The End of Organization Theory?: Language As a Tool in Action Research and Organizational Development

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THE END OF ORGANIZATION THEORY?

Dialogues on Work and Innovation

The book series Dialogues on Work and Innovation presents empirically based studies as well as theoretical discussions on the practice of organizational renewal. Its publications reflect the increasingly urgent need for the development of new forms of work organization. In today’s interdependent world, workplace reform and organizational effectiveness are no longer solely the concern of individual organizations; the local and the global have become closely interconnected. Dialogues on Work and Innovation mirrors the fact that enterprise development and societal development cannot be kept separate. Furthermore, the Series focuses on the dialogue between theory and practice, and thus on the mutuality of knowledge and action, of research and development. The Dialogues stress the critical significance of joint reflexivity in actionoriented research and the necessity for participatory processes in organizational change.

Editors Hans van Beinum, Halmstad University (Editor in Chief) Richard Ennals, Kingston University Werner Fricke, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn Øyvind Pålshaugen, Work Research Institute, Oslo

Editorial Board O^guz Babüro^glu (Bilkent University, Ankara); Claude Faucheux (CREDS, Fontainebleau); Davydd J. Greenwood (Cornell University); Denis Gregory (Ruskin College, Oxford); Björn Gustavsen (National Institute for Working Life, Stockholm); Friso den Hertog (University of Limburg); Frieder Naschold (Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin); Kurt Aagaard Nielsen (Roskilde University); Robert Putnam (Action Design Associates, Natick, USA); Annemieke Roobeek (University of Amsterdam); John Shotter (University of New Hampshire); Stephen Toulmin (University of Southern California); René van der Vlist (University of Leiden).

Volume 5 Øyvind Pålshaugen The End of Organization Theory? Language as a tool in action research and organizational development

The End of Organization Theory?

Language as a tool in action research and organizational development

ØYVIND PÅLSHAUGEN Work Research Institute, Oslo

With comments from BJÖRN GUSTAVSEN The National Institute for Working Life, Stockholm

DAG ØSTERBERG University of Oslo

JOHN SHOTTER University of New Hampshire

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

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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 Pålshaugen, Øyvind. The end of organization theory? : language as a tool in action research and organizational development / Øyvind Pålshaugen ; with comments from Björn Gustavsen, Dag Østerberg, John Shotter. p. cm. -- (Dialogues on work and innovation, ISSN 1384-6671 ; v. 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Organizational sociology. 2. Action research. III. Shotter, John. IV. Title. V. Series. HM131.P243 1998 302.3’5--DC21 98-25042 ISBN 90 272 1774 2 (Eur.) / 1 55619 828 0 (US) (Pb: alk. paper) CIP © 1998 – John Benjamins Publishing Company 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 75577 · 1070 an amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O.Box 27519 · Philadelphia PA 19118–0519 · usa

Contents Introduction Björn Gustavsen Chapter 1 Organization Development and Action Research The relationship between word and deed in organization development The organizational form of language: discourses Action research: organization development through the reorganization of discourses A sketch of a strategy for action research (in three phases) Chapter 2 The Foundation Phase: Dialogue Conferences

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11 11 15 18 22

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Linking up with the company’s discourse Launching the development organization concept Dialogue with the executive management The decision to hold a dialogue conference The dialogue conference for the company The need for an internal public sphere at the company Old problems in new patterns: effects of the internal public sphere Break (1): from present problems to tomorrow’s organizational form Alternating perspectives: personal experience and organizational understanding Break (2): from the subject matter of the dialogues to dialogues as a work form The simulation of the development organization The decision to establish a development organization

25 28 31 35 37 39 40 43

49 52 54

Chapter 3 The Project Development Phase: Development Organization at Work

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The development organization as an internal public sphere Interpretation of experiences with the development organization Modifying the development organization

59 64 68

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CONTENTS

Discussion about cooperation problems The interconnection between discussion and cooperation procedures The dialogue conference for supervisors and elected department representatives Cooperation or conflict? Linguistic and real dilemmas Interlude: the question of delegation Discussion of the development organization: simulation of processes, not results Opinions on the differentiation of the development organization The yardstick for evaluating the development organization Separate discussions with the company management and the trade union leadership Strategy for transferring process competence to the company The supervisor’s conference under the direction of the company Discussions in the company development committee The interpretation of the trial arrangements At the limit of discussions: a practical test

69 71 76 77 80 80 84 86 87 93 99 103 104 106

Chapter 4 The Institutionalization Phase The paradox of institutionalization

109 109

Chapter 5 Coda: Theory and Practice in Action Research What, if anything, is new? New theory and practice A new interpretation

113 113 116 118

Commentaries Critical language theory in practice Dag Østerberg

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An organization’s internal public sphere: its nature and its supplementation John Shotter

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References

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Introduction Bjørn Gustavsen1

In these times, when the world has been turned into ‘discourses’ and ‘texts’, one may, with Richard Rorty, ask if there is, behind all the texts, something which the texts are about and which is not, in itself, a text. There are four possible answers: (1) Yes, (2) No, (3) Don’t know, and (4) Don’t care. In the study which forms the point of departure for this book we are quite close to alternative four. The study in this case is Øyvind Pålshaugen’s doctoral thesis: a case study taken from a development project in an industrial plant. If the position that emerges through these studies is seen as falling close to alternative 4, this is not because Pålshaugen seeks to make light of the everyday concerns of work and working people. Rather the opposite, as witnessed by his involvement in time-consuming and resource-demanding development projects where the main concern is with industrial democracy. In the language–reality relationship he does, however, in principle, opt for language. Not only in a simple sense, such as arguing that “more than one description can fit any given reality” but in a deeper one where, for instance, language often emerges as the reality; there simply is not anything to be found ‘beyond’ or ‘behind’ the conceptual constructions which people apply in dealing with each other and their situation. These constructions are the situation rather than a reflection of it. Change no longer becomes a question of identifying optimal patterns of organization in structural terms and telling those concerned why they should adopt these patterns. Change must be seen as a question of improving on existing, and creating new, linguistic tools which enable those concerned to relate to each other in new ways. Even if there are realities ‘behind’ linguistic expressions, which can be separated from these expressions, these realities are accessible only through the linguistic expressions of the local actors. There is no way in which research can ‘directly’ gain insights into the social aspects of a workplace. In this way, language acquires a key position. What, then, happens to such classical topics of social investigation as ‘organizations’ since the investigations are generally based on the idea of linguistically reflecting given realities and not creating them? 1. Bjørn Gustavsen is Professor at the National Institute for Working Life in Stockholm.

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THE END OF THEORY OF ORGANIZATION?

Reason and theory of organization When Max Weber conducted his study of ‘bureaucracy’ (Weber, 1958) he introduced, or reinforced, certain assumptions: • First, that such social phenomena as organizations can be made subject to human reason. They can be penetrated and understood by the human mind and this understanding can be converted into a written text. • Second, that organizations cannot only be understood one-by-one and as local phenomena, but in terms of general characteristics as well. ‘Bureaucracy’ was thought to be a pattern which successively made itself felt in an ever-widening circle of private enterprises and public bodies and authorities. • Third, that writing about bureaucracy is a purposeful action, that is: an action which serves some goals. To make contributions to a reasonable and informed discourse on organization must, obviously, form part of these goals. This presupposes, in turn, that there ‘is’ such a discourse ‘somewhere’. • Fourth, for this discourse to have meaning and purpose it must, in turn, be thought to be able to influence practice. If, for instance, bureaucracy is thought to be a good thing, the discourse should reinforce the dissemination of bureaucracy, or, if the opposite is thought to be the case, the continued development of bureaucracy should be hampered. (Weber, by the way, had a fairly differentiated view on bureaucracy; in his case it was actually not a question of either/or but rather one of a continuous evolution informed by a rational public debate about its functions and dysfunctions.) It is on the basis of assumptions of this kind that the cross-disciplinary research field called theory of organization has evolved. This does not mean that the assumptions have not been subjected to discussion and critique. Leaving aside first assumption, for the moment, and moving to the second, much of the later development of theory of organization can be seen as a process of continuous movement away from a single concept towards a more pluralist understanding. Distinctions were introduced, such as that between formal and informal organization (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939) or between mechanistic and organic organization (Burns and Stalker, 1961). A major step came with the introduction of contingency thinking (Woodward, 1965) where it is argued that the question of what ‘good’ or ‘optimal’ patterns of organization may be cannot be answered in general terms, but has to be seen in the light of the more specific type of environment and technological–instrumental basis of the enterprise. Against this background, a typology of patterns was proposed. Contingency theory, in turn, can be encountered in different versions. Initially, it was thought that all organizations could be described in terms of the same variables

INTRODUCTION

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but that the scores would differ — while, for instance, a military unit would score relatively high on ‘degree of centralization’, a consultancy firm or a research organization would score relatively low. In turn, contingency theory became radicalized towards the position that different organizations need different variables to describe them (i.e. Scott, 1990); such a variable as ‘line control of workflow’ may be a good one in a description of a sawmill, while it may look odd if the object of study is the Church. This development was further radicalized with the introduction of ‘local theory’ (i.e. Elden, 1983), where the main point is that the question of optimum organization has become so contingent that one may as well set out from the idea that each organization constitutes a universe of its own. It may show structural likenesses to other organizations, but individuality has to be the point of departure. Whatever kind of theory of organization is promoted, the next question — corresponding to the third assumption above — is where to do the promoting? In research, the obvious answer is in the scientific texts. But is this enough? In most sciences it is thought that the scientific texts have impacts outside and beyond themselves: sooner or later, in some way or another, the contents of these texts must make themselves felt in real life. How is this to take place? The point of departure for Max Weber seems to be that theory of organization is played into ‘the discourses of society’. But what discourses may these be? Does society include informed discussions about issues of organization to which research, as expressed in individual studies, can make a contribution? As a general question this was placed most clearly on the agenda by Habermas in his famous work on the public discourse in liberal democracy and its fate under present social conditions (Habermas, 1962). On the one hand, this study points out the core significance of this discourse — ‘the moving force’ of democracy is just an open, informed debate about issues of importance to society. On the other hand, the study argues that this core democratic instrument has withered away. Modern communication is so infused with power, marketing and strategic thinking that it no longer works in favor of reason and enlightenment. It was this basis that his studies of communication were launched (i.e. Habermas, 1984/1987) — studies which, to have an impact on society, need just the type of debate which, it is argued, does not exist. Leaving such paradoxes aside, the question remains: to whom does theory of organization speak? We turn now to the fourth assumption — that theory of organization is able to reach out into the world to achieve an impact on organizational practices. In many ways, this assumption falls together with the third one. If a society level democratic dialogue is the mechanism through which theory of organization is mediated into society, the collapse of this dialogue is also the collapse of the practical impact of theory of organization. Discursively speaking, this theory is going up a blind alley.

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Returning, finally, to the first of the four assumptions, this leads into ‘the linguistic turn’ and the whole debate on the possibility of linguistically penetrating the social world and reporting ‘what was found’. Although not blind to the problems of, for instance, the relationship between general concepts and specific realities (Weber, 1975), theory of organization was nevertheless launched on the assumption that it is possible, through language, to penetrate the social world and make it transparent. The recent focus on the structuring power of language itself has implied a major challenge to this belief. Setting out from the point that all research is bound up with given language, research is facing the problem of having to rely on linguistic tools with serious limitations. These limitations are, furthermore, often unknown since our tool of investigation is language and there are limits to the extent to which we can investigate language itself through this tool (a warning voiced in particular by Wittgenstein). This is the terrain that Øyvind Pålshaugen enters in his treatise. His study is, in other words, not just another contribution to theory of organization, arguing, say, another concept to compete with those already present. Rather, the core point of his study is different: what role can theory of organization play? What does it mean to understand organizations? What does it mean to give an understanding a practical impact? Can understanding and practices be decoupled, or do they have to emerge together?

The study In his report on a development project in an industrial enterprise (a tobacco factory) a first aspect to strike one is that no effort is made to draw up an initial ‘map’ of the organization: its structural characteristics and whatever problems these characteristics may give rise to. Pålshaugen makes no effort to describe the initial situation in the enterprise in terms of any of the traditionally given conceptual toolkits supplied by theory of organization, nor does he describe the process as leading towards a particular, structurally definable pattern. What he deals with is a process that is unfolding in the enterprise; the process, furthermore, can be characterized in terms of a series of overlapping discourses. In these discourses the point is not to reach a ‘true picture of the workplace’ nor ‘a new theory of organization’, but rather to solve problems. The problems are approached one-by-one, from the assumption that the problems of the organization come to the surface in the discussions conducted between the organizational actors. In performing their jobs and grappling with their problems they rely on linguistic schemes and it is in these schemes that the roots of success or failure lie. Such schemes can, for instance, strongly delimit the range of alternatives perceived by the actors in a given situation, or they can lead them into unrealistic

INTRODUCTION

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alternatives. They can develop views on each other that lead them into stalemate conflicts, or into processes of innovative co-operation. The point for the researcher is to help introduce new interpretations, new conceptual schemes, new linguistic tools that enable the actors to get out of deadlocks and stalemate situations and to move on. Through demonstrating that there is generally more than one true picture of the workplace and its actors, old conflicts can be dissolved, new possibilities for action perceived, etc. But, it may be asked, will not this lead into a relativist and ad hoc way of dealing with problems that does not ensure long term coherence in the evolution of the organization? Not necessarily. At this point Pålshaugen actually introduces exactly the same kind of thinking that lies behind the role of the public discourse in democracy. In a democratic dialogue coherence is ensured, not by all actors subscribing to a single theory — be it of the good enterprise or the good society — but by creating a discourse dynamics that can ensure broad participation and strong collective memories. The establishment of an ‘internal public space’ is a core point in this context: such a space ensures openness in respect of decisions that are made and the possibility of linking them to each other, crosssectionally as well as longitudinally. This, it can be argued, is a far better way of achieving consistency and coherence than reliance on the ability of, say, one or a few managers to stick to a long term course. What Pålshaugen does is in may ways to reconstruct some of the main elements of a Weberian type of position, but on the local level. The enterprise is the unit where theory of organization is fed into a discourse on practices. This enterprise level discourse must, however, reflect some of the main characteristics of a democratic discourse on the level of society. In this way it is possible to bypass the breakdown of the society level discourse, as argued by Habermas, and still ensure a link to practice. It is also possible to achieve a more direct interaction between theory and practice than the one inherent in a process of mediation via society as a whole. There is one major exception, in the sense that Pålshaugen does not see the main contributions of theory of organization in terms of a conceptual scheme for analysis but rather in terms of discourse inventiveness, where the point is not to argue an externally defined view on the best way to organize but to help the local actors proceed towards more openness, a better ability to see new alternatives, a better ability to continuously draw more people more strongly into the discourse, and the like. Even in the absence of a theory of organization, one may imagine Pålshaugen bringing with him a theory of communication, i.e. of a Habermas type. This would imply approaching the workplace with a set of pre-given standards for good communication which could function as guidelines in the structuring of the local discourses. Even this is rejected, however. At this point, Pålshaugen argues that when Habermas tries to create general rules of communi-

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cation on the basis of the point that to use language is to follow rules, he makes a basic mistake. To follow a rule is not the same as being able to analytically describe and explain what this following implies — it can equally well be a more or less automatic action, based on learning by doing. Since this is the case, there is no guarantee that the logical structure of the relationship between the rule and its following is the same in all situations of rule following.1 Even where the logical structure can be identified, it may still vary. And if this basis varies, one is treading on uncertain ground indeed when trying, like Habermas, to make metarules which appear applicable to all situations of rule following — in particular is this the case since Habermas offers no independent empirical grounds for his argument, in spite of its character as ‘an empirical reconstruction’. For Pålshaugen, the discourse in which he actually finds himself is ‘the operative universe’. Change has to do with freedom, and to experience freedom a situation should be seen as open and subject to transcendence by those who are in it. Externally defined criteria of rationality can, from such a perspective, be seen as constraints since they point out what direction should be taken. One may, possibly, dare to see some form of analogy between ‘the discourse situation’ as sketched by Pålshaugen and the theory of freedom argued by, e.g., Sartre, where freedom is to transcend a given situation through recognizing a lack of external determinants. This is the opposite to seeing oneself as bound by a ‘world wisdom’ which must be applied.

The role of research If the core thrust of the efforts of research is to help organizational actors to improve their own discursive competence, while at the same time no universal reason can be discovered concerning how discourses are to be conducted: what, then, is the role and purpose of research? From his point of departure it is reasonable to expect Pålshaugen to argue a radical view of ‘applied research’. In ‘applied research’, as usually understood in the social sciences, there are several oddities. One is that ‘applied research’ is seldom an application of the tools of research itself to solve problems, but rather research that studies the applications of others, i.e. what happens when a welfare agency tries to improve the situation of its clientèle, or a management tries to improve productivity. Another is that ‘applied research’, to be ‘applied’, must be subordinate to something else, and this is presumably ‘basic research’. Through this subordination, applied research, by definition, does not become a tool that is fully accessible to the actors in the specific situations where applied research is 1. A more elaborate version of Pålshaugen’s argumentation on this point is available in Norwegian (Pålshaugen 1997)

INTRODUCTION

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applied. If applied research is used to clarify ‘the situation of the weak’, such as children, the ill, the people at the periphery of society — a very popular topic in applied social research in Scandinavia — the weak will become even weaker, since the findings can only be fully understood in terms of the superordinate basic theory which is developed and managed outside the application situation. In this way the weak are not only subject to control from the center, the center also deprives them of their self understanding. A core point in Pålshaugen’s position, then, is that ‘applied research’ has to be transformed into a type of research in which all types and levels of understanding are part of the research process itself. Those who are to benefit from this research must, furthermore, themselves participate in the research process. The division between ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ research must be abandoned, as well as the distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. Although departing from, and linking to, established discussions and positions — for instance in Scandinavian action research (Gustavsen, 1992; Toulmin and Gustavsen, 1996) — Pålshaugen, can, in sum, be seen as radicalizing the debate. By linking premisses that emerge directly from a theory of science position to real life situations, he, in principle, leaves out the whole field of ‘sociology’. In his treatise sociology is represented by theory of organization, but there is little reason to expect that any other branch of sociology would have fared any better, if it had been visited by Øyvind Pålshaugen. Furthermore, he also also leaves out any effort to conceptualize criteria of communication which have to seek a basis for their validity outside the specific discourse situation itself. He argues that, in relating to other people, social science must emphasize the freedom and openness inherent in each situation and help people utilize this freedom. This is radically different from looking for ‘explanations’ in the form of seeing human acts and behaviors in the light of ‘determinants’. ‘Determinants’ are, in this context, the enemies of freedom. From this perspective , Pålshaugen comes to argue a radical reconceptualization of ‘applied research’. Applied research has to be directed at helping people understand and utilize the freedom inherent in their situation, rather than at applying a general theory given from outside with the aim of ‘understanding’ them.

Points of discussion There are, of course, objections to such a position as argued and demonstrated by Pålshaugen. Some examples: When Pålshaugen can, in the tobacco factory, convert the idea of industrial democracy into broad participation in ongoing discourses about the workplace and its surrounding organizational structures, it is not only on the strength of local arguments and consensus with the actors concerned. Backing any consensus

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around such a point there is an agreement on development between the Norwegian Confederation of Business and Industry (NHO) and the Federation of Trades Unions (LO) where discourses are emphasized as a major vehicle for change and where the principle of broad participation is expressed (Gustavsen, 1993). How does such an agreement come about? What type of argument can induce the parties in the labor market to make this into a part of the established industrial relations system? There is a need to get the social partners to accept arguments of the type: “on the whole, direct participation in local discourses is the most efficient approach to change”. Then, however, one enters approximately the same terrain as Max Weber did when introducing ‘bureaucracy’ since Weber’s aim was not to create an ‘empirical concept’, directly applicable to specific realities, but rather to point at some characteristics with an empirical basis, and of general social significance, but also accepting a major gap between specific realities and the concept. The point was to have something with which to enter a general debate. What, then, are the differences between this type of position and the one argued by Pålshaugen? That it may be one of degree is clear enough, but is it one of principle? That one pertains to process, the other to content, is also clear, but what significance does this carry? Or will Pålshaugen, alternatively, refrain from expressing any views to the labor market parties centrally and limit his involvement to the local level so as to avoid having to make statements which pertain to a large number of non-present actors? The weakness here is obvious: if the parties in the labor market are not convinced by a certain type of argument, they will not generate the conditions necessary for the type of project run by Pålshaugen. In line with this point, the issue of scope, magnitude, or critical mass in workplace development also emerges. It is an empirically fairly well substantiated point that change in individual workplaces needs some degree of ‘supportive context’, in the form of broader processes of change. How do we, as researchers, set about making contributions to these broader processes? How do we, for instance, create links and network relationships between development projects if there are no communicative common grounds (nor any shared superstructure)? Another set of problems emanate from the direct link between theory of science and workplace development. With Pålshaugen, radical deconstructionism goes straight into the tobacco factory, unmediated by any ‘sociological’ understanding of the enterprise. Can a theory of science position be used in this way? Since theory of science discussions tend to avoid practical examples (throughout the vast volumes by Habermas on the nature of the social sciences one will, for example, hardly find one single description and discussion of any specific project), it is a major asset of Pålshaugen’s approach that he actually does take a theory of science position into reality, testing it in direct confronta-

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tion. There are, on the other hand, certain problems here; for instance, that the theory of science discourse may pertain to problems of legitimation and validation and not to operative procedures and sociological theory. Derrida and other deconstructionists may attack the notion that science can be given an indisputable foundation, without attacking the theories, procedures, and practices of science itself. These can, so to speak, stand on their own feet, without ‘Cartesian’, ‘Kantian’ or other types of foundations. Concerning the idea of freedom: to interpret freedom as being maximized if there are no rules, criteria, approaches, or strategies visible to a group of actors, is just one possibility. This may equally well be seen as a lack of freedom since it implies a lack of condensed experience from other, parallel, situations which can very well contribute to a lack of efficiency in the acts chosen by the group: the group may be free to do what it likes, but it leads nowhere. Freedom can also be seen as the possibility of knowing what other people in parallel situations have done, and to what effect. Then, however, these elements must be present, and making such elements present can be seen as just the function of social theory. Theory of organization can very well be seen as a set of alternative strategies for solving problems of organization. This leads to a further point: Democracy is not only Rousseau, it is also Montesquieu. It is not only face to face groups and basic human relationships, it is also the structuring of large systems characterized by distance, institutions and so on, where commonly accepted rules and institutional loyalties link people to each other, even while they may never see each other. Can we, for instance, manage without some kind of Habermas-type principles of communication — although one may have to downgrade the validity claims that underlie them? It is, in this context, worth noting that all democratic constitutions contain rules to ensure free communication, such as the freedom of speech, of association, and so on. In short: Does Pålshaugen substantiate a need for a radically different attack on the tasks posed by the idea of a ‘social science’, or does he, when all modifications are introduced, actually end up with an argument which essentially implies a rebalancing of the various elements of such a science and its various relationships, but where the main consequences will hardly transcend in a major way those inherent in the struggles, compromises and difficulties that are already well recognised, i.e. in linking theory to practice, in going from the local to the general and back again, and so on? In principle, it is fairly well recognised that the claims to be sciences in the naturalist sense tend to be misplaced in the social field. Even if this is so, there are many things we need to do and many relationships and movements that we need to build, or at least to help build. It is futile to expect that all elements in these efforts can be based on premisses that live up to one or other classical definition of science. This, however, does not prevent us

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from having to construct them as well as possible, and in this context to rely on methods of investigation that are ‘as good as possible’, making constructions that are ‘as productive as possible’. In achieving this we need all our intellect, all our capacities, all our ability to grapple with problems of the first order of difficulty. Much social research today has to do with trying to achieve this ‘as good as possible’ kind of approach or solution. Radical deconstructivism can easily overshoot the target since it deals efficiently with a certain type of validity claims, but not equally efficiently with helping us find out what do we should do then. On the other hand, Pålshaugen takes his position into the field and demonstrates how it can be set to work — he does not answer all questions and deal with all issues, but he certainly demonstrates his points within the framework set by the project. Even if one may end up with a view less radical than the one argued in Pålshaugen’s thesis, it is still so that the type of radical deconstructivism argued in the thesis brings the problems associated with the idea of ‘social science’ quite sharply into focus. Even if one does not follow Pålshaugen all the way, but chooses to put more emphasis on considerations that pull in other directions, the point that the social sciences are crowded with unresolved problems, conflicts, and tensions, is in itself of major significance. In the eternal struggles between distance and involvement, theory–langauge and life-world–language, reality and concepts, correspondence theory of truth, consensus theory of truth and ‘does it work’ theory of truth: how do we create and sustain the idea of ‘science’? At best, there are no simple answers and, whatever position one may chose to take, there is certainly a need to do it with humility and in full acceptance of the point that those who may choose differently are equally ‘scientific’ — or unscientific, as the case may be for us all.

Chapter 1 Organization Development and Action Research The relationship between word and deed in organization development ‘Organization development’ is a multisyllabic and rather tedious term, but one that nevertheless has the power to evoke interest. This is no small achievement, given our way of life, in which time seems to be an increasingly scarce commodity but where each second runs the risk of disproportionate elongation. In industrial life, where time is money, the term is most often abbreviated to OD. But this only serves to confirm that OD is just as natural and nearly as necessary an ingredient as a Managing Director in any self-respecting company. Now, it is just about as difficult to deduce the activities that might be concealed behind the term OD as it is to deduce the types of personal characteristics that one might find in an MD. There are just as many types of ODs as there are MDs. But what is perhaps even more important is that any general description, referred to a type, will always be vague and schematic when applied to an actual person. The mismatch between a typological description and the many facets of the actual, real world is something with which we are all familiar. For this reason one might believe that typological descriptions of organization development could not be accorded any great stature. At most they might serve as conversational curricula on the lower levels of certain particular educational routes. But this assumption does not hold true. Rather to the contrary: typological descriptions, models for organization development, are commodities that are valued by both practitioners in industrial life and theorists in those segments of the social sciences that concern themselves with organization theory. The popularity of the models among practitioners is probably most easily understood. Industrial people are industrious people; they need no scientific explanation for the fact that models are schematic and lack a relation to reality. Ordinary common sense tells them this, and ordinary economic know-how dictates that models must be used according to their better judgement in any case. More strange, perhaps, is the popularity and status of typologies and models

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based on them within the world of science. Here, organization-theoretical schemas dominate to such an extent that the numerous individual studies of all sorts of organizations almost appear as sub-contractors that supply the building materials for the models’ construction, rather than the other way round. While science should by all accounts be an instrument that serves to penetrate the depths of a specific phenomenon, it appears here as a vehicle with which one can soar higher and higher over it. After some reflection, this may not be so strange after all, however. The attraction of theoretical accounts is in large part due to the practical realities which are excluded from the accounting process. At the same time, the realities which seem to be accorded a place in the model are set in motion in a way which seems exciting. Here we find the secret communion between the practitioner and the theoretician. Both of them know that it is an illusion to say that the model models reality. But in the same way that we cannot avoid being fascinated by a good film, even though we view it as nothing but a play, an illusion, neither can we avoid being fascinated by a good theory. And it is precisely as theory that it is fascinating. The models of organization theory provide just this opportunity to ‘play with realities’. At the same time, thinking about the realities of organizations is an organized way of playing with an idea. The game can proceed in many different ways. The various genres in the literature on organization theory can be seen as groups of related games with different sets of rules. At one end of the scale we find that type of game in which the rules are extremely comprehensive and must be closely adhered to. All concepts must be the subject of exact definition, the road to be followed must be accurately mapped out in advance, every single stage of the game must end with a conclusion, and all questions posed must be answered before the game can be ended. At the other end of the scale the rules are fewer and not as rigid. Demands are not so strict as to force the game to take place in certain predetermined forms; the game must only have the form of a narrative. It is the creation of the narrative that is the objective of the game. When the story has been told, the game is over. The view of organization theory and models of organization development as a kind of game perhaps becomes most clear when we view the game as a type of dynamic activity and not just a set of static rules. The activity has three main forms: organization-theoretical models can be written, read and discussed. Let us investigate what we might achieve by viewing such activities as sorts of games. That discussions can have the character of play and games, and, at the same time, be genuinely engaging in a way which games, in the usual sense of the word, are not, is something we have all experienced. How many of us have not found ourselves involved in more or less long-winded discussions, in which the self-ironic rejoinder that rounds off the discussion expresses a recognition that the it has the character of a game: “Ah! We’ve solved the world’s problems!”

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT AND ACTION RESEARCH

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The irony arises from the fact, agreed upon by all participants, that the discussion that has just taken place can have no impact whatever on the actual circumstances that constitute its subject. Nonetheless, the rules of the game governing such discussions are precisely such that the remark that the world’s problems have not only been discussed but ‘solved’ is a justified characterization. In fact, the game’s rules provide directions concerning what sorts of contributions are relevant to the particular subject being discussed. That the discussion should ‘simulate action’ is one of the rules for conversations in which the world’s problems receive their ‘resolution’. The discussion often goes along the following lines: the conversation starts with a depiction of one or more social circumstances that others among the participants view as completely erroneous; this is the way that we lapse into a discussion about how things ought to be managed or done if the problems are to be solved. It is to this section of the discussion — the part that applies to how things ought to happen and how things ought to be done — that we point when we say that the discussion produces ‘solutions’ by simulating actions. Very many types of discussions contain an element of simulating actions and solutions, without the discussion thereby becoming the sort of game that we have just described. If we go to the opposite end of the scale, in terms of the connection between what is discussed and the practical realities, we can take a working group in a company as an example. If we imagine a group of workers talking among themselves in order to get to the bottom of some of the problems that have cropped up in their own work situation, we might realize that their discussion, too, must to a great extent revolve around how they ought to organize their work so as to solve the problems. It is in this sense that the discussion must simulate solutions. But there seems to be a close affinity between the discussion and practical reality in this example; as close here as it was distant in the first example. It would not be incorrect, however, to say that the discussion in the second example simulates action. One can see that the simulation does not necessarily correlate with reality if the solution arrived at during the discussion proves to be ineffective in practice. There will always be a divide between paper ‘solutions’ and practical ones, across which safe passage cannot be guaranteed. This approach to the problem may become even more distinct if we reflect more carefully about how discussions proceed in practice. It is an undeniable fact that the only practical way in which we can introduce our personal experiences and images or models of reality into a discussion is by means of words; i.e., by means of language. We cannot communicate with each other about reality by allowing reality itself, or our experiences of it, to present itself in an unmediated form. Reality must, so to speak, be paraphrased, converted into a linguistic form or inserted into linguistic models if we are to be able to discuss it with others, to talk

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to one another about it. True enough, a discussion can be nourished by a number of things which are not purely linguistic, such as conducted tours/inspections, numbers, figures, photographs, drawings and diagrams. But what gives all such non-linguistic elements their place in an understanding of reality are the linguistic expositions, explanations and syntheses of the distinctive elements: in brief, all the linguistic utterances that maintain the discussion. In itself this is obvious, and it is why we do not pay any great heed to the fact that language is the predominant medium in discussions and in all communication between people. We move around just as naturally within language as we do in the air we breathe. We are aware that language and reality are not necessarily the same thing, but we experience language more or less as if it possesses a type of parallelism comparable to the relation between a map and the landscape it reproduces. A few question marks must, however, be placed against this model of the relationship between language and reality. Even though individual factors within the (linguistic) model can be crosschecked against reality (a standard example is physical extension), these individual factors inhere within the linguistic model of reality as a system in which the system consists of something other than the sum of its individual parts. If, as an example of a linguistic model of a system, we choose a company, we realize that the linguistic model of the company as a system cannot be directly related to the company as a practical reality: a linguistically created model can only be tested against other linguistic models. There is much to say for the image of the relationship between language and reality in the form of the map–landscape model, but we would like to suggest two modifications: • we can never undertake a direct comparison between the map and the landscape: instead, we must compare our map with others’ maps; • the map (that is, our linguistically articulated understanding of reality) is itself a part of the landscape. Our objections to the idea that it is possible to construct linguistic models with a direct and unequivocal basis in reality not only includes models constructed by means of discussions. All types of models, whether expressed in speech or in writing, come up against the boundary represented by the fact that they cannot shed their skins or become disembodied: they are, and will remain, models, built with language as their fundamental material, constructed through one form of language game or another. Thus there is no fundamental difference between, for example, discussions about organizational development in a company and scientific renditions of organization development. The rules of the game may be different in certain respects, but in both cases we are dealing with a type of game that simulates reality. Some of the most important game rules in both cases are precisely those that ensure that the simulation does not appear as a simulation, but proceeds in such a way that the impression is given that it is reality manifesting itself.


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The organizational form of language: discourses After having employed a considerable number of words to construct a model of the relationship between language and reality, a central point of which was to demonstrate that no models (not even the one I have created) can be bound to reality in any unambiguous way, it is perhaps not amiss to recall something that we all know already, namely that linguistic models are not in practice rendered ineffectual because of this. It is perhaps even more to the point to remind ourselves once again that saying that, by means of language, we make models of reality is not without problems. Our linguistic models are not only models; they are an expression of the predominant way in which we human beings construct a common reality, namely through verbal communication — whether in the form of a conversation, a discussion, in writing or by reading. Thus, our linguistic constructions are also constructions of reality — our common reality. To be able to create a common reality we have to operate through a common language. We are all familiar with those conflicts, both in family life and at work, in which people who share the same practical reality still do not share the same perception of reality, and who thus find themselves at loggerheads in conflicts which give the impression of being unresolvable. In such cases we often say that the two sides ‘do not speak the same language’. Being able to speak the same language is an important precondition for the creation or re-creation of a community. But this example also reminds us that the problem of ‘speaking the same language’ cannot be reduced to a mere question about the form of language. Ways of living and of speaking (life forms and language forms) are intertwined. An eighteen-year-old apprentice from Drammen and a similar apprentice from Liverpool may communicate more easily that two sixty-year-old people from, say, Oslo’s west side and a fjord on the western coast of Norway. A lack of community in language forms can be viewed as one aspect of the lack of community in forms of life. Taking the breadth of variation in ways of living into account, as well as the fact that in modern societies the individual life form is a considerably more complex than an homogeneous affair, then we can say that the notion that we live in a shared reality, with a common language, is more a comforting notion than an actual reality. Turning our sights towards the multitude of ways of living and forms of language which society embraces, we could just as easily say that both social and individual lives are played out against a fluctuating multitude of realities. The sympathetic idea of The One Reality that language carries with it still does not seem to have become reality. One of the effects of the variability of individual forms of life is that most of us have learned to master several forms of language. The form of language use

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changes with the type of situation or type of activity in which we are engaged. As a rule we are not free to choose in this area; different types of situations require different types of language use. Language is brim full of terms for this: colloquial language, polite language, the language of officialdom, street language, literary language, everyday language, the language of politics — all these terms are collective names for different sorts of institutionalized ways of speaking or forms of language. The terms just given above have been chosen as an illustration only, with no attempt at systematization. Now, at the point of convergence between social science and linguistics, there is a separate discipline — sociolinguistics — which works on charting and investigating all the institutionalized forms of language that live side by side in our society. An important field in this area studies how linguistic conditions contribute to the creation and maintenance of conflicts between ethnic groups and social groups, such as between middle-class and working-class people. Sociolinguistics is a variegated science that encompasses many sub-fields, but we shall not touch on any of these. We shall, however, mention a general point: the existence of institutionalized forms of language, in which language communities are blended together with social communities, shows that our perception of reality is something we have not discovered on our own. When we appropriate language we also appropriate, simultaneously, that (or those) perception(s) of reality which, to a large extent, are to be found ready made in the language community (communities) in which we grow up. If we term such institutionalized forms of language use discourses, we might say that our perception of reality to a large extent depends on which discourses we are, and have been, involved in.1 Put another way: our perception of reality depends on how our experiences are imprinted in the language we use. If what we have just written about our perception of reality is taken too literally, it might seem as if different perceptions of reality are things which are impressed upon the individual within the language system in which he/she happens to exist. But, as we know, language is not a closed system. To the extent that linguistic constructions, models, interpretations of reality, discourses, or whatever one chooses to call them, are viewed as a type of system, it is important to remind ourselves about the openness of the systems in at least three respects. •

First, all forms of discourse possess a certain number of varying aspects of similarity with each other which nearly always create points of connection and possibilities for linkage between them. A favored metaphor here is the

1. Sociolinguistics experienced a major growth during the 1960s and ’70s. In the 1980s it became supplemented by new, multidisciplinary perspectives, in which language is alanyzed as different types of discourse. For reviews see, for example, Potter and Wetherell (1987), and Macdonell (1986).


