oriented and contextsensitive, constantly seeking to balance stability and instability. But as people accept this ‘¶exibilization’ of work practices and relationships, they also acquiesce to a ‘¶exibilization of self’ (Grey and Garsten 2001). Hence, in contrast to an investment into an essential singular self, organizational participants are inducted, perforce the interactive intensities and diversities that they are engaged in and confronted with, into becoming comfortable with a more diŸerential, more complex, more loosely experienced self (Hall 1996). At the same time, heightened and unpredictable interactivity inevitably creates uncomfortable situations, implicating people in a new re¶exivity. In conjunction with a push towards being a ‘portfolio worker’ who has ‘career resilience’, people are distanced from their organizational role and self, being encouraged to regard and enact both more ¶exibly (cf. GoŸman’s 1972 ‘role distance’). Here, identity does not anchor itself primarily or purely to the substance of familiar enactments, but to contextand community-sensitive dynamics and ecologies of enactment, participation and justiªcation. Individual conduct no longer appears to be socially-determined: choices are shaped by values which themselves arise from ties of community identiªcation. Community thus emerges as the ideal territory for the administration of the individual and collective existence, the plane upon which micro-moral relations amongst persons are conceptualized and administered. (Rose 1999: 136)

What newly grounds this organizational self, then, are not pre-determined tasks, linear command relationships and career trajectories, but interactive practices that become the basis for new kinds of subjectiªcation. As argued above with reference to the pathway(ing) example, textualization is one of those subjectifying interactivities where knowledge, relationships and self are dynamically re-negotiated. In that way of putting it, textualization is at the heart of the post-bureaucratic organization as a site for the invention and enactment of the ¶exible self. This promotes textualization into a process of subjectiªcation where, as the enunciation of knowledge about work, the self is organizationalized, and the organization is ‘self-ed’. Thus conceived, textualization is the resolution of an opposition. It is a form of subjectiªcation that is “simultaneously individualizing and collectivizing” (Rose 1999: 46). the kinds of relations to the self envisaged, the kinds of dispositions and habits inculcated, the very inscription of governmentality into the body and the aŸects of the


governed depend upon an opposition: in identifying with one’s [own speaking; RI] as a subject one is simultaneously identifying oneself with a collectivized identity … . (Rose 1999: 46)

As the post-bureaucratic strategy par excellence, textualization fuses expression of self and expression of ‘collectivized identity’. It is the means for workers to localize their a¹nities, their understandings and knowledges, while at the same time binding these to external and more formal forms of evidence, reporting, and accountability. As the crux of post-bureaucratic re-organization, textualization is at once a form of information management, a mode of worker empowerment and commitment, a site of worker socialization (and organizationalization), a means of accountability, and a strategy for innovation.

Conclusion This chapter has pursued the tenuous relationships that Chapter 7 uncovered between the record and the substance of work. The present chapter considered ‘pathwaying’ as a practice that clinicians are increasingly being co-opted into, and that proceduralizes, records, monitors, and adjusts work practices in ways that clinicians among themselves ªnd representative and workable. Conceived as a written, an enacted and a dynamic set of understandings, the pathway operates at the interstice between work and the myriad representations that employees and managers build around it. The chapter went on to discuss how particular clinicians confronted the practice of pathwaying. The ªrst extract showed how the ideational dimensions of medical practices relating to asthma became reconªgured within a generalizing and prospective formulation. This involved ‘Mitch’ enacting a set of meanings about medical work that bound him into a new knowledge-based governmentality. For his part, Ben’s enactment saw him privileging a multi-disciplinary stakeholderperspective on medical work, and re-negotiating more traditional, professioncentred kind of allegiances. His talk navigated in between team allegiance and his bond with his professional fraternity. For both Mitch and Ben, new ways of doing and being at work were at stake: their participation at the pathway meetings opened them up to new forms of subjectiªcation. The chapter ªnished by pointing to the reconªguration of worker self within the post-bureaucratic context, and to textualization as the post-bureaucratic strategy par excellence through which workers are encouraged to bind themselves into locally-deªned and distally-accountable relationships. By interacting with each other in ways that lead to new consenses about the work, workers themselves throw “a web of visibilities, of public codes and private embarrassments over

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personal conduct” (Rose 1999: 73). Central in shifting the organization’s ‘relations of rule’ (Smith 1990) towards ‘enactments of self-rule’, textualization makes the self visible, the worker accountable, and the work measurable.

Chapter 9

Conclusion Post-bureaucratic organization

Introduction This last chapter draws together the main strands of the argument presented in this book. Following on from that, I will pursue some of the consequences of recent organizational developments for workers’ education and training on the one hand, and for organizational research on the other hand. Put in general terms, this study has addressed the discursive characteristics of organizational change. The main focus of this study has been that post-bureaucratic organization appears to want to straddle two contradictory dimensions of organization. First, it wants to create a visibility of the worker by dissimulating organizational authority. It does this by reducing hierarchy, devolving decisionmaking power, setting up collaborative decision-making forums, emphasizing ¶exibility, and dissolving inside-outside boundaries and rigidities. At the same time, post-bureaucratic organization is increasingly weaving people into activities of public display and self-presentation. Second, post-bureaucratic organization wants to enhance the transparency of the work. The activities that people are beginning to enact are not just about selfdisplay, but about a display framed within knowledging, informating and accounting practices, particularly those that seek to set explicit procedures, benchmarks, standards, competences, guidelines, and other meta-discursive constructs. These formalizing devices, moreover, broaden the space of data production and performance comparison, of surveillance and monitoring. The post-bureaucratic organization informates itself on the back of ongoing digitization, which in turn cranks up intensities of knowledgeing, communication and interaction. These intensities arise especially because knowledges are becoming dispersed from management out across the workforce: post-bureaucratic work is not principally about following pre-determined rules, but about enacting (any kind of) rule-making. In this way, post-bureaucratic organization shifts organizational ‘relations of rule’ into ‘enactments of self-rule’.


