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Management and Language

Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
Management and Language
The Manager as a Practical Author

David Holman and Richard Thorpe

SAGE Publications
London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi

Copyrighted Material
© David Holman and Richard Thorpe 2003

First published 2003

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or

private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright Designs and Patents Act, 198 8, this publication
may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by
any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in
accordance with the terms of licences issued by the
Copyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the
publishers.

SAGE Publications Ltd

6 Bonhill Street
London EC2A 4PU

SAGE Publications Inc.

2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, California 9 1 320

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd

32, M-Block Market
Greater Kailash - I
New Delhi 1 10 048

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library

ISBN 0 7 6 1 9 6907 1
ISBN (pbk)O 7 6 1 9 6908 X

Library of Congress Control Number available

Typeset by Photoprint, Torquay, Devon

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press,
Gateshead

Copyrighted Material
 I would like to thank my parents,
Annette and Bob Holman,
for all their support throughout my life.
David.

Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
 Contents

About the editors ix

List of contributors xi
List of figures xii

Introduction: management and language: the manager as a practical author

David J. Holman and Richard Thorpe

PART 1 Setting the scene 13

1 Managers as practical authors: everyday conversations for action

John Shotter and Ann L. Cunliffe 15

PART 2 Developing and understanding the story 39

2 Using narrative and telling stories

David M. Boje 41

3 Full of characters: identity and talk in practical authoring

David 1. Holman, Jeff Gold and Richard Thorpe 54

4 Visual media and the construction of meaning

Richard Thorpe and Joep Cornelisson 67

PART 3 Developing the author's position 83

5 The leader as a practical narrator: leadership as the art of translating

Francois Cooren and Gail T. Fairhurst 85

6 The logic of message design in organisational argument

Shirley Willihnganz, Joy L. Hart and Charles A. Willard 104

7 Authoring as a collaborative process through communication

Stanley Deetz 12 1

PART 4 Rewriting the script, rescripting the author 139

8 Conversations and the authoring of change

Jeffrey D. Ford and Laurie W Ford 141

Copyrighted Material
viii M a n a g e m e n t a n d La n g u a g e

9 All in a knot of one anothers' labours: action learning as joint

practical authoring
Mike Pedler 157

10 A critical conversation between author managers and management

authors
Dorothy Lander and Craig Prichard 172

Author index 19 1

Subject index 194

Copyrighted Material
 About the editors

David J. Hol man is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Organisation and
Innovation, which is part of the Institute of Work Psychology, University of
Sheffield. After graduating in psychology at Manchester Polytechnic, he
worked as Psychological Technician supporting people with learning dis­
abilities at home and at work. He then went back to academia and completed
a Diploma in Personnel Management at Manchester Polytechnic. It was
during this period that he met Richard Thorpe, who was to become his
supervisor on his PhD that examined the experience of skill development in
undergraduates on management courses.
On completing his PhD, David joined the Institute of Work Psychology
where his research focuses on the affects of job design on employee well­
being, learning and innovation. He has maintained an interest in manage­
ment education and development and has continued to work with Richard
Thorpe in this area. David is the co-editor of The New Workplace: A Guide
to the Human Impact of Modern Technology and Working Practices and has
published in j ournals such as Human Relations, the Journal of Occupational
and Organisational Psychology, the Journal of Occupational Health Psychol­
ogy, Management Learning and the British Journal of Management.

Richard Thorpe is Professor in Management and Director of the Graduate

School of Business at Manchester Metropolitan University. After spending
the early part of his career in industry culminating in the management of a
manufacturing company in the Highlands of Scotland, he joined Strathclyde
University. There, as a Research Fellow, he undertook a national study of
payment systems in Britain. This research led to collaboration in three
publications - Incentive Schemes in Britain, 1 978-1 980 (Department of
Employment, 1 982), Payment Systems and Productivity (Macmillan, 1 9 8 6 )
and Strategic Reward Management ( Financial Times International, 2000).
In 1 9 80, he j oined Glasgow University where he continued to widen his
research experience making contributions to the Scottish Business School's
Doctoral Programme. In 1 9 8 3 he was accepted for the International Teachers
Programme in Sweden and embarked on a PhD in small firm growth and
development, the experience of which led to a collaboration with his

Copyrighted Material
x Ma n a g e m e n t a n d L a n g u a g e

supervisor ( Mark Easterby-Smith) o n a research text book, Management

Research: An Introduction, 2nd edition ( Sage, 2002 ) .
On leaving Scotland, h e settled a t Manchester Metropolitan University
where the focus of his work and research took a new turn, focusing on the
Management of Change and the Learning and Development of Managers. It
was a PhD research project supervised by Richard and conducted by David
that was the genesis of the collaboration on this book.