•

•

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term ‘family resemblance’. In the same way that we can sense in different members of a family — who individually are independent and quite distinct — undeniable characteristics which show that they are linked together through bonds of family relationships, we can also see that very different discourses are correspondingly connected to each other through various linguistic bonds. Second, linguistic systems or discourses are not inert. Language may well be said to be a human product, but it is not a finished product. Language may rather be seen as an unending series of re-productions and new productions. Viewed as a medium for the construction of reality, language works only when it is in use. Speaking and talking, as well as listening and reading, reveal that it is as an activity that language forms reality. Each and every formulation is of necessity a re-formulation: it must relate itself to a linguistic system as a pre-given thing, but it also creates the possibility of something new. Third, the discourses in which we participate and the experiences we have do not lie in two separate systems. In the same sense that it is legitimate to say that language takes part in constructing the reality of which it itself is a part, it is also legitimate to say that language participates in constructing our experiences. ‘Recounting experiences’ takes place in the form of linguistic articulations and it is in the form of linguistic constructions that we are able to express our experiences and ‘share them’ with each other. The experiences we have do not become experiences in the usual sense of the word without this articulation or transformation into a linguistic product. Nevertheless, our experiences are not independent of the language in which they are expressed; but neither do they converge with, nor are they identical to, the linguistic formulations by means of which they find their expression. Viewed from this perspective, the openness of language in relation to new experiences can be regarded schematically from two angles: new experiences can contribute to the emergence of new linguistic constructions and reformulations; reformulations and new linguistic constructions can contribute to the emergence of new experiences, that is, perceptions which, up to now, we have overlooked, repressed or forgotten, or, briefly: aspects of reality which do not seem to exist because they have no place in language, in our discourses.

Let us summarize our viewpoint: Language, in the way in which it exists in a network of discourses, forms our perception of reality and pre-organizes our experiences. But the individual discourses are not closed and inert systems, they exist in the form of languagein-use, including the openness and potentialities for change which this implies. Our linguistically constructed reality is constantly re-constructed through num-

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berless discourses, and if our perception of reality is to be renewed and improved, it is important both to bring new experiences to, and gain experiences from, each individual discourse. When discourses are understood as institutionalized linguistic systems, this means that discourses are also socially organized systems. Thus each individual discourse may be said to be formed by two types of organizational principles or rules. The internal principles of discourses are those rules which apply to the use of language; what, and in which form, one is permitted to speak or write. The external organizing principles are those rules which concern participation in the discourse; who is allowed to take part, and the form in which participation takes place.2 As is the case with most other social institutions, the various types of discourse have also acquired their own organized form through a mixture of formal and informal rules. Some of these rules are explicit, others implicit. This is not the place to go into detail about this, the point here being primarily to show that all discourses are regulated, are characterized by having one or other form of organization, some more pliant, others more stringent, some more, some less conspicuous. If it is an appropriate task for research to contribute to the creation of new and better ways of understanding reality, then the reorganizing of discourses presents itself as a promising tool.

Action research: organization development through the reorganization of discourses In the area of social research called action research,3 the reorganization of discourses — seen as a tool — may lay claim to special interest. The term ‘action research’ is based on the fact that the research strategy, in a general formulation, concerns participation in practical attempts to improve reality and, on this basis, to improve people’s understanding of it. The justification for this research tradition is rooted in both theoretical and practical questions faced by social science in its relation to the society of which it itself forms a part: • On the practical level, and to the degree that it has any ambitions that its words will lead to actions, social science faces significant difficulties, a fact that is not least apparent in the considerable amount of research on the use of research (See e.g. Holzner et al., 1983; Bulmer, 1986; Beck and Bonss, 1989; Lindblom, 1990). As one way of dealing with this problem, action research has chosen a strategy which implies that activity is organized as

2. M. Foucault undertakes a more differentiated analysis in “The order of discourse” (Foucault, 1984). 3. A comprehensive interpretation of this research tradition can be found in Gustavsen (1992).


•

•

•

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part of the research process within the social arena being studied. The relation of research to practice then becomes, not a problem about how to achieve concrete action, but about achieving that type of activity which it is in the interest of research to support. The practical field in which action research operates has largely centered on work organizations in the private and public domain, on projects in which management and the workforce have cooperated indifferent forms of organization development. Against this background, action research has attempted to propose ways of functioning that combine the development of productivity, the working environment, and codetermination in enterprises and organizations. All such activity necessarily has a local ambit. But, just as with social science in general, action research must also have a certain general character if it is to lay any claim to being of general interest. On the practical level, therefore, it is a task for action research to contribute to the development of general techniques in the form of practical methods that can be applied in organizational development processes which aim, for example, at improvements in productivity, the working environment and codetermination. On the theoretical level, social research is faced with the problem that it is not the sole possessor of knowledge about society. How, for example, does one tackle the relationship between the interpretation offered by an organization-theoretical study of a particular industrial organization, and the interpretation, or interpretations, offered by the members of the organization itself? In such cases, arguments have been advanced in favor of various perspectives belonging to a variety of sociological or scientific traditions. Based on the way in which action research is confronted with this problem, the present author, among others, has argued that the relationship between the knowledge of the social scientist and that of other members of society must be regarded as complementary; as two different forms of knowledge which, somewhat simply put, can be traced back to two main forms of discourse: the discourse of social science and the discourse of community life (Pålshaugen, 1988). As has already been suggested, these discourse types are not readily commensurable and therefore they are not amenable to ranking in an hierarchical order in which the one discourse is considered superior to the other, in terms of their respective truth values.

From this perspective, it is no simple matter for a social scientist to appropriate a position as an expert on an area of society, such as working life, especially not if being an expert on someone else’s reality is first and foremost supposed to mean that the social scientist has a better understanding and perception of this reality than those who live in it. Such a position can only be maintained if one presupposes that the social scientific discourse is elevated above the discourse of

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the community or of everyday life. But if one drops this precondition, instead regarding the two types of discourse as partly overlapping and partly incommensurable, then the way is open to two new ways of dealing with such dilemmas, which arise out of the fact that the two forms of discourse generate different types of understanding. First, the view of the two types of discourse as complementary but overlapping implies that one is not in the best position to decide what the representatives of the two discourse systems have to gain from one another when working to develop a new understanding; neither as a supposed neutral, external third party, nor unilaterally from one of the parties alone. Such a new understanding can best be achieved by connecting the discourses in one or more forms of dialogue. Second, the differences between the discourses indicate that the development of new understanding by connecting the discourses does not necessarily mean that those who take part in such attempts will develop a common or analogous understanding. The point of connecting different discourses is not to try to make the discourses more homogeneous, but that the various groups of participants develop and improve their understanding of reality through common participation, and each in their own way. Against the background of this perspective on how the relationship between social scientists’ and community members’ understanding can be handled, at the theoretical level there is a dual research task for action research in work organizations: both to contribute to the development of new forms of understanding among the members of the work organization in a way which can be of help for practical improvements; and, in addition, to develop a new understanding of the methods and instruments that are used to attain this, i.e., of the role of action research itself in the development of such methods and instruments. Put more briefly and more succinctly: this part of the research task can be characterized as a question partly about assisting members of a work organization to achieve a better understanding of their own practice, and partly about action research itself achieving a better understanding of its own practice. These two forms of practice are indeed not identical, and there is just as little reason to presume that those who are involved in them will develop an understanding that is identical. After this general description of action research’s theoretical and practical research objectives and the connection between them, we should be in a position to be more precise about the purpose of giving priority to the reorganization of discourses as the chief instrument in that action research strategy. As has been mentioned, action research in working life has mainly concentrated on different forms of organizational development, that is, the reorganization of work organizations. Theories of organization and other sociologically based perceptions of organizations’ structures, functions and ways of working — not least theories about how the organizations ought to function — have, in different ways, been introduced into the organization members’ discourse on how the work organiza-


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tion could in practice be changed for the better. The two central dilemmas outlined above, i.e., the relationship between theoretical interventions and concrete activity, and the relationship between the understanding of the researchers and that of the organization’s members, have also been the object of discussion within the ranks of action researchers. Different strategies have been advanced. Among these, I will present one which has achieved predominance, especially during the course of the past decade. The manner in which it tackles the dilemmas is that researchers employ their knowledge of organization theory and sociological competence mainly as a help to organize the discussions in which the members of an industrial organization must participate to ascertain viable methods of reorganization and new ways of functioning. Rather than trying to bring to light or construct models that simulate ‘solutions’ of organizational problems in a certain enterprise, such as a factory, from within the social scientific discourse on work organizations, one tries to organize a new type of discourse between management and workforce with the aim of inspiring concrete suggestions about new forms of organization and practical activity in the enterprise. The establishment of such a new type of discourse may be called a reorganization of the discourse in the enterprise. A discourse about the enterprise always already exists in organizations and enterprises, maintained by the members of the organization, its leaders and employees. In the enterprise’s discourse on itself, a number of perceptions of reality are in circulation concerning the present situation of the enterprise, its past and its future, and of its various components. Different groups of leaders and employees will have an understanding of the life of the enterprise and its operation which in some respects converge, while in others they are divergent. A common factor in all the groups is that their perception of the reality of the enterprise is to a large degree created within a segment of its discourse, and this is to a significant degree a regulated or organized discourse. The pattern of conversations, discussions, meetings, documents, notes and other forms of verbal communication in which the individual member of the enterprise is involved, depends to a large part on the position and function filled by the individual employee. Thus, the way in which the enterprise’s discourse is organized will contribute to the creation of different perceptions of the enterprise among the various groups of employees and leaders. These perceptions of reality all have their share of both fact and fiction, or, to put it in another way: each in its way represents a truth with modifications. A research strategy that aspires to overcome these more or less unavoidable flaws in the discourse of the enterprise by attempting to create a more perfect representation of reality — as if from beyond the perimeter of the discourse — in the form of a scientific description which could function as a basis for common understanding and activity, easily risks ending up as just another truth with modifications. The action research strategy therefore aims at reorganizing the

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established pattern of communication in the enterprise by organizing new forms of discussions and talks — dialogues — between people and groups who normally do not enter into such dialogues with each other within the traditional organizational form of the enterprise’s discourse. Action research that is pursued with this aim in mind, we regard as a contribution to the reorganizing of enterprises through the re-organization of discourses.

A sketch of a strategy for action research (in three phases) What such an action research strategy might be based on in practice cannot be illustrated in any other way than by presenting an interpretation of an example of such practice. In the following chapters we shall provide a comprehensive presentation of one such example, taking the form of an exposition of our own experience with an action research project in which the research aspect consisted of a combined attempt to experiment with the reorganization of discourses as a practical instrument in organization development, and to develop new perspectives on this form of action research. The action research project we examine in this monograph was undertaken as a part of a research program which is run by a research team at the Work Research Institute in Oslo (WRI). The main objective of this program is the development of practical methods and theories for organization development in which all employees take part. The attainment of the objective is sought through involvement in enterprise development projects that are based on broad participation. The network concept refers partly to attempts to encourage enterprises to cooperate in networks for enterprise development processes, and partly to attempts to organize different forms of competence networks which can support the process in the individual enterprise. Based on the industrial structure in Norwegian working life and the pattern of organizations and institutions which are responsible, in different ways, for offering assistance to enterprises undertaking organization development in one way or another, one can depict three especially appropriate forms for the creation of such network relations in the shape of what we have called network projects (that is, enterprises cooperating on development in networks with relevant competence support): network projects at concern, branch and regional levels. Branch organizations and associations, as well as regional centers of competence, will as a rule be the starting point for creating external competence networks that can support development in small and medium firms, while concerns are generally large enough to develop internal competence networks themselves. Our research program has mainly been involved in action research programs at the company and branch level, and the project presented here was undertaken at the company level.


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The strategy of the individual network project must be planned as a cooperative project between the relevant enterprise(s) and the research team. The project must satisfy both research requirements and the needs of the enterprise and its employees. Such action research projects necessarily have an experimental character, which makes it impossible for any of the parties to guarantee beforehand that all needs will be met during the course of the project. The strategy of the project is therefore divided into phases so that, as each phase comes to an end, each ofthe parties concerned has the opportunity to evaluate whether or not they wish to continue with the cooperation in the next phase.4 The first phase is termed the foundation phase since its main objective is to arrive at an agreement on the initiation of a development project, under conditions that all parties concerned — management, researchers and employees — will find of interest. This is to be achieved by means of different forms of dialogues between the research team and the enterprise, and between its various groups of employees and the management. If such an agreement can be achieved, then the research project will have attained the minimum necessary amount of support within the enterprise to pass to the next phase, called the project development phase. It is in this phase that one really starts the practical developmental work in the enterprise, alternating between dialogue and actions. Our responsibility in this phase is the development of dialogue-based organizational measures which can be of help in producing both new understanding and new forms of practice. The third and last phase is called the institutionalization phase, since the goal here is to attempt to get the enterprise to institutionalize some of the organizational measures and dialogue-based methods. Such methods can include new, locally modified forms with which the enterprise has had experience and thereby has gained a certain amount of competence, so that the development of the enterprise in terms of broad participation becomes institutionalized as a part of the normal form of work or organization. In the following chapters we attempt to make more concrete and further develop the perspectives on action research that have been sketched above by presenting an interpretation of an example of our own research practice in this area. The action research project we analyze was undertaken at J.L. Tidemann’s Tobacco Factory in Oslo, which employs approximately 300 persons (including management). The project lasted from 1987 to 1989. Our presentation has been devised as an exposition of the most important research experiences gained in each of the three phases outlined above.

4. The division into stages that we apply here was worked out by P.H. Engelstad (1989), who in cooperation with the author was responsible for the action research project presented in this book. From WRI, Bjørnulf Bernhardsen and Olav Eikeland also took part in the project.

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In addition to the reasons already indicated — which will be expanded upon further in some of the later chapters — for focusing on our own research practice, we also briefly mention another type of justification for this emphasis. In the scientific literature on organization development and action research, the dominant tendency is that the organization developer’s or action researcher’s (the external expert’s) practical contribution to the organization development process is played down to a large degree. What predominates are descriptions of those general theories, principles and methods upon which the process has been based, together with descriptions of the results that their implementation has achieved in the organization concerned. What is very nearly always absent, however, is a description of what the external experts have actually done that is supposed to legitimize the connection between the theories, methods and the practical results in the report. Under such circumstances, the relationship between theory and practice easily becomes characterized by a form of arbitrariness, an aspect which reduces the value of the theoretical discourse on organization development. We have made an effort to avoid this trap by explicitly focusing on our own practice in this monograph. As will be seen, this type of presentational strategy means that the open character of action research will be made more evident, in the sense that the theoretical perspectives are developed through a reflection on the research practice, rather than the practical contribution of the research being presented as if it only represented the realization of pre-existing perspectives.

Chapter 2 The Foundation Phase: Dialogue Conferences Linking up with the company’s discourse When people from a research institution and a company get together to discuss the possibility of a collaborative venture, the researchers are faced with their first task in the practical formulation of an action research project: creating a link to the company’s discourse. Our strategy for coupling the two discourses can be called an interventionist strategy. It is based on the assumption that if research is to play a contributory role in changing the discourse of the company, then its chances of achieving results are far greater if the research perspectives are made relevant within the framework of the company’s discourse than if the company’s personnel acquire the ability to participate in a new discourse on the company, but within the framework of a research-type discourse. In what follows we shall elaborate on this perspective by presenting some examples of our interventionist strategy as it was manifested in our attempts to link up with the local discourse at the factory where our action research project was carried out. Researchers from the Work Research Institute (WRI) had earlier taken part in an organization development project during the years 1973–1978. Two members of the current factory management had participated in this endeavor, called the ‘job design project’, which was considered to be a relatively successful project. The project resulted in a ‘job design system’ which, among other things, involved the merging into a single system of job, competence and wage development. The company had also benefitted from these project experiences during the process of designing a new department at the factory. The management thus had faith in the proficiency of WRI. Now, ten years later, the situation at the factory was still unsatisfactory. The job design system, which was supervised by a coordinating committee consisting of representatives of the management and union, was not functioning as intended. The working environment and cooperative conditions were poorer than could be desired and all parties agreed that absenteeism was unacceptably high. It was against this background that we were

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invited to attend a meeting with the coordinating committee, the job design committee, that we have mentioned above. At the first meeting — which thus represented our first opportunity at linkage — we were introduced to the committee by the plant director, who also chaired the meeting. He mentioned the earlier job design project and stated that this system had gradually proved to be too static. Both leaders and union representatives agreed that what was needed was something which was more dynamic and which kept up with the dynamics in the everyday life of the factory and which could grasp the ‘viable possibilities for improvement’. The need for a ‘vitamin injection’ was admitted, but no one had managed to get much further than this acknowledgement. Therefore the company had contacted us. The plant director was interested in discovering whether we could collaborate on working out a plan for a ‘new deal’ since we could bring new experiences to bear, gained from other companies with which we had had contact and collaboration as researchers, in addition to the great deal of new experience which had been accrued at the tobacco factory during the past ten years. After this brief introduction, the managing director called upon us to speak, to tell our listeners ‘what new research knowledge had been accrued since we last met’; knowledge that the job design committee could benefit from or make use of. This introduction — uncomplicated, not intended to be taken too literally, and absolutely open for whatever we might have to say — was, in itself, an irreproachable way of drawing us into the discussion, linking us to the discourse. At the same time, using the simplest of means — plausible words and phrases — the plant director constructed a concept of research in which even the wording made it evident that it was created within the discourse of working life. Research is described here as a progressive activity in which new truths are discovered and old ones are left behind. Research results are described as knowledge in the form of a product; one which the company needs information about, so as to be in a position to decide whether they have any use for it and whether they should therefore acquire it. Internally, in our own discourse, we formulate our perspective in a different fashion: from our perspective, social research constitutes a type of discourse which, where the matter of truth is concerned, is not a superior form of discourse, but one that is on an equal footing with other discourses. As a rule, therefore, knowledge acquired through research cannot take on the attributes of a product that can be purchased or acquired in an already finished form. The communication of knowledge will usually involve a form of the development of new knowledge. Nevertheless, it would have been quite wrong of us if, during the course of the discussion, we had said: ‘Now, your idea about research is wrong, ...’ and then proceeded to force our own conception of research onto our audience. Wrong, not because it would have been impolite, arrogant, or immoral in some

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other way, but because ditching their research concept and replacing it with our own would have the opposite result than the one we desired, namely to link our discourse up with theirs. Even an explication completely devoid of complicated terminology, as an argument for an alternative research conception, would not be assimilated as anything other than a foreign body in their discourse. There is simply too great a difference between their context and ours, in terms of experience, conceptions, premisses and terminology as a common ground for discussion about research, for an isolated segment of an argument, a text, to be transplanted into a completely different context. An attempt to persuade them that their conception of research was wrong and that ours was right would not have been wrong merely on pragmatic grounds: it would probably not have succeed in practice anyway. But above all it would be wrong because the EITHER/OR logic presupposed by this type of conceptual opposition does not hold. True enough, differences such as the ones between the plant director’s and our own research concept, such as we have just described, may well be present. But it would have been our own fault, had we conceived his formulations of research as a closed concept; one which, in the name of veracity, we were therefore obliged to correct by substituting another research concept — one that was just as closed. Instead, we could view his statement as an expression of a need for something more open, as a perspective on research. In this case, too, our perspectives would be far from coincident. But it is more important to note that, in terms of the possibility of talking together, we will also see that, despite their differences, both perspectives are not without their points of convergence: there certainly have been changes in the concept of research within the circle of action researchers during the 1980s. Thus the question ‘What is new?’ is justified, even though the answer, as we shall see, diverges somewhat from the destination that the question points to. The same applies to the question of what ‘use’ research can be to the company. Even though we are in no way interested in handing over a ready-made research product, we are, as researchers, extremely interested in contributing something of practical advantage to the company. In other words, even though we do not believe that the task of research is to produce and administer truths which are stored inside closed concepts, it is far from impossible to find points of convergence between the respective discourses of working life and research, and thus to set in motion a common discourse which can open the way for the development of new perspectives. The question, ‘What new research knowledge had been accrued ... which wein the company can make use of?’ should not, therefore, be dismissed, but should be employed as an opening for an intervention in the company’s discourse. Our task is to make use of the question as it is formulated, to link up our research-strategic perspectives by, among other things, playing on the experiences gained by the company in previous encounters with research. In other words, the experiences of the company and the perspective in which they are

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interpreted constitute the uncircumventable point of connection for the commencement of a dialogue. In line with this perspective we tried to answer the question by taking it at face value, although without creating expectations of a definitive answer, as if the products of research were already packaged and awaiting delivery. We proposed three factors which ought to be sufficient to provide some information and to set the perspectives in motion so that the dialogue could get off the ground.

Launching the development organization concept First of all, we presented the opinion that the job design system, viewed as a system through which possibilities for job expansion are built into the work organization, is an example of a strategy for job expansion/job development which was subsequently found to be too static. Over recent years, therefore, we had developed another, better strategy for job expansion which managed to take account of the fact that a work organization is a dynamic entity. Instead of trying to create improved job conditions for the individual employee by introducing new components into their jobs, we would now recommend a strategy which consisted of all being given the opportunity to participate in various types of development work in addition to their own tasks in the daily running of the company. In this way, one could combine a strategy for the development of the company with a strategy for the development of each individual employee’s job. To illustrate this last point, which draws every single employee and the work organization as a whole together into one development strategy, we presented the following analytical perspective: every industrial concern must master two types of fundamental task in order to survive in both the short and the long run. These are, respectively, production tasks and development tasks. Production or operational tasks are the most predominant, and the organization of production — the work organization — is structured according to an assumption that this is a way in which the company’s total activities are divided so that all employees can efficiently fulfil their obligations, seen from the point of view of the whole. As a rule, the development tasks are reserved to some few persons, usually at management and sometimes at staff levels. Our point was that, in the same way as companies have a work organization that involves all employees who, individually, are responsible for parts of the total work task, firms should also have a development organization that involves all employees who would thus have the opportunity of working with different partial development tasks in relation to the company’s total development effort. The company will thus also be able to benefit from its employees’ resources and competence in its improvement and development work, and the employees’


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jobs will be invested with a new dimension. This, in turn, could create the opportunity to combine an improvement of each individual’s work situation with the improvement and development of the company as a whole. A development organization, of course, is not a goal in itself, a thing to be achieved as the result of an organizational or company development process. On the contrary: the development organization is an instrument, a method for organizing a development process, organized in line with the types of development tasks one is working on, analogous to the organization of production according to the different types of production tasks. The development organization does not of itself represent any improvement of the company and its employees’ jobs, but it does represent a method by which to organize that development process which should lead to the desired improvements. In this connection — and this was our second point — we stressed that our principles and models tended to give us more of a negative insight into what good organizations are, rather than positive knowledge. We knew a good deal about organization forms and principles that do not function optimally, but far less about what type of work and organization forms could function optimally in each individual case; or in this company, to take a germane example. Our practical contribution to the development of the factory’s organization would therefore only marginally be concerned with providing theoretical models as goals for a future organization form. On the other hand, we might have a good deal to offer regarding adapting and tuning the process through which the factory leadership and employees themselves found or created new organizational and cooperative forms, based on existing local preconditions at the company, ranging from the business/financial side to the technical/organizational and personnel side. This once again underlined our view that our research task did not consist in delivering a finished product. Our task would be to come in as participants in the organization of a process to create or generate a product, in cooperation with the company’s management and employees, a form of cooperation which remained to be defined. As a third factor, we advanced the hypothesis that if one desired to achieve real, permanent changes in organizational and cooperative forms, then one ought to prepare oneself for a process in which the work organization as a whole represented the point of departure. Even though one only wants to change certain segments or areas of the work organization, experience has shown that the interplay between the whole and the parts is often critical for success in changing the parts. This is an important reason for involving the company as a whole in the development organization. In presenting these three aspects we had not only linked up with the company’s discourse, we had also shifted the approach to the problem by introducing some new perspectives or angles. We thereby found ourselves in the middle of a general

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discussion. From the company’s side, both the management and the union representatives could easily see the advantage of running a continual development activity which, among other things, created the possibility for ongoing adjustments to and updating of the forms of work in the factory. One of the problems with the job design system (which, by the way, had been established in a more rigid, less flexible form than had been WRI’s original intention) was precisely that some of the preconditions which formed the basis of the system had been changed, while the system remained the same. Because of this, a troublesome discrepancy had arisen between the ‘system on paper’ and the ‘system in practice’. Despite this, the company’s people had difficulties in seeing quite how a development organization involving comprehensive participation could work in practice. Our response to this understandable uncertainty was not to launch on a description of what a development organization can look like in practice. That would have been to simulate a solution. Such a simulated solution, in the form of a linguistic model, could easily result in an arbitrary restriction of the discussions and processes which are supposed to lead to real solutions. Our answer therefore consisted of delineating some of the principles underlying what we call dialogue conferences, which can be an appropriate means by which to establish locally adapted forms of development organizations in companies. As the name denotes, a dialogue conference is not built around speeches, lectures or other forms of monologue, declaimed before an audience. Rather, it consists of a series of dialogues between the conference’s participants, who are divided into parallel groups for discussions, with short plenary sessions in which the main points from the group discussions are reported. The way in which a dialogue conference is organized provides the participants with an ample opportunity to discuss a wide range of problems in and possibilities for the company (or companies) in which the participants work. In somewhat simplified terms, it may be said that the framework of a dialogue conference is formed by what is discussed and by who is doing the discussing. By pairing the question concerning what the general thematic starting point for the group discussion should be with the question about which categories of participants (senior management, line management, employees, department or type of work, sex, age, etc.) ought to sit together in discussion groups, one obtains an instrument with which to involve all participants in a type of dialogue in which everybody, in principle, has an opportunity both to learn and to confer something new, viewed in relation to the way discussions on similar questions generally take place in a company. By utilizing the knowledge possessed by the company and union branch leadership, together with our own competence in the field of organization theory, it is possible to work out a plan for such dialogue conferences in which the general framework is tailor-made for the conference participants in question. Within this


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framework, the contents of the dialogue will be decisively furnished by the participants themselves. When making use of a dialogue conference to establish a development organization it would, in our opinion, be relevant to hold a company conference in which either all employees participate, or a representative selection of them, together with management, to discuss the types of problems and development tasks they are faced with, and then to use the results of such a company conference as a basis to begin the work of forming a development organization. The further discussion in the present case oscillated between diagnosing concrete problems and development tasks at the company and evaluating the various appropriate means and measures for doing something about them. The dialogue had thus been set in motion and the discourses had found a point of contact. But more linkages were required. Within a relatively short time it became clear that the job design committee and the question of a conference for the management and the union representatives was, organizationally, too narrow a framework for a discussion that would embrace the establishment of a development process for the factory as a whole. The commencement of such a comprehensive process demands that the company’s top management gives both its approval and support. Our next task, therefore, was to initiate a dialogue with the top management group.

Dialogue with the executive management The executive management group we met consisted of the concern’s managing director, the plant director and the administrative director at the tobacco factory, together with the factory’s production manager. Briefly, the executive management viewed the situation at the factory as follows: absenteeism was too high (ca. 20 percent), productivity (exemplified by the degree of machine utilization) was too low, cooperation between the workforce and the work supervisors was difficult — especially the relationship between the elected department representatives and the management. The workforce consisted mostly of unskilled workers. The level of proficiency was, in other words, not especially high, and interest in the development of competence was considered to be relatively low, although this might change. In addition, the management believed that the company’s union branch, represented by the workplace branch committee, followed a much too centralized line, in the sense that many questions which the management thought could be dealt with at the departmental representative level were handled by the works branch committee. The situation was considered to be insupportable and something had to be done. The executive management wondered, among other things, if they had to choose between a ‘democratic’ or an ‘authoritarian’ approach: either play on the

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employees’ need for self-development, participation and their interest in their job, or ‘chastise’ the workforce by increased control and stronger sanctions for failure to fulfil their obligations, as set out in their employment contract. Viewed in a pragmatic light, neither of the two alternatives was judged to be a certain path to success. Lack of interest in the job and in self-development would reduce the value of the ‘democratic strategy’. Changes in the make-up of the labor market, in which the ‘old hands’ were on the way out, becoming replaced by younger employees who, despite their lack of professional and occupational training, nevertheless were in a position to place other and greater demands on their employers, meant that the ‘authoritarian strategy’ would also be difficult to carry out in practice, and would have little guarantee of success. This dilemma, represented by the choice between two strategies, seemed real enough. But it arose because the discussion followed the normal procedure: different opinions and viewpoints are supposed, after a while, to flow towards a common conclusion, which presupposes that a picture of the situation at the factory is developed during the discussion with which the participants can agree — more or less. But precisely because of this, the picture of the situation becomes too one-dimensional, more one-dimensional, in fact, than can be warranted by the premisses on which the conclusion is based. (The premisses, after all, being the participants’ contributions to the discussion.) A number of points emerged from several parties to the discussion, based on the individual participant’s position and function and, hence, their experience in the company. During the course of the discussion, the various points formed a much more complex and multidimensional picture of the factory than the brief, short-hand version we have depicted and which was about to become generally accepted as a type of conclusion, or, rather, a premature judgement, a prejudice. Let me give a few examples of this: the picture of the situation which gradually became received opinion, as described above, was mostly constructed on ideas about the constitution or quality of the workforce. But his close contacts with the workforce led the factory director to indicate that production problems were always occurring. These were minor defects and trivialities which caused conflicts on the shop floor; mostly minor conflicts but sometimes greater ones. The managing director then asked what caused these problems, and was it not possible to control them in some way? The production manager found it difficult to illustrate his experience in adequate, linguistic images; he could only articulate that the factory was ‘teeming’ with all sorts of such minor problems. In his work at other factories — he was relatively new to this one — the administrative director had gained the impression that, if they were given the opportunity, then often far more of the employees possessed hidden resources and developmental needs than one had grounds to believe beforehand; i.e., before the actual opportunities had been created. Moreover, the experience of the factory director was that many of the employees had a personal interest in the


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smoothest and most effective possible running of daily production. Among other things, the administrative director was concerned that the work situation at the factory would have to be developed to embrace other qualities so that it became sufficiently attractive to younger workers, both now and in the future. When the participants in a discussion draw on their own individual experiences and perspectives the picture of reality which is thus constructed is characterized by increasing complexity. When such discussions develop according to the force of their own velocity, what usually happens is that this complexity is reduced again, as the example we have presented shows. Our task in this type of discussion is, first, to try to prevent the complexity from becoming reduced, but rather to allow it to become structured. In addition, the picture of reality must, to a certain degree, be negated so that the discussion remains open to the possibility that reality can be very different from the picture painted in the discussion. The task of structuring the picture of reality to ensure that its complexity is not lost is generally the simplest one. Our knowledge of and competence in organization theory can be utilized here. During the course of the discussion we can use a certain repertoire of organization models and principles to order the material which arises according to some analytical framework, which makes it easier to see the various elements in the material in a unified and organizational perspective. This can be considered as a part of the problem of linking an organizational discourse to the local discourse in a company. The ‘trick’ here consists partly in letting the character of the material produced from the company’s side of the discussion be the decisive factor in relation to the types of organization-theoretical points which we play into the discussion. The second task — negating the picture of reality — belongs to another realm. Since any discussion of the type we are referring to here must necessarily take the form of a construction of reality, then we, as participants, will always try to ensure that the reality construction becomes as appropriate as possible. Hence our positive contribution, which is primarily an aid in structuring the picture. But a well-structured and complex picture of reality is still a construction: a picture that is not identical to what it is supposed to depict. The construction is neither complete nor the only possible one; its validity is relative to those who have taken part in its construction; i.e., the discussion participants. Other participants, with other experiences and viewpoints, would have constructed a different picture, a picture that would partly correspond but also partly differ; partly in competition with and partly as a supplement to our picture of reality. Hence our negative contribution, which consists in precisely this assertion. The picture of reality drawn in the discussion which proceeded as a diagnosis of the situation at the factory, is not a picture of reality that can be used as a point of departure on which to base the simulation of actions, i.e., to formulate concrete recommendations about measures to be initiated. Instead, the picture of reality must be supplemented — and thereby altered — so that more of the people who constitute the

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operational system (the work organization), are brought into the discussion in appropriate ways. Now, the business of partially negating the picture of reality that has been created is not as difficult as it might sound. The company management has broad experience in dealing with basic terms, questions of policy, etc., and in this sense is quite used to the fact that actual reality diverges from the general picture. The management is also used to taking decisions in which they must leave the responsibility for realizing the objectives of the decisions to completely different people, without having especially clear or concrete notions about what this realization entails in practice. By playing on this type of experience, it is possible to air our idea that all should be given the opportunity to participate in organized discussions about identifying the company’s problems and tasks, as well as to take part in suggesting and implementing solutions in those areas in which they possess the necessary competence. In the actual case we are describing here, an opening for this lay in the management’s reflections on the desire to decentralize the work in handling the operational, working-environmental and cooperative problems. On the one hand, the management’s opinion was that such a decentralization would be much more preferable; but the tradition of a more centralized organization and form of work was so deeply entrenched that both the existing attitudes and competence of the workforce made it difficult to imagine or think through a procedure for how a decentralization strategy could be accomplished in practice. This problem complex is eminently suited to demonstrating the point that those who comprise the individual links in the company’s organizational chain ought to be brought into the discussion of how the organization ought to be structured. The question of which tasks and problems can/ought to be fulfilled/solved, at what level in the organization, will have a number of different answers, depending on everything from technological and organizational preconditions to personal qualifications. To be able to find appropriate measures based on local conditions, those who work under these conditions must participate in the concrete formulation of the measures. To summarize: Our job in the discussion with the company management was first of all to try to ensure that the picture of the complex reality which arises through the various leaders’ points of view is painted as a structured, but at the same time as an open picture of reality. In this first round the result of our interventions had a negative character: we prevented the discussion from ending up in a simplified and closed picture of reality. Further, we ensured that this picture of reality was not carried over into the familiar simulation phase, in which words simulate actions and ‘solutions’ are expressed in a verbal form which have no other practical foundation than a closed and simplified linguistic construction of reality. Expressed in another way: we contributed to the disavowal of a putative belief that what is at stake is the formulation of quick solutions to the problems.