The discourses of post-bureaucratic organization Discourses of organization Discourse has provided the explanatory means for this study. ‘Discourse’ in this study has been used, quite generally, to mean ‘meaning making’; that is, established practices of doing and saying, and not some hypothetical process that goes on in people’s heads. People make meaning in myriad ways, from gesturing and speaking, to building technologies and infra-structural arrangements of space. Each of these meaning makings has diŸerent aŸordances: some are more ephemeral and temporal; others are more durable and portable. A semiotician at heart (Latour 1996b), Latour has talked about these latter more durable kinds of meaning making as ‘immutable mobiles’, highlighting the ways in which they transport meaning ‘intact’ from one place to another, in the form of maps, for example, or machines. Socially produced spaces, while immutable, are of course not portable, but they too impose very speciªc conducts on those who are in or around them. I argued in the earlier chapters that there was a parallel to be drawn between what we do with language and what we do with discourse (i.e. ‘semiosis’) more broadly. Language displays a number of characteristics that enable us to recontexualize ‘here-and-now’ and ‘I-and-you’ meanings into ‘whenever’ and ‘whoever’ meanings. In Chapter 3, I discussed the notion of ‘grammatical metaphor’ (Halliday 1994a), to suggest that a reconªguration of syntactic elements in the sentence enables us to shift from a local into a distal kind of meaning making. According to this logic, ‘I commenced work’ translates into ‘Job commencement’. The latter formulation is a nominalization (turning ‘commenced’ into ‘commencement’), and, as seen in Chapter 4, nominalization is a locus of knowledge production in so far that its more abstract form encapsulates, indexes and treats as given more speciªc kinds of knowing, saying and doing. As kind of grammatical metaphor, ‘nominalization’ is of central interest to considerations of organizational discourse, both as linguistic dynamic that aŸects organizational discourse, and as a way for thinking about organizational production more generally. As seen, nominalization concerns the tendency of parts of the (English) sentence to be shifted into the noun (or the nominal group). As dynamic that in eŸect ‘thing-iªes’ how we understand, talk about and experience ‘the real’, nominalization is not dissimilar to traditional forms of organizational production. Both nominalization and organizational material production are about achieving a shift from particular individuals doing things (‘I commenced work’) towards ªxed entities or products that pertain to more and diŸerent kinds of people (‘Job commencement’). Put diŸerently, and replaying the theme just touched on above, nominalization parallels the Fordist organizational momen-

Conclusion 195

tum from speciªc into general, from old into new (terminologies and technologies), from local into distal. Seen from a discourse or ‘social semiotic’ perspective, then, we know that people’s meanings can privilege local ‘here-and-now’s or shift towards distal ‘whenever’s. Such perspective teaches us too, though, that neither of these ways of meaning-making is any less discursive. Put diŸerently, neither local nor distal meaning makings have a greater monopoly over ‘truth’, or are any closer to the ‘real’. As suggested in Chapter 3, de Saussure’s original conception of language (and discourse more broadly) as constituted in relations of diŸerence does not merely serve to emphasize the relational basis of meaning. It also gives pride of place to the insight that no one kind of meaning making can claim to be more natural or more necessary — even if people do lots of ‘work’ to render some meanings more natural and necessary than others, putting a brake on the view that ‘all is relative’. Thus, rather than allowing ourselves to be carried away by this insight into the discursive or semiotic constitution of all meaning making (as do Cooper and Chia), we need to acknowledge that practical reality puts a stop to the ¶ight of ‘unlimited semiosis’ (Eco 1990, 1992). The reality of social relations and practices dictates to a large extent the ways in which the relativity or ‘unlimited semiosis’ unleashed from within de Saussure’s theory is pragmatically limited and constrained. Put more simply, while meaning may hypothetically and philosophically be always constituted in unending chains of diŸerence, these chains of diŸerence are brought to heel by the practical decisions we ongoingly (have to) make about ‘how to go on’, how to interpret what people say and do, how to act on the circumstances that we ªnd ourselves in. Here, the practical, material reality of what we take something to mean and of what transpires as a result cannot be dismissed as ‘illusions of simple location’ (Chia 1998). We are constantly confronted with having to act, and those acts themselves will delimit what things mean, even if they are confusing and ambiguous. And even by classifying and accepting something as being confusing and ambiguous, we construe it so that it aŸords ‘a way to go on’. If the workings of the sentence are suggestive about meaning making more generally, it also pays to consider how people speak to each other in real-life, organizational situations. Such a methodological move, of course, implicates the researcher in re-presenting ‘what goes on’. Adapting a practice common to ordinary social life — re-presenting experience for the beneªt of giving others a window on our own experiences (Urban 1996) — this study has deployed empirical analysis to provide a window on the experiences of workers in organizations. As is in the nature of windows and representations more broadly, empirical representation provides a view on some things while eliding other things. I do not disregard or misrecognize the tentative and partial nature of the representations