Copyrighted Material
 Contributors

David M. Boje , Professor, Department of Management, New Mexico State

University, USA.
Francois Cooren , Associate Professor, Department of Communication, State
University of New York, Albany, USA.
Joep Cornelisson , Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam,
Netherlands.
Ann L. Cunliffe, Assistant Professor, Department of Public Administration,
California State University, USA.
Stanley Deetz, Professor, Department of Communication, University of
Colorado, USA.
Gail T. Fairhurst , Professor, Department of Communication, University of
Cincinnati, USA.
Jeffrey D. Ford, Associate Professor, Max M. Fisher College of Business,
Ohio State University, USA.
Laurie W. Ford, PhD, Critical Path Consultants, Ohio, USA.
Jeff Gold, Senior Lecturer, Leeds Business School, University of Leeds, UK.
Joy L. Han, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University
of Louisville, USA.
David J. Holman , Research Fellow, Institute of Work Psychology, University
of Sheffield, UK.
Dorothy Lander, Assistant Professor, Department of Adult Education, St
Francis Xavier University, Canada.
Mike Pedler, Revans Professorial Fellow, Revans Institute for Action Learn­
ing and Research, University of Salford, UK.
Craig Prichard, Senior Lecturer, Department of Management, Massey Uni­
versity, New Zealand.
John Shotter, Professor, Department of Communication, University of New
Hampshire.
Richard Thorpe , Professor, Graduate Business School, Manchester Metro­
politan University, UK.
Charles A. Willard, Professor, Department of Communication, University of
Louisville, USA.
Shirley Willihnganz, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Commu­
nication, University of Louisville, USA.

Copyrighted Material
 Figures and tables

1 . 1 Creating an organisational landscape 24

2 . 1 Types of storytelling organisation 44
4 . 1 The relationship between media use and the degree of difference
and interdependence between individuals or departments 69
4.2 Metaphor of management 72
4.3 Cognitive map - vision of the political landscape 77
5 . 1 Sandra's narrative schema 89
5 . 2 The situation before the implementation o f managed attrition 97
5.3 The situation after the implementation of managed attrition 98
9.1 The development idea 1 64
9.2 A big picture: whole systems development in Walsall 165
9.3 Three tasks i n facilitating organisational learning 168

4 . 1 Themes and strategy development 78

Copyrighted Material
 Introduction
Management and language:
the manager as a practical author

David J. Holman and Richard Thorpe

Almost anyone connected to the practice and study of management will, at

some point, have heard managers ask questions such as:

'How should I act in this situation?'

'What can I do in this context?'
'What is the best way to proceed?'
'What can I use to help me inform my action?'

In response, one might offer a range of suggestions, e.g., consider this, notice
that, think of that, or even make a number of prescriptions, e.g., do this, do
that. Whether instructive or prescriptive, the comments made in the ensuing
discussion would probably be informed by one's personal experience and
knowledge of management practice.
Another significant factor informing a person's response to questions
such as those above would be his or her beliefs about how managers should
approach their practice, i.e., a perceived ideal of managerial action. For
example, one person might suggest that a manager should proceed like a
scientist, by being as rational and objective as possible, by constructing and
testing hypotheses and by applying general principles and theories. A person
advocating such a view could be seen as having a scientific/technical under­
standing of managerial action, and an image of the manager as a practical
scientist ( Alvesson and Willmott, 1 996; Holman, 2000a; Reed, 1 98 9 ) .
Another person might quote Mintzberg, who stated that 'brief observation of
any manager will quickly lay to rest the notion that managers practise a
science' ( 1 999: 302 ) , and argue that this 'scientific' ideal is practically
impossible to achieve and not particularly useful even if it was. Rather, they
might suggest that a manager can proceed by reflecting closely on the social
and political processes of organisational life and on one's personal knowl­
edge of the situation, and use the insights gained from this to transform the

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2 Management and Language

situation rather than simply test a hypothesis on it. This person might be seen
as having a 'practice' perspective of management and an image of the
manager as a 'reflective practitioner' ( Reed, 1 9 89; Schon, 1 98 3 ) . 1
The 'scientific/technical' and the 'practice' perspective o f management,
and their associated images of the manager (respectively, the manager as
practical scientist and the manager as reflective practitioner), have been
highly influential in the study and practice of management. However, within
the practice perspective there has been a growing interest in how language is
used in organisational practice - sometimes referred to as the 'linguistic turn'
(Jablin and Putnam, 200 1 ; Westwood and Linstead, 200 1 ) . Thus, another
person in a discussion on how a manager might proceed, might agree with
the advocate of the practice perspective, but argue that the manager needs to
play closer attention to the way that language is used to shape the organisa­
tional landscape in ambiguous and uncertain conditions. She or he might
argue that closer attention to language use is important, as it is the primary
means through which managerial action occurs and with which organisa­
tions are created, maintained and changed. This person, while also coming
from a practice perspective of management, might suggest an alternative
image of the manager, and one that conj ures up more linguistic connotations,
namely, the manager as a 'practical author' (Shotter, 1 99 3 ) .2
The aim of this book, then, is to examine what it might mean to be a
practical author and to show how it applies to different facets of managerial
life. However, to show why we believe this idea to be valuable and timely, we
first provide a more detailed account of how it relates to the two other
dominant images of management, the manager as a practical scientist and the
manager as a reflective practitioner. We then go on to examine the linguistic
turn in management and organisational studies. Finally, we show how
Shotter's idea of the manager as a practical author resonates with many of
the concerns and themes in this linguistic turn.