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Our objective, however, is not to arrive at a result shaped only in the form of a negative acknowledgement. But this stage of the discussion is necessary to get to our second main task in this type of discussion: to present and have evaluated an outline of a practical procedure or strategy for organizing practical development work based on the needs and interests of the company on the one side, and based on our research needs and interests on the other. The strategy we present is thus a variation on the one we have depicted above, adjusted, refined and specified in relation to the actual context; that is, the discussion in which we are taking part. In this phase of our discussion with the management, then, it is the practical question — what must be done? — that occupies center stage. This type of discussion also simulates actions to a certain extent, though not in the form of a simulation in which verbal solutions anticipate the real ones. The discussion has now arrived at a stage in which the simulation of action takes place explicitly as a simulation, that is, as a discussion of alternative plans for action. Different plans were evaluated and the discussion ended with us being asked to write down a concrete alternative in the form of a rough draft of a plan for a company development project based on broad participation. The plan was to contain a proposal regarding the objectives of the project, a specification of the company’s and the researchers’ respective roles in the cooperative venture, the indication of time frames and some alternative suggestions for the organization of the project’s first stage.

The decision to hold a dialogue conference The goal of development projects that involve everybody in a company must necessarily be formulated in relatively general terms. Based on the actual situation at the company, we first opted for the following formulation: “The goal is to create new and improved job conditions and cooperative relationships between all groups of employees, in such a way that all employees are given a real foundation upon which to strengthen their sense of belonging and obligation to the company, and, thereby, to reduce absenteeism and personnel turnover.” This formulation was chosen because its contents were closely tied to the problems that formed the focus of our discussions with the company management and union branch during the initial contact phase. In addition to a common goal, which serves as a framework, it is also necessary to agree on a division of labor within the common venture. For us, it is vital that the company takes the responsibility for the practical progress of the development project. Everything of importance in the development work takes place at the factory, under the direction of the company. We define our role as supplementary to the main roles of the company and the employees. Our task is

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divided into two parts, formulated in general terms as: “Partly to assist in the development of the strategy in the development project and partly to assist in the practical implementation of the individual measures which shall stimulate/support the development work that takes place in the company.” The measures for which our practical assistance is required include various types of dialogue conferences as well as certain training expedients and situationally contingent participation in specified meetings/discussions, for example in connection with unforeseen problems or conflicts that can arise during the course of the project. In addition, if the collaboration is continued further into a project development stage, we presuppose our own participation in a body responsible for coordinating the development activities and formulating a general strategy. The chief reason why the company itself must take the responsibility for implementing the development project is that this is a test to see whether company development is considered to be sufficiently important to the company itself. From the research point of view, a company development project, as a research experiment, will be an experiment under real conditions only if the responsibility for its implementation lies with the company. Again, in research terms, we are not interested in doing action research by trying to achieve as close a resemblance as possible between a work organization and a simulated model. Our research interest lies in being able to experiment with dialogue-based means and measures under real conditions, not to make the way the company organizes its work correspond as closely as possible to good and attractive concepts. We want to change and improve the situation as it now stands. Both the company and the researchers take chances when entering into a binding agreement based on these preconditions, for the result of an experiment can, by definition, not be known on in advance. This dilemma is handled by constructing the collaborative process in phases in such a way that both parties (the company and the researchers) are free to evaluate the basis for any further collaboration at the termination of each phase. In addition to the formulation of the objectives and the stress on the company’s general responsibility vis à vis our supplementary role, our proposal for the framework plan therefore also contained a recommendation for a three-phase strategy. For the first phase, our recommendation was to arrange a set of two dialogue conferences, one for the total leadership of the company and one for the leadership and the workforce; either a representative body of the workforce or all of them together. The executive management accepted the main points of our draft for a collaborative venture. Commencing with a set of two dialogue conferences was adjudged to be a good idea, and the management decided to conduct two such conferences, with us a professional leaders. They regarded the dialogue conferences as an experiment and wished to invest more resources and effort in the second, the company conference, than was actually necessary for the experiment to be a real test. Altogether 46 people from the ranks of the employees were


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selected to participate in the second conference, based on our criteria concerning adequate employee participation, if the conference was to live up to its name as a company conference: i.e., one that included all the department representatives, the union branch committee, the senior safety representative, three to four production workers from the larger departments,and two from the smaller ones. In addition, the whole of the executive leadership (seven people), middle management (five people), and the supervisors (ten people) were to take part, as well as four persons from the staff section, representing 26 people in all. The number of people attending the conference would therefore be 72, two thirds of whom were employees, with one from the management. With the management’s decision to arrange these two conferences, it might be said that our strategy for linking up with the company’s discourse had achieved the result we desired: an agreement between ourselves and the company to enter into the first stage of a collaborative process of company development based on broad participation; one in which the testing of dialogue-based forms of work, in the shape of two dialogue conferences, was the first item on the program. As mentioned, our task during this phase is to shoulder the professional responsibility for planning and implementing the dialogue conferences.

The dialogue conference for the company Based on a predetermined goal for the development work in a company, the development organization, with all its diverse elements, should be viewed as a tool, or a set of tools. The organization of the development work can be viewed as a supplement to the organization of the production work. Our task would partly be to organize some of the discussions to be held within the framework of the development organization and partly to feed ideas, comments, suggestions, etc., into these discussions. We term this two-fold task our contribution to a reorganization of the company discourse, and partly an intervention in this same discourse. We shall give this perspective greater depth by looking more closely at the execution of our main task during the first period of the development project’s initial phase, the holding of a set of two dialogue conferences, one for the management and one for both the management and a representative group of the employees. The management dialogue conference included the factory’s executive management, together with some of the white collar workers. The management conference had a dual goal. First, it would give the leadership groups a personal experience with such dialogue-based forms of work, which is one of the main points of employing a development organization. Second, the line management would be given the opportunity of finding out what their own interests were in a company development process in which all participate. We regarded this as an

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important device to reduce the risk that the line management would be squeezed between the executive management and the shop floor, which is a constant risk in projects of this type. According to the participants’ own statements and in our own judgement, the two-day management conference functioned according to plan. Nevertheless, in a certain sense the conference could be considered a preliminary exercise and we shall therefore not analyze it in greater depth. As an example of how we organize a dialogue conference, we shall instead concentrate on the company conference, which was held two weeks after the management conference. The plan for the company conference followed our general methodological procedure for dialogue conferences, in which the stress is on sequences of group discussions, with subsequent plenary reports. When organizing the individual group discussions, the central point is the combination of what is discussed (the theme), with who does the discussing (the composition of the group). It is we, the researchers, who select the members of the groups, basing the selection on a taskoriented view of the company’s organization and structure. We now explain this procedure in greater detail. The theme of the first group discussion was simply the following question: “What are the most significant problems in the company today?” An important reason for focusing on the problems in the company as an opening gambit, so to speak, was to convert the dammed-up frustration, which exists to a greater or lesser degree in all companies, into a ‘starter motor’ at the conference. Most of the participants have a need to air their views, and the conditions for entering into more constructive and positive discussions are better when one has had the opportunity to speak one’s mind about what one feels is wrong at the company. The groups were composed on the principle of the greatest degree of homogeneity within each group, with a corresponding difference between the groups. The criteria employed to achieve such homogeneous groups relate primarily to position/function in the company hierarchy, supplemented with other criteria of significance for differences in individual experience and competence, such as age, seniority, and sex. Criteria such as these finally gave us five groups of operators (grouped according to the department they worked in), and groups of supervisors, two consisting of the union leadership and the executive leadership, respectively. The point of this form of group composition is presented in an open fashion: the problems each individual identifies as important will vary with the position/ function that the person in question occupies in the work organization, as well as other, more personal idiosyncrasies. Evaluations will be based in part on experience, things one comes into contact with during one’s daily work at the company. But the evaluations will also partly be based on a lack of experience, a lack of knowledge of different types of circumstances in the company due to the fact that, in one’s daily work, one has no contact with them. The problems each


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individual identifies as the most important will depend partly on professional qualifications, skills, knowledge and insight, and partly on opinions, suppositions and prejudice. This applies to all groups in the company, both among the leadership and the workforce. No one has personal contact with, and a total view of, everything in a factory. In certain situations it is true that there may be some objective criteria for giving preference to a certain type of problem, such as technical or economic criteria. But the employment of such criteria will always have a subjective bias: they must be employed by specific persons whose evaluations will necessarily be based on a mixture of insight and prejudice. Even though prejudice is tied to persons as an element of personal opinions, a prejudice cannot be viewed solely as a personal shortcoming. Prejudices are collective phenomena; the distinguishing feature of a prejudice is that it already exists, it circulates in the common jargon — in a local discourse — prior to personal experience with the matter it relates to. A prejudice can be dissolved in several ways; among others by the discourse participants encountering new experiences or by bringing new participants into the discourse — and with them, new experiences. As a consequence of this awareness, both these forms of prejudice neutralization are deliberately woven into the fabric of a development organization. The primary tool at a dialogue conference is to introduce new participants, and, thereby, new experience, into the discourse.

The need for an internal public sphere at the company The mix of insight and prejudice in a discourse will depend on who participates, and on what their various experiences are. If we analyze the local discourse in a firm with the idea of determining its shape or form based on the identities of its participants we will generally find that the local discourse is not a unified phenomenon. The company’s local discourse is built up of several smaller, distinct discourses manifested within different arenas. We will call this type of configuration of discourses the company’s local discourse formation. The discourse formation in a company normally consists of four types of arenas for discussion: the various leadership bodies, the cooperative bodies, and the bodies of the union. The fourth arena in reality consists of several, often very different, arenas: the daily conversations and exchanges of opinions which take place between co-workers on an individual basis, in pairs, groups and networks of various types. We will call this fourth discourse arena, which is a significant but changing and opaque arena, the company’s sub-public arena. A common feature here is that the discussions in this part of the company’s discourse formation are invested with a certain private character, in the sense that they take place without anything other than accidental points of contact with the first three arenas, which have a more openly public status.

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True enough, neither the leadership nor the union are subject to any demand to make their transactions within the company public, in the way the cooperative bodies are. But the leadership and the union nevertheless do have a formal status which causes transactions within them to become more than personal expressions of opinion. They are a part of the company’s official discussion and decisionmaking system. On the other hand, most companies lack a vehicle for organizing some of the abundant chatter which is heard on the sidelines, to bring it into full view. Briefly: there is no internal public sphere 1 in the company in which all members of the company organization have the opportunity to become involved in open discussions about things which concern the company and those who work in it. The development organization — and the dialogue conferences as a part of it — involves an attempt to organize a public sphere in the company, supplementary to the company’s and the employees’ other bodies, and thus also supplementary to the traditional discourse formation in companies. Such a supplement can have an effect in several directions: the sub-public discourse, which in practice has the form of minor discussions, isolated from one another, with a more or less randomly varying selection of participants, is, so to speak, confronted with the unknown parts of itself (for example, through the plenary reports at a company conference). The possibility thereby arises for reflecting on the relationship between insight and prejudice within the company’s sub-public discourse — including those parts of it in which each individual takes part. Moreover, those who are participants in the discourse that is organized through the company’s formal bodies will be exposed to new ideas and experiences through the development organization, which can lead to changes, a nuancing and re-evaluation of the impression of the company that they have traditionally held. A summary of the results of the group discussions on the company’s most significant problems can demonstrate this in a more concrete fashion.

Old problems in new patterns: effects of the internal public sphere A great number of the problems noted in the plenary reports had also been expressed at the management conference. But something new was added (both new problems and new angles on familiar problems) as a consequence of the fact that this conference included a large group of new participants — the workers on the shop floor. These participants stressed, for example, that the supervisors had 1. The choice of this term is inspired by Habermas’ term ‘the internal public sphere of an organization (Habermas, 1990, p. 357 ff.). Habermas intends this primarily to denote interest organizations. R. Kalleberg (1983, p. 60 ff.) has argued for the establishment of a ‘discussing public sphere’, internal to companies. See also his ‘Demokratisering av foretak’ (Kalleberg, 1984, p. 384 ff.).


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too little contact with the people they were supposed to supervise; the information for, and the training of new employees was not good enough; people became involved in new projects at too late a stage; some felt they were under surveillance by supervisors and department heads; the organization and allotment of tasks was not as it should be (among other things, in the form of too much borrowing by people from other departments); and, in connection with absenteeism, there was an uneven distribution of the workload between those at work. It was also emphasized that communication between the workforce and the leaders was absent — in both directions. In addition, certain physical working environment problems were mentioned, such as dust and the need for ventilation. We recognize such problems as the lack of authority to take decisions at the supervisor level and, at times, the high degree of absenteeism in these reports. In the group discussions that gave rise to the reports, however, the problems are not so much discussed on a structural level, i.e., as problems at the level of the leadership and the company. They are rather discussed according to the way in which they are experienced, without any beating about the bush, more or less as consequences of the two structural problems. Absenteeism is a problem for those who are at work; the leadership is judged according to its behavior and its actions, not according to how it is organized. There is an exception to this way of talking about the factory’s problems. Not surprisingly, the most obvious exception is represented by the group comprising the union branch leadership and the principal elected representatives. They maintained that diffuse areas of responsibility among the leadership was a significant problem and they also held that absenteeism was first and foremost a problem for those who were ill, and only secondarily “for the rest of us”. In regard to the cooperative relationships at the factory, the representatives expressed their views much more sharply than the rest of the employees, who had mainly used expressions such as ‘dissatisfaction’ to characterize the problem. Under the heading ‘personnel policy’ they advanced the following characterization: “Production is more important than concern for the workers. The operator is looked upon as a necessary evil. The regulations are erected on a foundation of mistrust and control.” When somebody pointed out that the work crews were not allowed any great room for self-direction, this group mentioned some of the factors that were absent, and the absence of which hampered the crews in having a greater say about their own work situation. For example: information; following up decisions; production pressure. In virtue of their function, the representatives are used to expressing themselves in block capitals and to viewing problems in a wider context. The supervisors presented a ‘list of problems’ which, in the main, was identical with the one they had presented earlier at the management conference. It was rather surprising that a direct criticism of the union branch’s tendency to

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evade or ignore the supervisors — a criticism that had been given some prominence at the management conference — was hardly mentioned here. The most likely reason for this was that the supervisors had already stressed this as a problem for the executive management, and they therefore regarded it as management’s job to do something about it. With this criticism, the supervisors seemed to have put the ball out of their own court, and they were not enthusiastic about any direct confrontation with the union leadership, a thing they had had previous experience of. To judge by the report from the executive management, the attempt had not been without effect. The executive management also commented on a number of the points that had already been discussed at the management conference, describing them as ‘diffuse areas of responsibility’ and ‘too unclear a basis for following economic constraints in the departments’. What was new, however, was the executive management’s stress on the view that ‘decisions are taken at too high a level in the company’. This does not mean that the problem was unknown to the executive management, but it had been highlighted more intensely and from a number of angles during the management conference. Seen in this light, it can serve as a small example of what it means when we say that the discourse changes when it is organized in new ways. The problem of some types of decisions being taken at too high a levels was, as indicated, no revelation for the executive management, but when this problem was presented in a more concentrated form within the leadership’s own internal public sphere, as it was in the discussions which had been organized at the management conference, then the problem was also accorded a more prominent position in the executive management’s own discourse. The general point of carrying out a ‘survey’, in the way this is done during the first part of a dialogue conference, is not primarily to evince many new problems in relation to what is already known, but rather to clear the ground so that the dialogue conference can facilitate a certain redistribution of the problems, in terms of their place and significance in the company’s discourses. When discussions about the factory’s problems are removed from the time-honored cooperative and negotiation bodies; when they are swept from under the carpets in all the departments and sections in the company and are presented in one forum, side by side in plenary in such a way that they constitute a whole; then new patterns can emerge. Different patterns than those with which one is familiar in the different segments of the company’s traditional discourse formation. As an example, the plenary presentations we have just reviewed showed that the factory’s chief problem can neither be said to be a high level of absenteeism and personnel turnover, rooted in bad attitudes to work, nor an unclear and authoritarian leadership, also rooted in the bad attitudes of the employees. The chief problem rather lies in generally poor cooperation or interaction at the factory,


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both within and between the different levels. This lack of ability to cooperate mostly seems to be the result of deficiencies that are inherent in organizational factors, as was made evident in the group discussions viewed as a whole, and not just deficiencies in people’s personal attitudes, as would seem to be the case when the individual groups’ points of view are judged in isolation. The problems which arose during the first round of the dialogue conference are not really either new problems, nor unknown problems. Both the problematic aspects of conditions in a company and their criticism are more or less familiar to most of the participants. Experiences and opinions circulate unabated on the subpublic level. But when significant parts of the multifaceted content of these discussions are first cultivated (in homogeneous groups) and then brought together within an internal public sphere (in plenary assemblies) in such a way that everybody can observe each other’s opinions in full view, side by side, then the possibility is created for the reorganization by each individual participant of his or her understanding of the problems. The total picture painted by all the reports from all the group discussions relativize the totalizing tendency which characterizes the reports from the individual groups in isolation. The problems emerging from all the groups are given a place in the picture, but the place they occupy in the picture as a whole, as it is formed in the plenary assembly, is less prominent than the place they occupied in the total picture which circumscribes the horizon of the individual group discussion. Hence, the picture of the whole held by each participant can be changed. In this way, the establishment of an internal public sphere can lead to the development of a new and, perhaps, richer understanding of the problems at the company, compared to the opinions are formed by discussions on the sub-public level.

Break (1): from present problems to tomorrow’s organizational form The initial discussion, the survey of problems, at most dialogue conferences will tend to create certain exaggerated expectations, along the lines of: “it’s high time something was done about the situation”. The desire to get things ironed out is natural; the exaggeration lies partly in the conception of the amount of time it will take, and partly in ideas that the types of workable solutions will more or less pop up of their own accord when the problems are delineated. These two things are linked together and are caused, to a large degree, by the illusion that is a necessary precondition, if a discussion is to interest its participants: the difference between the verbal treatment of the problems and their practical treatment is constantly placed in abeyance. The method by which we attempt to reduce the risk that this illusion will lead the participants to fix their attention on the simulation of solutions within a

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relatively simplified construction of reality is, as we have stated, to ensure that the discussions at the conference are not planned in such a way that they create a forward-tilted, unbroken whole. Instead, we try to create breaks between each of the sets of discussions so that the discussions as a whole constitute a constellation of heterogeneous contributions to a construction of reality. After the problemcharting phase with which a company conference generally starts, we therefore make a leap from the quotidian problems to the hypothetical questions of how one could achieve a reduction of the problems and an improved utilization of resources at all levels, if the company were organized in another way. The focus is redirected from today’s worries towards a future organizational form. In the present case there were two considerations that persuaded us that we should not hold out overly high hopes regarding the degree of interest the participants would invest in a discussion about alternative forms of organization. First of all, significant changes in the company’s technology or total work organization were not likely to take place in the near future (three to five years). Secondly, the very size of the factory was such that many participants would not find it easy to discuss organizational questions from the point of view of the company as a whole. For the following discussion, therefore, we chose to direct the searchlight on alternative organization forms, in the shape of group organization within the departments. The theme to be discussed in groups, the group task, was presented together with an elementary model of two principles for work organization: the first type, in which each individual is given their own limited task; and an alternative type, in which two or more persons (= smaller groups) get together to perform the work and share the responsibility for the finished product. Based on the general point that different types of tasks or discussion themes demand different types of group organization, the participants were requested to discuss which types of group formations would be suitable in connection with the various tasks relating to the individual department. As its point of departure, the discussion was to consider two main types of tasks which are the responsibility of the production workers: operational tasks (such as production, maintenance, problem solving); and leadership tasks (such as planning, coordinating, control). The groups were composed in such a way that workers from the same department constituted the nucleus of each individual group, to which were added leaders from other departments. This is the way in which we manage to achieve the representation of leadership functions in each group, but without the discussion of alternatives becoming too tied to the experiences and past history of workers and leaders from the same department. The plenary report of this set of group discussions revealed that eight of a total of ten groups had arrived at a number of suggestions as to how the groups could be organized in the factory. Two groups, which had struggled with the


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questions but without managing to tame them, got answers to a fair number of the questions that they had formulated (without being able to answer them) through the various examples from the other groups’ plenary presentations. The plenary presentations can thus have a retroactive learning effect on the activities in the group discussions. The majority of the discussions had been based on the formation of smaller production groups (six to nine persons) based on the location of machines and having a variety of solutions in regard to maintenance functions and the positioning of the supervisors in relation to the production group. As examples of running tasks which could be put into effect in a better way by group organization, certain service and maintenance tasks were mentioned. The possibility of a job rotation system was also stressed which, together with improved technical aids, could also improve the ability to solve problems during the course of production. The majority of the suggestions fell within the area of leadership tasks. The production groups could themselves take on the responsibility for quality, for following up specified production goals, for the evaluation of how leave could be fitted into the job rotation, and they ought to be able to take part in making decisions on prospective changes to the predetermined weekly production program (which has traditionally been the responsibility of the supervisors). Greater participation on the part of the workers in such questions as new acquisitions ought also to be possible to arrange. Several of the groups — one of them in particular — concentrated on production planning and outlined a model giving the production group the possibility to exert greater influence over the supply of materials, a factor that was felt to be a necessary precondition for combining higher effectiveness with improved working conditions. The group emphasized that the model was only a suggestion which could be modified/changed “if and when something or other might happen — if we’re lucky”, as the group put it, thus at the same time expressing a measured irony which, precisely by taking the discussion seriously, demonstrates that it had to be taken seriously only as a discussion. All in all, these group tasks revealed that there was considerable interest among the employees in delegated authority and in situating the problem-solving facilities as closely as possible to those directly involved. If we compare this to the answer given to a similar question at the management conference, then we can see that the matters are now assuming a considerably more concrete form. This is partly due to a somewhat less formal wording of the exercise, but it is also due to the fact that the people who are actually involved in the exercise — the production workers — are themselves participating in the discussion.

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Alternating perspectives: personal experience and organizational understanding We have stressed that the dynamo of a dialogue conference is the authentic interest of the participants in the various discussions, and that such interest depends on the discussions being perceived as meaningful in some way. The criteria for and basis of such an experience will vary among the participants, but common to all is that the meaningfulness of the discussions must be experienced instantly, as the discussions take place. Organization development, alternative organizational forms and such similar topics run the risk of being viewed as unrealistic theorizing, of no interest to the people whose daily work places them in the center of a concrete reality. It is understandable that many people are skeptical about the use of discussing major organization projects with the company leadership if the leadership does not demonstrate a corresponding interest in all of the minor problems which dominate the daily life and horizon of the workers. On the other hand, however, one of the main goals of a dialogue conference is that, precisely by virtue of the broad participation of the employees, it will ensure that the discussions on organization problems remain in touch with everyday realities. As a supplement to the traditional discourse formation in a larger company, in which participation in such discussions is usually restricted to the management, a few officials and, at times, the union leadership — who participate on behalf of others — the dialogue conference is meant to be an element in an alternatively organized discourse in which the people who make up the organization discuss organizational questions on their own behalf. To realize this intention it is not sufficient to alternate between discussions on concrete, near-at-hand problems on the one hand and general, long-term organizational questions on the other. Such a division of thematics runs the risk not only of stifling the individual participating group’s engagement, it also risks injuring the whole idea of the project. Concrete, day-to-day problems have an organizational aspect, and organizational problems have a concrete, day-to-day aspect. What may not immediately be apparent, however, is the connection between them. These connections must first be constructed precisely by discussions between those who are involved with them in a company organization. Our task as conference leaders is thus to devise an organizational framework for the discussions that gives the participants the opportunity, based on their individual experiences, to try to construct such connections through the discussions. As an aid to such discussions we have created a simple matrix consisting of four areas, as follows:

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Requires changes of task and responsibility delegation or significant investments Does not require changes of task and responsibility delegation

III

IV

I

II

Within departments

Across departments

The matrix can aid in classifying different problems and development tasks according to certain simple organizational features. Read horizontally, the matrix points to a division of problems/tasks between those which only concern one department and those which traverse departments. Read vertically, the matrix divides problems/tasks between those which do not involve either the delegation of tasks or authority or require substantial economic outlays, and those which do involve the delegation of tasks and authority and/or economic measures. As the figure shows, this division results in four areas, each area comprising a unique compound of certain simple horizontal and vertical dimensions of an organization. Area I contains such problems as only affect the workforce within a department. Many types of environmental problems and straightforward production problems can be noted here, for example. The second area contains a number of problems relating to coordination and issue-handling routines between departments. The third area could include questions related to, for example, delegation of responsibility within a department, substantial new acquisitions, etc. And the fourth area will be the place for problems that affect several departments and several levels of authority, i.e., such problems as will often require organizational changes or a form of organization development for their resolution. By composing the discussion groups in such a way that they contain participants from all levels in the company (and all departments when called for), the group discussions will provide training in discussing the company’s problems and development tasks with a basis both in each participant’s personal experience and immediate perspectives on things and in an organizational perspective, during one and the same discussion. This alternation of perspectives creates the opportunity for all participants to express their views, but without the need to demand that their own conceptions of what counts as eligible and relevant experiences and viewpoints must apply to everybody else. Thus, this four-area

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matrix was introduced into the third set of group discussions at the company conference. Each group was composed of ‘diagonal groups’, i.e., the nucleus of the group consisted of people from the same department but it was supplemented with supervisors, department heads and management representatives from other departments. The group exercise involved a discussion about which short-term measures and more long-term development tasks each group considered to be the most important. The resulting ideas on measures and development tasks were to be placed in the four areas of the matrix, according to their organizational dimensions. As the reader will realize, the point of grouping measures and tasks together lies not so much in the result, the classification, as in the discussion which leads up to the result. Nonetheless, it is, of course, the results of the discussion that are presented at the subsequent plenary assembly, not how they were arrived at. Together, the plenary reports offered long lists of suggestions for measures and development tasks, grouped according to the given organizational dimensions. As an illustration we reproduce some of the suggestions from each of the four areas: Area I (measures within depts./do not require org. change) • participation in production planning, rotation arrangements, daily information routine, improved access to tools, weekly delegation of work tasks within a group, carried out by the group. Area II (measures across depts./do not require org. change) • improve coordination of sales planning and production needs, translation of manuals into Norwegian, the establishment of a common lubrication depot, improved planning when lending personnel to other departments. Area III (measures within depts./affects leadership and/or economy) • new and clearer job descriptions, an improved system for information and feedback between operators and supervisors, layout tasks, delegation of the job of distributing order folders from supervisors to the work crew, greater participation by the employees in the purchase of trucks, new tool store. Area IV (measures across depts./affects leadership and/or economy) • new dust-extracting ventilation system, noise-absorbing walls between machine groups, replacement of worn production material, training in product knowledge covering new products, the establishment of project groups for the reorganization of lines of production. Viewed qualitatively, these key phrases mirror the character of the suggestions for measures which emanated from the group discussions. In quantity they amount to about 50 percent of the total recommendations. Thus, at the end of the third group session that concluded the first day of the company conferences, we stand at the foot of a veritable mountain of problems awaiting solution.


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Break (2): from the subject matter of the dialogues to dialogues as a work form At this stage of the company conference — during our preparation of the agenda for the second day — it was vital to avoid the temptation to “give the participants what they want”. Such a temptation offers many opportunities to describe what the solutions to the multitude of problems and tasks should look like in practice. This transition from describing problems to describing solutions, which might appear as a ‘natural development’ of the conference, would represent precisely that step from using language in common to construct models of reality, to using language to simulate actions and practical solutions, without a sufficiently clear demarcation of the difference between the context of discussion and the context of practical action. The illusion that a linguistic act is identical to a practical action would therefore once again threaten to cloud the discussion with an illusory content. Despite the fact that the first three sets of group discussions comprise a constellation full of breaks, when viewed as contributions to constructions of reality, they still have one thing in common: they have all been based on the production of images of reality — not one single image but several different ones — according to pre-given, varying perspectives. As has been mentioned, the dynamics the conference plays on are based on people’s need to have a say when it is their own reality that is being described. The conference opens the sluices, the words stream out, and the participants dive happily into the more or less lashing currents of which they themselves are the sources. But is it worth remembering that these rivers run into an artificial lake with no natural outlet to any ocean. The images of reality are real enough as they go, but they are also a form of artificial product: constructions created by the discussions which are organized at the conference. To counteract the tendency to take the conceptions of reality manufactured at the conference as if they were reality pure and simple, it is necessary to insert a set of discussions which break with the basic flow of the three discussion sequences of the first day. The break takes place in that the group discussions do not now focus on some type of subject matter around which a picture of reality is to be constructed. Instead, we place the actual construction rules at the focus of the discussion. This occurs in the fourth set of group discussions, scheduled for the start of the second day. While introducing the tasks of the fourth group to the participants, we point out that all of the various diagnoses of the state of the company and the recommendations for changes which have arisen during the conference are the creation of a selection of participants who together number between a quarter and a third of all the company’s employees. The participants are invited to speak on their own behalf in the group discussions; which they have in fact done. One implication of this is that a different selection of participants would have caused the

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discussions to proceed somewhat differently, with other pictures of reality being constructed. This is why it is necessary to highlight the form of work that yields the subject matter of the conference, in addition to the purely content-wise orientation which has typified the conference thus far. And the most significant aspect of the dialogue-based form of work lies precisely in the opportunity to construct or organize discussions in ways that are appropriate to the tasks/ problems one aims to resolve within the company conference, of which the discussions form a part. We therefore confront the participants in the fourth group discussion with the question of how one can best organize the necessary discussions, which must be arranged in the company after the conference, so as to initiate dialogue-based development work in which all employees are given the opportunity to participate. Before introducing this problem to the participants, we held talks with both the company management and the union leadership — both separately and together — so as to hear their evaluation of their experiences with the first three sets of group discussions, the point being the prospects of proceeding with a broadly designed development project after the conference, as indicated above. These talks took place during the evening after the conclusion of the first day of the conference, and were important in fashioning the conference plan for the second day. Both the company management and the union leadership were content with the first day and ready to support the idea that all employees should be involved in a dialogue-based development project in which both the organization of discussions and the implementation of measures could take as their point of departure the idea of some form of division of operators into so-called production groups, in the way this had been expressed both at this conference and at the previous management conference. How the production groups ought to be organized, the number of people in each of them, how they were to be divided (who belongs to which group) etc. — all this constituted an open question. Based on previous experience, among other things with the job design system, both the management and the union branch were aware of the inadvisability of creating a uniform model for production groups, to be followed in the same way throughout the whole of the factory. The production groups should be organized on the basis of what best suits the local conditions in each department. Against the background of this principle, and against the background of the general principle that those who are affected by a measure should have the opportunity to express their views on how the measure should be constructed, we suggested a task text which opened up the possibility that all employees could take part in a discussion of how the production groups could be optimally organized. The exercise text is reprinted below: “The establishment of viable production groups in the departments appears to be a common objective. The question, then, relates to how the discussion about


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the formation of such production groups should be organized when the preconditions are: (1) that all recommendations must be adapted to local conditions in every department; (2) that those who are to make up the respective production groups must take part in the discussion about the formation of the groups in their own departments. The exercise consists in formulating proposals for how these discussions can be organized in practice.”

The participants in this group work were selected according to the ‘homogeneous’ group principle, since we wished to elicit all possible differences between the various groups of employees in terms of their views on how the discussions should be conducted. When presenting the exercise, we emphasized a number of practical questions which the participants should consider when discussing the problem. Should the discussions be held in the form of dialogue conferences or as meetings in the company? How could the discussions best be fitted in with the daily work at the factory, which had to take place at the same time? How should the discussions be led and coordinated? How could participation be ensured? When should they take place? And what sort of time frame should they operate within? All these questions were relatively simple in themselves — but not so simple as to warrant omission when the practical question of organizing proper discussions is on the agenda. The plenary reports following this set of group discussions demonstrated two things in particular: (1) that the majority of the participants were not used to discussing problems of how discussions can be organized in the best way. (2) That a large number of the groups developed their own ideas and conceptions of how the discussions should be arranged, against the background of their own experiences of the dialogue conference. The first point is hardly surprising. Nor is the second particularly stunning, but it is less obvious: if the experiences of the dialogue conferences had been bad, then its work forms would not have been accorded such a predominant place in the different groups’ proposals for the methods of approach. This discussion thus served a triple objective: a certain repertoire of proposals for ways of carrying out the discussions was produced; the participants were given a specific opportunity to reflect on and become more conscious of the work form they themselves employed; and finally, we were given an indirect evaluation of the participants’ experience with this type of work form. The proposals from the ten groups which had performed the exercise varied considerably. But in spite of all the variations, some common topics recurred in the answers. The majority stressed that discussions in small groups and further treatment in plenary sessions would have to be combined. Further, several groups touched on the significance of maintaining a link with the established cooperative bodies. In addition, most of the groups had evaluated the necessity of including a supervisor in the production groups, but had concluded that there would be little point in this. The most detailed proposal for a method of approach

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was the one which was worked out by the executive management group. The proposal from the elected representatives was less detailed, but just as ambitious in terms of the intention of giving all the employees the opportunity to play a role in the development work. Both due to the contents of the proposals, which corresponded in the main with the ‘tone’ in all the groups, and because they had emanated from the company management and the union leadership, respectively, we let these proposals for methods of approach form the point of departure for the fifth group work, which was to conclude the conference.

The simulation of the development organization When rounding off a dialogue conference it is crucial to emphasize that the next step is from words to deeds. This does not mean, however, that the final work group and plenary session are used to arrive at agreement and the taking of decisions about which measures and solutions are to be implemented after the conference. A dialogue conference is not a decision-making forum; on the contrary, it serves the function of producing the best possible basis for decisions — which, in this connection, means a basis for taking a decision after the conference about how the development process should be organized further. In other words, the spotlight during the last group discussion is not directed at the proposals for measures and solutions of problems that have been raised at the conference. When the conference participants return to the hectic activity of the factory, where innumerable minor and major operational tasks have to be performed, good intentions and simulated solutions from a dialogue conference are of limited value as long as the most important feature is missing: guidelines on how they can be implemented in practice within the framework of the everyday work, in addition to all the other tasks which must come first, by virtue of the primacy of production. It is exactly because they are not solved in a satisfactory way within the compass of the quotidian activities that the various problems and development tasks have to be made the subject of an organized development process. There is thus little point in reverting in the final group work to a discussion mode which continues to simulate solutions. Instead, the participants are asked to simulate models of the organization of the development process which will generate solutions en route — i.e., models of a development organization. In general terms, the development organization must consist of a discussion system linked to an activity system. The building or organizing of this discussion system, together with ways of linking it to the company’s operative system, was the theme for the final work group. The group exercise was divided into two parts: five groups, each consisting of employees, supervisors and/or department


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heads from the same department, were to discuss the part of the development organization encompassing the organizing of the development work at the departmental level. These groups were given copies of, respectively, the company and the union leaderships’ keyword answers to the previous group exercise, and were asked to discuss “how the proposals concerning methods of approach suggested by the management and the union leadership can be adapted in practice” in each group’s own department. Three groups, consisting of leaders and union representatives, were given a two-part exercise. In the first part they were asked to discuss the possible tasks and composition of a party-representative ‘company development committee’ which could be established to take on the main responsibility for organizing the continued development process in the company after the conference. The second part of the exercise asked them to discuss how the existing party and cooperative bodies could be tied into this development process, one of the chief aims of which was to relocate problem-solving as far down the organization as possible. The division of the last group exercise into two themes, and its distribution to different groups of participants, reflects the circumstance that the actors in a development organization will also have different tasks and functions, depending on their position in the production organization. That fact that everyone is to take part does not mean that everyone has to be involved in everything — the division of functions and tasks is also necessary in a development organization. But the main point, as we have seen, is that everyone ought to have the opportunity to have a say about what their own function and position in a development organization ought to be, and to have a say in defining this function. The groups which discussed the department-wise adaptation of the ideas they were presented with in the exercise text produced relatively detailed models of how to organize the commencement of the development work. This amount of detail was possible because the groups were now basing their discussions on the prevailing conditions in their own departments and because they had learned a good deal during the previous discussion, extracting various elements from the different models presented at that time. The majority of the proposals involved a combined use of small groups and plenary sessions or assemblies, and the employment of the departmental committees as a central ‘development group’ at the departmental level. Very nearly all groups underlined the importance of being able to discuss things in small groups, the reason being that ‘more people would dare to take part, and the discussion would be “more open” ‘. Even this idea doubtless had its origin in the experience acquired at the dialogue conference. Even if the division into smaller groups contributed to making it easier for people to take part in the discussions, some pointed out that some sort of training in discussion and organization techniques was desirable. All together, the plenary reports showed an increased awareness among the participants of the very

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fact of organizing and conducting satisfactory discussions as a part of the development process. The job of clarifying the framework for the development work in the form of time frames and progress plans, as well as coordinating and following up this progress in the individual departments, was viewed as an important task for a prospective company development committee by all of the three groups of leaders and union representatives, who were supposed to discuss tasks for, and the composition of, a ‘company development committee’ as well as the involvement of party and cooperative bodies in the company development process. Furthermore, such a committee ought to be in a position to evaluate (and plan if necessary) training measures and other support schemes as an aid to the departments in the development work. The committee ought also to have the responsibility for arranging the exchange of experiences between the departments, and, in part, it should also function as a motivator, seeing to it that necessary decisions are made, as required by the work in progress. The proposals for the composition of a prospective ‘Company Development Committee’ varied somewhat, but mostly included the incorporation of a representative from all levels of leadership in the factory, together with a representative from the union leadership and one or two from the operator level. Two of the three groups were of the opinion that the committee also ought to include an external member, representing ‘neutral’ professional interests. Viewed as a part of the basic material for later decisions about the establishment of a development organization involving broad participation by all employees at the factory, it was significant that the opinions reported by all of the eight groups pointed in the same direction as far as the character and extent of the outlined development process was concerned. Neither the comments nor the brief, concluding plenary discussion offered greatly divergent ideas. The union branch said that many of their members and also the union leadership had initially harbored doubts about the efficacy of the company conference, but most were now very satisfied with it and were optimistic regarding the work ahead. After these concluding remarks, it remained to be seen what all this unanimity might lead to in practice.