that I have mobilized as data (Thibault 1994). But as I argued in Chapter 3, it makes little sense to pronounce on the total ‘undecidability’ (cf. Cooper 1989: 486) of ‘what goes on’ and of the representations that we mobilize to talk about it. Contradicting their own intent, ‘grand’ pronouncements such as Cooper’s pretend to remain unaŸected by the proclaimed ‘inability of discourse to represent’. Lest I give a foundationalist answer to a foundationalist challenge, Chapter 3 took to heart the call for critical re¶ection on the resources used to represent the interests and claims of this study. In this study I have diverged from both organizational theoretical concerns with innovative and un-naturalized ways of doing and thinking organization, and from discourse analytical prerogatives to do with power, predictability and regularity. In contrast to these normative (deconstructive and critical) kinds of enquiry, I have wanted to understand how actors produce particular organizational outcomes. One part of this has been analyzing the dynamics of situated, collaborative interaction through which actors enact organization; another part of this has been analyzing the formal constructs through which actors mediate and naturalize organizational meaning. I could have spoken about these outcomes in more abstract ways as other theorists do, and not include instances of speaking and writing as a way of exempliªcation. For me, however, instances of speaking and writing embody a kind of hologrammatic richness, in the way that molecular moments of human meaning making can harbour meanings and implications that reach far beyond the immediacy of those moments themselves. Re-presenting ‘what went on’ (discourse1) is for me a way of bringing into view the outlines of ‘how we (currently) go on’ (discourse2). In doing so, I have freely moved in between hermeneutics and descriptions of the formal relations and manipulations of discourse, to outline how I understand what is happening in organizations. My focus of interest has been the ‘production of organization’ (Cooper 1993) and the ways in which discourse is deployed to do so. I identiªed two ways in which this production manifests itself: the one depersonalizes and distances, and the other personalizes and localizes. The former comprises three moments. First, through dediŸerentiation people are co-opted into ways of meaning making that transcend their diŸerences. Second, these ways of meaning making delinguistify ‘away’ the particulars of space, time and agency that used to anchor those diŸerences, and with which they used to identify themselves. Finally, the consensus that (potentially) develops around these new kinds of meaning making aŸords new and more complex social practices and relationships; put diŸerently, these new discourses enable people’s understandings and knowledges to ‘stretch’ across time and space: they become time-space distanciated. All this manifests, at the level of discourse, in more durable and thing-iªed meaning-makings: nominalizations, architectural designs, buildings.

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The production of organization can also come about as a result of practices that are personalizing and localizing. Here I am thinking of course of the increasingly participative ethos that characterizes post-bureaucratic organization. In this case, production is not principally and purely recontextualized into progressively complex and thing-iªed discursive-semiotic forms, but is maintained as a dialectic between face-to-face performance and negotiation on the one hand, and sociallyderived kinds of representation on the other hand. Here, the tension between actors’ social understandings and the discourses they use to do their work is put centre-stage. Within limits, worker participation is the site where people make sense of, invent, and infuse meaning into new discourses and self-displays. As shown, in Chapter 4, the nominal group is again the prime site in language where these kinds of tensions become visible: do we settle on a more nominalized form for referencing our knowledge and understanding, or do we still want to unpack what we say into more speciªc and particularising forms? Having set out these tensions and relations at the level of discourse, we can replay these themes at the level of organization. Thus, the pre-occupation with depersonalizing and distalizing discourse is very typically Fordist: here, standard tasks, set routines and linear responsibility chains are presented as if legitimate in and of themselves, and as if valid in perpetuity. In contrast, the pre-occupation with participation and personalization on the one hand, and with resemiotization on the other hand, is typically post-bureaucratic: here, organization is to some extent allowed and encouraged to emerge from individuals’ collaborative meaning makings and from the dynamics of their interactions. The organizational modalities that are at stake here — Fordism and post-bureaucracy — can be rewritten as a dialectic between hegemonic power and worker-initiated governmentality.

Post-bureaucratic organization: Hegemony into governmentality This study has argued that at the heart of emerging forms of organization is what Rose identiªes to be the crux of neo-liberal government: the establishment of “lines of force across a territory spanning space and time” (Rose 1999: 50). These lines of force can of course be achieved by means of (re)materializations of meaning that distance, mediate and naturalize particular kinds of human relations. Here we can think of data, reports, records, o¹ce arrangements, room design, built construction, and so on: all these are ways in which meanings have been unhinged from face-to-face sociality and become re-inscribed into a technical, extra-human domain (Berg 1999). In this Fordist modality of organization, `lines of force’ are anchored in and legitimated by organizational hierarchy, bureaucratic specialization, historical precedent, occupational and professional tradition, and linear processes of production, education and specialization. Such


environment favours kinds of decision-making in which ordinary employees have no or little direct say, and over whose execution they have little discretion. Overall, as technology of organizational conceptualization and as practical management, Fordism is primarily concerned to translate its `relations of rule’ (Smith 1990) following a linear logic from the particular into the general, from the little into the big, from the part into the whole, from the old into the new, and from the available into the less available. In objectifying the worker, the work and the product in these ways, Fordism takes the roles, sentiments, identiªcations and views of managers, employees as well as consumers for granted. In contrast, in the post-bureaucratic organization — in so far as that such organization can be said to exist (Heckscher and Donnellon 1994) — ‘lines of force’ are increasingly realized not just by phenomena that are on the outside and beyond the sphere of in¶uence of ordinary workers, but also by forms of participation that occur in addition to traditional kinds of work. These new kinds of participation begin to reconstitute the site and the nature of work. They aŸect how workers talk at work, and they introduce a challenge to traditional occupational and professional conceptions of knowledge and power, conventional perceptions of self and identity, modernist assumptions about work, management and organization, and the semiotic constitution of organizational time, space and agency. Put more generally still, in speaking about ‘post-bureaucratic organization’ I seek to foreground two kinds of developments. On the one hand, organization is becoming less discrete, less ‘monological’, and more engaging with and accommodating of contesting ways of doing, being and saying. While much of this might be mere rhetoric or ‘shadow play’ (Hardy et al. 1998), some of it too points to an inclusive and collaborative ethos. On the other hand, workers are required to develop new ways of conceiving of identity and self, work and responsibility. While for some these constitute insurmountable challenges and problems, for others they represent opportunities for overcoming fossilized regimes of truth, outdated regulatory ideals, and for instituting new attitudes to work and organization. Neither of these developments, I suggested, can be evaluated a priori as either good or bad, primarily because they are often more complex than commentators are willing to acknowledge, and because workers’ uptake or resistance is always more complex and pluralist than simple and reductive judgements would have it. For workers, the post-bureaucratic developments involve at least two kinds of challenges and/or opportunities. First, in shifting from doing to the talking about doing, and in potentially negotiating new ways of treating asthma or ªxing a missing machine component, workers construct a subject matter (their ‘ªeld’) that is distanced from the actual work; that is, distanced in time and space. Thus, instead of purely focusing on the practical here-and-now of the work itself and enacting the self as ‘process worker’ or as ‘doctor’, they also (have to) become