Perhaps the most dominant image of management has been the manager as a
scientist or practical scientist ( Kolb, 1 9 8 4 ) and a scientific/technical perspec­
tive of management has underpinned this image. From a scientific/technical
perspective, managerial activity is characterised as a rational, technical and
morally neutral process of planning, controlling and decision-making aimed
at securing the organisations ends through the efficient use of administrative,
human and productive resources ( Reed, 1 9 8 9 ) . These activities are thought to
be most effective, and the aims of management most likely to be achieved,
when based on 'hard' information and grounded in the rigorous application
of scientifically validated knowledge and techniques. Furthermore, the 'best'
managers are seen to act according to a hypothetico-deductive scientific

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 I ntroduction 3

model of action, i.e., that action should involve constructing and testing
hypotheses and applying general principles and theories to problems (Schon,
1 98 3 ) .
The image o f the manager a s scientist has 'exerted a powerful influence
on the development of management thought' ( Reed, 1 98 9 : 74 ). Indeed,
through the influence of writers such as Frederick Taylor, management
thought was largely founded on the belief that managerial activity should be
akin to scientific activity. It is perhaps of no surprise then that management
education, particularly during its postwar expansion, sought to teach man­
agement as a scientifically based practice and teach only those ideas and
techniques that had been scientifically validated. There are also numerous
examples of managers using the image and aura of science when trying to
j ustify, legitimate and account for actions made (Pavlica, 1 996; Watson,
1 994).
The idea that managers ( or the 'best' managers) act in a scientific manner
and the ideal of management as a scientific practice has been subject to a
sustained, and some would say fatal, critique. One 'nail in the coffin' has
come from studies of management activity that have pointed to the fact that
managerial work is characterised by brevity, fragmentation, a fast pace, a
high degree of informal interpersonal contact and much ritual activity (Hales,
1 9 86; Kotter, 1 9 82; Stewart, 1 967; Mintzberg, 1 973 ) . Such studies have also
highlighted the social and political nature of managerial work. Moreover,
they have demonstrated that managers often have to make sense of and take
action in ambiguous and contradictory conditions in which both the means
and ends of action are highly uncertain. These descriptions of managerial
activity seem far removed from the image of the manager as scientist and this
alternative view of managerial activity, i.e., as a pragmatic, social and polit­
ical activity, can be labelled a 'practice perspective'. It is worth noting that
'critical' perspectives of management also share this view of management
action, although they are more explicit about understanding management
within its wider social, historical and economic context and with examining
the ends of management practice.

It could be argued that even if managers do not act according to the ideal of
management as a scientific activity, this does not necessarily mean that the
ideal is a poor one and that it should not be adhered to. The proponents of
this view might suggest that the problem does not lie in the theory but in its
execution. Yet, even the ideal of management as a scientific activity has come
under attack. One of the most notable of these critiques comes from Schon
( 1 9 8 3 ) in his book The Reflective Practitioner. In this highly influential work,

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4 Ma n a g e m e n t a n d L a n g u a g e