The decision to establish a development organization Initially, after the two dialogue conferences had been held in October 1987, everything proceeded as if nothing had happened. The daily tasks and duties claimed the attention of all, and a factory does not run itself. The organization and implementation of a development organization in which all employees can take part in addition to their daily chores, but still remaining within the frame of ordinary working hours, is an involved undertaking which cannot be done at the


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drop of a hat. The management’s first action thus came as no surprise: it dragged its feet. Discussions started up after some months, however. We were drawn into them in an advisory capacity. The management’s opinion was that the company conference had clearly documented both the ability and the desire of the workforce to participate in discussing how the factory could be improved. Nevertheless, the management doubted whether it would be the right strategy to initiate the process throughout the whole of the company simultaneously. The reservations originated partly in the purely practical fact that a rather large apparatus would be set in motion, and there was speculation about whether one might perhaps achieve a better learning effect by starting in one or two departments, and then letting the others follow, one by one, hopefully on a sounder basis as experience was gained. Our advice was formulated negatively, in the sense that we would not claim that a simultaneous start would be the only path to success. Our argument was based on some known problems with partial implementations: (1) the positive results which are booked in one segment of the organization prove to be difficult to transfer to other segments due to normal human reaction patterns: one does not want others, with whom one shares the same status, to become exemplary models or ideals. (2) The possibility of doing things in different ways, of gaining many types of experience and, thereby, through discussions across organizational demarcation lines to attain a greater manoeuvering space for alternative, locally adapted approaches and solutions is improved when the development process is initiated throughout the whole of an organization. In practice, this means that the development work in the respective sections or departments takes place simultaneously, in parallel. For these reasons — and this was our advice — it might be worth the trouble to try something new: establish a development organization in which all can take part from the word go. Our advice was hardly decisive: whatever we say, it is the opinion of professional experimenters. The scales were tipped by the union’s branch leadership. With the active support of the union leadership, the management decided to put all its eggs in one basket: we were asked to formulate a draft proposal for a way to organize the development work in its initial stage. As we have emphasized, a company development project ought to be viewed as a supplement to the measures and tasks the company already has to carry out to produce its wares and services, not as an isolated project to be carried out on the sidelines, unconnected to the main body of the company organization. In our proposal for the construction of a development organization we therefore aimed to create links to the work which was already in progress and to make use of already existing forums and bodies. In this perspective, an arrangement called the ‘feedback of production information to the departments’ was important. The arrangement was a relatively new addition and was utilized by the majority of the

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production departments. What happened was that the department management inspected the production results for the previous month or fortnight (depending on the frequency of meetings) in relation to quantitative and qualitative goals. This took place at a plenary meeting of a few hours’ duration, led by a department manager. The inspection of the production information then became the subject of idea formation and discussions about how the next production period could be improved. This arrangement, together with the activity in the agreement-based departmental committees, constituted the most important points of connection for our suggestion about a supplementary development organization, the main contours of which are set out below. In each individual department an ordinary plenary meeting for the feedback of production information was to be held at regular intervals. In connection with this the departmental committee, represented by the department head or the supervisor and the department representative, was given the responsibility of arranging group discussions in which all employees in the department participated. These groups, called ‘production groups’, ought not to be too large, preferably no more than nine members in each group. The themes to be discussed were in the main to comprise proposals for solving operational problems and working environment problems. The departmental committee was to shoulder the responsibility for the translation of decisions into practical measures by seeing to it that minor problems were resolved quickly and by finding cooperative methods, such as project groups, for solving more long-term problems. Against the background of the two dialogue conferences we recommended the establishment of a Company Development Committee to coordinate the development work and to function as a forum for technical discussions. Members of the committee should be drawn from the executive and departmental management, the supervisor level, the union leadership, and department representatives. In the committee itself, the assistant production manager, the personnel manager and the union branch leader were to share the responsibility for the practical progress of the development work as a whole. Using our proposal for fashioning the structure of the development organization as a basis, the management worked out a proposal for the initiation of the process: the proposal followed our recommendations in the main, although certain small modifications had been made concerning the importance of the respective departments working out the forms of work which harmonized as far as possible with their own local conditions. In addition, the company and the union decided to apply for funds from the Basic Agreement’s Enterprise Development (HABUT)2 to cover outlays for two project workers, one for the 2. The HABUT arrangement, which is currently named The Social Partners’ Joint Action Program – Enterprise Development (HF-B) is described, inter alia, in Gustavsen (1985) and Pålshaugen (1988).


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management and one for the employees. These two research scholars were to work with the company development committee. In the discussions between the company management, the union leadership and ourselves about the proposals for constructing and initiating the development process, we continually returned to the problem that the majority of the employees only had slight experience of, and training in, the type of discussions envisioned for the production groups. The department management and the department representatives also lacked experience in leading such discussions. Since the quality of the discussions strongly influences the individual long-term participant’s motivation and interest in taking part in them, it might be an idea if someone from our ranks, with our ability to get such discussions to function smoothly, played a part in organizing and conducting them. There were two main disadvantages with our involvement in planning and executing the discussions: the greater the degree to which measures in an organization are implemented with the assistance of external resources, the greater is the risk that the measure is perceived as a ‘foreign body’. If the intention is that the dialogue-based development work is to become a part of the company’s future forms of work and organization, then both the company management and its employees must develop their abilities to lead and organize the dialogue-based activities themselves. These two aspects were strong arguments in favor of the company’s own people organizing the discussions; on the other hand, the need to achieve the best attainable quality of the discussions in the early stage argued for our participation in this work. The solution to the dilemma was that we worked out some ‘game rules’ for the discussions and the development work. In these we formulated a number of criteria for organizing, conducting and following up discussions. The rules were to be understood as guidelines which could help in planning and executing the discussions so that they fulfilled their purpose of functioning as dialogues as well as possible. The rules depicted the guidelines both for the composition of the production groups, the work forms of the groups, the themes for discussion, the practical pursuance of proposals and, finally, the productiongroup arrangement’s place among in the cooperative organs of the company. To find this place among the official cooperation bodies we suggested a pilot scheme in which the departmental committees were enlarged to include one representative from each of the production groups in the department in question. As members of the extended departmental committee (EDC), the supervisor and department representative were to share a special responsibility for the progress and follow-up of the discussions in the production groups. We emphasized the importance of having some forums in which supervisors and department representatives could exchange viewpoints across the boundaries of the departments about their roles in the development work, and we also emphasized the importance of their working together with the two research scholars on the implementation and further development of this part of the company development project.

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The company management and the union leadership chose to present their decision to start a company development process in a form which, not only in words but also in practice, demonstrated that the process was to be based on the use of dialogue and broad participation: the managing director and the union leadership arranged departmental meetings in which goals, plans and game rules for the company development project were presented, together with a proposal concerning the composition of the production groups. The proposal had been worked out as a cooperative effort between the supervisor and the department representative in the relevant department. At these plenary meetings, small discussion groups were arranged after the introductory presentations, in which the employees discussed the proposal as well as how they thought the production-group activities could best be fitted in with the demands of their daily work. Thus, the presentation of the decision to start a development process in which all could take part took the form of a first step in the implementation of the decision.

Chapter 3 The Project Development Phase: Development Organization at Work The development organization as an internal public sphete In the roughly six months between the staging of the two dialogue conferences and the point at which initial formation of the development organization had been discussed and agreed, the organization became the subject of quite intense activity. The discussions in the production groups got off to a flying start in all departments; reports from these discussions were handed over to the expanded department committees (EDCs), which were rapidly inundated with cases to handle. The project workers participated at the EDC meetings and designed a pair of uncomplicated forms as a help in systematizing the paperwork. One they called a work form, which was used to record particular problems or conditions people wanted changed, together with the way in which they were to be dealt with and the person responsible for doing the job, as well as a time limit. The other was a report form on which the person(s) involved with following up or dealing with a problem were provided with information on who had raised the problem, together with a short description of what the problem involved, and a time limit for handling it and filing a report. The main part of this form was reserved for a short description of how the problem had been dealt with or resolved. With these two simple tools, the project workers helped us to achieve a certain amount of systematization in the processing of the many, and highly divergent types of problems which arose in the discussions in the production groups. After the summer holiday, when the first stage of the practical implementation of the development organization was planned to have been completed, the project workers made a summary of all the 176 cases which had been raised in the EDCs on the basis of the activity in the production groups. The problems were divided into subgroups according to the type of treatment required to solve them. The summary looked like this:

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Problems grouped according to required solution

Number

Communication Negotiation Organizational changes New acquisitions (purchases) Mechanics dept. Ventilation Carpentry / construction Electro dept. Tinsmith

101 10 4 23 24 6 5 2 1 n = 176

We see that the three medial measures which recurred most often were associated with communication, new acquisitions, and help from the mechanical and maintenance department. An analysis of those sectors of the company organization which had to talk with each other to solve the 101 problems caused by communication failures gave the following result:

Communication failures in the system

Number

Operator – operator Operator – dept. / production management Operator – assistance unit Dept. head – supervisor Assistance unit – assistance unit

39 37 23 1 1 n = 101

Of the 23 cases requiring new acquisitions, seven required budgetary provisions, while 16 purchases could be made without delay. That this had not been done before, even though the need for the new acquisitions had not been hampered by financial considerations, seemed to a large extent to be due to communication problems. The project workers had attended all of the EDC meetings which had been held during this period, 11 in all (most of the six departments had held two EDC meetings, a larger department had held three and two smaller departments one each). Their analysis of the above tables, based on these experiences, are of interest: “As the figures indicate, a large number of cases have surfaced so far in the project. ... A good number of them are problems which have been raised previously with no result. Many of them are ‘trifling’ but still cause difficulties in the everyday work situation.”1

1. Cited from the project workers’ report to the Company Development Committee.

THE PROJECT DEVELOPMENT PHASE

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The number of problems referred to at the company conference did not amount to as many as 176, which was the figure when the rest of the workforce had been brought into the discussion through the production groups. But the impression we had gained at the company conference was confirmed when we moved over to the factory: in very many cases, problems impacting effectiveness and the working environment corresponded, because some of the most crucial working environment problems consisted of ‘trifling’ things which hampered people from carrying out their daily tasks in a satisfactory way. The problems are not that serious in themselves. What makes all the ‘trifles’ more than trifles is made clear only when they lose their isolated status, which is what happens when they become part of a more inclusive and differently organized discourse: In most companies, many problems remain unsolved because they are considered ‘insignificant’ by those whose responsibility it is to do something about them. When these problems are brought into a common arena, a public sphere inside the company — which in our case was the development organization — then their significance changes and increases. Not only is their significance increased by adding them together; each individual problem gains greater weight when it is articulated within a public discourse which — by virtue of the difference in perspectives between the various participants in the discourse — makes it possible to assert that a problem has several implications simultaneously. A handwheel on a machine which is difficult to turn, too narrow a stairway next to a machine, a failure in the planning routine, the lack of a spare part, a problem with raw material deliveries — all these are examples of ‘trifles’ that form a problem both for efficient production and for the working environment. In addition, the mere fact that a problem exists says something in each case about cooperation patterns or the lack of them, about priorities, and about personal experiences and relationships. How much importance is given to these different perspectives can vary, but all of them are legitimate points of view in terms of highlighting the problem’s full significance in the internal public sphere in the company. The development organization, moreover, creates the possibility to articulate the concrete perspectives which happen to be relevant to the particular problem. In this way, the development organization helps to give familiar problems a new and greater significance, a thing which has proved to be a prerequisite to getting anything done about them. As mentioned, the project workers pointed out that a great number of the problems had been raised previously, but without result. On the reasons for this they say: “Over half of the cases which have been raised (101 of 176) could have been solved by communication. Lack of communication is not only evident in that people do not talk to each other. Just as frequently, people talk together with no objectives or the ability to take decisions. Lack of insight in and / or understanding of each others’ situation is also an obstacle to communication”.2 2. Cited from the project workers’ report to the Company Development Committee.

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The project workers’ diagnosis is based on the actors’ own accounts of the different reasons why nominally ‘trifling’ problems had remained unresolved. We hear that it is not only a lack of communication which is the reason; often it is the quality of the communication that founders. This gives us the opportunity to point out that the establishment of a development organization in which everybody can participate is not about increasing the extent or the volume of the existing communication in a company, but that it is an attempt to improve the organization of that communication which, to a greater or lesser degree, takes place anyway, but in a more disorganized and less goal- and activity-directed manner. In other words, the establishment of development organizations is to a great extent an attempt to reorganize the company’s discourse formation. Let us look at this more closely. The discourse formation in an enterprise traditionally consists of a small, public stage and a large, sub-public stage. The main thrust of the communication takes place on the sub-public plane. It is here that particular patterns of communication are formed in which opinions about things and people are created and circulated. Communication on the sub-public plane is rich in content and multifaceted; a great amount of both knowledge and experience is relayed here. But the practical potential of the sub-public communication system, its ability and opportunity to induce practical activity, is often deficient — which may partly be due to lack of power, and partly to lack of relevance. The imputed powerlessness of sub-public communication lies, among other things, in its lack of surface contact with the company’s formal processing system. The result of this lack of direct contact is that sub-public communication also suffers from a certain lack of relevance in relation to practical measures. Since all the opinions — about what is wrong, what the reasons are and what ought to be done differently — are seldom tested in practice in concrete trials, they have little chance of being refined and developed. Thus they keep circulating in a more or less closed system, and, in spite of their grounding in experience, may easily end up as strongly held convictions, not easily distinguishable from prejudice. The reverberation from sub-public communication may also influence communication in the official organs of the company. Participants in these organs are also participants in different aspects of the sub-public discourse, and opinions which have their source there will not infrequently lie under the surface of communication in the official strata, though without being explicitly articulated. In such cases, discussions in these forums can seem more like negotiations than dialogue, in the sense that the discussion becomes an arena for the advocacy of arguments based on preconceptions belonging to each of the parties to the discussion, rather than an arena in which one or both parties develop new viewpoints through joint discussion. The poor quality of communication on the


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sub-public plane is transplanted to the public sphere in the company, and the company’s discourse formation as a whole becomes stamped by a form of organization based on negotiation and monologue. One of the important changes in the company’s discourse formation that occurs with the establishment of a development organization is that the most important elements of the sub-public discourse are given a new context, thereby gaining a new function and a different significance, as we have already mentioned. This new context, which comes into being with the development organization, has two defining characteristics. Everybody takes part in those discussions which are directly connected to an official system of activity, and their participation is binding. In our case, the connection is established by placing the production groups in the extended departmental committees which are responsible for following up the discussions in practice. In contrast to the case with the sub-public discourse, the viewpoints, opinions and recommendations expressed through the development organization will become part of a system of an internal public sphere in the company, which, precisely by virtue of its function as a public arena, makes the results of the discussions more binding. This increased normative significance can be seen on two particular levels: the practical implementation of recommendations for actions cannot so easily be sabotaged when the recommendations are the result of discussions which take place in an internal public arena, rather than being the result of discussions on the sub-public plane. On the other hand, viewpoints and recommendations that do not win support in an open discussion cannot become legitimate sources of dissatisfaction and frustration, which could be the case as long as opinions continue to circulate within a segment of the sub-public discourse, without being tested to discover how much actual support they might gain when everyone with a right to an opinion is brought into the discussion. In the present project, the core of the company’s internal public arena consisted of the production groups, the production meeting / plenary assembly, the extended departmental committees, and the Company Development Committee. The organization of this supplement to the company’s traditional discourse formation in turn exerted an influence on latter. This influence was initially felt in two ways. One form of change came from the production groups, which had the opportunity to invite management or staff personnel to their meetings to clarify or discuss relevant matters. This facilitated a form of communication that can be beneficial in many ways. The other form of change consisted in creating direct contact between, for example, staff personnel, leaders or experts whose presence was necessary to solve a problem, and those who wanted the problem solved: either a production group or the EDC. Direct contact replaced or supplemented the customary written contact, which otherwise was quite usual. In such cases, written communications have

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certain drawbacks which easily become part and parcel of a low-quality discourse formation. The project workers from the union put it as follows: “Letters simplify”. The opportunities available for highlighting both the problem itself and alternative solutions, as well as the composition of the final solution, are normally far worse when the form of expression is characterized by shorthand and monologue than when it takes the form of a verbal dialogue. Another aspect of the significance of direct contact was formulated by a department head: “Personal contact means that both the problem and those who are responsible for its solution, in every section, become visible in a way that both deepens our understanding of the problem and our obligation to do something about it. Far more than impersonal notes.”

Interpretation of experiences with the development organization For the same reasons that a development organization most often is a constructive supplement to the discourse formation in a company, it is also a brittle construction. The weight of the daily, habitual tasks in a company is small in comparison with the periodic, time-constrained activities that take place under the direction of the development organization. While the daily running of the company and everyday gossip move almost under their own momentum, in the sense that they follow well-beaten tracks, with barely a thought for the enormity, complexity and efficiency of the apparatus which is in motion every single working day in a company, every small initiative in the development organization is greeted by a good deal of attention in the form of reflection and discussions, precisely because the development organization does not follow already established patterns. Instead, it must be built as it goes, so to speak, in an attempt to create new patterns. In spite of all this extra attention, the activities in the development organization are only a small part of the total activity in a company, and the extent of the effects of the development work must be judged in this light. For somebody looking at all this from the outside, this disproportional ‘balance of power’ between the production and the development organization is comparatively easy to see; for those who find themselves in the midst of the development work, both the perspective and the horizon seem different. As researchers, we were confronted with this in our participation in the Company Development Committee which was responsible for the development project as a whole. The division of labor between the company and ourselves was as follows: the company’s own people, including the project workers, did all the work of organizing and conducting the discussions in the development organization. Our task was to be discussion partners, to take part in the analysis of experiences and


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offer advice and recommendations for the further organization of the development process. We performed this task by taking part in the meetings of the Company Development Committee, which met about once a month and consisted of the plant director, the administration director, the assistant production manager, the personnel manager, the supervisor (subsequently two) and the personnel secretary (who was also a project worker on a half-time basis) from the management’s side; the leader of the factory union branch, the branch secretary, two safety representatives (one of whom was the union’s project worker), later reinforced by a third from the mechanics groups; and 2–4 researchers from the Work Research Institute. The point of the meetings was to discuss experiences with the progress of the company development project and to determine the strategy for the work ahead. One of the recurring topics of discussion at these meetings was the issue we raised above: the relationship between activity and the expected results of the development work. The supervisor especially, but also partly on the part of the union, intimated that the activities in the development organization did not come up to expectations: only already well-known issues were aired at the discussions in the production group; by no means all of the participants were active in the discussions; and after two or three meetings, the group found nothing more to talk about. Had not we, who had suggested the idea of a development organization, also expected more than this, and how pleased were we with the results up to now? That was just about how the question was put. Our role in discussing such questions could neither be to modify the questioner’s diagnosis by enhancing reality, for example by claiming that it could not be all that bad, pointing at some positive feature or other. Nor could we turn ourselves into advocates for honorable intentions and pray for patience: wait and see, useful and advantageous things will happen soon. Both these strategies would be ways of evading or overlooking the facts: a good deal of the issues were already well-known themes; a lot of people were not actively participating; the desire to discuss current production and working environment problems petered out after a couple of rounds. The question was, rather, what did these facts mean, how were they to be interpreted, which other facts did they need to be connected to? Briefly, what type of experience did they signify? Our contribution to these discussions was to show that people’s experiences could not be interpreted solely in the light of one perspective only. If the experiences were assessed using a linguistically constructed model of an ideally functioning development organization as a standard, then they would undeniably appear as both wanting and insignificant. But a far more relevant standard than this kind of construction against which to evaluate experience is a representation of the actual situation at the company. Interestingly enough, this point had to be raised by us because many people from the company held to the theoretical

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model as the evaluation criterion, in the belief that they were adopting our perspective for assessing the practical development work. The picture of the actual situation at the company also has to be constructed, in words and by means of discussions. Our contribution to this construction is not to bring up new and unknown elements of the company’s situation so as to create a new and different picture of the company than could be painted by its own development committee members. On the contrary, our job is to remind the participants in the discussions of their own experiences of the company, in such a way that the actual situation at the company, which was the starting point for the way in which the development work was organized, is not ‘forgotten’ or pushed to one side. Viewed from the perspective which arose when the real situation at the company was depicted, in all its complexity and with all its built-in problemcreating mechanisms, there was far greater agreement between us and the members of the Company Development Committee: the results that had been achieved were about what one could reasonably expect. Taking into account the small amount of the total social practice at the company taken up by these development activities, there is a limit to how much they could accomplish in the way of change as regards passivity and activity in discussions, for example. Nevertheless, it was a fact that many had had a say in the production groups who had not offered their opinions earlier. And that many of the issues were things which had already been aired did not mean that everything was as it was before. They were now raised in a new context, and, to a certain extent, new light was shed on them. They now became the subject of serious treatment. That the groups’ preoccupation with all the ‘trifling’ problems did not last long was part and parcel of the process, drawing attention to an important aspect of the further strategy of the development process: it had to have a certain, built-in momentum which could provide the participants with a feeling of movement and change. Their collaboration in discussions and activities must not be allowed to deteriorate into a type of ritualized repetition. In view of this, the conclusion was that the activity of the development organization had more or less given us the results which could reasonably have been expected at this stage, during which efforts had been concentrated on seeing how the experiment with the production groups worked in practice. The aim of establishing production groups as a provisional arrangement was two-sided, of course: on the one hand it was an attempt to initiate a process of practical development work based on discussions and the implementation of practical measures. On the other, it was a test of the effectiveness of this particular way of organizing development work. Viewed as an experiment, the effect of the development organization must be measured in relation to the situation in the company at that time. The point of the theoretical model of a development


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organization, which we had brought up and manoeuvred into the discussions on many occasions, is not to grapple with reality so as to get it to resemble the model, bit by bit. The model of the development organization is an aid to structuring discussions about how practical development work can be organized as a whole. Based on the concrete experiences with it, the model must be revised, developed further, and supplemented — always bearing in mind that it should function as an aid. It must be possible to assess the individual parts of the practical development work in context and as a part of a unified organized process, when the strategy for the ensuing development work is discussed in the Company Development Committee. Viewed in these terms, our task in these discussions has both a theoretical and an ‘anti-theoretical’ nature: we have to ensure that the exchange of perspectives takes place in the discussions. Our theoretical interpolations consist of sketching models of the development organization as an aid to guiding the discussion, based on the need for unified perspectives. Our ‘anti-theoretical’ observations consist in demonstrating that the results of the practical development work must be assessed primarily in the light of the concrete reality which happens to constitute the situation of the company at a particular point in time in the development work, and not primarily in the light of the theoretical reality described by the model. This example reveals an important aspect of our general role as discussion partners in the company development committee. Since practical reality cannot be expressed in discussions in any other way than as linguistic constructions, which are also the medium of the theoretical models, no watertight barrier exists between the construction of ‘practical realities’ and construction of ‘theoretical models’ in a discussion. The risk that a statement in a discussion, which constructs a model, an ‘idea of reality’, will gain the status of a ‘practical reality’ is always present and makes itself constantly felt. This is often detected by someone and the statement is countered, corrected or modified. Often, however, the transmutation takes place unnoticed by anyone, and fictions enter the discussion as facts. Without other secure footholds than a certain critical turn of mind — the ability to discern — together with a professional perspective, as depicted above, on the phenomenon that discussions constantly tend to construct images of reality in which larger or smaller parts of the picture are pure fantasy, it is one of our tasks in such discussions to counter statements which sound as if they belong to that category. Again, our contribution to the discussion is a negative one, in the sense that we can very rarely claim to have positive knowledge which we can use to raise objections to something that has been said. As a rule, our objections must be based on ‘justifiable suspicion’, and we depend on others in the discussion to follow up and ‘confirm’ our apprehensions by recounting other experiences, viewpoints or information which round off, dismiss or undermine the

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comment(s) that inspired our reaction. As far as constructing sufficiently accurate representations of local reality is concerned, this dependence on discussion partners from the local reality is one of the main reasons for the broad constitution of the Company Development Committee, with several representatives from all levels of the company.

Modifying the development organization When the arrangement with the production groups was explicitly initiated as an experiment to last until the summer holiday of ’88 (a period of three months), the aim was not to test whether a development organization in which all take part was a good or a poor way of working, and then say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to making the arrangement permanent. The point was to gain experience with one way of fashioning a development organization, and so adjust, develop further, or change the form of working on the basis of these experiences. In this connection, a principle had been established which implied that the further development of the work forms could follow different tracks in the various departments, depending upon what was found to be most beneficial locally. This principle had already been discussed in the Company Development Committee, as we have seen. In our view, the professional reason lay in the general notion that the work ought to be organized according to the type of job to be done, which varies from department to department. The question of similar versus different treatment, which was taken up by the union branch, found its answer in formulations such as “each department has the same opportunity to use the forms of working and organization that suit it best”. After the summer holiday, a number of adjustments and alterations were therefore implemented in the general plan of the development organization. One important change had to do with the role of the project workers. HABUT project workers generally have a dual function: on the one hand they represent an extra resource in initiating company development work; on the other, they play the role of catalysts in the development of competence and resources relevant for participating in and running the development work among the management and workforce of the company. Since development work based on broad participation quite literally runs the risk of being pushed to one side due to the demands of the current work load, the project workers always face the risk of being left with a number of development jobs which others in the company ought to have done. In this situation, neither an adequate development of resources nor of competence will occur in the company. Such symptoms were also present here. To support the EDCs in their work with cases originating with the production groups, ‘gangs of four’ were estab-


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lished in conjunction with the EDCs, based on a suggestion of ours. These consisted of a supervisor and an elected department representative as well as the two project workers. Together, the four were responsible for pursuing matters raised in the EDC. The ‘gangs of four’ held a brief meeting after each EDC meeting to discuss how the separate issues could best be handled in the further course of the process. The reason for this was partly that the number of cases had increased due to the arrangement of the production groups, though equally important was the wish to achieve a treatment of cases which corresponded as closely as possible to the intentions of the development project as they were expressed, for example, in the ‘game rules’ for the production group arrangement. The project workers’ primary consideration was to contribute to the satisfactory handling of cases in this sense, but they were often left with the responsibility for the ensuing case administration as well. Now, however, the project workers took the initiative of transferring a larger part of the responsibility for following up cases to the individual departments by widening participation from the departments in the ‘gangs of four’ so that they now consisted of, respectively, supervisor, department representative seconded by a deputy representative, and safety representative, in addition to the project workers. The group retained the name ‘gang of four’ since it took over the tasks of the ‘original’ gangs of four. The production group arrangement was retained in most of the departments, but some started to use monthly plenary assemblies instead and channelled their cases into the EDC. It became clear, however, that the production groups would not generate many new issues or questions on their own after having aired the immediate problems connected with production and the working environment which had taken place during the spring and early summer. The gangs of four were therefore given the job of putting new discussion topics onto the agenda of the production groups, cooperating with the project workers when necessary and, through them, also with the company development committee.

Discussion about cooperation problems It soon became apparent that in the same way that there had been a generally shared acknowledgement of the need to air frustrations about problems with production and the working environment, there was also a widespread need among the workers to air their frustrations in relation to the supervisors. The relations between workers and supervisors were many-sided and, of course, varied from individual to individual, but, generally speaking, they were still characterized by too many conflicts, friction and insinuations in day-to-day work. The supervisors, for their part, were interested in finding out more about,

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and getting a better perspective on, the causes of the employees’ dissatisfaction with them, so that they would be in a position to separate relevant from irrelevant complaints and to enter more actively into a dialogue about how cooperation could be improved. Against this background, it was decided that all the production groups and plenary assemblies were to discuss the subject: “What are our demands on and expectations of a supervisor?” Not many original or surprising opinions emanated from this round of discussions either. A written summary of the demands and expectations, presented and taken down by the project workers, revealed little beyond the general demands that most, in principle, would not be able to disagree with. For example, a supervisor should possess such characteristics as dependability, civility, the ability to inspire respect, to tackle criticism, and to take decisions. Further, a supervisor should be knowledgeable about, among other things, the company and its organization, the law and agreements, and the tasks of a department. The duties of a supervisor were, among other things, to plan and organize, to delegate, inform and motivate, to praise and criticize, to help build a good working environment, etc. In addition, a certain amount was said about how a supervisor should perform his tasks, among other things by showing an interest in his job, conducting rounds in the department, displaying concern, and taking on the role of an arbitrator in conflicts. Finally, some areas in which the workers felt that the supervisor ought to be trained / brought up to date were pointed out and appended to the list of characteristics and knowledge which the supervisor should ideally possess. As we can see, what is included in this summary is not very different from what might be found in an elementary handbook for supervisors. But the significance of this round of discussions exceeded this: first, the individual discussions had a more concrete and, to a certain extent, local character, so the demands were given a more specific and personal form than in the general summary referred to above. The EDC meetings at which the outcome of the discussions were reported and at which the individual supervisor was confronted with all of the viewpoints together, therefore had a directly personal atmosphere which some experienced as quite harsh. In such a situation, in which sharply expressed points of view can be aired without a current conflict being their immediate cause, the normative sway will often be even more significant in that psychological defence mechanisms, which are normally activated in a direct confrontation, remain dormant. Secondly, this round of discussions also contributed to yet another problem area being transposed from the sub-public plane to the internal public sphere of the company. This had a dual function. On the one hand, the dissatisfaction that had often been expressed on the sub-public plane was converted into positive demands of a quite general nature, but which retained their relevance, even when freed from the situations in which, and the individuals by whom, dissatisfaction


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was most often expressed. In this manner certain general norms were created which remained in place, having a legitimacy they otherwise would not have had, had they only been a part of and articulated within the diverse patterns of conflict in the sub-public arena. On the other hand, the articulation of demands by the employees to the supervisors affected the employees themselves in a way that tends to make normative obligations all the stronger: when the workers have the opportunity to present their demands and expectations to the supervisors in full public view (internally in the company), then they have explicated a set of standards that they are obliged, in principle, to maintain themselves. In the same manner they must also thereby concede the same right to the supervisors to discuss whatever demands and expectations they have of their workers, based on a correspondingly normative framework. Norms and attitudes are very important for cooperative relations in a company. Difficulties in cooperation between different sections of a company can often be traced back to these factors. “A change of attitude, that’s what’s needed”, is the usual rejoinder. But there is an intricate relationship between social norms and social practice on the one hand, and between attitudes and actions on the other. Changes in the norm system and in attitudes can, without doubt, open the door to new ways of doing things. The problem, however, is that norms and attitudes are so powerfully ingrained in social practice, both as regards genesis and ramifications. A strategy to change practice by first achieving a change of attitudes can easily disintegrate into the well-known circular logic of the ‘chicken-and-the-egg’ conundrum. If one is not to be caught up in this type of game, a parallel strategy must be implemented in both areas simultaneously. The normative discussion about the role of the supervisor thus had a certain value, but attempts to bring about palpable changes in that role ought to be initiated at the same time, so that one would have the opportunity to engender new and tangible experiences which could inspire movement and change both in that social practice and in those social norms which characterized the unsatisfactory cooperative atmosphere.