Conclusion 199

textualizers, or discourse workers. This new space of work can be as destructive of old identiªcations as it can be constructive of new ones. Second, and at the same time, workers now (have to) become oriented in these new textualizing environments towards self and each other as co-producers of a new, interactive, politicized, communicative mode of doing. This new communicative mode of work not only potentially produces new knowledges and new ways of doing the work; it can also create new alliances, new intimacies, and new ways of being. Over and above these shifts, the central element of this communicative/ participative mode of work is that workers induct and are inducted into a selfinitiated governmentality: they ‘progress’ from obeying relations of rule to performing enactments of self-rule. Within this new modality of organization, work interactions are opportunities for workers to ‘fold authority into the soul’. As their talk interweaves and re-weaves distal (organizational-practical) and local (socialinterpersonal) discourses about being and doing at work, workers can capitalize on the interpersonal and social aŸordances of face-to-face interaction. Put in special relief in the meeting room, these aŸordances manifest as workers assume a mutually conªrming or disconªrming gaze. Their gaze not only gains a solidity thanks to their number. Its ‘weight’ is also inherent in the fact that its judgments and assessments are enacted by one’s peers. In this way, the ‘volatile social space’ of the meeting room serves to centralize people’s co-presence as the site where approvals and disapprovals are registered, answered and calculated; where diŸerences, deªciencies and deviances become evident, re-fashioned or excised; and where an unorganized admixture of knowings and sayings can transpose into knowledge, creativity and novelty. Under their own and each other’s gaze, workers turn visible, but the parameters of that gaze are ultimately set within and proªled by the ‘lines of force’ that permeate the organization. It is in that sense that people’s visibility is a function of organizational transparency: what is ‘seen’ is that which proªles out against the context of organizational resources, opportunities, and discourses.

The problem of organization The tension that permeates organization derives from the schism between local experience and the ways in which that experience is communicated (informated) for the purpose of accounting for what happens to others. The post-bureaucratic impetus is to bridge this gap between local and distal, and, with the help of digitized modes of communication/information, reduce the distance between recording and protocolizing, between doing work and knowing about how the work is done, between negotiating social relationships and knowledge relationships. In doing this, post-bureaucracy co-opts workers into accepting greater


levels of responsibility for and engagement in organizational decision-making; higher levels of political stress due to having to negotiate such decisions with others whose views are likely to diŸer, and less time to do their work due to their involvement in meetings and committees where these collaborative negotiations and decision-making contests take place. In short, workers are to be able to devise and display discourses that are both local, and distal. Being confronted with power and diŸerence on such interactive occasions, workers not only have to accept changes in work practice but also changes in their ‘conduct of conduct’. First, this means, given the higher levels of accountability and monitoring, that workers are expected to display higher levels of responsible autonomy and self-governance, to be realized through openness about work practices, performance evaluation, and practice improvement. Second, it means, given the more dynamic and less predictable nature of work and participative decision-making, that they will have to accept a ‘¶exibilization’ of practices and relationships, and, as a consequence, enact a ‘¶exibilization of self’ (Grey and Garsten 2001), and with that, a ‘re¶exivization of self’ (Iedema and Scheeres 2003). This raises serious issues not only for the education and training of employees, but also for how we do research in organizational settings. I conclude this chapter by addressing these two issues in turn.

Post-bureaucratic reform and training Whereas in Fordist and neo-Fordist organizations, employees ªtted into clearly marked institutional hierarchies and were in charge of clearly circumscribed (proceduralized) and specialized tasks (see Rose et al. 1992), post-bureaucratic organization tends to demand that they be multi-skilled, broad-banded, and linguistically articulate and assertive. Rather than management determining the sequence and manner in which tasks are to be carried out, employees are now encouraged to participate in the conceptualization of tasks and of the work process as a whole. They negotiate their jobs as members of ‘quality circles’ and consultative committees, as occurs in hospital settings where clinicians get together to protocolize and benchmark their practices (Chapter 8). Now, workers are not merely required to do their work, but also to talk and think about and plan their work and its eŸectiveness. The requirement to talk about their work places enormous demands on the discursive skills of workers, especially when these demands become part of competency assessments: On the one hand, operational level workers in all industry sectors who have been doing their jobs competently, often for many years, are failing the competency assessments derived from competency standards, even after undergoing training programs.

Conclusion 201

On the other hand, vocational level workers who are required to undergo training in formerly professional ªelds such as sciences, materials technology and so forth, often have di¹culty coping with the language demands of higher training levels. (Solomon, mimeo)