Schon argues strongly against the ideal o f professional and managerial activ­
ity as a scientific and technical activity. Schon suggests that such a model,
based on what he calls a technical rationality, is inappropriate for many
professional activities. For Schon, a 'technical rationality holds that practi­
tioners are instrumental problem solvers who select technical means best
suited to particular purposes. Rigorous professional practitioners solve well­
formed instrumental problems by applying theory and technique derived
from systematic, preferably scientific knowledge' ( 1 9 8 3 : 3-4 ) . Schon demon­
strates that one of the main difficulties of a technical rationality is its assump­
tion that, when a person is confronted by a problem, the problem is already
fairly well defined. Yet, many of the situations and problems that managers
have to contend with are not well defined but uncertain, messy and ambig­
uous. In these situations the problem is not just problem solving but also
problem setting. In other words, the issue is not just 'What techniques do
I use? ' but also 'What is the problem with which I am faced?' A further
assumption of a technical rationality is that the knowledge or means with
which to solve a problem can be applied to it in a relatively easy manner.
However, even when a problem has been defined and 'set', the outcome may
still escape the categories of applied science as the problem may be multi­
faceted, unique and riven with value conflicts. Simply applying scientific
knowledge and technique to a problem may therefore prove problematic.
Schon is also critical of the notion that technical problem solving
requires an objective stance, that it involves acting in a way that is akin to
hypothesis-driven testing and experimentation, and that it is primarily con­
cerned with the implementation and testing of technical decisions. Thus,
according to a technical rationality, a manager can be viewed as someone
who manipulates a situation from the outside, like a scientist observing
experiments in a laboratory. Yet serious doubts can be raised about whether a
person could ever 'step outside' of their worldview, as such a belief misses the
fact that the manager is embedded within his or her situation and that it is
their experientially derived knowledge from within a context ( i .e., their
social, political and cultural knowledge) that is essential for successful action.
Schon therefore stresses the importance of attending to the social and polit­
ical context in which problem setting, problem solving and knowledge appli­
cation occurs - something that a technical rationality tends to ignore or
downplay. A further consequence of a technical rationality is that the social
and political abilities required in these processes can sometimes be viewed as
less important. Indeed, personalities and politics are often blamed for the
failure of managerial activities, instead of recognising that it was possibly
failure to address the interests of different individuals and groups that helped
to undermine the potential 'success' of managerial activity.
Schon argues that activity could be approached differently. He labels this
different approach 'reflection-in-action' and those who practise it, 'reflective
practitioners'. Reflection-in-action is considered to be particularly appro­
priate for guiding action in unique and uncertain situations and to have a
number of important characteristics. One characteristic is a focus on problem

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 I n t r o d u ct i o n 5

setting, i.e., the need to frame a situation and 'impose' an order on it. In this
process the reflective practitioner is not dependent upon established theory
but employs an array of personal knowledge, theoretical knowledge, heu­
ristics and techniques. Furthermore, the person attempts to actively trans­
form or create a new situation - action goes beyond testing existing
knowledge. Moreover, in reflection-in-action, problem setting and transfor­
mation are intertwined and, as such, knowing and doing and means and ends
are not held to be separate and distinct entities.3 Schon also suggests that
engaging in reflection-in-action is like having a reflective conversation with
the situation. By making this comparison, he draws attention to the inher­
ently social nature of practice and many of his examples show how
reflection-in-action occurs through discussion. Another important character­
istic of reflection-in-action is that it recognises that practice is embedded in a
context of meanings. This highlights the need to attend to the contextually
specific nature of one's own and others' understandings. It also highlights
the limits of one's personal understanding and, in particular, that others with
different commitments may not share the 'compellingness' of one's personal
knowledge.
With regard to the study and practice of management, Schon's work
provided a powerful and cogent argument that professional activity could be
modelled on principles different to those emanating from a scientific!
technical perspective. In addition, Schon provided a powerful metaphor, the
reflective practitioner, which could act as guiding ideal. Indeed, the idea of
the reflective practitioner has been widely adopted in many spheres and in the
field of management it resonated especially well with the practice and critical
perspectives of management. This resonance occurred because they each
emphasise how practitioners deal with messy and ambiguous problems,
because they each highlight the social and political nature of practice and
because they all share a subjectivist epistemology. Studies of management
emanating from a practice perspective also highlighted that managers
engaged in little reflective activity, something for which managers were often
criticised. Schon's notion of the reflective practitioner could therefore be held
up to managers as an exemplary model of professional activity and, impor­
tantly, as a model that was in tune with the difficulties faced by managers in
their everyday lives.

Since Schon's work on the reflective practitioner, ideas about the nature of
management have progressed. From within the practice perspective of man­
agement, greater attention has been given to the nature, role and function of
language in organisational life (Jablin and Putnam, 200 1 ; Westwood and