The interconnection between discussion and cooperation procedures This theme was discussed in the Company Development Committee in the wake of the production groups’ discussion of the supervisor’s role. Our task in the discussion was to lift the question of changes in attitudes versus changes in practice out of the chicken-and-egg dilemma into which the discussion constantly tended to relapse. On the other hand, there was not much we could say in tangible terms about the alternatives to the supervisor’s role that ought to be implemented as trials. The company’s own people were obliged to sort out the

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possibilities here, by virtue of their more detailed knowledge of the supervisor’s functions and tasks. During this discussion, an existing draft of a proposal for a sort of ‘cooperation agreement’ between the supervisors and the department representatives was tabled. This included common and partial responsibilities connected with leadership and coordination tasks in the daily running of the works. The proposal existed only as a partially worked out outline from the hand of the assistant production manager. He had been pondering a type of cooperation contract for some time. Among other things, the discussions at the company conference about delegating the work of solving conflicts and problems between the company and the union further down in the organization meant that the proposal’s time had come. Some of the proposal’s main ideas were debated and were received positively by the Company Development Committee. Because the way of thinking was not traditional, and the proposal contained elements that might prove controversial, we pointed out that, rather than taking upon itself the responsibility forformulating a detailed proposal, the Company Development Committee should organize a procedure for working out a finished proposal; a procedure which could ensure appropriate cooperation from the parties involved — bearing in mind that the proposal’s final form ought to be as detailed and as concrete as possible, so that the greatest possible amount of normative support would be ensured. The agreed procedure was as following: the company development committee appointed a project group that was to work out a concrete proposal for a cooperation agreement between the supervisor, the department representative and the safety representative. Additional tasks for which the operators and mechanics had responsibility were also included in the proposal. The project group was to consist of the personnel manager, the assistant production manager, a supervisor, the union branch leader, the branch secretary and the two project workers. Parallel to this group, a working group consisting of a supervisor, department representative and the safety representative from the department where the cooperation agreement was to be tried out first, was to work out a version of its own. The two proposals were to be coordinated by means of a common discussion between the two groups, before presentation to the production groups from the relevant department for discussion, comments and recommendations for revision. On the basis of this, the department committee was to present an evaluation which the company management and the branch leader were to endorse. As has been stated, the whole development organization in the department involved — which was the company’s largest — was spurred to action in devising proposals for the cooperation agreement. The discourse formation within which the proposal was produced and discussed had a different form than


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the company’s traditional discourse, and the discourse on the proposal in consequence acquired a different character. But there was an intriguing question in this connection: was the design of the proposal for the cooperation agreement and its implementation different from what it would have been if it had been formulated by means of the usual working method? We shall examine this by taking a closer look at the individual stages of the process. First, it must be mentioned that the very existence of the company development project, with its organizational form and its thematics, was undoubtedly a necessary precondition for the launching of a proposal embracing such extensive cooperation between the supervisor and the department representative. Without the opportunity provided by the development organization for entering into a dialogue about a proposal of this type, it would in all likelihood never have become the subject of serious, material discussion. Rather, it would have been dismissed by the union on principle. This despite the fact that the proposal was based on the intentions of Section 9 of the Basic Agreement between the labor market parties on Information, Cooperation and Codetermination. A suspicion that this might well turn out to be the result was the reason why the proposal had not got any further than a corner of the assistant production manager’s desk. The strategy of working out two proposals simultaneously created benefits in the form of two proposals which supplemented each other in ways that were clearly related to the composition of the two groups. The project group’s proposal (appointed by the Company Development Committee) was more systematic and more thorough in relation to all the areas which had to be covered by an agreement, while the working group from the department included more recommendations about calling in operators and mechanics to solve problems, in line with the intention to locate problem solving as close as possible to the source. Moreover, the two proposals overlapped to a large degree, more or less as expected. When, in spite of this, we suggested letting the two groups work alone rather than together, the reason was that this parallel form of work gave each individual member of the department group a better opportunity to discuss each different task and area of responsibility in concrete terms, and thereby be better fitted to handle the practical consequences of the agreement when it eventually came to be implemented. Even if the discussions about reorganizing tasks and delegating responsibility of necessity also imply the simulation of solutions, such simulation has a different function when it is performed by the people who are going to implement the solutions in practice, than when simulation is carried out by third parties. The two proposals were condensed into one and sent to the production groups for discussion. The proposal consisted of 26 clauses in all. Every clause specified the type of task, as well as the person responsible for carrying it out. There was a wide variety of tasks, from the presentation of sales forecasts, the

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ordering of raw materials, the creation of a weekly agenda, manning questions, writing machine reports, performing product controls, product trials, obtaining accessories, training, doing repairs, keeping production accounts, to carrying out preventative maintenance — in short, all the major management, coordination and control functions associated with the daily running of the department. One important aspect of the proposal, in addition to specifying the task involved and who was in charge of it, was that it also included recommendations for how the people responsible for the different tasks were to fulfil them or carry them out; in other words, a recommendation concerning the form of work. This was important because the formalization of cooperation, as we know, does not necessarily lead to cooperation in practice. In most cases it is neither the formal possibility nor the general will that is absent or insufficient — the problem is finding concrete, appropriate forms of cooperation in practice. The recommendations for the manner of execution/work form simulate a form for which the actual people in charge must provide a content. The proposal does not thus simulate solutions in terms of content, it simulates the form of work that is expected to give the best practical results. We consider this emphasis on specifying the work form, in addition to enumerating responsibilities, to be a fruit of the experiences with the company development project. Here, the positive significance of centering the discussions on the form of work, processes and procedures which create new solutions, rather than going through the traditional simulation of solutions in a verbal form, had become increasingly more evident. In many cases, the suggestion for the work form included holding meetings and talks between the persons involved. More generally, we can say that communication was always the most important of the proposed work forms. It comes as little surprise that an improvement of cooperative relations between parties in a company requires an improvement of communication. The need for better information and communication are two recurring themes when problems and improvement areas are monitored at company conferences. The problem is that, as long as the need for better communications is not explicitly expressed, but is left as a generalized need, possibly augmented by an insistence on changes of attitudes (“we must improve our communications”), then it is extremely difficult to do anything about it in practice. Not everybody is supposed to communicate with everybody else. Better communication does not mean unrestrained communication. Communication, in other words, must be organized, too. And this was precisely what the proposal for the cooperation agreement intended: the organization of communication procedures, in a specific way corresponding to the task at hand. In this way, the proposal would also imply an element of change in the company’s formal discourse formation. The discussions in the production groups on the proposal for the cooperation agreement revealed a familiar dilemma,


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though in a new light, which made it plain that the dilemma would have to be handled in practice and would prove difficult to resolve either theoretically or on a verbal level prior to any practical experience: the draft agreement’s 26 clauses were discussed clause by clause. The groups stated their acceptance or disapproval of the agreement, together with any comments they had, in their reports of the discussions. The production groups approved the majority of the clauses and thought that the recommendations were excellent. The comments consisted, for the mostpart, of clarifications or specifications of certain preconditions which would have to be satisfied here and there if the proposal was to function. In some cases, individual groups did not agree with the department representative sharing responsibility with the supervisor, for example in coordinating day and evening shifts and in preventive maintenance. In spite of the relatively large degree of consensus between the production groups on the measures suggested under each of the clauses, a general comment from one of the groups expressed a doubt that had arisen in the discussions of several of the production groups: “The group is afraid that if the representative is given too many jobs, then this will have a negative affect on the performance of his duties. Another danger is that the representative can be perceived as a ‘new’ supervisor.” This problem — that the department representative would be transformed into a new type of supervisor as an effect of the cooperation agreement — was not based on any one point in the agreement. As stated, each individual clause was received positively. The problem lay with the agreement as a whole. That is to say, how the agreement would be implemented in practice. If the proposal for a cooperation arrangement had been presented in a traditional way, as an already worked out recommendation which the union could have accepted or rejected, this dilemma would have had to have been tackled on a purely theoretical level. One would have had to choose one of two simulated solutions to the problem. Either yes, the representative would become a new kind of supervisor, or no, the representative would only have more influence on production, but still as a representative. Depending on which of the two simulated results the union arrived at, they would have to decide to say yes or no to endorsing the agreement. But when the department representative and the union branch’s members had had the opportunity — provided by the discussion plan — to simulate in talks the concrete substance of each individual clause, and to simulate various outcomes of the agreement as a whole, they found that the dilemma could not be resolved in any satisfactory way at the simulation level, i.e., by discussion. There was therefore a greater willingness to try out the settlement in practice, as a trial arrangement, so that real experiences could be given a role in the search for improved cooperation arrangements. A decision to implement the cooperation agreement as a trial arrangement for three months was taken shortly after these discussions.

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The dialogue conference for supervisors and elected department representatives The content of the cooperation agreement was a product of the company’s own people. Our contribution consisted of taking part in devising the procedures for discussion and formulating the proposal, in line with our general role to assist in the reorganizing of the discourses at the company, thus changing the company’s discourse formation. In this respect, the next largest of our tasks was to design a program for — and lead the running of — a dialogue conference primarily for supervisors and department representatives, but also including department heads and the company management. Since the improvement of cooperation between supervisors and department representatives was considered to be of critical importance for an improvement of cooperative relations in general, the staging of a dialogue conference for these two groups in particular had been long awaited. In connection with the trial implementation of the cooperation agreement, which was initially to be undertaken by the morning and afternoon shifts, the former of which had already implemented it, there was, among the many new experiences and ideas which the company development project had created in its wake, a concrete example of a potential future cooperation arrangement. We felt that it was important to discuss this at an early stage of the trial. There were two reasons for this: those who practiced the agreement would be given the opportunity to adjust/improve their practice, both through reflection on own experiences and by suggestions from others. Those who had not been party to any agreement but were open to the eventuality of doing so, would have the opportunity both to express their critical reactions to the agreement and to develop their own ideas for alternative agreement arrangements in their own departments. In this way we would avoid the situation that the agreement that was being tried out in one department would be perceived as a type of ‘carbon copy’ for the other departments. The creation of such a discussion context around the cooperation agreement was one of the main goals of the dialogue conference. In addition, there was the general aim of training the participants to think more in terms of organization, and not just in terms of persons, in connection with problems, conflicts and difficult cooperative patterns. We shall examine more closely how the dialogue conference was conducted so as to indicate how our general goals were handled in practice. The dialogue conference for supervisors and department representatives was held at the end of October 1988. In addition to the two previously mentioned groups, the participants in the dialogue conference were: the factory and department leadership, the safety representatives, the union branch committee, and the two project workers; 51 persons in all, 23 of whom were from the union branch


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and 28 from the company management. The conference extended over one and a half days, from Friday at 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, and included in all four sessions of group discussions and a plenary assembly. The form of the dialogue conference had been worked out by us in cooperation with the Company Development Committee.

Cooperation or conflict? Linguistic and real dilemmas The first group discussion at the conference was to debate the advantages and drawbacks of the cooperation model for supervisors and elected representatives in such a way that the problem complexes could be made concrete and illuminated from all sides, rather than discussions being driven by a need for quick decisions for or against the cooperation model. Our job was to elicit the concrete types of dilemmas that might lie in the model, based on the perspective that dilemmas which can seem difficult to resolve when they are handled on a general, linguistic level, can prove to be accessible to treatment on a specific, practical level. The gist being, in other words, to attempt to unravel linguistic constructions and configurations which impede or disguise real action alternatives. Our unpretentious device consisted of carefully disassembling the compact preconception which is, apparently, a precondition for using language correctly: words which signify an object have a meaning which is identical to the object, and this meaning is different from the significance of words which name other objects. A supervisor is a supervisor, and a department representative is a department representative. Undoubtedly a correct inference, but what such an inference signifies and how meaningful it is depends on the type of discourse of which it is a part. By introducing a simple analytical distinction into the text of the group exercise which was to be discussed, we managed to resolve the apparently absolute distinction between what a supervisor is and what a department representative is, in a way that would help to create a greater breadth in the day-to-day interaction between the two types of employees. We emphasized that all jobs are conglomerations, or include the execution of a number of different, more or less important tasks. We illustrated our point as clearly as possible by stylizing two main tasks which the supervisor and department representative, respectively, had to be able to perform. The supervisor must be able to perform the job of being (a) a leader capable of taking decisions, and (b) a problem-solving collaborator. The department representative must be able to perform the job of being (a) a party representative/negotiator, and (b) a problem-solving collaborator. It thus became evident that the division between the two categories is not absolute: depending on the type of task, relations between the two can take on the

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character of either a hierarchical order-giving or conflict situation, or a more egalitarian discussion, or cooperative situation. Common to both groups is that they must be able to alternate between the roles of opponent or collaborator, according to the situation they happen to be in or the task they happen to be facing. Institutionally, this type of alternation is written into the two main parts of the Basic Agreement in which part A regulates party interests while part B regulates cooperative interests. But this alternation between opposition and cooperation will, in the context of everyday work, have to be handled in a large number of varying situations which are not written into the Agreement’s general text. At this point judgement, competence, and existing local agreements are drawn in. The cooperation agreement was an example of such a local agreement and was based precisely on the ability of the supervisors and department representatives to alternate between their respective functions (leader/collaborator and party representative/collaborator), depending upon the type of task in question. The cooperation agreement specified a number of tasks and, what is more, the appropriate form of work. Against this background, the conference participants were asked to discuss the most significant advantages and disadvantages of a cooperation arrangement based on the ability of the same person(s) to alternate between the different work forms. For this discussion we divided the participants into homogeneous groups so as to achieve the greatest possible breadth of views between the groups, precisely because the different opinions on this subject are strongly connected to the situations and experiences which make up the participants’ points of reference. The reports from the group discussions revealed the greatest consistency regarding their views on the advantages of a cooperation arrangement of the type outlined in the exercise text, but there was greater divergence on the disadvantages. The most important advantages mentioned were the possibilities for a greater say in the work situation on the part of the supervisors; the possibilities for faster and better decisions; increased competence, and improved understanding of each other’s work situation. Whereas the department representatives laid greatest weight on their increased opportunities to influence the work situation, the supervisors emphasized that the department representatives’ participation in decision making would result in greater support from the employees. While increased opportunities for development, learning and insight were largely viewed as a benefit for the department representatives, the factory management group emphasized that such a cooperation arrangement would also give the supervisors a better understanding of the department’s assignments and working conditions. As far as problems and disadvantages were concerned, the department representatives expressed uneasiness about the possibility of losing contact with their colleagues, both because such a cooperation arrangement would demand a


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lot of their time and because the department representative might assume a role which was closer to the role of leader. One group pointed out that the arrangement might give the department representatives a greater say, but not necessarily the individual employee, which was the actual intention of the agreement as they perceived it. Another group was concerned that the cooperation arrangement presupposed another type of department representative than the traditional one, with greater emphasis on abilities to carry out daily tasks and less emphasis on knowledge of the law, regulations, etc. They therefore feared that such a department representative would feel less commitment to the union. While the department representatives had mainly discussed such problems as the possibility of role conflicts and their relationships with the members they were supposed to represent, the supervisors had been more preoccupied with problems tied to their daily work situation, and with their relationships with the department representatives. The cooperation arrangement would be more time consuming, and they wondered where the time was to come from. One group was of the opinion that the supervisors’ knowledge of, among other things, economy, the Basic Agreement and local agreements, ought to be improved. Another said that the personal prerequisites for functioning according to that type of model were not always present, and that the cooperation model would be vulnerable to personal antagonisms. We see that, though there are many viewpoints, astutely expressed, at the same time they can to a large extent be grouped according to party interests. A summary of the viewpoints, as presented here, however, gives a one-sided impression. The main impression of the discussions in practically all the groups was that they had managed to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the cooperation model without feeling obliged to conjure up a conclusion. In this way they been able to discuss the various advantages and drawbacks individually, so as to find out what they consisted of in fact, rather than carrying out a pros and cons balancing act between them on an abstract level. As an intervention in a discourse, our analytical distinction did not spawn further schematic discussions. Rather it induced a greater mobility in the discussions: the demonstration that the same person in two roles would have to alternate between different modes of working, one conflictual, the other cooperational, depending on the situation or the type of task involved, made the discussion more relevant to concrete activity in the sense that it became easier to adapt language to the practical situations in which the experiences of the participants are formed, rather than the participants having to adjust themselves to the either–or logic so easily forced upon us by language when we meet together in a discussion. In this way, the experiences of the participants can contribute to an enrichment of the discourse instead of the discourse making the participants all the poorer by levelling-down the significance of their experiences.

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Interlude: the question of delegation As we have mentioned, the dialogue conference was also meant to serve as an opportunity for supervisors and department representatives to develop their ability to discuss their various tasks from an organizational point of view. For the next two group discussions, we therefore first chose to prepare a discussion about a delegation strategy based on a view of the factory organization as a whole. Thereafter, we desired a more detailed discussion about delegation strategies for that sector of the work organization with which both the supervisors and the department representatives were in contact, each from their own respective position: viz., the operators. The groups for both of these discussion sessions were composed in such a way that each group included representatives from the factory or department management, the supervisors and the department representatives, the two latter categories being drawn from different departments. Thus, the experiences and insights of the relevant groups of participants at the dialogue conference could be expressed in each group, at the same time as we loosened bonds which — in relation to the ideal of a discussion with the greatest measure of freedom — easily dominate discussions when participants get stranded in the familiar, personalized discussion patterns which so easily become established during the course of time through the ongoing interaction in the department. Both of these sets of group discussions, with ensuing summaries in plenary assemblies, had the dual function of being both a training in discussing organizational problem complexes by concentrating on concrete issues, and in generating a range of ideas and concrete proposals for new ways of handling cases, performing tasks and delegating responsibility. As regards the latter part of this — viz., the content — we undertook a brief analysis during the conference of the recommendations and viewpoints which had arisen, constructing a point-bypoint general summary of the opinions about which there seemed to be a broad consensus, and those opinions we found interesting and would like the participants to discuss in greater detail. We appended this summary to the exercise text for the fourth and final group discussion.

Discussion of the development organization: simulation of processes, not of results The last group exercise was presented in the following words: “The next stage of the company development project is to find out in practice how the following measures can be combined in the best possible way:


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1.

Clarification and strengthening of the supervisor’s area of responsibility and authority. 2. Assigning the responsibility for collaboration in the daily running and the development work in the department to the supervisor and department representative. 3. Increasing authority and support for the department representatives on the part of the union branch. 4. Use of department meetings for information exchange about questions of concern to the whole department. 5. Dividing the department into production groups in such a way that the groups can take on more responsibility for internal coordination, effective maximum utilization, quality and product control, etc. 6. Ensuring that necessary training for this is given to department heads, supervisors, union branch representatives and operators. 7. Ensuring that departments and work groups have the necessary control data in the form of production goals and production results, as well as important, variable cost factors. Taking the conditions in their own department as a point of departure, the groups shall formulate a recommendation for how each of these measures should be shaped so that their combination will have the greatest possible effect.” We supplemented the exercise text with an oral introduction, in which we clarified the goal of the final discussion. We said that the majority of the measures on the list were generalized summaries of those the participants themselves had stressed as being important in previous discussions. Moreover, we had added a couple of extra points so that the discussion was given a more unified perspective as a starting point. On the one hand we reminded the participants about the production group arrangement, so as to underline the importance of maintaining contact with the individual employee in the development work; and, on the other hand, we raised the point about eliciting the various control data at the department group level and, if necessary, at the working group level, so as to strengthen the interconnection between the development work and the ongoing production work, or, to put it in another way, the connection between the development organization and the work organization. In this way we managed to stress that a unified, organized company development process must include a set of measures which, in principle, make it possible to relate the development work to all vital interests within the company, from the individual employee to the company’s business activities. At the same time, it was important to make clear that, within the framework of the general unified perspective, it was necessary to find the practical mode and

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combination of concrete measures the participants considered the most appropriate, based on the local conditions in their own departments. The general unified perspective sketched out in the exercise text had to be transformed, so to speak, into a local (department-wise), unified perspective in the group discussions. With this in mind, the groups were made up of participants from the same department, that is, the department head, the supervisors and department representatives of each department in each individual group. The factory’s executive management constituted its own group and was asked to discuss how, on the basis of the exercise text, it could best support the company development project at the stage into which it was now entering. As we can see, the exercise in this final discussion consists of outlining how the development organization can best be extended and consolidated in the separate departments, taking into consideration both local conditions and the overall perspective. The discussion was carried out as a simulation, in the sense that we did not prepare it in such a way that the group work would result in plans for action, e.g., in the form of concrete details prescribing what should be done and when. For us it is more important that the quality of the discussions at a dialogue conference represents a sound and relevant basis for decisions, rather than achieving decisions at the conference itself. In this regard it is important to note that a discussion always has a dual aspect, in that it simultaneously both constructs and simulates reality. One cannot avoid a discussion, even one that is planned as a simulation (e.g. of alternative forms of organization), inevitably including traces of a construction of reality. On the other hand, the content of a discussion, however down to earth it is, will never be identical to the reality the discussion seeks to embrace. Thus, the discussion’s dual aspect cannot be eradicated; a discussion cannot be carried out either as an unqualified simulation or as an unqualified reality construction. The quality of a discussion, in the sense of being a foundation for genuine decision making, therefore has not much to do with whether it is planned as a simulation or not. Viewed in relation to the problem we have repeatedly touched on about the relationship between the verbal simulation of activity versus the concrete enactment itself, the problem of the quality of discourses does not seem to be one which can be formulated in terms of halting the simulating character of discussions. Instead, it must be posed as a problem concerning the content of discussions, or more precisely: what types of action ought to be simulated in a discussion when evaluated in relation to the concrete actions the discussion is supposed to lead up to, induce or support? The answers here will vary depending upon the actual mixture of discussion / action in the individual case. For the type of situation we are describing, in which the concluding discussion at the dialogue conference should, according to the objectives, produce a certain basis for decisions about how the subsequent


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development work in each individual department in the factory should be organized, a main feature is that the discussion is not formed as a simulation of solutions but as a simulation of those measures and processes that are supposed to contribute to the creation of solutions over time. The contents of the discussion through which the individual participant’s viewpoints are shaped and developed, will thereby come to center on which work forms are the most appropriate in the development process. In this way, the practical significance of the choice of work forms is made more evident to the participants: work forms, measures, and the very organization of the development process are incorporated into their picture of reality, which is usually dominated by ideas about solutions and results, not by ways of achieving them. The manner in which measures are implemented is decisive for the quality of the results, but in the traditional company discourse it is the question of the solution, the imaginary anticipation of the result, that captures the attention of the participants and dominates the discussion. Nevertheless, agreement on the course of action in the implementation of measures is just as important as a modicum of agreement on the contents of the measures as a precondition for a good result. For these reasons the question of future work forms became the main theme of the concluding discussion of the dialogue conference, thus focusing attention in the direction of practical activity. In addition to this more or less situationally conditioned and pragmatic reason for concluding a dialogue conference with a discussion on measures and processes rather than solutions and results, which is a consequence of the fact that the center of gravity of the discussion in our experience generally creates a bias in the direction of simulating solutions (solving the local world’s problems), there is another, more general, reason. When discussions that simulate solutions are meant to be guidelines for actions, one very easily runs the risk that open possibilities for practical actions in concrete situations are suppressed or missed because the open alternatives contained in the actual situation are not part of the simulated solution model. New possibilities can, in a certain sense, be obstructed because what may pass as ‘new’ is delimited by the structure imposed by the simulation model. Discussions simulating processes meant to elicit solutions do not, in the same way, risk aborting new, unforeseen, solutions in the practical situations since the objective of this type of discussion is precisely the organization of such measures and methods which, by means of the alternation between discussion and activity, can create new solutions en route. For the reasons mentioned, a dialogue conference held as a part of a development project will usually conclude with a discussion on the practical process the participants are to initiate after the conference, and especially on how the process ought to be organized. The company conference, held exactly a year before, had also had this as the theme of the last round of discussions. The groups

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then, as now, were composed departmentally, and viewpoints and suggestions for ways in which to organize the development process varied between them. Opinions varied now, too, at the conference for supervisors and department representatives, but with an important difference: one year previously, almost none of the participants had had any practical experience with development processes of the type to be discussed in the exercise. The differences in opinions were therefore, to a large degree, based on pure supposition about the future way of working. Now, however, the participants had had six months to experience development work based on broad participation as a work form. Focusing on this experience in the discussion also enabled earlier experiences with cooperation on problem solving in their daily work to become the sounding board of the discussion. Prior to the company development project, of course, the participants had also utilized various work forms when solving problems and handling cooperative tasks. Thus, when the spotlight is focused on those work forms that have been implemented through the company development process, they can be compared and contrasted with those work forms the participants used previously, without them having been the subject of discussion. These experiences have thus had no place in the discourse.

Opinions on the differentiation of the development organization The differences in opinions between the departments, as depicted in the reports to the plenary assembly, proved to be based largely on considerations concerning the relationship between experiences of the various work forms in the trials which the development project had implemented and experiences with those work forms that had already been established in the different departments. Hence the participants’ knowledge of, and competence in already existing work forms, different from those which had been implemented through the development project, were accorded relevance in the discussion. Broadly speaking, the differences in opinion between the departments were based on the relative size of the departments. The larger departments stressed the need for getting the cooperation agreement between the supervisors and the department representatives to function properly and wanted to use the department meetings in which all the employees took part as a step in this direction. They also wanted information on relevant control data and the involvement of the workers in these discussions on production and environmental problems. They were, however, more skeptical of the idea of the production groups which, they were afraid, might well degenerate into too much talk with too little action. In the small departments, however, interest focused on the functioning of the production groups. They ought to be organized according to a principle of proximity in


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production relations as well as being given more tasks, such as responsibility for coordination in the areas of manning and overtime, for maintenance and efficient machine utilization, the assignment of tools and the conduct of quality and product checks. The need for a detailed cooperation agreement in these departments was less keenly felt since cooperation between the supervisor and the department representative already functioned very nearly according to the intentions of such an agreement, albeit on an informal basis. Some viewed this as an advantage because of its extreme flexibility, while others saw a need to channel cooperation into a somewhat more structured form. There were relatively ambiguous and non-specific answers to questions about the need to strengthen the supervisors’ area of responsibility and authority, the need for support by the union branch to the department representatives, and the need to provide necessary training at all levels (department heads, department representatives, supervisors and operators). The importance of doing something to satisfy these needs was stressed, but little was said about what or how this could be done. In itself, this is not ‘unnatural’ since, with the exception of the aspects that concern the internal affairs of the union, it is the responsibility of the factory management to see to the implementation of measures to meet these needs. In their discussion of how the company management could best support the company development project in the coming phase, the management had in fact also discussed these questions, among others. As the company management perceived it, the question of clarifying authority had three sides to it, viewed in terms of delegation. On the formal level, what would have to be clarified was which tasks ought to be delegated and which tasks needed to be taken over. This implied that the level of leadership immediately above the supervisors had to demonstrate an ability to delegate in practice, hence “avoiding balls kicked in their direction”, unless there were good reasons to “save” them. In addition, the company management had to back up the departmental leadership so that it was given the necessary legitimacy in its efforts to delegate and, at the same time, was given new types of leadership tasks, such as project management. The company management also raised the question of training and placed it in relation to their responsibility for a goal-directed recruitment policy at all levels. Training at the various levels had to conform to the nature of the tasks, and the company management considered it important that training requirements should be pointed out by the individual groups themselves, as the changes in the task structure became clearer. Furthermore, the management saw it as their responsibility to oversee the adequate dissemination of information on production goals, production results and other relevant control data, necessary for clarifying the individual department’s place and importance in relation to the totality of the factory’s production and financial situation. The management also

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considered it their responsibility to ensure that a certain momentum was maintained in connection with decision making on all leadership levels, with a subordinate procedure for rapid information feedback. As a policy signal, the executive management emphasized that the forms of cooperation had to be organized in fulfillment of the requirement that the employees would be given the opportunity to “contribute with their experiences before plans were implemented”.

The yardstick for evaluating the development organization The managing director rounded off the conference by reminding the participants about the point of effectiveness through cooperation, mentioned above, and said that it was in the attempt to achieve this that he saw the significance of the work forms which had been tried out in the company development project. Here he proposed the following standard for evaluating the quality of the project: “We are not carrying out this project because we see it as a unique idea or as a guaranteed success, but because we have to do something and, at this moment, we have not found any other practical methods which we feel are better. If we find such, we can make use of them.” This way of explicating a standard was in agreement with our own. Instead of constructing a model in the form of a linguistic figure composed of straightforward and elegant formulations towards which the worker bees of the company constantly had to glance in the hope that their daily buzzing would gradually lead to something which seemed as marvelous as the formulations, the director pointed to the practical realities existing at any given time as a yardstick for the quality of the development activities. Is cooperation better now than before? Are there other practical work forms which are better? This is the way in which the yardstick for the quality of development work be established: as a question of practical activity, measured against other practical activities. The concrete evaluations themselves can only be done in discussions, but the standard provides the point of reference or the character of the discussions. What is decisive is not whether the practical development work corresponds to a particular model but whether, within a unified organized discourse in the company, it achieves the status of a better form of practice than others, based on the experience and judgement of the discourse participants. Our task in this connection is to contribute to the organization of a discourse formation such that the type of standard we have described can be implemented; though not, strictly speaking, as a predetermined standard. As an evaluation of present experience in the light of both earlier experience and possible future experience, the yardstick finds its form only as the discussions unfold.


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Separate discussions with the company management and the trade union leadership The concept of an internal public sphere in the company was created in analogy to the concept of the public sphere on the level of society, thereby indicating that the company too has its ‘private sphere’. The institutionalized part of the company’s ‘private sphere’ consists, among other things, of the line organization and the union. Our strategy for establishing an internal public sphere at the company involved organizing segments of the company’s total discourse formation in such a way that all who so desired would, in principle, have access to, and the opportunity to participate in this part of the company’s discourse. The organization of an internal public sphere as a unified, open system was not meant to supplant the partial, closed systems, but simply to supplement them. The individual member of the company organization has duties to fulfil in both system types; no one works within only one of the systems. Everybody shall have access to the internal public arena in the company at the same time that the individual’s function or role in this public sphere is conditioned by the functions or roles he or she fills in the company’s line organization and / or trade union organization. In the practical part of our research work, too — that is, the organization of and participation in discussions — we have to tackle this division between discussions that take place as a common concern in an internally organized public arena, and discussions that are connected to party interests outside the realm of the internal public sphere. The greatest number of the discussions in which we participated took place in forums that were part of the system of the internal public sphere, such as the Company Development Committee and the dialogue conferences. But we also had a need from time to time for talks both with the management on various levels, and separately with the union. The main objective of these talks was to establish whether there was a need to carry out separate, specific measures which could support the collective company development process, as seen from the one or the other, as well as the type of measures required. Viewed from our angle, the dialogue conference for department representatives and supervisors actualized the question of the degree to which the total management capacity and leadership competence at various levels was sufficient to follow up the intentions of the company development work in the way these had been expressed by the people themselves. Or, more correctly, it was not the dialogue conference alone but the difference between, on the one hand, the intentions which were presented at it and, on the other, the practical experiences and problems which had been reported at the monthly meetings of the company development committee, which actualized the question of capacity and competence on the part of the management. A corresponding difficulty, this time with

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the balance tipped on the side of the competence problem, was also apparent as regards the department representatives, as we saw it. Such problem complexes, however, are not entirely amenable to treatment in open forums. Although everybody knows that there is a varying degree of correspondence between desired and available competence — both among the management and the union — it is often a very tricky affair to convert this general knowledge so that it is relevant to the actual conditions in a particular enterprise. Things like this have both a personal and a strategic side, something which induces both the company management as well as the union leadership to protect ‘their’ people when diagnoses such as lack of competence are tagged onto particular individuals. Discussions of such problems in the company’s public forums easily turn into strategic games with stalemated positions in which tactical manoeuvres are the only form of movement. A way out of this, of course, would be to let party-based discussions supplement discussions in open, common forums. For this reason, we raised these questions with the parties separately. The plant director and the administrative director attended our discussions with the management. We addressed both the management as a whole and its three levels (executive management, department and production leadership) separately, the aim being to discover possible measures which could either be built into the company development process or implemented as supportive devices. Our task in this discussion was to pose critical questions, the aim being to elucidate the most realistic diagnosis of the management situation. It was therefore significant for us that both the company director and the administrative director took part in the discussion. The administrative director would, from his staff position, have a more unbiased view of both lacks and possibilities; while the plant director, with his operational responsibilities, would be able to keep a sharper eye on the considerations which would have to be taken on behalf of the ‘realm of necessity’ in the evaluation of possible measures. With the participation of both of these executives, the likelihood of attaining an open, but closely realistic, diagnosis and simulation, was better than if only one of them had taken part. During the discussion it became apparent that there was little divergence between our assumptions and the two directors’ views regarding the diagnosis of the situation. We had the feeling that personnel capacity was a little low in the executive leadership group. This was confirmed to a large extent, but depicted as a temporary situation which would be improved with a better organization of the relationship between the factory’s technical department and the works department, a matter which was close at hand. A clarification of the division of tasks and responsibilities between the two main departments would make it easier to delegate responsibility and free some of the executives from some of the detailed tasks they were obliged to handle at present.


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As regards the other two levels (the department leadership and the supervisors) the two directors were, of course, aware that the picture was mixed. Many were good leaders, others acceptable, others not quite as good. Nevertheless, the company management itself had to accept a good deal of the responsibility for the deficiencies in this management level, partly by virtue of their recruitment policy (which was not sufficiently goal directed), and partly by virtue of a certain lack of support given to these leaders, for example, in the form of a more explicit management policy which they could use as a guideline in relevant situations. Measures were being implemented in this area, too, to improve the situation. The dialogue conference for department representatives and supervisors had contributed to the crystallization of the demand for a new, general job description for supervisors. The company management perceived this as an opportunity to clarify important parts of the company’s management policy and had taken upon itself the development of a job description for supervisors. This job description, together with the trial arrangement of the cooperation agreement between the supervisors and the department representatives were, in addition to the form of management and cooperation which one had attempted to incorporate through the work forms which were used in the company development project, the most obvious expression of the company’s management policy. The company management’s opinion was that the individual leaders should be given the chance to show that they were capable of complying with this leadership policy before the question of internal changes and possible replacements was put into effect. To this picture belonged supportive measures, such as training at home. The executive management thought that an offer of education in the form of individualized rather than collective upgrading courses should be part of the strategy to get the intermediate leadership and supervisor levels to function according to the intentions of the management policy which was under development. Our discussions with the two executives resulted in a high degree of consensus concerning the management’s capacity and competence. At the same time we gained a clearer picture of the relatively long-term and adaptable strategy the executive leadership was to implement to improve the situation. In fact, it may be said that the executive leadership would play on the normative power of the company’s internal public sphere as a part of its strategy. Based on an acknowledgment that its policy signals on management forms and leadership style had been too weak or diffuse, the management decided that it would be unacceptable to go ahead with the substitution or replacement of intermediate leaders with whom they were dissatisfied on the basis of a management policy which, for a large part, was still on the drawing board, even though its intentions now would be clearer and more consistently expressed than previously. Instead, their management policy would be allowed time to manifest itself as a form of practice in

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the realization of, among other things, the job description for supervisors, the cooperation agreement and the forms of leadership in the company development project, supplemented with supportive educational measures on an individual basis. In this way, only when all the leaders had had the opportunity over time to adjust their style of leadership and upgrade their leadership competence in line with the management policy, which was initiated incomplete openness within the framework of the company’s internal public sphere, would the company management consider it appropriate to act in relation to undesirable deviations from the norm. Neither did the union leadership experience any difficulties in admitting that all was not as it might be within their own ranks. Taking part in our discussion with them were the shop steward, the executive committee and the project worker from the trade union. The union leadership was attracted by the strategy that all should take part in the company development work, but had to acknowledge, at the same time, that in relation to that goal, the majority of their members were too passive. Further, not all the department representatives were equipped to sustain the required momentum for the work. The diagnosis of passivity encompassed many aspects of a greatly divergent character. Among other things, it revealed how large and numerous the individual differences were. For some, passivity could be explained by their feeling that there was little point in becoming involved because the yields — in the form of practical improvement — were, in their experience, minimal. For others, involvement was limited to ‘speaking up’. Pursuing the things they had ‘spoken up’ about, and accepting a part of the responsibility for changing them in practice, was much less evident. For yet others, lack of interest in the company development work could be explained by their experience of the practice and work forms that had been provisionally implemented as trials. The outcome was a drop in the ocean compared to the constant rounds of conflicts, problems and lack of cooperation they experienced in their daily work. The contrast and distance between these two types of experience weakened the project’s credibility. Such people had little interest in becoming involved. There were also those who felt that certain people’s feeling that their daily work meant little to the company (“if you’re away, no problem; you’re as interchangeable as nuts and bolts”). They experienced this as an estranging factor in relation to the emphasis on the importance of everybody’s participation in the development project which, after all, only took a small amount of time compared to the ongoing production work. In their identification of the different causes of passivity, the union leaders spoke partly on their own behalf and partly on behalf of their members, as they understood their feelings to be. Our knowledge of industrial organizations in general, and our knowledge of this company in particular, gave us little reason to


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question the points that were raised, apart from the fact that the causes were probably even more numerous than had been stated. For us it was more important to get answers about whether the reported causes — and possibly others that we had not yet managed to unearth — indicated that things in the strategy, the method or the measures of the company development project ought to be changed, and / or if there were special support measures that ought to be implemented to bolster and improve the development process. In this connection, we reiterated our agreement with the administrative director’s remark at the last dialogue conference: what legitimized the company development project was not that it was good in itself, but that no one could see any better alternative in practice. Neither could the local union leadership really see any other alternative to the process that was in motion, apart from “going back to the way we did things before”, which was considered a worse option. The discussion thereby swung over to the question of how the competence of the union leadership, the department representatives and the membership could be developed so that their participation in the company development process would be more effective. There was agreement here that training was necessary, but not by imparting what was called ‘dead knowledge’. Learning would have to take place mostly by practice, and educational measures must be connected as closely as possible with the tasks which the individual involved had in relation to the company development process. At this juncture, one aspect of the members’ passivity was raised which nobody had mentioned before. Many of the ordinary workers had little training in the reasonably concise expression of the problems which occupied them but which were of a more comprehensive character than, for example, current working environment problems or everyday production problems. This was judged to be an important reason why the work in the production groups advanced little further than the discussion of problems in the latter category. An important job for the union representatives, in collaboration with the supervisors, therefore, would be to organize and adapt discussions so that the workers were able to discuss more extensive problem complexes in a goal-directed way. Such discussions could be organized in production groups, at production meetings after plenary assemblies — all according to the work forms the individual departments had chosen in their endeavors to involve everyone. Subsequent discussions with the union leadership revealed that a large part of the need for education on the part of the union in connection with the company development was related to organizing, presiding over and participating in meetings and discussions, and on being able to find appropriate procedures for following up different issues in practice. This is not really surprising. In most companies, the ability to lead meetings as well as handle various issues is heavily

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weighted towards the management and white collar personnel, including leading union figures. For these groups it is much more common to use language in precise, organized forms as an operational instrument. Other groups in the company have greater experience with the use of language as a means of personal expression. Without practical experience, it is difficult to develop the ability to use language, including language as an operational instrument, which is why we emphasize the importance of involving all workers as participants in an organized network of discussions with operational goals, of which the development organization is an example. As has been seen, our discussions with the company management and union leadership, on questions of capacity and competence did not reveal a need for immediate measures. The talks were held in November 1988 and during the period up to the end of the year it seemed most profitable to carry on with the work of adjusting the general conditions for improved cooperation in the factory. The forming of new job descriptions was first in line, together with ensuring normal progression in those parts of the development organization which involved the greater part of the workers — the production groups and the department meetings. A prospective plan for education would have to be formulated on this basis. These three issues embodied the theme for the Company Development Committee’s last meetings that year. As far as the job description for supervisors was concerned, all this was mainly the responsibility of the company management — our job was to participate in the discussion on work forms to ensure that supervisors could be drawn into the development procedure in an advantageous way. Agreement was reached that the company management would work out a provisional instruction which the supervisors were to review and work on further in connection with a dialogue conference arranged especially for the supervisors. As regards the workers’ participation in discussions on productivity and working environment problems, the various departments had selected different work forms during the autumn after all of them had followed a similar course during the spring and early summer. Two of the intermediate and two of the smaller departments had retained the production group arrangement. The largest department, as well as one of the smallest, had gone over to a combination of production meetings and plenary assemblies. The department management favoured production meetings at which the feedback on production data and relevant discussions constituted the agenda. These meetings were combined with monthly plenary assemblies in which the department and production leadership participated,chaired by the project workers and department representatives presided. We were asked if this was not a ‘defeat’ for the production group arrangement. Our ‘reply’ centered on recalling that an important aspect of such development processes was to plan them in such a way that the departments


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could develop different, locally adapted work forms in the way that they themselves felt were most efficient, but still abiding by the condition that certain minimum demands were satisfied; in this case that all the workers had the opportunity to take part, a demand which was satisfied in the various arrangements. In addition, we took the opportunity to show that this was yet another example of the fact that the standard for improvement lay, not in the realization of the special model for development work that had been launched at the start of the project, but in the search for practical work forms that were better than those available before the development process began.