The requirement to multi-skill places still greater demands on workers. The Sydney Roads and Tra¹c Authority, for example, now has systems in place encouraging workers to formulate their own training needs and to determine the new skills they would like to learn (Joyce et al. 1995). Similarly, Area Health Services in Australia require staŸ to articulate performance assessments about and targets for their work. Failure to produce these self-steering target statements and participate in training programs can lead to disciplining or even dismissal. Deªnitions and knowledges of work that are ªxed, whether as procedures, routines, or even those which govern behaviour and dress, are simple and stable compared to deªnitions and knowledges that are negotiated ‘on the run’ with team members. Participation in such negotiations requires not only that we have the appropriate languages for speaking, writing, gesturing, and so on. It also means that we need to ‘keep with it’ and stay informed, at the risk of taking our eyes oŸ the ball. Put in those terms, deªnitional and knowledge changes do not merely challenge the ways in which we think and speak, but they also challenge our professionaloccupational identities, in so far as these are based on speciªc assumptions and enactments. Clearly, organizational change calls into being modes of identiªcation and subjectiªcation that rely less on one particularly and well-rehearsed ‘regulatory ideal’ (Hall 1996), than on a mosaic of strategies, assumptions and practices, or a pastiche of elements making up practice and self. If this is indeed happening, participation in the organizational sphere is no longer a matter of apprenticing into stable communities of practice (Wenger 1998). Rather, it appears the point of gravity of learning to work is displaced towards managing self in situations where one is facing complex a¹liations, unstable practices, and with that, complex expectations regarding the conduct of conduct (Grey and Garsten 2001). This means that the focus of employee training is shifting from substantive and ideational notions of work towards questions about how to produce and enact meta-discourses about work, and how to interact with others in sites where these meta-discourses are negotiated, devised, challenged, and settled. In the training literature, this manifests in terms of employee training courses centring not only on ‘managing interpersonal relationships’ but also on ‘career resilience’. In sum, training shifts from teaching management or work as technical practice, to also inculcating a managing attitude of self to self. As noted in Chapter 2, the practice of textualization becomes the practice par excellence where the worker institutes “a sort of permanent political relationship between self and self” (Foucault 1983b: 246). Converted from basis for learning into object of ‘unlearning’


(Blackler et al. 1999), programs increasingly target self as something to be confronted not as a natural and necessary essence, but as a managed outcome of what we say and do. For managers, courses are also being re-oriented from technical and systems issues towards inspirational leadership and strategy, or practices that ‘look ahead’ to where the organization might be going. With the emphasis now on leadership, strategy and change, managers are increasingly inducted into rhetorics that construe the adequacy of the workforce and of the product as issues that are the onus of others, particularly the workers themselves. If traditional management tried to retain Fordist power by becoming increasingly skilled at ‘the management of meaning’ (Gowler and Legge 1983), post-bureaucratic management is faced with having to institutionalize practices and processes where trust can be conªrmed, where champions for change can be found, and where accountability relationships can be made visible. In a climate where managers are becoming as visible as employees through having to change, strategize, lead and set the example, the question about how to enact the conduct of conduct is an equally pressing one. For managers as for workers, training for the post-bureaucratic workplace involves programs that emphasize that relationships and conducts are increasingly ‘out in the open’, and that address literacies and conducts that go beyond technical-instrumental concerns, to focus on how to prepare people for such enhanced visibility.

Implications for research The focus of this study has raised a number of issues for organizational research. First, by conceptualizing organization as an achievement of meaning making and meaning re-making, we have grounded it in the dynamics and constraints of discourse. This means discourse cannot merely be language, ways of speaking, or some immaterial, private and hypothetical realm of meaning. Instead, discourse is a multi-modal material phenomenon. On the strength of this deªnition, we can describe discourse in terms of ensembles of organizational investment, knowledge and practice; arrangements of what people do with what kinds of resources and outcomes. This multi-modal/material deªnition of discourse brings into view the tensions and interactive dynamics between heteroglossic realizations (that maintain their localness and immediacy) and monoglossic realizations (that achieve a distalness and obduracy). It opens up to view organizational discourse as an interactive dynamic that aŸords or closes oŸ ‘lines of force across a territory spanning space and time’. Second, this study contends that organizational ethos is shifting from doing work to talking work, and from hegemonic power towards governmental rela-

Conclusion 203

tionships between self and self, and between other and other. This shifts our attention as discourse researchers from the surface and structural manifestations of talk and other kinds of meaning making, to problematics that aŸect the ways in which workers are becoming implicated in having to speak diŸerently, having to re¶ect on themselves, having to speak across professional-occupational boundaries. Such research goes beyond the ‘constants’ of interaction as well as beyond recognisable patterns at the level of register or genres. It situates itself at the heart of workplace dramas, values and concerns, without losing sight of the discursive nature of what is enacted. Third, performativity now is not merely that set of conducts by means of which the worker shows herself to be productive and organized, but also, and perhaps more particularly, conducts that project the worker self as a concerned, involved and engaged individual. Such conducts have been conceptualized in the literature in terms of an unnatural transposition of intimacy into organizational and productive displays, analyzing it in terms of ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild 1983) and ‘synthetic personalization’ (Fairclough 1992). As this study has argued, it does not pay to prejudge the emerging imperative to interpersonalize with coworkers (and consumers), and oppose constructed and managed displays of self to ‘naturally and necessarily’ occurring private and intimate realizations of self (as if these could ever be entirely ‘natural and necessary’, notwithstanding the ongoing Freudianization and consequent ‘necessitation’ of self). Such a stance rules out a priori the enabling potential of a re¶exivized, ¶exible self, and it closes ourselves oŸ from reaching particular research conclusions. Overall, if in earlier times our ‘object of research’ might have been delineable in terms of a ªnite skill, set of meanings, a specialized register or a series of discourse rules, such delineation is now not just harder, but also much less viable. At the same time, the trend towards textualization at work outlined and illustrated in this study calls into question the foundations of both organizational discourse analysis (seeking regularity) and organizational discourse studies (seeking innovation). With the advent of textualization, our focus of interest has to shift from adopting ªxed moral and analytical stances as researchers, to tracing the speciªcs of how people and organizations wield heteroglossia and monoglossia, and what this does to people’s work and self, and to the products of their work. Social scientiªc research can no longer luxuriate in abstract and decontextualized moralities or philosophies, and distance itself from the praxes of ‘social reality’. It has to get its hands dirty, not least to satisfy its own post-modern rhetoric about the increasingly boundary-blurring and cross-disciplinary nature of knowledge and practice. Our research, then, might more proªtably focus on discourses that centre around expressing and negotiating being, doing and talking at work about work. Such discourses have the potential for being both re¶ective and re¶exive. Re¶ective,