Copyrighted Material
6 M a n a g e m e n t a n d La n g u a g e

Linstead, 200 1 ) . For example, studies have looked a t how linguistic resour­
ces, such as stories, metaphors and discourses, are used to construct notions
of management, leadership and self-identity ( Calas and Smircich, 1 99 1 ;
Townley, 1 993; Watson, 1 994). Other studies have attempted to understand
how language-based constructs (e.g., scripts, schema, cognitive maps, frames)
are used to make sense of the organisation and how they guide action
( Fairhurst and Sarr, 1 996; Gioia et aI., 1 989; Huff, 1 990). There has also
been an emphasis on how social practices (e.g., negotiation, storytelling,
rituals, teamwork, persuasion, arguments) and symbols (e.g., totems, myths,
sagas) are structured and unfold over time (Boje, 1 99 1 ; Gersick, 1 9 89;
Holman, 2000b ) . Yet another area of interest has centred on how these
different linguistic resources and social practices are employed by organisa­
tional members to create, maintain and alter 'the organisation' ( Bastien et aI.,
1 995; Boden, 1 994; Donnellon et aI., 1 9 86; Fairhurst, 1 993; Ford and Ford,
1 994; McPhee, 1 989; Weick, 1 995). An assumption in these studies is that
language use is central to the generation of the organising process. Indeed, for
some, language is the very thing with which organisations are constituted
(Taylor and Van Every, 2000) and organisations are likened metaphorically
to texts ( Putnam et aI., 1 996; Tompkins et aI., 1 9 8 9 ) .
The linguistic turn in organisation and management studies has been
prompted, in part, by the increasing influence of social constructionist ideas
about reality, knowledge, language and communication; ideas that differ
from those underlying the traditionally dominant scientific/technical approa­
ches. Thus, scientific/technical approaches to management and organisational
theory have assumed that reality is objective and that valid knowledge
reflects this reality ( Burrell and Morgan, 1 979). Flowing from this is the idea
that language is predominantly a system of representation, i.e., depicting
reality, objects, rules, norms, etc. In organisational studies, this has meant
that there has tended to be a focus on the conditions needed for effective
communication ( often conceptualised as information exchange) within
organisations and the interpersonal skills/abilities needed for effective com­
munication ( Deetz, 200 1 ) . Furthermore, language and communication has
generally been viewed as one explanatory factor among many. On the other
hand, the linguistic turn has placed language use at the centre of organisa­
tional and managerial life. Language use is considered to be one of the key
phenomena to be studied. This change was prompted, in large part, by the
view that social reality is socially constructed and that social interaction is an
essential part of this process (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). Language is not,
therefore, just a system of representation used to exchange information.
Rather, language is predominantly performative, productive and formative.
In other words, language does things, it makes things happen and it gives
form to reality ( Austin, 1 962; Garfinkel, 1 967).
For organisational and management studies, this means that language
use is seen to be the means through and with which organising and managing
occur. Psychology too has not been unaffected by the linguistic turn and the

Copyrighted Material
 I n t ro d u c t i o n 7

increasing interest in social constructionism ( Billig, 1 9 8 7; Edwards and Pot­

ter, 1 992; Gergen, 1985; Smith et aI., 1 995 ) . For example, in approaches
variously labelled as discursive, relational and dialogical psychology, primacy
is given to social relationships. In particular, there is a focus on the conversa­
tional or dialogical practices that people use to coordinate everyday activities
and how these everyday performances emerge from the uncertain, ambiguous
and vague conditions that often exist in the social world. There is an empha­
sis, then, on the linguistic processes that create, make and shape the social
world and ourselves. A further feature of these approaches is an assumption
that it is only from within these ways of relating to each other that people can
make sense of their surroundings and come to know the world around them.
The way in which we 'come to know' and what we know is based within
these wider relational activities (Hosking et aI., 1 995). Another feature, and
one emphasised by Shotter, is that because normally we must respond to
others in a way that takes their actions and intentions seriously, and because
we must coordinate our activities in socially acceptable and legitimate ways,
the problem of 'how to act' is not j ust a technical issue but also a moral one.

When we read Shotter's chapter on 'The Manager as a Practical Author'

( 1 993), we were struck by how it resonated with the linguistic turn in
management studies, j ust as Schon's reflective practitioner resonated with the
practice perspective.4 This resonance occurs because Shotter's notion of the
manager as a practical author highlights and dramatises practical language
use in organisations, the performative role of language and the centrality of
language to the process of organising. However, we also thought that what
made the idea of the practical author so appealing was that it went further
than simply reiterating the importance of language to managerial practice.
What we found so illuminating was the wider theoretical position in which it
was placed, namely, a relationaVdialogical approach to psychology. We felt
that much could be gained in the study and practice of management by
considering some of its implications. In particular, we were drawn to the idea
that 'good' managers recognised the formative power of language and that
they could jointly author some shared sense of organisational space within
which they and others could be situated ( Cunliffe, 200 1 ) . We also liked the
fact that Shotter drew attention to the types of conversational activities that
would be needed in authorship - and these were quite different from those
prescribed in most management textbooks. They include:

1 To articulate a clear formulation of what for others might be chaotic and

vague, and to give them a shared or sharable significance.
2 To create a landscape of enabling constraints relevant for a range of next
possible actions.

Copyrighted Material
8 Management a n d Language

3 To set out a network of moral positions or commitments ( understood as

the rights and duties of players in that landscape).
4 To be able to argue persuasively and authoritatively for this landscape
among those who must work in it.
5 To do the above in j oint action with others.