Strategy for transferring process competence to the company At the company development committee’s first meeting in 1989, towards the end of January, a completely new item appeared on the agenda: the transference of process competence to the company. Both from our research perspective and from the perspective of the company, it was very important that measures and work forms that had been tried out as a phase in the company development process were so designed that the company itself, with its own people, would gradually be able to implement them on its own, without assistance from us. The research strategy in this type of action research uses trials under realistic conditions, to develop new knowledge of organization development based on dialogue and broad participation as a working method. The communication of this practically applicable knowledge must take place within one and the same process. As we have seen, the process as a whole includes a number of measures, all of which constitute what we, in an all-embracing concept, have called the development organization. The strategy is modeled on the hope that the development organization will, in principle, become a permanent fixture in the company’s organization structure, in the sense that the company administers a continual development effort that embraces the company organization as a whole and in which all members are given the opportunity to participate. That the development organization, in this sense, ought to become a permanent arrangement does not mean that its various elements and total composition should keep to the same organizational form in a predetermined, static way — just as little as the organization of production can be static. The majority of the measures in a development organization have a temporary character. They will play both different roles and be activated to different degrees during the various phases of a development process, and, in addition, will change during the course of the process, keeping pace with new experiences and new insights. The precondition for all this being, of course, that the company has access to competence that can adjust old, and implement new measures as the development tasks change during

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the process. In our action research projects we therefore try to patch together a network of persons who have, or can develop, such competence, with the aim of continuing the development work. As has been mentioned, it is possible to build up competence networks consisting of the company’s own people in larger companies, and the task that was put on the agenda — “the transference of process competence to the company” — comprises, among other things, an attempt to develop an internal competence network at this company. The conditions for ‘transferring process competence’ by developing internal competence networks are, generally speaking, three in number. (1) The company management must have a unified strategy for the development work that indicates the scope of the contents and progress of the development process. (2) The company must set aside personnel resources that can lead the development work on different levels and be part of the competence network. (3) Those persons who are to constitute the core of the competence network must be given a special opportunity to learn from their own and others’ experiences with the various work forms in the development work, during the process. During the discussion on the first of these three points, we advised the company management, for the future, to adopt a more assertive stance in the development work. Somewhat schematically and simply, we might say that, up to this point in the process, the development organization had been used to encourage workers to take part in resolving immediate production and working environment problems, to work on cooperative relations between workers and supervisors, and to focus in a goal-related way on the supervisor’s function, including the cooperation between the supervisors and the department representatives in their daily work. That precisely these areas had emerged as the centerpiece of the development work was probably no accident. In that the company development project took as its point of departure the establishment of a form of collaboration that intended the participation of all, the cooperative relations between the different parties in the company naturally enough became actualized, and in this area it was precisely the abovementioned types of problems that had piled up and which obscured the immediate horizon. As some of the knots were unravelled and a certain amount of momentum had been gained in this area, we felt that the furtherance of this work demanded that the company management also evaluate the possibilities of using the development organization to motivate the workers to collaborate in resolving those production and productivity problems that the company considered to be of strategic importance from a business point of view. The company management’s


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representatives agreed with our analysis, with some reservations, and, for the forthcoming meeting of the company development committee, would prepare an outline of how the company development work could be strengthened by adjusting the company’s strategic goals. The plant director presented this outline at the Company Development Committee’s meeting nearly a month later. He emphasized that the company development project’s leitmotif was not any one particular unifying idea but rather those work forms that had been implemented through the project, especially the various forms of participation through dialogue-based work forms. Against this background he expressed the opinion that it was important to divide the development work that had been carried out at the company into two categories according to the work form they necessitated. One category consisted of the large, mostly technical projects in which broad worker participation was less significant, but in which traditional representative participation on the part of the union was the most relevant. The other category, in which the work forms originating in the company development project were the topic of interest, was connected to development measures for improving productivity and the local working environment in the departments. Here, the factory leadership expressed a wish to define general objectives, termed ‘departmental production goals’, taking the annual budget as a point of departure. The department leadership and supervisors could then be given the task of operationalizing the objectives. Together with the union representatives, they could then frame the question of how the operationalized objectives could best be achieved in the form of development tasks for workers in the departments, by using the production groups, production meetings and plenary assemblies with discussion groups — all according to the specific form of work that the supervisor and the union representative found best suited to the individual department. The general objectives for the departments were to be set down in terms of six main points, which were to be specified for the individual department. The points embraced productivity objectives, quality objectives, objectives for raw material utilization, for the working environment, for spoilage / wastage, and economic objectives. With these as a framework, the work forms in the company development project were to become the most important means by which to operationalize the goals as concrete development tasks for the individual employee. As we can see, the management’s plan for a more assertive strategy in the company development work depended on the possession by the company’s own people — especially heads of departments, supervisors and union representatives — of sufficient competence to take part in the development process, and to lead it further. What, then, was the state of affairs in terms of constructing an internal competence network? As mentioned, this question was also on the Company Development Committee’s agenda.

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The available company resources for carrying out the development processes had been given an extra boost in the form of the two development project workers funded by HABUT. During the year that had passed since the decision was taken to start the practical development work with the establishing of the production groups, the two project workers had played a decisive role in the realization of the plans. They had developed methods for coupling dialogue and action, and they had functioned as advisors and supporters for the line managers and union representatives in their work of organizing various dialogue-based forms of participation. As mentioned, a number of groups had been appointed, consisting of supervisor, department representative and deputy and, in some cases, the safety representative. These groups had been given the responsibility to see that issues discussed in the production groups or in the plenary assemblies were taken up and discussed further in the expanded department committees. These groups, popularly nicknamed the ‘gangs of four’, of which there were ten in all (corresponding to ten sectors in the five main departments), also represented an important resource in the implementation of the company development process. In addition to the project workers and the ‘gangs of four’, we could say that the Company Development Committee, with its 14 members, also represented a certain resource potential, although in a different way. We shall return to this point later. As regards the opportunities for those persons who constitute the core of the internal competence network, as outlined above, to discuss their experiences of the development work and to develop their own competence during the process, the project workers had the relatively greatest opportunities. These opportunities could be said to have three main sources: their own accumulated experience, together with discussions they had in connection with the planning and implementation of the various elements of the development process; discussions in the company development committee and participation in the dialogue conferences; and participation at project worker meetings arranged by HABUT, at which development project workers from different companies exchanged experiences and discussed methods, strategies and goals for company development work. The combination of practical experience and development work, and the opportunity to discuss and reflect on their experiences, were instrumental in the rapid accumulation by the project workers of such a significant degree of ‘process competence’ that they could assist other key persons in developing such competence. These included members of the ‘gangs of four’. To start with, the project workers had taken upon themselves the job of following up progress in the workers’ discussions of questions of productivity and the working environment, but precisely due to the need for developing the competence of the supervisors and department representatives in such tasks, the responsibility for the progress of discussions and case work had been transferred to the ‘gangs of four’. The project workers could then concentrate on discussing experiences and


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the development of effective work forms with the members of the ‘gangs of four’. This thus became an additional arena for the development of process competence. The Company Development Committee also represented an important forum for competence development. The most important responsibility of this forum was tied to the development of a unified strategy for the development process. In addition, a sub-committee of the development committee had the formal responsibility for ensuring the continued momentum of the process. The development of a unified strategy for the development process, however, was not so much a question of being one step ahead of the practical process in terms of new ideas and concepts. It was rather a question of achieving a thorough discussion of the practical experiences that were gained during the course of the process, the aim being to discover those work forms and methods which might produce better results and which could be tried out in practice. By ‘thorough discussion’ we mean an opportunity to evince those interpretations of practical experiences which are most precise from the point of view of the whole; that is, viewed from the points of view that were felt to be relevant by all the various participants in the committee. The perspectives we contributed needed to tie in with people’s interpretations of their own experiences so as to ensure that the discussion retained a foothold on reality. This meant making it as relevant as possible with regard to actions. This was also the reason why, with the process well under way, we preferred that suggestions and ideas for changes and new measures originated from within the ranks of the company’s own people. Many of our proposals, even though they perhaps seem rather elementary and down-to-earth to us, could easily give the impression of being ‘airy-fairy’ simply because they lacked a basis in reality, in the sense in which we use the term here. We therefore had to cut down the supply of suggestions from our side. The disadvantage of this, of course, was the risk that too few suggestions were made. Nonetheless, during the discussion of how ‘process competence’ could be transferred from us to the company, this method worked well. Those who had already become relatively competent — viz., the project workers — were genuinely interested both in developing this competence further and strengthening the company’s general ability to push the development process forward, using as much internal competence as possible. As a supplement to the management’s plans for the progress of the development process, the project workers presented a plan for an activity structure for the period until the summer recess which was based on the continuing development of competence, with a minimum of external support. The project workers’ outline plan had been formulated as an extension of a seminar for project workers arranged by HABUT. This seminar focused on the

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formulation of different types of concrete goals on different levels within the unified development process, the aim being to improve planning and the groundlevel momentum of the development project. The supervisor, together with a representative from the company’s management, had also taken part in the seminar, which was rounded off by the participants making a list of practical tasks that had to be undertaken in the development processes in their own companies. On the basis of this work, the project workers concocted a plan outlining the main agenda of the development process until the summer vacation, broken down for each of the ten department areas, and with specific deadlines. The plan’s first point represented a stage both in the development process itself and in the establishment of process competence: the project workers were to hold a series of meetings with all the ‘gangs of four’ to discuss both the themes which ought to be raised in discussions in the production groups and the plenary assemblies, and the work forms in the local development work that the individual gangs of four ought to inaugurate. In the department areas where production groups existed, these were to be reorganized so that the composition of the individual group corresponded to functional requirements of the work organization. This reorganization had been discussed by the Company Development Committee and was to be instituted to make it easier for the production groups to relate to their daily work situation in the discussions, contrary to the case when the groups had been put together without regard to their location in the work organization. This series of meetings was to be completed during February. During April there was to be a discussion of the current experience with the cooperation agreement between supervisors and union representatives. The aim was to complete a revised draft before the summer vacation. The procedure for making a cooperation agreement was to be constructed in a way which, first, would enable the agreement to be fashioned according to the interests and working conditions of the people it affected (the supervisors, the department representatives and the workers). Second, by giving all the people involved the opportunity to discuss the draft and submit ideas, the procedure was meant to contribute to marshalling as much support as possible for the final version. Two different committees were given the task of developing separate drafts of an agreement text. One committee was composed of central people in the company (i.e., the personnel manager, the assistant factory manager, the safety representative, the leader of the union branch, and the project workers); the other committee consisted of local people (the supervisor, the department representative and the safety representative from the relevant departments). On completion of this work, the two drafts were to be combined into one by the committees and distributed to the workers in the departments for discussion and suggestions for alterations and / or the addition of further points. Discussions aimed at arriving at similar agreements in other departments were to be initiated by the ‘gangs of four’. Issues of a more comprehensive


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character that still remained on the agenda of the department committees were scheduled to be resolved by the end of May, with the help of the work form described above. With the aim of completing a new supervisor’s job description before the summer, a dialogue conference was to be held for supervisors in April. Here they would have the opportunity to go through and analyze their work tasks, and, on this basis, to discuss and submit suggestions for the revision of the company leadership’s draft. As an element in the development of process competence in the company, the dialogue conference was to be arranged and lead by people from the company with assistance from the project workers.

The supervisor’s conference under the direction of the company Our involvement with the dialogue conference for supervisors consisted solely of participating in preparatory discussions, partly in the meetings of the Company Development Committee and partly in those of the project leadership (which consisted of the leader of the workplace union branch, personnel manager, assistant production manager and the two project workers). In view of this, our presentation will be confined to portraying the work for this dialogue conference as an example of those procedures and work forms that the company, based on its own experiences with the company development process, found expedient for the occasion. As we have already remarked, one of the objectives of creating a supervisor’s job description was to achieve a manifestation of the company management’s policy on the tasks, forms and style of leadership for supervisors. The main intent of the supervisors’s job description was to establish a common framework for the performance of situational leadership, that is, leadership based to a large degree on the delegation of responsibility and authority. The point here is that the conditions for the exercise of this type of leadership accord as well as possible with the company’s policy, adjusted to the requirements of the concrete situation. In doing this, we came face to face with a familiar dilemma. If one desires to encourage forms of situational leadership among supervisors, it is no use drafting all-inclusive, detailed job descriptions. The supervisors’s job description therefore had to be formulated in general terms. The question of how such general terms can be tied to the concrete problems that arise in the execution of the everyday work processes thus becomes a burning issue. Without any such interconnections, general job descriptions would be relatively worthless. An attempt to explicate such interconnections by incorporating specifications would only end up in an endless list of details, obscuring the most important point: interconnections between a general policy / job description and

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the concrete situations cannot be made on paper, where interconnections can only be simulated. In practice, interconnections can only be made by the individual supervisor in the actual situation. What ought to be done in advance is to try to improve the chances that each supervisor will make the right ‘connections’ him / herself as situations arise. It would not be enough, at the dialogue conference, to concentrate solely on achieving a shared understanding of the contents of a generalized supervisors’ job description in the hope of achieving a more unified management strategy and more uniform styles of leadership. The discussion of the contents of a general supervisors’ job description ought to be supplemented with a discussion of the tasks and situations that the supervisors found problematic. This would not aim to achieve a sort of wall-to-wall carpet of discussions which foresaw all possible situations, but rather the creation of an assortment of discussions so that the tasks and problematical situations could form the context for discussions on the general job description, and vice versa. Against this background, the dialogue conference for supervisors sought to serve four parallel objectives: • the attainment of a reasonably good idea of which tasks were important for supervisors in the immediate future; • the achievement of a joint discussion about the framework for, and degree of freedom in handling personnel; • the achievement of a common understanding of the main thrust of the supervisor’s job description; • and, based on the above, to elicit ideas about educational requirements and other conditions which would need to be adjusted if the supervisors are to function effectively. The dialogue conference itself, however, was only one element of the process of achieving these objectives. The conference was to last one day (in practice, two days, with half of the supervisors and department heads taking part on the one day, the other half on the next; the company management participated on both days). In the main it functioned as a necessary open forum for the supervisors’ internal relations and, not least, their relations with the other levels of leadership in the company. Seen in this light, the dialogue conference can be considered as a sub-system of the internal public sphere: a leaders’ public sphere. The connection with the internal public sphere was through the union’s project worker participating in the dialogue conference as an observer (and as an associate of the conference staff). Also, the conference report was to be made generally accessible within the company. To ensure that the discussion of the development of the supervisors’ job description would be sufficiently effective, it was necessary to organize work preparatory and subsequent to the conference. The preparatory work consisted of two parts, one based on individual work, the other on group work.


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The individual task consisted of a particular form of job analysis. Each supervisor was asked to draft a list of how time at work was divided between the various types of jobs during the course of a week, on a form which indicated the four main areas of such jobs: economy, management, personnel management, and development leadership. After this, using the same form, the supervisors were asked to indicate which tasks they considered important for a supervisor in the future, and finally, to mark with plus or minus those tasks that they personally thought were important to spend more time on (or less, as the case may be). The group task consisted of discussing and commenting on the company management’s draft for a supervisor’s general job description, and submitting suggestions for changes to individual points, or the whole thing, as necessary. The result of this work was to be written down before the commencement of the dialogue conference. With this preparatory work as a basis, the objectives of the dialogue conference were attended to in the following three sessions: 1. A group session (with a subsequent plenary presentation) in which one discussed and tried to summarize the results of the individual job analyses. 2. A plenary presentation of the results of the work on commenting / revising the management’s draft of the supervisor’s job description, together with a general plenary discussion of its contents and the remaining work needed to finalize the job description. 3. A group session (with subsequent plenary presentation) in which supervisors were asked to discuss which situations and tasks they felt were difficult to handle as supervisors, and to suggest measures that could ensure that such situations / tasks were tackled in a better way in the future. The work form of the dialogue conference followed the pattern learned during the previous dialogue conferences. A conference staff, in this case consisting of two company management representatives together with the management project worker, established the general, common platform for the discussions by issuing the group tasks and composing the groups, while the participants, dominated by the supervisors, produced the most significant material for the discussions. The results of the preparatory work and the dialogue conference can generally be said to relate to three areas: of the tangible results, the most important was the demonstration of the need for both a general work and a specific job description for supervisors, worked out separately for each individual department area. The company management therefore decided, as a supplementary task, to finalize its work on the general job description on the basis of the suggestions for changes that had emerged before a given date (ca. one month ahead). During the course of the two following weeks, the supervisors themselves formulated the specific job description, in collaboration with the department head.

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Second, as a basis for decisions on future forms of leadership and leadership tasks, the conference clearly showed that of those tasks that the supervisors would have the opportunity to spend time on in the coming weeks, there was an emphatic interest in the following areas: participation in budgeting procedures, including investments; an increased say in production planning; fuller information on financial allocations which affected their own department; and, in cooperation with the operators, continued priority to following up daily production; and, on this basis, attaining greater freedom to organize activity in their own department. Together with the material on problematical situations / tasks, this provided the management with fertile grounds upon which to take future decisions on individual measures to improve conditions in such a way that the supervisors could exercise theirleadership functions in a more satisfactory way than previously. Suggestions for a number of these measures were left to the supervisors to devise. This task was to take place on a group basis, and the deadline was set for the middle of June. The third area in which these discussions can be said to have given results is less evident, but nonetheless just as significant as the two previous ones. By means of the applied work form by which preparations were made for a relatively comprehensive discussion of the formulation of a new supervisor’s job description, and based on broad participation by the parties involved, much more was achieved than the mere organization of a type of over-democratized ‘hearing process’. The inclusive discussion procedure was not only a means to obtain a job description of the best possible quality in the form of a written summary (both its general and specific parts). In addition, the formulation of the supervisors’ job description was used just as much as a means to organize a set of discussions about leadership tasks and styles — a partial discourse on supervisorship — which in itself contributed to the development of the supervisors’ perception and understanding of their roles and tasks as leaders, in a far more concrete and personal manner than any existing supervisor’s job description could have done, however well formulated it might be. The practical effect of all this was quickly noticed by the supervisors’ superiors. The supervisors displayed greater assurance and independence in their behavior towards both their superiors and subordinates. They displayed more openness and felt freer to speak out, they took more practical initiatives on their own behalf and showed a better ability to shoulder responsibility. This development was not so much the result of ‘a redeeming word’ from the management, but of the words which liberated their, and the other leaders’, experiences of their own recently organized discourse on work supervision, and which had revealed that the framework for actions was not as limited as the supervisors had believed.


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Discussions in the Company Development Committee During the period subsequent to the supervisors’ assembly in the second quarter of 1989, our contribution to the development work concentrated mainly on discussions in the Company Development Committee. Here, questions about the continued development of the process dominated the agenda, together with questions about possible new measures. During this period, the Company Development Committee was our most important forum for intervening in the company’s discourse on development work. Our interventions, viewed as the transference of knowledge and contributions to the development of knowledge in the company, consisted of two main types. The first may be said to be a type of critical or negative input. The other contribution had a more positive character. We have provided examples of both forms earlier and will present further examples from this phase in the development project so that the essence of the matter, existing as it does in the area of tension between the examples on the one hand and our generalized formulations of it on the other, is rendered even clearer. The aim of our critical interventions was to hinder the discussion from becoming side-tracked or ending up in a cul-de-sac, and (positively) to influence it in such a way that it would liberate the participants’ experiences. Our task could be said to consist of three general components, all of which, in their way, should assist the participants in the discussion to achieve a better understanding of the company development process, in accordance with their personal experience of it. We have presented examples of all three already; let us only briefly refresh our memory here. We should: • Contribute to the organization, not the reduction, of the complexity of the contents of the discussion. • Explain that the standard for evaluating the practical experiences cannot be comparison with some linguistic model of reality, but comparison with other practical experiences. • Remind people that problems can not be solved ad verbatim in the discussions, but that the aim of the discussions is to help find suitable practical forms of work, whereby problems can be solved as they appear, and possibly in ways that cannot be anticipated in discussions. This way of approaching the discussions in the Company Development Committee presupposes that the discussions, in a certain sense, cannot engender a greater understanding of the process than the practical experiences upon which they are based. But it is precisely this that should be considered the criterion that ensures the connection between the constructions of reality formulated in the discussions of the Company Development Committee, and the participants’ practical reality. If such a connection had not been present to a sufficient degree, the discussions

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— which in themselves might seem interesting enough — would not have had the potential either to develop the capacity to find new forms of activity in the company, nor the ability to hold on to those forms which had proved most positive among those that had been tried out during the project. Another way of expressing this is to say that our most important contribution to competence development by means of discussions in the Company Development Committee consisted of our attempts to articulate perspectives which drew the participants’ understanding of the company development process as close as possible to their new experiences. Let us clarify the point by an example.

The interpretation of the trial arrangements At the same time as the trial arrangement with the production group was established, a trial arrangement with expanded department committees (EDC’s) was also initiated. The use of the department committee was, of course, necessary in order to forge a connection between discussions and practical case handling in the company’s ordinary channels. The expansion meant that the representatives from the production groups participated in the department committee in an addition to the permanent representatives so as to ensure a direct line of contact between each discussion group and the unit responsible for following up the cases in practice. The reason for this was that this was an entirely new experience: issues on the department committee agenda originating from such broadly based discussions. After roughly nine months of experience with both of these trial arrangements, six of the ten department areas had decided to replace the production groups with monthly plenary assemblies in combination with production meetings every second week or every month in the ten department areas. (Four of the department areas retained their production groups.) What is more, when the work load had decreased sufficiently in relation to the large amount existing during the first rounds, the project workers suggested that the EDCs might be dissolved, reverting to the use of ordinary DCs. The permanent first item on the agenda of every DC meeting was to be the issue raised in the production groups for the plenary assemblies in the department. This had been suggested after the project workers had held discussions with the ‘gangs of four’, and it was seconded by the company development committee, including ourselves. While discussing this issue, some members of the Company Development Committee commented that the termination of the EDCs really ought to be seen as a step backwards, viewed in relation to the intentions of the company development project. It was a ‘return to the old DC’, which lacked the breadth of participation of the EDCs. As an extension to this, the question was whether such


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trials had any real point when the result was that one ended up going down the same old paths. To counter this interpretation we proposed another perspective; one that was not tied to the use of a theoretical model of the company development project as a standard for interpreting and evaluating experience. The aim had been to use trials and new arrangements to find ways of relating broadlybased discussions on production and working environment problems to the practical resolution of such problems in the company’s agreement-based organs. To achieve this in practice we had established the EDCs, and the project workers had assisted these in the handling of both discussion results and case load. After a while, the project workers had been able to retire into the background since the EDCs and the ‘gangs of four’ managed to do most of the work themselves. It now looked as if the process had reached a phase in which the ordinary DCs could manage these processes. The EDCs, which under the trial arrangements had demonstrated their usefulness as constructions that helped to attain the desired relationships between the production groups / plenary assemblies and the department committees, could thus now be dissolved. The achievement of the trial arrangement was the discovery of a suitable practical method of maintaining the correspondence between broadly-based discussions and pursuing the results of these discussions further in the department committees. And, we emphasized, this was the general objective of all the trial arrangements which had been tried out: not to retain the experimental model at any price (which would mean making the trial arrangement permanent), but to attempt a new form of practice, something different from the old one. Using both the new and the old, we hoped that a third way could be found that was better than both of the others. The company had never previously had a system for discussions in which all the workers could take part, the results of which were a permanent fixture on the agenda of the department committees’ meetings. This was that ‘third form’; a better form of practice than the original, and a form to which the trial arrangement (the ‘second form’) had been midwife. Seen in this light, the move away from the EDC arrangement was not to be judged as a retrograde step, but as a step ahead, measured in relation to the initial state of affairs and in relation to the practical experiences that had been acquired during the trial arrangement. Against this sounding board of old and new experiences, the company’s actors had arrived at a better form of practice which was not contained in any of the models we had constructed, and our only job was to describe the abovementioned perspective as an alternative mode of understanding, in contrast to what some of the actors themselves had submitted. After the depiction of this perspective, they had no problems in sharing it — and in that sense we contributed to bringing the participants’ perspective into harmony with their experiences.

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At the limit of the discussions: a practical test As yet another example of the fact that critical contributions to the discourse can inspire a new understanding of the forms of practice implied by the development process, but which the participants were unable to produce by themselves, we present a discussion of the objective of the trial arrangements — a discussion which was actualized on many different occasions. As it had been raised by a member of the Company Development Committee, the problem complex was as follows: at the production lines x, y, ..., it is important that the person who is at the head of the line works effectively because this person determines the efficiency of the other four on the line. Since we were judged to be especially competent in organizational problems, the question to us was: should there be a rotational arrangement which is maintained for environmental reasons, which determines which person should stand first on the line at any time, or should the supervisor not see to it that an efficient operator is always first? Our way of tackling this problem was to displace it, thus severing it from its ‘either / or’ construction: EITHER a rotation arrangement OR a supervisor. Instead of trying to find a solution to the problem by means of a discussion, which would be to simulate a solution, we displaced the problem by recommending a procedure that attempted to resolve the problem by testing some trial arrangements in practice. The alternatives appeared to be the only instances. But in practice, a number of other alternatives would be seen to exist: an arrangement with partial rotation from which one or more persons were excepted; possibly a combination with a form of rotation between production lines; special support measures which ensured that the ‘first man’ was efficient; a rotation arrangement which was not ‘automatic’ but which could be influenced by the supervisor, etc. There were many possibilities, and an arrangement which suited one line may not necessarily be the best for another. Here, the principle of equality was adopted for the development process. This principle did not imply that all new solutions had to cover all cases everywhere, but that all should be given the same opportunity to take part in the work of finding local solutions. In this way, by demonstrating that one ought not to attempt to solve the problem solely on the level of discussions, but in an interplay between practical trials and discussions, we lifted the problem complex out of the sidetrack in which language’s EITHER/OR logic constructs a reality consisting of simplified clear-cut categories which override the multifaceted reality we confront in practice. We are playing here in the interstitial space between verbal statements which simulate real situations and the real situations as they are manifested in practice. This interstitial space also has openings through which practical solutions can emerge. Such solutions are not to be discovered in or by discussions, however extensive and profound they might be: the practical situations disclose possibilities that are not contained in the discussions.


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A third example of a form of critical intervention in the discourse can be illustrated by a discussion on absenteeism, which also arose at this point. Even though it was possible to see that some improvements had occurred during the progress of the company development project, such as improvements in the working environment, an improvement of cooperative conditions, a reduction of injuries and an increase in productivity, sick leave had remained at a slightly variable but consistently high level. This was a matter of concern to all the parties in the company. The question of whether one could find effective methods of reducing sick leave was therefore raised in the Company Development Committee. Almost of its own accord, the discussion ran along well-beaten tracks: the management saw the matter as a lack of a sense of responsibility, as the wilful exploitation of the sick leave benefit scheme, and similar causes. The union, on the other hand, pointed the finger at the high pace of work, the unfulfilling content of the work, and weaknesses in the working environment as the chief causes. Broadly speaking, a solution based on the first type of diagnosis would lie in the restoration of morale among the work force, while a technical / organizational renewal of the factory would be the solution according to the second diagnosis. We have also earlier given examples of how we lift a discussion out of the conventional tracks, in which it is completely dominated by the company’s traditional, negotiational form of discourse. We did this once again by reminding the discussion participants that they had experiences which would paint a much more complex picture of the absentee problem, if only they would allow these experiences to rise to the surface. Only by recalling cases of absenteeism with which they were all acquainted, distinguishing between long-term and short-term absenteeism, differences in absenteeism according to age, sex, type of work situation and family situation, differences between department areas and, not least, all the individual differences, was the discussion quickly shunted away from a search for a delimited set of causes for absenteeism, based on the unspoken preconception that there ought to be a one-to-one relationship between general causes and general suggestions for solving the problem. Instead, the discussion eventually concentrated on how one could in practice proceed to discover what could be done in the individual departments. This necessitated the inclusion in the discussion of those who had intimate knowledge of the problem in the discussion, that is, the leaders and workers in the various department areas. In these examples, our critical interventions were based on our efforts to lift the discussion out of a sidetrack in which the various participants from the company seem to expect that the solution of a problem can be found within a discussion — a common phenomenon, which we have termed “simulating solutions through the medium of discussion”. We help to move the discussion onto another track, with other results, by reminding the participants that their own experiences contradict the simplified logic of simulation. Here, the discussion

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takes a turn towards a more complex representation of reality and looks beyond itself to the need to find practical solutions by trial and error according to a particular, but at the same time, an open strategy: new experiences are given the chance of influencing the final formation of the practical solutions. Our positive interventions in the discussion, especially those which consisted of different suggestions for organizational trials and test arrangements, were also aimed at the creation of opportunities to engender new experiences as an organizational instrument to create movement and new openings in old conflicts and recurrent problems. When we introduced our suggestions in the form of particular models grounded in a theory of organizations, as was the case, for example, with the dialogue conferences, the production group arrangement and (partly) the ‘gangs of four’, the point was not to use the practical trials as a means to test the respective theoretical models against a practical reality, but to use the models as an instrument by which to organize trials in which new experiences were tested against old experiences. Only in exceptional cases would such trial arrangements conjure up a new practice which is experienced as satisfactory enough to become a part of a more permanent arrangement and organizational form. But inasmuch as completely new experiences can appear at all as interesting challenges to the familiar experiences, an opening is made for the basic realization that changes and alternative forms of practice are possible. Such quiet tremors belong, perhaps, among the most important preconditions for the creation of changes of a more comprehensive character.