because they talk about what people do and how they do it. Re¶exive, because they put people’s identity at risk to themselves and to others. This means that as organizational discourse researchers we now a radically reconstituted brief. With textualization, the rules for and outcomes of workplace participation are not issued once and for all, neither by a self-fulªlling worker, nor by an exploitative manager or supervisor. Instead, we are faced with a more open-ended and far more delicate and complex range of positionings and identities, and potentially less circumscribed and more changing kinds of talk. This means discourse practice is more volatile, political, confronting and involved. To ªnish, the implications of textualization, and of the politics of workplace reform, are ultimately matters that are at once meta-discursive (challenging boundaries) and contested (defending boundaries). This also means that neither our data nor our interpretations and analyses of workplace discourse are likely to be seen as ‘innocent’. This also means that our involvements may not always translate into products that are amenable to accepted notions of academic purpose, output, and identity (Scheeres and Solomon 2000). Given the re¶ective and re¶exive power of discourse, and thanks to the very deªnition of discourse itself, we ªnd ourselves at the heart of workplace change and struggles of resistance and identity. The onus is on discourse researchers now to equip themselves, such that they can handle the complex interpersonal dynamics inherent in the ongoing textualization of workplace practice and reform.

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Author index

A Adler 189 Adorno (and Horkheimer) 40 Alexander 66 Alvesson (and Karreman) 29 Armstrong 51 Ash 166 Atkinson, P. 39, 51, 104, 177, 186 Atkinson, M.A. (Cuff and Lee) 39 B Bakhtin 40, 58, 66, 69 Barkema 7, 8 Barley 29 Barley (and Kunda) 29, 36, 100, 110, 176 Bateson 67, 120, 186 Bauman 7 Benner 32 Benveniste 135 Berg 10, 55, 78, 153–154, 197 ~ and Bowker 154, 163 ~ and Timmermans 10, 48 Berger (and Luckmann) 37 Bernstein 12, 150 Bertens 29, 33 Berwick 178 Bijker 36 Billig (and Schegloff) 38 Blackler 202 Bleich 164 Boden 27, 39 ~ and Zimmerman 39 Boje 29, 30–33, 34, 43, 176 Bourdieu 1, 45, 116, 129, 134, 135 Bowker (and Star) 19 Brown, A. 33 Brown, P. (and Levinson) 119 Burns and Stalker 2 Burrell 29

Burrell (and Morgan) 28 Butler 39, 43, 184 C Callon 186 ~ and Latour 135 Cameron 7, 40, 54 Candlin 42 Caws 33, 59 Cedersund (and Säljö) 117 Champy 16, 17, 176 Chia 29, 34–36, 41, 43 ~ and King 29, 36, 62, 195 Child (and McGrath) 111, 189 Chouliaraki (and Fairclough) 41, 43 Christie (and Martin) 27 Cicourel 38 Clanchy 89–90 Clay (and Schaffer) 6 Clegg 6, 45, 89, 96, 98 ~ and Hardy 101 Codman 160 Coiera 155, 159, 161, 162, 169 Cook-Gumperz (and Messerman) 159, 163, 183 Cooper 29, 34–36, 43, 51, 62, 63, 175, 195, 196 ~ and Burrell 29 ~ and Luxmoore 168 Cox 162 Crawford 154 Cuff (and Sharrock) 39 Czarniawska 29, 43 D Daft (and Wiginton) 28 Danet (and Bogoch) 89 Davies (and Harré) 68 Deacon 69


Degeling (et al) 14, 163, 168, 181, 184, 187 Dent (and Whitehead) 180 Derrida 59, 62 de Saussure 59, 195 Docker 62 Donaldson 29 Douglas 52, 145 Doyle 37 Dreyfus (and Rabinow) 51 Drew (and Heritage) 27 Drew (and Sorjonen) 27, 38 Driver 86 Drucker 177 Dryzek 135 Duckett 178 du Gay 3, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 43, 51, 97, 101, 149, 176, 189 E Eco 59, 195 Eggins 74 Elias 20, 48, 84, 85 Ellis 19 Elkins 90 Erickson 51, 52, 53, 177 F Fairclough 3, 11–14, 40, 41, 43, 102, 203 ~ and Wodak 41 Farrell 51, 101–102 Feinstein 160 Fiol 29 Firth, A. 27, 116 Firth, J.R. 59–62 Fisher (and Forester) 135 Forester 129 Foucault 17, 30, 37, 40, 44, 45, 46, 48, 50, 56, 83, 85, 91–94, 152–153, 201 Fowler 41 ~, Hodge, Kress and Trew 41 Freidson 179 G Gabriel 29 Gagliardi 134 Garfinkel 39, 40, 52, 66, 67, 135, 152, 159 ~, Lynch and Livingston 39

Gee 20, 42, 43 ~, Hull and Lankshear 2, 3, 12, 17, 42, 43, 54, 100, 180, 181, 189 Giddens 45, 47, 52, 66, 70, 84, 85, 87–88, 91, 104, 109, 175 Goffman 40, 51, 149, 190 Goody 86–88 Goodwin 39 Gordon 44 Gottdiener 59 Gowler (and Legge) 202 Gramsci 44, 45 Grant (Keenoy and Oswick) 27, 29 Gregory 118, 138 Grey (and Garsten) 2, 15, 54, 100, 112, 130, 190, 200, 201 Grimshaw 27, 116 ~ and Burke 27 Gruber 116 Gumperz 40, 42 Gumbrecht (and Pfeffer) 65 Gunnarsson 27 H Habermas 5, 21, 45, 47, 65, 70, 130, 146, 182 Hak 38, 42 Hall, S. 190, 196, 201 Hall, C. (Sarangi and Slembrouck) 42 Halliday 6, 37, 40, 41, 48, 57, 58, 59, 64–65, 73–75, 90, 106, 141, 194 ~ and Martin 77 ~ and Matthiessen 115 Hanlon 180 Hannan 164, 169 Hardy (et al) 183, 198 Harré 65 ~ and Gillett 32, 65 Harvey 8, 47, 100 Hasan 21, 59 Hassard (and Parker) 62 Healey 113 Heath 39 ~ and Luff 39 Heckscher 1, 2, 3, 10, 15, 18, 100, 111, 150 Heckscher (and Donnellon) 1, 100, 150, 198 Hein (and Wodak) 41 Heritage 38, 66