Although Shotter's original chapter on the practical author was highly

instructive, it was also relatively short. We therefore wanted to expand on his
original ideas, to consider what other activities or abilities might be useful for
practical authorship and to examine how it might be applied to aspects of
managerial practice. This book is an attempt to meet those aims and is laid
out in the following four parts.
Part 1 introduces and extends the idea of the practical author. In it, John
Shotter and Ann Cunliffe situate the practical author within a wider theoret­
ical framework, define practical authorship, focus on how managers create
intelligible formulations through everyday linguistic practices ( see also chap­
ters 6 and 8 ), highlight the linguistic and poetic resources available to help
managers in authorship ( see also chapters 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 ) , and argue for the
need for ethical forms of discourse (see also chapters 2, 3, 6 and 7).
Parts 2 to 4 offer a variety of perspectives that one might consider in
relation to the broad framework set out in Part 1. In particular, there is a
focus on the linguistic resources that can be used in authorship and on how
authorship might come into play when engaging in certain managerial tech­
niques.s Using the metaphor of 'authorship' we have grouped the remaining
chapters into three further parts, namely, 'Developing and Understanding the
Story', 'Developing the Author's Position', and 'Rewriting the Script,
Rescripting the Author'. It should be noted that we do not seek to provide an
exhaustive account of how managers use language, nor do we seek to provide
a definitive version of what a practical author might be and the 'skills'
needed. We also do not aim to offer a singular perspective on the practical
author. Rather, our intention is to be inclusive and to expand on the concept
of practical authorship from a variety of theoretical perspectives.
Part 2 focuses on the types of resources that can enable managers to gain
a better understanding of the work context and themselves. In chapter 2,
David Boje argues that, although storytelling is important in creating organi­
sational realities, managers also need to be aware of how the storytelling
process can be problematic, both practically and ethically. He defines four
major types of storytelling that are used by managers, draws attention to the
ways in which they are problematic, and goes on to suggest an alternative
type of storytelling process that is more sensitive to the concerns of the
different communities within an organisation. Storytelling is one resource

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 I ntroduction 9

that managers can employ and important aspects of any story are the charac­
ters in it and the identities of those characters. Chapter 3, by David Holman,
Jeff Gold and Richard Thorpe, proposes a relational approach to identity. In
particular, the chapter explores how identity is important in shaping action,
how a relational understanding of identity might improve one's understand­
ing of how organisational practices unfold and explores the links between a
relational understanding of identity and practical authorship. Until this
point, much of the focus has been on words, but not all stories are told in
words. Cartoons, pictures and diagrams are all means with which a story can
be told or enhanced. In chapter 4, Richard Thorpe and Joep Cornelisson
address these issues and look at some of the ways in which visual media can
be employed to aid the process of practical authorship.
While Part 2 concentrates on how practical authors can use language
and visual media to gain a better understanding of themselves and the work
context, Part 3 looks at some of the ways in which language can be used
more prospectively to create and restore flows of action. In chapter 5,
Francois Cooren and Gail Fairhurst start by drawing attention to the impor­
tance of narrative in understanding organisational action. They then combine
this with actor-network theory ( Latour, 1 996) to demonstrate how leaders
can accommodate the multiple perspectives of those in an organisation and
translate them into new inclusive landscapes of action. In other words, they
provide a detailed insight into one way in which a practical author's position
can be created, developed and used to shape the flow of action within
organisations.
Shotter ( 1 993) also suggests that practical authors need to argue persua­
sively for the landscapes of action that they propose. Chapter 6, by Shirley
Willihnganz, Joy Hart and Charles Willard, therefore concentrates on the
different ways that arguments can be made in an organisation. Based on
O'Keefe's ( 1 9 8 8 ) theory of Message Design Logistics, they suggest that being
a practical author requires the rhetorical and argumentative skills that are
unique to a Rhetorical Message Design Logic. In this logic, argument is seen
as a cooperative, negotiated and creative dialogue that can generate new
responses to situations and reframe situations to allow room for action rather
than impasse. Another important feature of the argumentative process is that
it creates a shared space where incompatible agendas are acknowledged and,
possibly, reconciled. Thus, as in the chapters by Boje and Cooren and Fair­
hurst, the need to recognise and accommodate alternative perspectives is
highlighted as an important factor in moving organisational action forward
and as central to organisational ethics.
The need to engage constructively with different perspectives means that
an ability to negotiate between them is paramount. In chapter 7, Stanley
Deetz draws attention to how identity, social orders (e.g., organisational
practices), knowledge and policies are negotiated products. He argues that
managers are sometimes 'guilty' of trying to stabilise the meanings of these
facets or acting as if meanings were fixed. This, he argues, is counter­
productive, as it prevents individuals and organisations from creating new