Chapter 4 The Institutionalization Phase The paradox of institutionalization Up to this point in the project the company had displayed an open attitude towards the majority of our suggestions for the formation of the development organization and other measures. However, when we suggested trying new ways of organizing supervisory and intermediate leadership, the response was less welcoming. Since the suggestions never arrived at the stage of conversion into practical trials, we shall not dwell on them here. But briefly, the intention was to try out arrangements with collegial or group-based leadership at the supervisor and/or the head of department level, the chief argument being that if two or three leaders share responsibility, this could result in an immediate strengthening of all-round leadership competence, each group member’s competence complementing the other’s. Furthermore — the most important aspect — the arrangement would provide a unique opportunity to develop competence by means of dialogue between the leaders. The reason why the management was not overenthusiastic about the idea of group-based leadership was not so much for reasons of principle or other weighty arguments against experimentation with such arrangements, as it was for pragmatic concerns. From the company’s point of view — which in practice means the management in this case, but with the approval of the union branch — it now seemed more important to give priority to the work on attaining the best possible results from the trials and measures that had already been implemented, and to find appropriate and effective work forms in these processes so that the company would be as fit as possible to take over and run the development work itself. All in all, the development process seemed to have reached the stage at which the company’s need for consolidation was stronger than the need to experiment with yet more new trials and measures. The company development project could thus be said to be on the brink of the third phase, the institutionalization phase. The issue was discussed at the last meeting of the Company Development Committee before the summer vacation, at the beginning of July 1989. As we have already described, the cooperation between the company and us was based on an assumption that the development work would pass through

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certain phases. At the end of each phase, we were to look back and evaluate whether we were both sufficiently interested in continuing the collaboration and, if so, in what form. It seemed as if we had now completed the two first main phases, the foundation phase with the establishment of a development organization, and the project development phase in which local forms of development work were tried out. Since the company was now more interested in furthering the process itself, and in attempting to use participatory and dialogue-based work forms to implement measures that had been shown to be needed by the development work, it seemed relevant to adopt the view that the process was now at the point of transition to the institutionalization phase. In this phase, the parties at the company, relying on their own resources (the internal competence network), were to attempt the institutionalization of such development forums and work forms as they found appropriate, based on their experiences with the two previous phases. The discussions made it clear that, of the development forums that had been tried out, i.e., the various elements of the development organization, the parties wished to continue with the Company Development Committee as a supervisory and strategic forum, the production meetings, and the departmental plenary assemblies. The company management would attempt to formulate the departmental work objectives as six points, which could thereby provide an important part of the framework for the work on questions of productivity and the working environment in these forums. On the other hand, however, the parties expressed doubt about whether those departments that still had production groups ought to try to make the arrangement permanent. The arrangement demanded greater vitality in the ongoing development work than had been evident so far. Nevertheless, all parties shared the view that the work forms themselves, with broad participation in discussions on a variety of problem-solving measures were sufficiently interesting to continue with — both to determine what the people involved could decide to do themselves, and to create as wide a basis as possible for decisions on higher levels. In this regard, the company management called the development process an ‘accordion organization’, in which breadth of participation oscillated backwards and forwards, depending upon the number and nature of the development measures being worked on at any one time. In relation to prospective measures in connection with the problem of absenteeism, and in connection with trying out new forms of productivity work, which the parties planned together, there would be an attempt to utilize work forms based on broad participation and on organized dialogues. In addition, there was agreement about working to transform the provisional cooperation agreement between the supervisors and department shop stewards into a permanent agreement, as well as initiating such trial arrangements in other departments. As an extension of the last dialogue conference for supervisors, and

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the completion of the supervisors’ job descriptions, the company management also wanted to develop a method for drawing the supervisors more intimately into the processing of the department financial budgets. The project workers were to continue in their roles until the end of the year and would, given their competence in the development process, be able to assist in refining the work forms deployed in the various measures, as well as playing a central role in the Company Development Committee. Moreover, they would continue to support the ‘gangs of four’ in their work on developing methods for participatory case handling and procedures in the interplay between the employees in the departments and the department committees. The perspectives and plans that the company had drawn up represented a reasonably comprehensive strategy for continuing the development work under its own supervision. Viewed from our point of view — that is, from the point of view of action research — the coming stage of the process would not present any significant opportunities to organize trials with new work and organization forms: new in the sense of untried. Viewed thus, there was little incentive for us to continue our collaboration with the company in the coming phase. On the other hand, we had little or no experience at all with action research in the type of institutionalization phase that the company now appeared to be entering. Both from our own work with research-supported development work in other enterprises and from the research literature on the subject, we knew that the institutionalization phase was in many ways a critical one that, in practice, might just as easily prove to be a de-institutionalization stage during which the established development process disintegrates, peters out or stops completely. We were thus confronted with a dilemma: in view of the risk that what our professional optimism leads us to call the institutionalization phase would never be able to live up to its name, there might be some research interest in being able to participate in developing such organizational and practical ways and means which might perhaps prove to be the necessary preconditions for the successful realization of this stage in enterprise development in general. In the present situation there was an agreement between ourselves and the rest of the Company DevelopmentCommittee that, if the development work was to receive the required priority as a part of the company’s ordinary activities — at all levels and in all areas — an essential precondition was that the company management expressly indicated this as an explicit part of its policy by taking responsibility for the progress and possible renewal of the development work. Such an indication would be difficult to combine with our continued participation in shaping the process. As long as we remained involved in the practical implementation of the various organizational measures, as well as in the discussions in the Company Development Committee on the development process’s strategy, we ran the continual risk of being left with strategic, conceptual control

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over the development process as a whole. This carries with it the risk that the measures would not be sufficiently assimilated by the company’s internal competence network. For example, our comparatively painstaking work, with innumerable deliberations on matters of organization theory and other professional issues connected with the development of our suggestions for organized trials with different forms of organization and work, would involve a continual risk that one of the many important criteria that determine the value of such trials would not be fulfilled in practice; namely, that they create the possibility for the company itself to develop sufficient competence to continue carrying out trials, in new forms if required. In this connection it is worth mentioning that, even though we are very professionally aware of this criterion, it was the company’s project workers who raised the question of the transference of process competence to the company, and not us. The result of the discussion of this dilemma was that the company, in its strategy to institutionalize the development work, elected to take over the entire responsibility for the continued professional leadership of the development work. At the same time, the company management thus emphasized that it would intensify its involvement in incorporating participatory and dialogue-based work forms in the company’s daily activities. This meant that we would not be participating in any practical way in the further progress of the development process during the institutionalization phase. We were quite prepared that this would be a likely outcome of the dilemma. Seen from the point of view of our theoretical perspectives, it had been entirely predictable, but no theory could contain any recipes for how it could be tackled in practice. We could, of course, have suggested various other approaches, but none of them could include any a priori guarantee that the dilemma would be resolved in a beneficial manner. It would have to be resolved in practice; in other words, by means of some form of trial. Our division into three main phases of action research projects related to enterprise development is, as we have mentioned in several connections, not a theoretical phase model which is meant to be ‘copied’ by the practical development, but an experimental phase model that is intended to prepare the ground for the development and implementation of organized trials which can result in new experiences. Both the so-called foundation phase and the project development stage were realized precisely because of the development of trials with new work forms, the concrete configuration of which was not contained in our theoretical models of the respective phases. But the last phase is what we have called institutionalization. Hence, it was quite predictable that this last phase, which also seemed to be able to guarantee that all trial arrangements and tests would ultimately result in something solid and palpable in the end, would have to proceed in the same, open-ended way as the two previous phases — as trials.

Chapter 5 Coda: Theory and Practice in Action Research What, if anything, is new? In the introduction to this monograph we spoke ironically about different stereotypes in the literature on organization development regarding the rules for theoretical presentation; stereotypes which stretch from a strictly definitional approach to a purely historical narrative. In conclusion, we cannot avoid noting the irony that our own presentation has to a great extent taken on one such wellknown form: the form of the narrative. Now, at the end of the story, must we then conclude that, for the nth time, we have only staged a revival of a presentational form that cannot be used to say anything new? Happily, the logic of irony does not have to be so inhuman. Rather to the contrary, irony can be an expression of something deeply human. It points out our imperfection by exposing the impossibility of our attempts to re-create the world immaculately, unambiguously, in language. The ironist has a feeling for the ambiguity of language and plays on this when he expresses himself. An ironical statement has not so much a hidden meaning as it has a double meaning. The ironist both means and does not mean what he says. Which is why small children cannot stand irony, and neither can normal science. Being caught in the revolving doors of one’s own irony is not necessarily any worse than having the opportunity to direct one’s gaze at oneself, to reflect on one’s own words and one’s own experience; in this sense, irony always causes trouble, but it is not lethal. As the story of our action research project nears its end, let us therefore follow the threads back to the point of departure and ask ourselves the same question after the research project’s conclusion as the plant director asked at its inception: “What new research knowledge has been accrued since we last met?” The reader will recall that the irony in this question lay in its formulation so as to express the greatest possible openness about expectations, while at the same time also expressing quite definite expectations of the answers that ought to be given in the actual context. This involuntary irony, the lisp of language’s smile to

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those of us who use it, cleared a manoeuvering space where one could enter into a dialogue, rather than formulating already rehearsed replies. When the question is repeated now, however, it is not others but we who ask it of ourselves. Ought this to signify that the question can at last be treated directly, without any suspicion of irony, receiving an unambiguous answer? We shall see. When the question of what is ‘new’ in research is not placed within the discourse of working life, but within research’s own discourse, the demands for precision are immediately sharpened; the question must, so to speak, be calibrated. What we have termed the research discourse is not an homogeneous entity, just as little as is what we have termed the discourse of working life. Depending on the angle from which we look at it, social science and social research can be considered as parts of the same discourse formation, or, if one prefers to accentuate the heterogeneity, they can be considered as related, though different discourses (cf. K. Menzies 1982). And the question ‘anything new?’ must be situated in relation to a localized type of discourse, or set of discourses. Such situating is no simple matter; even though books are still the most prevalent building blocks in the establishment of a scientific discourse, such discourse does not allow itself to be localized in a physical object. One of the most comprehensive attempts to develop a conceptual apparatus by which to delimit discourses is Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). The book is structured as a systematic reflection on Foucault’s own long-lasting philosophical investigations into a number of those disciplines — in the natural and human sciences — that could be called ‘the science of man’, viewed as discourses. Not least because of this, it is worth emphasizing a point that has largely remained unnoticed in the secondary literature on the work (with few exceptions, notably M. Blanchot, 1987, and G. Deleuze, 1988). This is that the entire, large apparatus of positive concepts which are developed in the book to explain the concept of ‘discursive formation’, which forms the main concept in the delimiting of discourses, is defined solely in negative terms, in that Foucault tells us what the concepts do not mean. The book is thus an exemplification of a grand attempt to negate one’s own attempt to erect certain a priori criteria by which to delimit and localize discourses. What ‘remains’ of the concept of discursive formation is that it points to the factual nature of a discursive practice which may well be regulated, structured and situated, and which, in addition to having its own material dimensions, is also interwoven with a non-discursive practice, but which is always a specific practice. This negative form of presentation allows the book to open the way to the understanding that discourses are regulated and situated, while at the same time showing that one can only attain insight into how and what this means, concretely, by investigating, or entering into a specific discursive practice. This ought to be ‘old news’ and, along the same lines, it seems more beneficial to confront our question head on within the discursive practice in

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which we ourselves are an active participant: the action research tradition. In so doing we prescribe certain delimitations from within, rather than trying to home in on the discussion from the outside. Action research is distinct from other social scientific research, first and foremost in that it not only studies action in a social field. The research strategy also presupposes that researchers participate in the organization of activity in a social field. As we mentioned earlier, action research can be characterized as a type of social research that is based on experiments under real social conditions. The experimentation consists of attempts at organizing a new social practice: ‘New’, in terms of action research, is thereby a criterion which applies both to the theoretical and to the practical elements of the research. If we relate the concepts of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ to our earlier reflections on the relation between language and reality, we immediately notice that the criterion ‘new’ — even though it is generated by the context of the individual researcher — still cannot be applied as if it exists as a purely external criterion, independent of subjective experience, in the manner in which this is spun into, or expressed through, the researcher’s linguistic presentation. A problem we thus confront can be portrayed by taking as a point of departure something that resembles a paradox: in a certain sense, we ceaselessly create new experiences. Viewed in a linear temporal perspective, everything we experience is ‘new’. But, by contrast, it may also be that we seldom encounter new experiences, which is to say that our experiences in the flow of daily life do not give us the experience of experiencing anything new. Whether or not we feel that we encounter new experiences is conditioned by the practical situations in which we happen to find ourselves, but not by them alone. A person who lives an apparently chameleon-like life can experience that all rivers empty into the same ocean after all, while a person who lives a life which, from the outside, seems to be a paradigm of sameness, may constantly experience new layers and dimensions in his existence. In other words, our ability to create new experiences is just as important as the nature of the practice we happen to be involved in at any particular time. Seen thus, a new experience is not anything we merely passively witness; new experiences are things we ourselves must actively participate in the production of, through the interpretation of our practice. Without any such active interpretation, we cannot experience anything new. In research terms, ‘interpretation’ means linguistic/verbal interpretation. If one is to be able to say that one has contributed anything new to action research, then the new experiences must be sculptured into linguistic interpretations — scientific presentations — which represent something new in the relevant context, that is, the discourse into which the presentation enters as an integral element. This means that, just as the criterion ‘new’ cannot be applied independently of subjective experience, just as little can it be applied independently of

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the interpretations of the research practice which are already in circulation in that discourse which constitutes the context for one’s own text. If one does not manage to provide any interpretation of one’s practice that says anything new in relation to existing interpretations of related research practice, one reveals a lack of ability to create new experiences. This is a more close delineation of the question that caught up with us towards the end of our own presentation: what new experiences have we encountered in the action research project presented here, viewed in relation to the experiences which have found their expression in the already existing interpretations in the discourse on action research?

New theory and practice The horizons of the discourse on action research are drawn diachronically from tradition by Kurt Levin (1948), through activity at the Tavistock Institute in London (Trist, 1981), to a multifaceted activity with branches on the continent, in Scandinavia, the USA and Canada (Thorsrud and Emery, 1969; Davis and Taylor, 1979; Sandberg, 1982; Kolodny and van Beinum, 1983). In a synchronic perspective, the center of gravity seems now to lie in Scandinavia (Gustavsen, 1992; Engelstad, 1990) with connections to research environments in, among other places, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the UK (Kemmis 1994). Viewed in relation to the abundance of practical experiments and theoretical perspectives which have been depicted in this discourse, a new dimension in our experience undoubtedly exists in the fact that our research project was one of the first attempts, under realistic conditions, to carry out organization development with the help of a development organization in which the entire management and all the employees could take part. A number of the elements in our research strategy — both theoretical and practical — represented, both in themselves and in isolation, nothing genuinely new, as anybody acquainted with the discourse of action research will have verified already. But the project as a whole represented something new, characterized above all by the two constant preconditions of our action research project. We have just touched upon one: the company development process was not to be restricted to any particular unit, group or department, but, in principle, was to include the company organization as a whole, and everybody — leadership and employees — was to take part in the process. We have discussed the second precondition earlier: our practical contribution to solving the problems and tasks at the company was not participating in discussions about suggestions for remedies, but participating in discussions about suggestions for how to organize procedures and processes which generated solutions as they were implemented in practice. These two preconditions were built into the way the development organization functioned, which is the focus of our theoretical and practical interest.


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Hence, both the development organization and our participation in the discussions were defined as a supplement to the company’s own system of action and discussion, and not as an independent system. The effects or results of the activities in the development organization were to be absorbed by the company organization, and the responsibility for the practical deployment rested entirely on the shoulders of the company. In accordance with this, our task as action researchers was not to try to develop the company in the direction of a particular organization model, but to try to develop organizational instruments that were appropriate for a company development process organized according to the principles we have described. As will have been seen, we used our theoretical competence, not as a help to organize concrete solutions, but as a help to organize discussions, which, by virtue of the combination of a choice of thematics and the composition of participants, might be conducive to the creation of good ideas about practical solutions. Depending on the nature of the development task, different types of such organizational means in the form of various discussion or dialogue fora will be required, such as we have described above: • Dialogue conferences of various types (among others, management conferences, enterprise conferences, supervisor’s conferences), • temporary dialogue units or groups (production groups, the expanded department committees (EDCs), the ‘gangs of four’), • as well as a forum for dialogue on the development strategy (the Company Development Committee). There are, in addition, measures in the form of written ‘rules’ (the game rules for the production group arrangement), and in the form of specially organized procedures (as in connection with the formulation of the supervisor’s job description and of the proposal for the cooperation agreement between the supervisor and the elected department representatives). All these dialogue-based instruments make up the concrete organization and deployment of a development organization. Our participation in this practical process, the creation of a development organization in which all employees take part, represents a new experience in action research. The instruments of the development organization all center on a question about organizing discussions in a new way. All our efforts, both in developing and implementing the various trials by means of dialogues, take place in specially organized discussions into which we intervene with the help of verbal comments; partly breaking down, partly building up, and partly reorganizing constructions of reality. Both our own and our discussion partners’ reality becomes changed to a certain degree. This massive and, at the same time, fluid experience of the effect of words has heightened our awareness of language as an instrument. In this way, the work of creating a development organization has also provided the

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opportunity to form certain new perspectives, detailed as follows: • The perspective on action research as a contribution to the reorganization of enterprises by reorganizing discourses. • The perspective on discussions as both constructions and simulations of reality. • The perspective on the development organization as a method to create an internal public sphere in the company. • The perspective on the theoretical models of organizations as an aid to structure discussions, not as ideals to realize in practice. • The perspective on the influence of action research in generating a common perception of reality as an almost entirely negative contribution in the form of displacing and dissolving fixed prejudices and rigid perceptions on the part of our discussion partners.

A new interpretation “Wait a second!” a learned researcher might protest here, that is, if he possesses a practiced eye for written details and does not blindly accept the writing of ‘action research’ as the compound name of a unified activity. As long as it is not established beyond reasonable doubt that the name ought to be split into, respectively, action and research, denoting two parallel activities lacking internal and reciprocal reference. “These new perspectives could, perhaps, have been presented independently of the practical trials in the company; they could have been developed as purely written attempts, pure theory in other words.” The protest is, metaphorically speaking, hair splitting — or, literally, name splitting. But it cannot be brushed aside quite as simply as that. Our perspectives are developed with a grounding in certain general concepts which are not new. The discourse concept is not new; the concept of the public sphere is well known; concepts like the construction of reality and simulation have long been in use in analyses of language use. We could claim that we have used these concepts in new areas, and thus developed new perspectives. This would not be completely wrong, but to formulate the issue in this way would be to come close to countering the objection by affirming it. We could just as easily have started with the above general concepts, made them concrete, and developed new perspectives by applying them in a theoretical description of a particular area, such as processes of organization development. Without doubt, it would have been possible to provide a description based on organization theory — and perhaps supplemented with, for example, arguments culled from the philosophies of language and of democracy — of how one ought to build and maintain a development organization; of how to make con-


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crete and illustrate the presentation with an imagined — i.e. linguistically simulated — enterprise as an example. But without any connections to the author’s own personal experience with practical trials, such a description would again tend towards pure simulation. Such a text would not be an exposition of personal experience; rather it would take the form of a theory whose movement towards a closed linguistic system would be controlled by the logical form of the manner of writing of normal science. Personal experience does not allow of description before the fact. The only thing one could achieve by this would be that the possibility of making specific experiences would be almost written off before one started. For what is specific in the researcher’s personal experience springs out of the collision between theoretical perspectives and practice, in situations of discussion and action which displace the perspective into new angles or forces the theoretical arguments onto different tracks than they would have taken had they been left to their own devices, that is, their pure logic of reality simulation. In our presentation of our work with the development organization, we have provided many examples of such situations for which we could not find support in the repertory of existing theoretical arguments, where we had to rely on our own judgement in constructing interventions which could create movement in, or renewal of, those discussions that tended to get stuck or shunted onto old tracks. For example, all the situations in which we had to specifically emphasize that there was no point in adjusting the company’s factual situation to resemble a particular theoretical model; or the situations in which we had to help in improving the interpretations of the situation by reminding our discussion partners that they had more complex and other experiences than those they brought to the discussion. In such situations we were obliged to formulate new perspectives and arguments which could break through the constructions of reality which, to a large degree, had been built with the help of theoretical perspectives we ourselves had introduced into the discussion. This shows that not only are our practical experiences something other than practical examples which, as it were, illustrate already existing perspectives. Experiences are also what breaks with perspectives, thereby revealing these perspectives as fractured and open, not as drafts for a self-sufficient theory which could be developed further as a logically closed entity, i.e., as a closed linguistic universe, immune to new experience. Thus, our experience shows that an arrangement for organization development by means of the reorganization of discourses cannot be fashioned either in practice or be presented theoretically as a graduated realization or concretization of particular theoretical perspectives, a set of fundamental principles, a general theory, or whatever one prefers to call it. In addition to the types of experience we have just referred to, others can be mentioned. They have also been presented in detail in the previous chapters:

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The development organization’s form, that is, the instruments of which it consists, are generated in progress, and its individual elements have a temporary form (e.g. the shaping of each dialogue conference, the rules for discussions in the production groups, the establishment of the extended department committees and their dissolution, the procedures for formulating the cooperation agreement and supervisor’s job description). What the actual results of the generated measures will be is unpredictable, both as regards the multiplicity of details and the general contours. For example, it was not possible to foresee that the axis between supervisor and department representative would become a main dimension of the development work. The emphasis on testing and trial arrangements, the arguments for which lay in the realization that language is not the best medium by which to simulate practical solutions. Language opens doors and shuts others at the same time; real openings may therefore be found which cannot be localized in language beforehand.

These experiences each demonstrate, from their own angle, that our theoretical perspectives do not provide any ‘recipe’ for practical procedures. The theoretical discourse is contained in a sort of tense and mutable set of constellations with the practical situations. It is the concrete situation, first and foremost, that can reveal the possibilities embedded in the particular constellation’s specific character. In pursuance of this, we see that the relationship between theoretical perspectives and personal experiences cannot be handled as an either/or relationship according to the model: EITHER we have a theoretical perspective which discloses new experience beforehand, OR we create new experiences that break with the pregiven perspective. It would be more relevant to say that our experiences, as they find expression in the form of the examples we have described in the text, serve both to visualize and to transcend our theoretical perspectives which do not admit an adequate description, disconnected from the examples — at the same time that our experiences do not admit their own depiction independent of the theoretical perspectives we formulate in the presentation of the examples. Thus, the examples become that element in the text that allows the expression of both our personal experience and our theoretical perspectives. The examples which, strictly speaking, are nothing other than the contents of the text, cannot be divided into perspectives on the one hand and experience on the other. This does not mean that the division between theory and practice has been abolished, but it does mean that he who inquires about the significance of this division cannot expect a redeeming answer, apart from one in the shape of another interpretation. We have chosen to give an answer that cannot be delivered in the form of a conclusion, but in the form of a monograph in which the question of the


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relationship between theory and practice has been depicted as a question of the interpretation of one’s own experience. In the manner that our presentation of our interpretation has given us new experience, it has also, perhaps, managed to create something new in the reader’s experience. If so, that means that our presentation may also, in the end, serve as an example of organization theory in practice.

Critical Language Theory in Practice A commentary on: The end of Theory of Organization? Language as a Tool in Action Research and Organizational Development Dag Østerberg1

Background The economy of Norway is of the type that is called ‘mixed’: a mixture of working activities organized on the one hand by the state and local administrative units, and, on the other hand, by those who dispose of privately owned ‘capital’, means of production, distribution etc. The public and the private sectors are about the same size, each employing nearly half of the wage-earning population. Since privately owned means of production and distribution belong to a small minority, wage labor is by far the dominant way to earn a living, to acquire the necessary ‘means of subsistence’. It is incumbent on the public sector to provide a living for that part of the adult population which is not working — the retired, the disabled, the unemployed and others. Historically, the labor movement rose at a time when the ‘Mercantilist’ state was transformed into the ‘Liberal’ state and the public sector receded. Therefore, this social movement — the organization of property-less wage earners — was first and foremost directed against the class of private capital owners, since they organized most of the wage labor done. At that time, the industrial revolution — the application of the fruits of mechanical and chemical science to production processes — made the industrial factory worker the prototype of the wage laborer. Industrial wage labor versus industrial capital constituted the hard core of the opposition and conflict between Labor and Capital. Subsequently, the Liberal state 1. Dag Østerberg is a former Professor of Sociology at the University of Oslo. He has published extensively on general sociology and the sociology of culture.

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changed, taking a neo-mercantilist direction: it became itself entrepreneurial, interventionist and oriented towards ‘welfare’; the number of jobs within the public sector expanded strongly. Trades unions became highly diversified, representing all branches of those in public employment, in addition to the privately employed, among whom the fraction of industrial workers has diminished. Nevertheless, industrial wage labor within the sector of privately owned capital, even if not numerically dominant, has retained a very important position within our economy. In a mixed economy, even though the conflict between ‘wage labor’ and ‘capital’ is encompassed within the broader opposition between employees and employers, industrial working life retains many traditional characteristics. The workers are organized in unions, negotiating collectively with the private owners or their representatives — the class conflict of interests is clear and recognised by both parties. But since the heyday of laissez-faire, this conflict has become strongly mediated by the state. A series of legislative actions served to regulate working relations within industry, as elsewhere. The class conflicts have become institutionalized to a high degree. The application of industrial sociology is one of the devices introduced, the aim being to improve mutual understanding, and contribute to a renewal of industrial relations. As outlined by Gustavsen in his introduction to this volume, ‘action research’ of the type described by Pålshaugen is the outcome of a relatively short but intense history of the sociology of industrial organization, exploring an array of possibilities. This kind of research is the opposite of naive, it resembles ‘the owl of Minerva’ which, as Hegel said, is flying at the end of the day, the close of an epoch. So many high hopes have been cherished and nourished, only to wither away, that industrial sociological research has become very self-reflective, calling forth questions of a ‘post’-type. Are we entering a post-social-democratic, or even a post-modern age? Are the very notions of work and work organization going to lose their significance? Will ‘the idea of a social science’ have to undergo a more profound change than the hermeneutical critics of positive, empiricist methodology were striving for? Such questions, one may surmise, lurk on the intellectual horizons of Pålshaugen and his group, during their research at Tiedemann in Oslo. This attitude of doubt may seem unwarranted, given Pålshaugen’s description of the situation. Thus he notes that the workers complain that “production is given priority over concern for human beings”, which calls to mind Marx’s chapter on ‘The Factory’ in Das Kapital. Another is that “distrust and control” on the side of management permeates the whole organization of work, expressing alienation and subjugation. Management, on their side, charge the subordinate staff with unwillingness and undue absence from work, faked illness and the like. Does not the social researcher rather confront a ‘classical’ industrial situation, essentially marked by a class opposition?

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But one must also reckon with the fact that this opposition has already been dealt with in countless ways, and that a whole apparatus has been installed to administer to its symptoms and consequences. What more can be said and done? A not yet explored (or not yet fully explored) possibility is to create a betriebsinterne Öffentlichkeit, a term inspired by Habermas, as a sequel to the celebrated notion of burgerliche Öffentlichkeit. The decay of public discussions has led Habermas to seek for functional alternatives; one of them is fora within the enterprise or organization, where all employees (and, perhaps, the owners, too) may meet each other for more or less informal talks and discussions, and where any topic may be ventilated, momentous or trifling. The aim of Pålshaugen’s action research group at the tobacco factory was to establish such a forum, a betriebsinterne Öffentlichkeit.

Linguistic turn Confronted with this task — further development of the organization — Pålshaugen performs a ‘linguistic turn’ in action research. In addition to inciting the participants to discuss this or that particular topic, he also wants to direct their attention to their ways of speaking and discussions as such. He endeavors to heighten their potential for reflection, to make the shift from level to meta-level with regard to their ordinary ‘life world’. This is not to choose a more modest task. On the contrary, as Pålshaugen writes, “the great majority of participants lacked experience in discussing problems related to how to organize discussions in the best way”. This indicates a certain rigidity of thought, which may be seen as an aspect of the routine character of much factory work, and, hence, as an aspect of subjugation. Free thinking is reflective and flexible, it is always ready to question itself and its conceptions, it has no idées fixes, it is self-transcending. When Gustavsen refers to Sartre’s philosophy of freedom as a possible background of this action research, it seems to me a very appropriate remark. To make the participants take one step back and look at their own discourse routines, to augment their reflexivity, is a kind of exercise which may prove liberating. Pålshaugen, it is true, has no affinity with this dialectic philosopher nor with his subsequent neo-Marxist theory of series, groups and organizations in the Critique of dialectical reason. Rather, he is attracted to the “deconstructivist” thought of Derrida, de Man and their adherents, that is, to a philosophy stressing the importance of language as a structure of layers of meanings, symbolized by the image or metaphor of palimpsest. Here it may not be amiss to remind the reader that these aspects of language are by no means neglected by the ‘materialist conception of history’. As far as I know, Marx and Engels were among the first to deal with language as a dimension

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of human activity or praxis. In German ideology, written in 1845, they affirmed: “die Sprache ist das praktische, auch für andere Menschen existierende, also auch für mich selbst erst existierende wirkliche Bewusstsein, und die Sprache ensteht, wie das Bewusstsein, erst aus dem Bedurfnis, der Notdurft des Verkehrs mit anderen Menschen”.

And “Die Produktion der Ideen, Vorstellungen, des Bewusstseins ist zunächst unmittelbar verflochten in die materiellen Verkehr der Menschen, Sprache des wirklichen Lebens.”

This outlines what later has come to be known as ‘pragmatics’ or even ‘speech act’ theory: thinking is internally related to language, which again is internally related to action, and generally is itself a kind of action. Action, in its turn, presupposes a social setting or situation, to which it responds and from which it derives its meaning — this is the fundamental assumption or insight of ‘sociolinguistics’. Another well-known passage sheds further light on language’s place in social lift. In The 18. Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon (1857), the famous utterance that men create their own history, but on the basis of given conditions, serves as an introduction to language as a multi-layered structure. The revolutionaries of 1789 somehow had to interpret themselves and their actions through their understanding of the Roman republic of Antiquity. Their discourses were molded by figures and topoi from that great epoch of the past, they gave themselves the names of Brutus or Cato, and spoke of the new constitution as a revival of Roman law. In other words, their experience of their own time was mediated by their linguistic habits. In retrospect, we can easily see that the ‘rhetoric’ of the Roman republic was a deflection, was ‘ideology’ in the sense of blurring and distorting. What really went on, was a particular social class’s (the burgeoisie’s) seizure of political power, reshaping social institutions to serve their own interests. To conceal this from themselves and their co-citizens, they gave their actions the outward appearance of being the pursuit of universally valid, lofty ideals. But they were by no means acutely aware of this — self-deception is not a lucid undertaking. The whole structure of language came, as it were, between the political actors and their situation, and partly offered, partly imposed upon them the Roman discourse as their medium of self-interpretation. They read the events and texts of their own day through the medium of the discourse of past times. Their language did not reflect or refer to ‘reality’ in a straightforward, immediate way. Marx, we may say, pointed to the palimpsest character of language. At the same time, he retains the notion of praxis as the mediation between the human mind and the material world. Language may not refer to an external world in the way an arbitrary sign points to or stands for an object (on this topic, Marx is ambiguous); but in any case language implies something other than itself, even if


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it can only be known through language. My reason for mentioning this is that Pålshaugen’s ‘linguistic turn’ seems to have turned him away from the ‘materialist conception of history’ and its preoccupation with ‘matter’, presumably on the assumption that Marx’s teachings do not allow their adherents to deal adequately with language. But this assumption is wrong; it therefore appears to me that the Marxist stance implies a more all-encompassing perspective than the one chosen by Pålshaugen, the ‘deconstructionist’ perspective. His deconstructionist leanings are notable, especially in the works belonging to the same constellation as the present text. True, it is a gross and banal error to impute to Derrida the thought that all existence consists of texts or the text-like. Nevertheless, most of his writings have had the impact of disregarding what has hitherto been considered as crucial social and political questions, to the benefit of linguistic and literary, rhetorical questions. Pålshaugen’s text conveys the same impression. If he deals with matter, it is with the materiality of language, to the neglect of other basic forms of matter. This may be a mis-reading on my part. For in the present text, Pålshaugen also writes in a more usual fashion about the difference between forms of language and forms of life, about one’s experience as something distinct from our discourses, about the task of creating good situations. To be sure, to point out inconsistencies in others’ texts is no great achievement. What I would suggest is that Pålshaugen confronted this ambiguity, not to make it disappear, but rather to make it more apparent. To circumvent classical topics within the sociology of work may be a ‘strategy’ of thought, with the oblique intention of arriving at a paradigm shift. Such a strategy is perfectly legitimate, though I think Pålshaugen’s text would have been easier to understand if he had given some grounds for why he wants to get rid of the old ways of thought.

Theory and experience — impersonal and personal In his final remarks, Pålshaugen defends his undertaking against the alleged ‘mainstream’ stance as to the proper relationship between ‘theory’ and ‘empirical data or research’. He does not want to be seen as a sociologist who works according to a certain theoretical perspective, or who endeavors to confirm or reject some piece of theory by the findings of his empirical research. Instead, Pålshaugen conceives of his own practice as an attempt to make possible and call forth new experiences, or new ways of talking of one’s experiences, ways which are at odds with pre-given theoretical perspectives. His action research directs the participants’ attention to their ways of speaking, their ‘discourse formation’, suggesting that this ‘discourse’ may shut them off from personal experiences, because it

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induces them to talk impersonally of themselves. The term ‘empirical’ very often refers to the experience or empeiria of others — the established methods of social research seem to involve a depersonalization of human experience. The muchdebated conflict or tension between ‘theory’ and ‘empirical research’ is misplaced and misleading, in so far as it prevents us from discussing the more pressing relationship between the personal and the impersonal within social science. This leads him to question the wisdom of drawing a clear line of demarcation between social science and art and aesthetics. In a previous work, Pålshaugen attempted to show that the ‘positivist struggle’ about method in social science had generally too narrow a scope. The antagonists were fighting for and against the natural sciences as a model for sociology to imitate; but they have overlooked that aesthetics and modern theory of literature and kindred disciplines can teach sociologists a great deal (Pålshaugen 1991). In our days, Habermas is a staunch defender of maintaining a separation between the domains of science and art. It is essential to modernity, he claims, to differentiate what was in pre-modern times undifferentiated — religion, art, rational knowledge. To strengthen his stance, he invokes the name and work of Max Weber. Now, Weber hardly ever spoke of ‘differentiation’ of cultural subsystems or the like, in a modern, optimistic tone. Rather, he spoke of the ‘autonomy’ of different cultural spheres as something entailing autonomous and opposing ‘values’ and ‘daemons’. Habermas, therefore, does not continue the sociology of Weber, but rather the integration sociology of Durkheim, and, above all, Parsons. Pålshaugen’s ‘research report’ is intended to be read as an alternative to both positivist, empiricist research and the liberating discourse ethics of Habermas, even if the intention is not stated overtly in the text. While the report is markedly different from so-called ‘mainstream’ social research, its contrast with research based on communication theory of the Habermas–Apel kind is not so easily seen. The crucial difference may be that Pålshaugen practically never tries to direct the participants’ speech acts towards some determinate end, but first and foremost tries to make them aware of their ingrained linguistic habits, to induce them to quit their orbits of thought and become exorbitant, to be aware of the depth and opacity of language itself. If this has been his way or method, it would be more in accord with a ‘deconstructionist’ philosophy of language. But such a method may also be interpreted as a response to a high degree of reification, cognitive and verbal, as regards topics of factory work. Then this action research could be seen as a preliminary step, preparing the participants for discussions of a more ordinary, argumentative type. If so, his reported case does not necessarily depart from Habermas’ pragmatics, nor from the ‘intervention method’ of Alain Touraine.


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Conclusion To conclude, it seems to me that Pålshaugen has shown quite convincingly, by means of a concrete case and in a personal vein, that the branch of organization theory called ‘action research’ has more in common with art, especially modern art, the art of our century, than with science as described in books on method and methodology. The purpose of this kind of research is surely to uncover truth, but no external truth criteria can be imposed beforehand, not even the canons of argumentative communication. As to his second concern, to show the pertinence of the language philosophy underlying ‘deconstructive’ ways of dealing with texts, both generally and within action research, I, at least, remained unconvinced by his demonstration. I fail to see why a language philosophy derived from the ‘materialist conception of history’ (or even from American pragmatism) cannot do justice to the situation, making the first-mentioned philosophy superfluous as a kind of obscurans per obscurius.

An Organization’s Internal Public Sphere: Its Nature and Its Supplementation A commentary on an aspect of: The End of Theory of Organization? Language as a Tool in Action Research and Organizational Development John Shotter1

“Not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly, is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgment, our concepts, and our reactions” (Wittgenstein, 1980b, Vol. 2, No. 629). “What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities” (Wittgenstein, 1980a, Lectures, 1930–32, p. 26).

Central to the creation of a development organization within a company or institution is, as Pålshaugen sees it (following Habermas, 1990, p. 357ff.), the emergence within it of a local, internal public sphere: a sphere of activity within which those activities relevant to crucial aspects of an organizations’ functioning make sense, and in which “the abundant chatter which is heard on the sidelines, [is brought] into full view” (p. 40ff.). Bringing this chatter into public view is important, for although many problems arising in an organization are ‘trifling’ — and remain unresolved because they are considered too ‘insignificant’ to matter to those in authority — they “still cause difficulties in the everyday work situation”. “When these problems are brought into a common arena — which in our case was the development organization”, Pålshaugen continues, “then their

1. Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, U.S.A. During 1997 John Shotter was an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, England, and Visiting Professor at the Swedish Institute for Working Life, Stockholm.