Author index 229

Hiley 116 Hindle (and Degeling) 181 Hjelmslev 61 Hochschild 11, 203 Hodge (and Kress) 19, 37, 41, 42, 57 Holquist 70 Hunter 51, 92 I Irvine 32 Ivins 91 J Jackson 3, 42, 54, 189 James, H. 20 Jönsson (and Linell) 50 Jordens 113 Joyce (et al) 201 K Kendall (and Tannen) 40 Knorr-Cetina (and Cicourel) 66 Kotthoff 116 ~ and Wodak 40 Kress 41, 43, 52, 75 ~ and van Leeuwen 42, 57, 58, 69 L Labov (and Waletski) 32 Latour 46, 55, 70, 149, 160, 178, 194 Lave (and Wenger) 59 Law (and Mol) 133 Lebaron (and Streeck) 39 Lefebvre 19, 97 Lehoux (et al) 166 Lemke 37, 58, 66–67, 77 Levy-Strauss 131 Lief (and Fox) 11 Luff (and Heath) 162 Lukes 44 Lyons 91 M MacKenzie (and Wajcman) 36 McDonald 167, 172 McElhinny 39 Manning 28, 29

Martin, Joanne 33 ~ and Frost 29 Martin, J.R. 37, 42, 66, 107, 117, 120, 155 Massaro 166 Matthiessen (and Bateman) 116 Maynard 116 Mayo 16, 100, 189 Mehan 50 Messer 116 Meyerkort 105, 178 Miller (and Rose) 133, 150, 182 Montgomery-Hunter 104, 154, 156, 164, 186 Morgan 16, 28 Müller 90 Mühlhäusler (and Harré) 75, 155 Munro, I. 172 Munro, R. 150 Muntigl (Weiss and Wodak) 41 ~ and Turnbull 116 Mumby 27 ~ and Clair 27 O O’Donnell 116 Ong 86, 88 P Palmer (and Short) 178 Pêcheux 40 Peirce 62 Peters 13, 176, 177 ~ and Waterman 16 Pettigrew 28 Phillips 29 Piggott (and Gillis) 166 Plum 32 Porter 92, 179 Power 152 Preziosi 97, 98 Psathas 76 R Reddy 131, 168 Reed 32, 134 Rorty 31, 46 Rose, D. (McInnes and Korner) 37, 42, 99, 200


Rose, N. 1, 6, 12, 17, 25, 30, 32, 37, 44–46, 51, 53, 54, 85–86, 91, 96–98, 100, 109, 160, 165, 168, 176, 177, 183, 187, 190–192, 197 Rothery (and Stenglin) 32 S Sacks 52 ~, Schegloff and Jefferson 38 Sarangi 12 ~ and Slembrouck 27, 42 ~ and Roberts 27, 42 Sass 116 Scheeres 1, 7, 14, 42, 51, 97, 101, 102, 110, 146, 149, 150 ~ and Iedema 42 ~ and Solomon 204 Schegloff 38 Schiffrin 40 Schutz 66 Sebeok 19, 37 Sefton 116 Segerdahl 38 Seidman 34 ~ and Alexander 63 Sellen (and Harper) 162 Senge 13, 16, 177 Shotter 20, 65 Shryer 154, 164 Silverman 28, 38 Smith 96–97, 109, 147, 151, 192 Snyder 165 Solomon 201 Sorokin (and Merton) 52 Still (and Costall) 57, 69 Streeck 39 Stubbs 39 T Tannen 120, 123 Taylor, C. 18, 64–65, 130

Taylor, F.W. 99 Taylor, T. (and Cameron) 116 Thibault 32, 36, 37, 44, 45, 59, 60, 120, 196 Timmermans (and Berg) 187 ~ et al. 55, 58, 70, 135, 146, 163 Treitler 90 Turner 28 U Urban 165, 195 V van Leeuwen 19, 37, 142 van Dijk 27, 151 van Maanen (and Pentland) 152 Volosinov 60 W Walsh 13 Weber 3, 85 Weigand (and Dascal) 27 Wenger 4, 31, 43, 47, 48, 53, 59, 66, 69, 152, 201 Whetherell 38 White 59 Whorf 95 Wilden 61, 132, 141 Willmott 176 Wilson (et al) 165 Wittgenstein 61, 98 Wodak 27, 40, 41 ~ and Matoushek 41 Y Yakel 9, 152 Yeatman 11 Young 29 Z Zuboff 168

Subject index

A accountability 152 administrative law 98 agreement 135 alphabetic script 90 anti-bureaucratic 15ff architectural design 143, 196 (arti)facts 134 attenuation of regulation 177 authenticity of the everyday 34 authority 88 autonomy 171, 179 B benchmarking 189 boundary ~ object 152 ~ maintenance 152 ~ crossing 181 bureaucracy 3 C career resilience 190, 201 casemix coordinator 183, 184 centrifugality 69 centripetality 70, 133 citizen dignity 18 civilizing process 85 classification 107 clinical ~ pathway 7, 103, 175, 178, 181ff ~ notation 159 ~ error 165 ~ practice improvement 181 ~ variances 182 continuity of care 178 commodification 13 community of practice 4 complexity 153