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10 Management and Language

potentialities. Rather, managers should b e actively involved i n complicating

and opening up the meanings associated with identities, social orders, etc., so
that new potentialities can be negotiated and jointly authored in collabora­
tion with others.
The first two chapters of Part 4 look at the ways in which practical
authors can engage in organisational change, i.e., re-writing the script of the
organisation. Thus, in chapter 8, Jeffrey Ford and Laurie Ford argue that
change is an unfolding of many conversations over time. They show that in
order to move action forward, managers need to engage in 'committed
conversations' in which each participant commits to engaging in certain acts
in the future. They then define and illustrate four different types of com­
mitted conversations and compare committed conversations to uncommitted
conversations. Chapter 9, by Mike Pedler, is also concerned with organisa­
tional change. He starts by comparing action learning and practical author­
ship and uses a practical example to show how action learning can be used to
coauthor change. The last chapter of Part 4, by Dorothy Lander and Craig
Prichard, is written as a conversation. In this conversation they aim to upset
the grammar of the practical author - to re-script the author - by taking a
critical examination of some of the assumptions that Shotter and Cunliffe
make in their writings about the practical author.

Notes

1 The two perspectives of management described here are derived from those
offered by Reed ( 1 98 9 ) and Alvesson and Willmott ( 1 99 6 ) . The 'scientific!
technical' perspective is derived from Reed's 'technical' and Alvesson and Will­
mott's 'technocratic' perspectives of management. The 'practice' perspective is
similar to Reed's 'political' and Alvesson and Willmott's 'progressive' per­
spectives. It must be noted, however, that Reed also uses the practice perspective
to denote an understanding of management that subsumes technical, political and
critical perspectives. That is not the intention here. The term practice is preferred
to political and progressive as it emphasises that this perspective is rooted in
empirical studies of managerial practice. The term practice is also preferred as
political is thought to be too narrow an understanding of the social practices
involved in management. The critical perspective is derived from the 'critical'
perspectives of Reed and Alvesson and Willmott.
2 As we locate the practical author within a practice perspective, we see it as
complementing the notion of the reflective practitioner and not as some compet­
ing alternative.
3 Schon describes a range of practices through which problem setting and trans­
formation might be achieved, although we will not detail these practices here.
4 We are not suggesting that the practical author is a better approach to practice
than the reflective practitioner. Rather, we view the practical author as another
'instructive account' and one that complements that of the reflective practitioner.
S We do not seek to provide an exhaustive account of practical authorship, our
intention is to illustrate how authorship can be applied to aspects of managerial
practice.

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 I n t r o duct i o n 11

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�ttingthe ce e TON E

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Copyrighted Material
 Managers as practical author :
everyday conversations for action

John Shotter and Ann l. Cunliffe

What is most difficult here is to put this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified,
into words. (Wittgenstein, 1 95 3 : 227)

Though he was trained both to develop such models [of his country's economy]
and to evaluate the models others developed, he [Fernando Flores] seldom found
time to do this work. Instead, he was constantly talking: he explained this and
that, to that and this person, put person A in touch with person B, held press
conferences, and so forth . . . Because he was sensitive to [this] anomaly [i.e., to
the fact that his work was not producing any particular products but that he
was working nonetheless] , it led him to take a course on the theory of speech
acts, and in that course he found the key to the anomaly . . . He saw that work
no longer made sense as the craftsmanship of writing this or that sentence or the
skilled craftsmanship of banging this of that widget into shape but that currently
work was becoming a matter of coordinating human activity - opening up
conversations about one thing or another to produce a binding promise to
perform an act . . . Work never appears in isolation but always in a context
created by conversation. (Spinosa et aI., 1 997: 45-6)

Lisa [a project manager] : So the understanding of what's real and what's

. . . urn . . . it isn't OK to do, is not well understood . . . I have no control
over the information and it really gets uncomfortable when you think the
construction company has a whole lot of subcontractors they pull in, so
you're left with a lot of fuzziness . . . and the whole project has that from
start to finish . . . I was saying to someone yesterday that a lot of what
I do at work is I have conversations with people and sometimes I feel
I should be having more output, and they said to me, 'well . . . you tend
to be in jobs with a high degree of ambiguity and in those circumstances,
talking things out with people and discussing them, that probably is your
job. It's to help figure out where are you in those circumstances and what
needs to get done.' So a lot of what I have been doing in my job is calling
together meetings which say we need to grapple with these issues, we
need to confront this stuff, or . . . I need to question these things.

Rob [a program manager]: We've set a goal that 95 per cent of the issues
I hear about shouldn't go further than me - only 5 per cent should go to
the next level of managers. Knowing which 5 per cent to escalate and

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16 S e tt i n g the S c e n e

when to escalate them consumes a fair amount o f time because there are
no rules. T he rule that I use is that if I start to feel in the pit of my
stomach, or if I can't sleep at night - it's time !