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significance changes and increases. ... A handwheel on a machine which is difficult to turn, too narrow a stairway next to a machine, a failure in the planning route, the lack of a spare part, a problem with raw deliveries — all these are examples of ‘trifles’ that form a problem both for efficient production and for the working environment.” The significance of these trivial problems changes and increases as they become publicly visible because, in fact, they are not just technical, mechanical problems: each time workers, who have taken the trouble to articulate a problematic detail they have noticed in carrying out their daily task are ignored, not only is a small, possible improvement in efficiency lost, but their dignity as caring workers has been slighted — their identity as someone of moral worth within the company is diminished. To have a voice in establishing one’s own conditions of work, and to be listened to seriously — in the sense of others visibly responding to what one has to say — is a part of what it is to feel oneself fully a person, and not subject to a reduced status in one’s workplace (Braverman, 1974; Sennett and Cobb, 1972; Shotter, 1984, 1993a). Indeed, to insist on judging everything that occurs within a person’s worklife solely in terms of production values and to reduce human relations to mechanical ones — even in a factory, where it may seem justifiable — is to discount the complexity of people’s moral and ethical relations to each other. It is to act as if we already knew their unimportance, when in fact, the opposite is the case — as those with any sensitivity to their surrounding circumstances appreciate. Indeed, Pålshaugen, in his account of the effects of direct, two-way verbal contact replacing or supplementing customary written contacts in the project, gives us precisely an example of just such a seemingly trivial problem, one that many in different positions within the workplace have often voiced, but which just as often has been ignored: he quotes project workers from the union as saying about the drawbacks of written contacts, that: “Letters simplify”, while a departmental head articulates the issue in more detail as follows: “Personal contact means that both the problem and those who are responsible for its solution, in every section, become visible in a way that both deepens our understanding of the problem and our obligation to do something about it. Far more than impersonal notes”. In other words, the unions and the departmental head both spontaneously note that something of importance is lost in one-way, monologic forms of communication that is restored in two-way, dialogic forms. The departmental head gives more detail. He or she suggests that it is not just a detail of possible technical importance that is being ignored, but also an obligation — and if management can ignore their obligations, can’t the workforce also ignore theirs? Thus, for everyone to have a visible place within a company’s public sphere, then, is more than just a matter of giving everyone the opportunity to participate in the development of the company’s production capacity; just as crucially, it is a matter of everyone being able to see the nature of each other’s moral involve-

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ments — their rights and duties — and thus to come to a much more detailed grasp of what, justifiably, is expected of them, and what, justifiably, they can expect of others. Human values do not disappear from a company just because its single, dominant, organizational discourse only allows expression of technical matters. What does disappear are the arenas within which they can be publicly discussed and resolved. In commenting on Øyvind Pålshaugen’s most interesting work, I want to agree with him on the central importance he attaches to the concept of an organization’s internal public sphere, and to try to supplement what he has to say about the strange new tasks we face in accounting for its nature with some remarks relevant to this issue influenced by Wittgenstein’s (1953) later philosophy. In particular, I want to focus on the issue of how a set of ‘trifles’, a seemingly disparate set of fragments can — if they are all manifestations of the same ‘landscape’ of an organization’s work environment, so to speak — be nonetheless used to fashion a “perspicuous representation” of it, a representation that produces “just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’” (Wittgenstein, 1953, No.122). As a first step, however, I would like to begin by noting the extent to which Pålshaugen has re-constructed or de-emphasized the role of experts conducting what used to be called research and producing what used to be called theory. Instead, he has assigned a central role to dialogues (with ‘researchers’ being just one kind of participant in them, along with other people with other roles from many different spheres in the organization) — we might now call the whole field, the field of organizational development or organizational-developmental studies. This change of focus — from theories to dialogue — is crucial. For, not only is it in the sphere of dialogue that the internal public sphere, of which Pålshaugen speaks, is constructed and has its being, but his focus on dialogical phenomena is at the heart of all the radical changes in worklife research I want to discuss below. So it is to a discussion of the strange nature of dialogical realities that I will turn to next.

Dialogical realities: attending to aspects of their nature through our words In the past, in social theory, two great realms of activity have occupied our attention: people’s individual actions, and their behavior. However, we are now beginning to realize that dialogical or conversational phenomena constitute a distinct, third domain of events, occurring somewhere in between these other two: (1) They cannot be accounted simply as actions (for they are not done solely by individuals alone, thus they cannot be explained by giving a person’s reasons); nor (2) can they be treated as simply ‘just happening’ events (to be explained by

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discovering their causes). (3) They occur in a chaotic zone of indeterminacy or uncertainty in between these two spheres — in attempting to make sense of events in this domain, Winnicott (1986, pp. 133–134) talked of it as a “transitional sphere” and of the entities in it as “subjective objects;” Vygotsky (1986, pp. 112– 124) spoke of “thinking in complexes” and of our talk of “family names” as “subsuming individuals in a manner closely resembling that of the child’s complexes” (p. 113); while, as everyone knows, Wittgenstein (1953) also characterized the relations between activities we talk of as similar as having a “family resemblance” to each other (No. 67). Although occurrences in this sphere contain aspects of each of the other two categories, they do not seem amenable to any clear characterizations at all — like determinate indeterminacies in chaos theory, only oxymoronic designations seem appropriate. Indeed, it is their very lack of specificity, their lack of any pre-determined order, and thus their openness to being specified or determined by those involved in them, in practice, in accord with the unique requirements of the circumstances they share between them — usually, without any awareness of their part in so doing — that is their central defining feature (Shotter, 1993b). We cannot emphasize this special aspect of our daily, dialogical activities enough: what happens between us, what happens within our relations both to each other and to our surroundings, is what matters — not happenings hidden either inside the heads of individuals, or ‘behind appearances’ in physical processes in the world. It is precisely the mixed, indeterminate, incomplete, ongoing — not wholly this, not wholly that — nature of our everyday ways of relating ourselves both to each other and to our surroundings that have for too long been ignored. Thus the fact is, that after all the special efforts of theoreticians, scientists, and philosophers, and various mystics, during the last couple of thousand years, to penetrate into hidden depths of things, to discover behind mere appearances the true nature of reality (the quest we inherited from the Greeks), and to embody the sublime in certain special techniques and practices — after all this, it is only just recently that we have begun to notice what it is that we are actually doing in our myriad, everyday, spontaneous, responsive reactions to each other. We are at last beginning to wake up to a strange new world, the world that we are actually living in ... here ... and now. We are beginning to notice its ever-changing, moving, living details. And furthermore ... we are beginning to realize that the methods of investigation and means for expressing the results that we have developed in the past, for inquiring into the supposed ‘external’ world around us, are irrelevant to us in this sphere. They are after the fact, in that they orient us to looking back on ‘dead’, already completed events; and they are beside the point, in that they lead us precisely to ignore the unique, moment-by-moment changing details to which we must attend if we are act in ways sensitive to our actual circumstances. However, having grown up as western, individualist, morally autonomous


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adults, we find it difficult to attend to such unique, fleeting details, and to accept that our social practices need not first exist as ideas-in-people’s-heads before being put into practice. We are so used to ‘thinking about’ everything (in terms of static theories and representations), that we are tempted into thinking that, to do anything at all, all our activities must originate from ideas (stable first principles) inside our heads. Yet, before we can do any ‘thinking’ as such at all, if we are to relate its results intelligibly to the lives of those around us, we must as children learn to do many other much more practical things first: things such as how to take turns — how to alternate between being a listener and a speaker, an actor or an audience; how to ask questions; to give answers; to name; to describe; to agree; to command; to obey; to disagree; to negotiate; to love; to hate; to promise; and so on. Where, of course, in learning, say, how in practice to keep a promise, we are learning something quite complex, of such complexity in fact, that we might still be arguing as adults as to what, exactly, it involves. All these things we first get to know of as practices, as followable ways of ‘going on’ with the others around us. Even theorizing is a practice that we have to be inducted into: we have to learn to distinguish between talk of actualities and talk of possibilities, and to what, in practice, we are committing ourselves in each such form of talk. And we first come to do all this, not in terms of an abstract world of principles and propositions ‘in our heads’, but in terms of the unique, everyday world of particularities within which we, as the individuals we are, live our lives. But for us, these particularities are not an incoherent amalgam. They constitute, as Wittgenstein (1953, No.92) puts it, a “surveyable” whole; that is: just as we know our ‘way around’ inside our own houses — the rooms, the cupboards, the drawers, the stairs, the attics and basements, where we put our clothes, where the Sellotape is to be found, and where other (often lost) things might be sought, which chairs are comfortable and suitable for what activities, and so on, and so on (see Bachelard, 1992) — so we can also have, to a certain extent, a comprehensive grasp of the rest of the particularities of our own ‘worlds’, the worlds within which we alone, and no one else, dwell. In this sense, we feel ‘at home’ in our world. And our knowledge of it, like that of our homes, is not a matter of argument or interpretation; for us it is an ultimate reality, we know our ‘way around’ in it, along with all the connections and relations between its component parts, directly and immediately; we and no one else are authorities on its character and its meaning for us. These particular worlds, our own ‘inner worlds’, are foundational for us. But this ‘inner world’ is not in our heads, we cannot find its nature in us by introspection; its nature is only shown or manifested in our activities as we body ourselves forth out into the world, and spontaneously respond (bodily) to the happenings around us. Thus to reveal its nature, its meaning for us, even to ourselves, we must first act in response to a circumstance: just as we learn different uses for the various different rooms in our homes in the

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course of our living activities with them, so we must also live out a range of activities ‘within’ out worlds if we are to understand them. Hence Wittgenstein’s (1953) comments: as: “Ask not: ‘What goes on in us when we are certain that...?’ — but: How is ‘the certainty that is the case’ manifested in human action?” (1953, p. 225); and: “Let the use of words teach you their meaning” (p. 220). For we only manifest or ‘show’ (to use Wittgesntein’s term) the ‘shape’ of our own ‘inner worlds’ to others (and to ourselves) in our actions: patients show their worlds of suffering and pain, so do others, their own unique afflictions (Sacks, 1986, 1995); musicians show us that they know their ‘way around’ inside the world of music in what they do musically; similarly mathematicians (in how they deal with symbol systems), painters (with colors), architects (with living spaces), and so on, and so on — even the tearing, tragic, painful world of the beggar on the street is shown to us in the beggar’s behavior (if we care to allow ourselves to be responsive to their suffering). What it is, fundamentally, that makes it possible for us to act like this, to integrate a whole collection of particularities into a ‘world’ as such, we do not know. Nor, for our purposes, do we need to know. But what we do know is, that if — as is required of us if we take a natural scientific stance — we withdraw from our ongoing involvements or engagements with the others around us, and stop to look back on what has already happened, to see it as a formal pattern, then, not only drop out the process of making living meanings with them, but we also ignore (with the costs mentioned above) the detailed complexity of our social relations, their ‘trivial’ particularities. Yet strangely, for all their complexity, we do still manage to live our practical, everyday lives with others out into the unknown, forwards, prospectively; it is only infrequently that we look back and try to act in accord with already determined principles. Indeed, more often than not, much of what we do in our daily lives we do without much cognitive effort, determining what sureness we have about things between us as we go along. It is a balancing act in which we ceaselessly respond and react to our circumstances, first this way then that, while in constant motion. But how do we do this, we ask ourselves? How is it that we are not all the time having to ‘work it out’, cognitively? Forgetting, or not noticing, that much of what we do we only do between us as a part of a social practice, making use of long established, culturally transmitted conventions, we are tempted into thinking that what we need to explain the processes ‘behind’ such activities like we try to explain ‘hidden’ physical processes: by searching for mysterious processes within us somewhere that, so to speak, ‘put meaning and understanding’ into our activities. But questioning ourselves in this way: (a) has led us into pursuing one explanatory theory after another, each put forward by clever (sometimes very clever) individuals, with each theory to an extent true, but each in its own way as one-sided or as


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inadequate as the last; and (b) it has also led us into ignoring not only our own everyday talk, but even more so, the everyday flow of spontaneous, unthinking, practical-social activity within which all our more selfconscious activities are embedded — without which, after all, it would be impossible for anyone ever to get any theorizing done at all. Instead of theories, giving us a picture of what something in itself is supposed to be, ‘really’, what we want is another kind of talk altogether. Talk that works to ‘place’ or ‘position’ what we’re talking about — not only in relation to other topics in our talk, as we talk about it, but also in relation to the rest of our lives together. Instead of a decontextualized theoretical-representational understanding of how things should be, ideally, we want a continually updated, ongoing, contextualized practical-relational understanding of how they actually are for us, in relation to our involvement in a practice. Indeed, as Pålshaugen remarks elsewhere (1996): “Research on the use of social research, over the years, has shown that [the representational-theoretical] kind of research report is of little use” (p. 151) ... and, they “are of very limited interest, if of any at all, to the managers and employees of the companies that are our collaborators in action research projects” (p. 153). Such reports do not function to supplement or refine already existing practices; they assume that the ‘slate can be wiped clean’ and a completely new practice implemented ‘from the ground up’ (as if people could be ‘re-programmed’ like computers). But what I think is really different for us now, at this point in the history of the West, is that we are slowly beginning to grasp what a practice is like... in practice... rather than in theory. That is: we are slowly learning new ways of talking that work to draw our attention to crucial details of our own talk-entwined activities, from within those self-same activities — whilst still on the run forwards, so to speak — without having to stop and step outside them to see them as if from afar. And this, I think, is where Wittgenstein’s work has its relevance for us, especially in its relation to what he calls the background to all our selfconscious activities, “the background against which”, as he puts it, “whatever I could express has its meaning” (Wittgenstein, 1980b, p. 16). For, it is to something in “the abundant chatter which is heard on the sidelines” (to repeat Pålshaugen’s phrase again) — in the “whole hurly-burly” (Wittgenstein, 1980a, II, No. 629) constituting the background landscape against which we make sense of actions and events — that we want to draw attention and to render publicly visible. That is: we want, somehow, to be able to use the relations between each particular piece of chatter, to get a vision of its momentary place (the part it is playing) within the whole ‘landscape’ of work-activity from which it emanated. Modernist notions of research are derived from Descartes’s efforts to ‘wipe the slate clean’ and rid us of all our current cultural conventions, our preconceived notions, our already acquired practices and ways of doing things, and to

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begin with idealized first principles. In a letter to his publisher, he describes his idealization of the world thus: “I resolved ... to speak only of what would happen in a new world, if God were to create, somewhere in imaginary space, enough matter to compose it, and if he were to agitate diversely and confusedly the different parts of this matter, so that he created a chaos as disordered as the poets could ever imagine, and then afterwards did no more than to lend his usual preserving action to nature, and let her act according to his established laws” (Descartes, 1968, my emphasis). But as Toulmin (1990) remarks: “The idea that handling problems rationally means making a totally fresh start had been mistaken all along. All we can be called on to do is to take a start from where we are, at the time we are there: i.e., to make discriminating and critical use of the ideas available to us in our current local situation, and the evidence of our experience, as this is ‘read’ in terms of those ideas. There is no way of cutting ourselves free of our conceptual inheritance [our local practices and ways of doing things]: all we are required to do is to use our experience critically and discriminatingly, refining and improving our inherited ideas [our local ways of acting], and determining more exactly the limits to their scope” (p. 179, my emphasis).

Wittgenstein’s poetic-relational ways of understanding: refining and supplementing an organization’s ways of ‘going on’ If, in our developmental inquiries we are not — as researcher-experts seem required to do in doing research — searching for fundamental principles, theories, models, or pictures to act as guides to future action, what is it as a community of inquirers that we are all inquiring into? And what might be a criterion for us in judging whether we have achieved an understanding of it or not? In answering these questions, we must remember who we are and where we are working: in inquiries into organizational development, we are not working on our own as self-contained, individual thinkers, looking across towards some already completed activities ‘over there’, seeking a way accurately to ‘picture’ them; we are working in with a whole crowd of other people, out from within a whole set of ongoing activities, all to an extent inter-related, to which our own activities must in some way be related. Where what is at issue, is precisely the character of the inter-relations between all the activities in question. Thus, rather than simply trying passively to ‘see’ what a certain something already in existence ‘is’, we are seeking a very different, much more active kind of understanding, one which will allow us all, in practice, to anticipate appropriately what will ‘follow’ from what, thus to ‘go on’ in an activity, or to ‘follow’ other people’s actions, in a direct, unconfused, concerted manner (without it being necessary to


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consult a panel of arguing experts as to how the meaning of a person’s actions should best be interpreted). Indeed, this is precisely the trouble with pictures and theories: they are not, so to speak, self-applicable. As Wittgenstein (1981) puts it: “When one has the picture in view by itself it is suddenly dead ... it remains isolated, it does not point outside itself to a reality beyond” (1981, No. 236) — people still need to be ‘instructed’ as to its meaning, the way the picture is being used to make a point in relation to a practice. If we are to go on in a social practice in this way — in a direct, unconfused, concerted manner with others, by anticipating appropriately how to follow certain actions with other actions, and so on — then we must know our ‘way around’, so to speak, inside the ‘landscape of relations’ in terms of which the practices in question are interlinked. We must come to feel ‘at home’ among them; to be able to ‘move around inside’ them just as we do in our own homes. Indeed, in his adoption of a much more ‘practical’ approach to the nature of (philosophical) problems Wittgenstein (1953) suggested that: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way around’” (No. 123). And regarding the ‘methods’ of inquiry he discovered for helping us to develop the special kind of understanding required — not so much to solve such problems as to bypass or dissolve them — he said: “Try not to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all. ... But ask yourself: in what sort of case, in what kind of circumstances, do we say, ‘Now I know how to go on’...?” (No. 154). Or, to put it another way: ‘If I don’t know how to go on, I don’t have a sense of what it is appropriate to do here, that the others around me can follow’. Here, then, in these remarks of Wittgenstein, I think we can find the clues we need in beginning to answer our questions above: what, as a community of inquirers, we are all inquiring into, is the possibility of constructing between us the kind of flowing, unconfused understanding we manifest when we know our ‘way about’ in a sphere of activity. Activity informed by this kind of understanding is to be contrasted with acting in relation to a theory: in ‘putting a theory into practice’, instead of immediately and directly sensing the fitting of one’s actions to the ‘shape’ of one’s circumstances, bodily, one has to act without any such sense; one must cognitively ‘work out’ what to do, step-by-step, and be able to argue and to justify to others one’s interpretation of the theory in question if challenged to do so. Clearly, such perfectly flowing forms of social practices do, to an extent, exist — the ease with which, in handshaking and/or kissing cultures, such rituals are played out being cases in point; while it is equally clear that such routines often run aground, and we find ourselves (at least for brief moments) not knowing how to ‘go on’. Indeed, a criterion for our not having yet fully achieved the special kind of understanding in question here is, of course, the continuing occurrence of such cases of disorientation, misunderstanding, bewilderment, and confusion. Elsewhere, especially with my colleague Arlene Katz (Shotter, 1994; Katz

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and Shotter, 1996; Shotter and Katz, 1997; and Katz and Shotter, 1997), we have outlined in detail some of Wittgenstein’s poetic methods for creating such new understandings of this special kind, so I will not repeat those details here. Here, I will just note that they are all in fact drawn from our ordinary, everyday uses of talk in practice, and simply consist in such activities as: 1. gathering examples (“don’t think, but look!” — 1953, No. 66). 2. deconstruction in practice: ‘stop’ ‘look’, ‘listen to this’, ‘look at that’ (to point out previously unnoticed features of a flow of activity from within the flow — 1953, nos 132, 144). 3. the use new metaphors (to reveal new possibilities in events hidden by the dead metaphors in routine forms of talk — 1953, No. 115). 4. making comparisons (sometimes using invented “objects of comparison” (1953, No. 130) like language-games... “to establish an order... not the order” (1953, No. 132) in our knowledge of the ‘relational landscape’ in question. Where the point of all these methods is not to find something new that is hidden from us and can only be grasped through a theory by inference from evidence. “It is, rather, the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand” (1953, No. 89). Thus “the problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known” (1953, No. 109). Where the point of such an arrangement is, to repeat, to produce “just that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’” (1953, No. 122) — what I have called above, a dialogical, relational-responsive form of practical understanding, to do with being able to ‘look over’ or ‘survey’ as a single, unbroken whole realm of activity. This is the special kind of understanding in practice that we seek. Thus what I do want to do in some detail here, is to connect Wittgenstein’s methods for refining our grasp of our own practices with Pålshaugen’s concern with what is involved in creating an internal public sphere within an organization. I want to try to bring out what these methods of Wittgenstein imply, for the practicalities involved in the creation of such a sphere — for clearly, to repeat yet again, something quite other than the ‘putting of a theory into practice’ is involved in such an endeavor. We can begin to explore some of the practicalities involved by noting some of Pålshaugen’s own comments, right at the end of his book, on his own strategies in writing it: in these comments he questions whether the results of the project came about by the use of a theoretical perspective that made the disclosure of new experiences possible, or by the creation of new experiences that worked to break with pre-given perspectives. And he rejects such an either-or formulation. “It


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would be more relevant to say”, he suggests, “that our experiences, as they find expression in the form of the examples we have described in the text, serve both to visualize and to transcend our theoretical perspectives. ... The examples become that element in the text that allows the expression of both our personal experience and our theoretical perspectives”. And I think Pålshaugen is quite right in his claims here: like his earlier concern with seeming ‘trifles’, here too it is the stating and the bringing together of a whole set of unique, detailed events that seems to be important to us. Why is this? And how is it possible for a text that consists only in particularities to work in this kind of way — to succeed in communicating something of a general kind to us? Because, we must remind ourselves, his text has its being still within the realm of dialogical phenomena — phenomena that are partially this and partially that, phenomena that by their very nature are still indeterminate, incomplete, phenomena that can only be presented textually in a fragmentary fashion — as Wittgenstein himself presented his own results of his own investigations. In reading such a fragmentary text, what-follows-from-what is utterly vague, it is not in any way explicitly set out. Thus the ‘gaps’ between the fragments must be bridged by the reader making an effort to bridge them, and in so doing using resources drawn from their own background knowledge of their own worklife experiences. In discussing the consequences of just such ‘indeterminacies’ in literary texts, Iser (1978) points out that in allowing for a whole “spectrum of actualizations ... literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulating meanings themselves”. Or, to put it another way: in our responsive, bodily living out of our dialogical reactions and rejoinders to a writer’s textual expressions of possibility, as readers of such texts, we jointly create and feel along with them, not only the more momentary, determinate meanings we co-create between us, but we begin also to imaginatively construct the ‘relational landscape’ of a whole ‘world’ within which each fragment has a place, and makes sense by ‘pointing beyond itself’, so to speak, to other aspects of the relational landscape. For as we ‘move’ from one particularity to the next, it is as if we must undertake a ‘journey’ with a ‘shape’ to it, so to speak: this is how the particularities in a text can succeed in ‘calling out’ from us something of a much more general kind, a set of interconnected responses occasioned by the way in which each particularity ‘points beyond itself’ to another, so that in one’s ‘travels’, one comes to ‘survey’ a whole imaginary ‘landscape of relations’. But the creation of such an imaginative whole from a set of fragmentary expressions of aspects of it, is not an easy task. Such a whole does not present itself to us automatically, as we accumulate a sequence of disconnected experiences. Indeed, as we know from our experience in getting to know our way around in cities new to us, we often become disoriented and lose our way — streets don’t join up as we expect, unanticipated rivers or railway tracks block our

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path, we fail to recognize a familiar landmark when approached from a new direction, and so on; and when people try to give us directions, we often find it difficult to follow them. And our knowledge of other cities is (although not negligible) of very little help to us also. It is the city itself that we must come to feel ‘at home’ in. And to do that, we have to tramp the streets, the little back streets as well as the main ones. And there is no one single order within which one can capture all of one’s relevant experiences. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1953) remarks about his own efforts to order the results of his investigations into an ordered whole: “After several unsuccessful efforts to weld my results into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination. — And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in very direction. — The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in thecourse of these long and involved journeyings” (p. v). Where he wanted to arrange the sequence in which one encountered each sketch, “so that if you looked at them you could get a picture of the landscape. Thus this book is really only an album” (p. v). Involved here, as we have already seen, is a special kind of understanding, a kind of understanding that, as Johannessen (1992) remarks, Wittgenstein (1974) at one time called “intransitive understandings” (p. 79): a unique kind of firsttime understanding that arises only from a unique form of expression, a form of expression that is not an expression of something, but which expresses itself — the first-time expression of a unique ‘relational landscape’ that one can use “to establish an order ... not the order” in our knowledge in a particular sphere of our own activities. For Wittgenstein, paradigmatic examples of such first-time, intransitive understandings can be found in our understandings of the unfolding movement of musical themes: “Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one might think. ... Why is just this the pattern of variation in loudness and tempo? One would like to say ‘Because I know what it’s all about’. But what is it all about? I should not be able to say” (No. 527). But the fact is, in listening to music, one cannot help but bodily respond to it in certain ways, spontaneously, and it is in such spontaneous responses than all our language-games begin. As Wittgenstein (1980) says about the origin and primitive form of the language game: “[It] is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language — I want to say — is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’[Goethe]” (1980, p.31). In other words, intransitive, first-time understandings are the kind of understandings that makes up the background to everything we do; these are the original practical, responsive understandings that we refine into our more detailed


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language-games; and these, I think, are the kind of understandings we are after when we seek to form an internal public sphere within an organization. We are not seeking a publicly shared understanding of something already existing, of which we would like an accurate picture, but a shared understanding for use in us all being able to make a sharable sense of occurrences in our shared workplaces, thus to be able to ‘go on’ with, and to ‘follow’ each other without continual misunderstandings and conflict. But as Johannessen points out, they are not all that easy to come by: “...the travelling is a constitutive part of the struggle for seeing clearly the landscape in question. Its a little like Plato’s example of knowing the road to Larissa. It may be known in two different ways: by making the trip to Larissa oneself or by getting someone to describe it to us ... [but ] to produce a reliable description of the road in the first place someone has to actually go there” (Johannessen, 1994, p. 225). In other words, the formation of an internal public sphere cannot be done simply by experts telling the rest of us what its ‘shape’ is; all of us involved in the activity have, to an extent, to make efforts, to undertake some ‘journeyings’.

Concluding comments Wittgenstein’s philosophy is deeply radical. Once we have understood it, everything will change. The whole nature of all of what we currently call “the behavioral or the human sciences” will take on an utterly different character from their present form. Why? For at least the following three reasons: (1) In revealing to us that we see the world just as much through our words as through our eyes, we now begin to realize that the only kind of ‘intransitive understandings’ we have ‘officially’ allowed ourselves in our supposedly ‘rational’ enterprises, have been ones of an already ordered kind, ones ordered according to principles of a mechanical kind. We have ignored all the other ‘relational resources’ available to us on the vast ‘relational landscape’ making up the background to our daily lives: we are already, spontaneously, making sense of our lives in many other ways, very different from the mechanicalways we currently feel are the only rational ways open to us. Wittgenstein’s methods allow us to see these ways, publicly, for the very first time: “The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. — And this means; we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful” (1953, No. 129). (2) Indeed, just as we come to know our own homes, our own cities, as a complex structure of essentially trivial details, so Wittgenstein’s methods enable us to begin finding our ‘way around inside’ the complexly interconnected details of

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our language-game-structured forms of life. And just as no single theory, map, or ‘picture’ could ever adequately capture what we know of our own dwellings or home towns, so no single set of principles can ever capture, ahead of time, all the detailed, grammatical interconnections possible within our forms of life. Yet, as Wittgenstein (1953) has shown, it is still possible for us to arrive at a kind of understanding of them — that (to repeat it yet again) which “consists in ‘seeing connections’” (no. 122) — through an appropriate arrangement of striking remarks, remarks that both ‘remind’ us of what in fact we already knowm but usually let pass by unremarked, and which allow us to notice a relational structure in what we already know. Thus, rather than putting a theory into practice, what Wittgenstein has us do here, is to put into our already existing practices another kind of practice, and practice that leads us to conduct our original practices in a more refined, self-aware manner. For the effect of his methods — if we practice them in the course of our daily ‘journeyings’ as we go from one activity to the next — is to make us more aware of the immense variety of unnoticed social, culture, and historical influences that are at work in the larger flow of surrounding activity, within which our own activities are embedded, and to which they are, in fact, intelligibly related. Their effect is thus, as he terms it, to incite us into creating within ourselves as “synopsis of trivialities” (Wittgenstein, 1980b, p.26), a sense of being able to ‘move around’ inside the many particular details of our own ‘inner worlds’, without it becoming a matter of argument or interpretation as to how we should proceed. And as we have seen, it is just such a synopsis of trivialities that Pålshaugen is aiming at in bringing (to repeat) “the abundant chatter which is heard on the sidelines... into full view” (p. 40), for it is within this ‘trivial’ chatter that the ‘shape’ of an organizations’ internal public sphere is to be found. (3) And a third major way in which things will change will have to do with our criteria for judging the results of our inquiries: although everyone would probably agree that we must test all our claims to truth in practice — for the very first time in history, we must all now take what that means, in practice, seriously. Does that mean that at present — with all our tests and methodologies — we have failed to do so? Yes, it does. For currently, although we are continually saying: “We must test our theories in practice”, we are then tempted to go on to ask ourselves: “Yes, but upon what are our practices based?” If Wittgenstein is right, then it is precisely this that is a wrong move. It is this ‘neurotic desire’ to make contact with a ‘reality’ beyond all our practical relations with each other, to find a ‘basis’ for our practices in special transcendental, metaphysical, or in biological realities, supposedly underlying (the usual term) or hidden behind appearances, that misleads us, and for which we need his ‘conceptual therapy’. For as he sees it: “We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. [For] these are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by


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looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in spite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy [of this kind] is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (1953, No. 109). We will only come to a sound understanding of language if we can ‘cure’ ourselves of always wanting to ‘explain’ it, and accept that in the background to all our explanations of things are the responsive, intransitive understandings in terms of which our explanations make sense. This, of course, is a really strange claim, and I want to emphasize its strangeness. Indeed, if we are to really understand what Wittgenstein is saying here, we must move into what for us is the realm of the uncanny, the extraordinary and unfamiliar, the really mysterious. Let me try to illustrate: about the empirical testing of propositions he says: “What counts as its [an empirical proposition’s] test? [An answer is given] — ‘But is this an adequate test? And, if so, must it not be recognizable as such in logic?’ — As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. But the end is not in an ungrounded presupposition: it is in an ungrounded way of acting” (No. 110: Wittgenstein, 1969). Or to put it another way: “Giving grounds”, he says, “justifying the evidence, comes to an end; — but the end is not in certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game” (1969, No. 204). Where, “you must bear in mind,” he continues, “that the language-game is ... not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there — like our life” (1969, No. 559). In other words, all our talk about ‘things’ as such, is grounded within certain of our relational ways of talking and acting, and ... in nothing more! Thus, to the question ‘Why do our relational ways of talking take the particular form they take?’, there is no clear, certain and final answer. This seems to leave us staring into a void, where before we held out a hope of ‘seeing’ something, a final ‘satisfying’ answer. But this is precisely what I mean by saying that we have never before taken the testing of our claims to truth seriously in practice. For, currently, we still expect all our investigatory practices to come to an end in us as individuals ‘seeing’ something as true. We want cognitively ‘to know for certain that X is so’. Whereas ... this is not what Wittgenstein offers us at all. What he offers us is the coming to an end of our problems in us, as a group,coming to do something new. They come to an end in us devising a new practice, one that at least to an extent overcomes some of the dissatisfactions of the old! And the cognitive satisfaction of certainty is replaced by a feeling of being ‘at home’ in one’s place in the world with others. Although it is difficult to believe it, once you have ‘got it’, you — and your ‘world’ — will never be the same again. So let me repeat it in shortened form: in

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practice, the justification of evidence comes to an end, not in us seeing something, but in us acting differently. Once you have grasped how to take this point about practices seriously, in practice, things that you took for granted in the past will become quite strange, unintelligible even — “one of the most dangerous of ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads or in our heads” (1981, No. 605) — while previously puzzling phenomena can become quite transparent — “if it is asked: ‘How do sentences manage to represent?’ — the answer might be: ‘Don’t you know? You certainly see it, when you use them’. For nothing is concealed... . How do sentences do it? Don’t you know? For nothing is hidden...” (1953, No. 435). Everything that we make use of, in understanding and grasping the significance of our utterance-interwoven actions in our everyday lives with each other, is out there in the ‘spaces’, in the ‘moments’, in the ‘time-spaces’, between us — if only we had the means, the ‘tools’ — the ‘microscopes’ or ‘telescopes’, or other kinds of ‘instruments’ to look through — to ‘see’ it: “I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.56). “Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment...” (Eliot, East Coker, 1944, p. 27)

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In the series DIALOGUES ON WORK AND INNOVATION the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 1. NASCHOLD, Frieder and Casten VON OTTER: Public Sector Transformation: Rethinking Markets and Hierarchies in Government. 1996. 2. TOULMIN, Stephen and Björn GUSTAVSEN (eds): Beyond Theory. Changing organizations through participation. 1996. 3. GUSTAVSEN, Björn, Bernd HOFMAIER, Marianne EKMAN PHILIPS and Anders WIKMAN: Concept-Driven Development and the Organization of the Process of Change. An evaluation of the Swedish Working Life Fund. 1996. 4. MERRELYN, Emery: Searching. The theory and practice of making cultural change. 1999. 5. PÅLSHAUGEN, Øyvind, Björn GUSTAVSEN, Dag ØSTERBERG and John SHOTTER: The End of Organization Theory? Language as a tool in action research and organizational development. 1998. 6. GUSTAVSEN, Björn, Tom COLBJØRNSEN and Øyvind PÅLSHAUGEN (eds): Development Coalitions in Working Life. The ‘Enterprise Development 2000’ Program in Norway. 1998. 7. ENNALS, Richard and Björn GUSTAVSEN: Work Organization and Europe as a Development Coalition. 1999. 8. GREENWOOD, Davydd J. (ed.): Action Research. From practice to writing in an international action research development program. 1999. 9. VAN BEINUM, Hans (ed.): Ideas and Practices in Action Research. An institutional journey. n.y.p. 10. KALLIOLA, Satu and Risto NAKARI (eds.): Resources for Renewal. A participatory approach to the modernization of municipal organizations in Finland. 1999. 11. LJUNGBERG VAN BEINUM, Ingrid: Using the Lamp instead of Looking into the Mirror. Women and men in discussion about the relationship between men and women in the work place. 2000. 12. MUNTIGL, Peter, Gilbert WEISS and Ruth WODAK: European Union Discourses and Unemployement. An interdisciplinary approach to employment policymaking and organizational change. n.y.p. 13. GUSTAVSEN, Bjørn, Håkon FINNE and Bo Oscarsson: Creating Connectedness. The role of social research in innovation policy. 2001.

The End of Organization Theory?: Language As a Tool in Action Research and Organizational Development

The End of Organization Theory?: Language As a Tool in Action Research and Organizational Development (Dialogues on Work and Innovation)

Yeast as a Tool in Cancer Research

Organizational learning: a theory of action perspective

Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective

Research in Organizational Change and Development: Vol. 18 (Research in Organizational Change & Development)

Research in Organizational Change and Development: Vol. 19 (Research in Organizational Change & Development)

The Organization of Language

The Organization of Language

End As a Hero

End As a Hero

End As a Hero

End as a Hero

End As a Hero

Research in Organizational Behavior, Volume 22 (Research in Organizational Behavior) (Research in Organizational Behavior)

Research in Organizational Change and Development. Volume 14

Research in Organizational Change and Development, Volume 16

Dialogue and development: theory of communication, action research and the restructuring of working life

Organization and Systems Design: Theory of Deferred Action

Organization Development

Seeing Organizational Patterns: A New Theory and Language of Organizational Design

Developmental Theory And Language Disorders (Trends in Language Acquisition Research)

The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory

Issues, Theory, and Research in Industrial Organizational Psychology

Action Learning, Leadership and Organizational Development in Public Services (Routledge Studies in Human Resource Development)

A Theory of Human Action

Action research in workplace innovation and regional development

A Theory of Human Action

Signs, Mind, And Reality: A Theory of Language As the Folk Model of the World (Advances in Consciousness Research)

Teaching as Learning: An Action Research Approach

The End of Organization Theory?: Language As a Tool in Action Research and Organizational Development