computer literacy 172 conduct of conduct 200 construction of documentary reality 152 conversation analysis 38 constraint as the condition of possibility for meaning 32 ‘cool’ societies 132 crisis of representation 34 critical discourse analysis 41 critical linguistics 41 D dedifferentiation 73, 142, 163, 171 delinguistification 5, 47ff, 73, 77, 196 democratization 11 ‘detached concern’ 11 difference 123, 129 ~ that makes a difference 67 chains of ~ 195 digitization 7, 193 diminuatives 137 discourse 3ff, 19-21 discourse1 20, 38, 58-62, 196 discourse2 20, 38, 58-62, 196 generative potential of ~ 134 as meta-semiosis 152fn local ~ 165fn, 175 distal ~ 175 detached ~ 165fn ~ as agency 169 reconfiguring ~ 171 prospective vs. retrospective ~ 186 auto-experiential vs. group-referential 186 meta- ~ 193 ~ of post-bureaucratic organization 194 ~ as meaning making 1, 194 discipline 95 discursive workplace studies 42


doing work to talking work 146, 198 downranking 141 DRGs (‘disease related groups’) 178 E economy of representation 153 emotional labour 11, 203 enactments of self-rule 192, 193, 199 enterprise 17 ethnomethodology 39 exosomatic 20, 145 externalising organizational memory 153 F façade of trust 183 facticity 151 flexibilization ~ of work practices190, 200 ~ of self 190, 200 Fordism 98, 194 frameshift 131, 168 frontstage 76 G generic structure 157 governmentality 44–46, 197 grammatical metaphor 73, 194 grand theory 34 H health care professional fragmentation of ~ 163, 164 informating ~ 162 here-and-now and there-and-then 170, 194 mediating ~ 170 heteroglossia 69, 133, 146fn, 202 hegemony 44, 197 hermeneutics 116 hesitation devices 137 historical specificity 160 ‘hot’ societies 131 human relations theory 16, 28 human resource management 16 I ideal speech situation 146

identity 50ff, 198 as geographic-moral locale 75 identification 177 collectivised ~ 191 illusion of simple location 35, 195 immutable mobile 55 infold (authority) into the soul 176, 183, 187, 189, 199 informal politics 150 information 150 storage 87 Institute of Clinical Excellence 180 interactivity 18 intensified workplace participation 11 interactional sociolinguistics 40 interactive literacy 131 K knowledge knowledge -intensive workforce 111, 189fn knowledging 102ff, 193 knowledge generation 177 dispersal of ~ 182 L labour of representation 34 langue 59 lines of force 1, 5, 10, 151, 153, 164, 168–170, 175, 197–199, 202 linguistic affordance 104, 186 lists 87 litigation 159fn localness 158 local and distal 199 logogenesis 115–116 M machines of morality 85 management of meaning 202 mediating medical ~ record 150, 154ff ~ art of science 179, 187 ~ outliers 186 ~ case presentation 186 membership categorization 76

Subject index 233

metafunctions 58, 64 ideational 64 interpersonal 64 textual 65 metonymy 141 mnemonic ~ power 88, ~ device 175 monoglossia 70, 135, 146fn, 202 multimodality 69 ‘must-ness’ 126 mutual relatedness 35 N narrative 32 negative politeness 15 new moral habits 85 New Public Management 13 new work order 100 NFR (‘not for cardio-pulmonary resuscitation’) 156 nominalization 74, 108, 157, 194 O organization mechanistic ~ 2 information-intensive ~ 9 interactive ~ 10 ~ as story-telling system 30 ~ of space 96 the problem of ~ 175, 199 production of ~ 196 organizational ~ change 201 ~ discourse analysis 36–43 ~ discourse studies 28–36 organizationality 34 over-bureaucratization 179 overlap (non-supportive) 123 P panopticon 92 paper ecological dexterity of ~162 micro-mobility of ~162 parole 59 pathwaying 175, 178, 182ff

~ as advanced liberal program of rule 187 PCIS (‘patient care information system’) 165ff performance of self 130 performance measurement 189 performativity 33, 39, 189 phase 118, 138 planning 112–115 population ecology theory 28 portfolio worker 190 positive politeness 15 post-bureaucracy 2, 100ff, 112, 193ff, 199 ~ as organic form of organization 2 ~ & participation ~ & negotiation documentary dimension of ~ 149 ~ & clinical pathways 182 post-Fordism 100 post-structuralism 33 power 43 practices 66 productivity vs. unproductivity 133fn procedure 84, 92ff pronominalisation 155 public scrutiny 150 Q qualifier 107 quality branches 180 quality circles 200 R reciprocity 68 recontextualization 12, 164 records ~ keeping 40, 149 fields in ~151, 159, 163, 164, 182 paper ~159ff electronic ~165 recursive categorization 107 redundancy 186 reflexivization of self 130, 200 regime of truth 76 regulatory ideal 184, 201 rematerialization 135, 197 relations of rule 192, 193


resemiotization 46, 133, 145, 175, 178 resistance 172 responsibilization 17, 111 role distance 190 rule-making 193 S scientific management 28, 99 scriptural regime 166 self-steering self 3, 12, 97 semiosis 65 service integration 178 social action theory 28 social disciplining 85 social semiotics 37, 63 social rationalization 85 stable mechanisms 83, 85ff standardization 8, 178 streamed care 178 structuralism 33 subjectification 43, 52–54 new modes of ~177 ~ as both individualizing and collectivising 190 surveillance mechanisms 91 symbolic violence 115ff, 135 synthetic personalization 11, 203 systems theory 28 system thinking 15 systemic linguistics 37, 41 T tactic out of its own orbit 17

team 189 ~ alignment 15, 177 doing being a ~ 187, 188 techniques of the self 85 technologization 14, 165 technology/ies of interaction 146, 150 textual presence 155 textualization 3, 7, 10, 54–56, 181, 184–192, 204 time 95 ~ space and agency 171 time-and-motion 99 time-space compression 8 time-space distanciation 35, 47, 77, 196 transparency of the work 18, 147, 149, 173, 175, 193 truths 142, 146, 171, 172 truces 171, 172 turn to discourse 29 U undecidability 197 unlimited semiosis 195 V visibility of the worker 18, 147, 149, 193 volatile spaces 97 W webs of commitment 45 worker empowerment 177 writing 86

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