A radical change is occurring in our attitudes to human inquiry. We are

moving away from analysing our surroundings objectively as external obser­
vers of static forms of reality and moving away from studying the activity of
others while standing at a distance from them. Indeed, in the past, we have
attempted to make sense of others' activity in terms of the realm of behaviour
(explained as a naturally causal sequence of events) and the realm of action
(in which we explain the reasons why individuals act the way they do) . We
have also tried to understand those around us in a one-way fashion, by
fitting our observations of their activities into static theoretical schemas.
Now, we are beginning to conduct our inquiries in terms of the special
practical understanding that emerges from the interplay between our own
responsive expressions toward others and their equally responsive expres­
sions towards us. We shall call this a relationally responsive understanding to
contrast it with the representational-referential understanding more familiar
to us in our traditional intellectual dealings. Through this reorientation we
are beginning to recognise the special, first-time quality of unique events. We
are beginning to appreciate the importance of our living, embodied involve­
ments and our own unique spontaneous responses in generating new ideas.
As Merleau-Ponty puts it, such bodily responses generate 'a spontaneity
which teaches me what I could not know in any other way except through it'
( 1 964: 9 3 ) . Managers themselves recognise this living relationship within
their everyday practice, as Rob's quote above shows. He talks of his
spontaneous bodily responses in the sense of an 'instructive spontaneity' that
teaches him something that he cannot learn in any other way. Such responses
constitute a sensitive instrument for him, indicating, perhaps vaguely at first,
something of the nature of his involvements with others and, what may
emerge from this, are new, practical ways of relating to orienting ourselves to
one's surroundings.
In this third relationally responsive realm, activity is understood to
possess some features that are quite different from those of the other two
realms discussed above. First, what is so special about these jointly struc­
tured activities is that they are always incomplete. Indeed the central defining
feature of relationally responsive activity is its openness to being specified or
determined yet further by those involved in it. No wonder Wittgenstein
( 1 953) remarks, as we indicate above, that the task of putting the unique
indefiniteness of activity, correctly and unfalsified, into words, is not an easy
one. Yet managers, such as Lisa and Rob, find themselves struggling with
these issues of uniqueness, ambiguity, and 'fuzziness' on a day-to-day basis.

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 M a n a g e r s a s P r a ct i c a l A u t h o r s 17

Secondly, relationally responsive dialogical activity is not simply to d o with

two self-contained people having a two-way conversation. Rather, what
matters when a listener perceives and understands the meaning of another's
voiced utterance is that

he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He either agrees

or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for
its execution, and so on . . . [Likewise, a speaker] does not expect passive
understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in someone
else's mind (as in Saussure's model of linguistic communication . . . ). Rather, the
speaker talks with an expectation of a response, agreement, sympathy, objec­
tion, execution, and so forth . . . (Bakhtin, 1 9 86: 68-9 )

Furthermore, it is the particular ways in which our utterances are responsive

to the circumstances of their use that gives them their specific meanings:

What is important for the speaker about a linguistic form is not that it is a stable
and always self-equivalent signal, but that it is an always changeable and
adaptable sign . . . [T]he task of understanding does not basically amount to
recognising the form used, but rather to understanding its meaning in a
particular utterance, i.e., it amounts to understanding [responding to] its novelty
and not to recognising its identity. (Voloshinov, 1 9 86: 6 8 )

I n other words, practical meaning occurs between u s spontaneously i n the

living responses a second person gives to the expressions ( utterances) of a
first. It is the particular way in which we voice our utterances, shape and
intone them in responsive accord with our circumstances that gives our
utterances their unique, once-occurrent meanings. Also, it is in the way that
listeners act in response to our utterances that we j udge whether they have
understood them or not. Put simply, meanings are created in the sponta­
neously coordinated interplay of people's responsive relations to each other.
We can talk of participants within such dialogically structured activities
as being practical authors, who create between them a unique sense of their
shared circumstances that enables them to act in ways intelligible to each
other. Just as authors create a text with a felt unity in collaboration with their
readers, so conversational participants create meaning in a practice with its
own shared 'structure of feeling' (Williams, 1 977). And as we go on together,
certain styles or ways of speaking, certain 'language-games', may become
intertwined into our shared practices (Wittgenstein, 1 95 3 ) . Such ways of
speaking may serve to express and specify intricate ways in which our
practices may be refined, elaborated, or otherwise be made more fitting to
our circumstances. It is in this more developed way that we speak here of
people as practical authors. Thus, practical authors speak in such a way that
other participants can creatively respond in their own unique way but in
ways that still makes sense to all those involved.
This concern with authoring connects with this book's overall aim. For,
as David Holman and Richard Thorpe point out in the introduction, its aim
is to explore and develop the image of the manager as a practical author, first

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