Rebuilding Babel: A Constitutive Approach to Tongues-in-use

Abstract

In this paper, we suggest that the Montreal School (TMS) tradition of organizational communication offers a fruitful analytical framework that allows us to better take into account the way people practically deal with plurilingual situations as they go on with their daily activities and contribute to shaping their organizations. We identify six core features of TMS and show their analytical power in studying plurilingual interactions. TMS, we argue, is conceptually well equipped to reveal the ways in which multiple tongues are dealt with in everyday organizational settings and to uncover the constitutive nature of tongue‐in‐use.

Speaking about vision, talking in the name of so much more: A methodological framework for ventriloquial analyses in organization studies

“…The various vents and figures that the framework helps us identify oftentimes carry the form of nouns and refer to the substance that builds a reality or situation (Burke, 1945/1962; Chaput, Brummans, & Cooren, 2011). They represent what matters to the human participants, whether positively or negatively, in harmony or contradiction, which explains why they materialize in discussions (Bencherki et al, 2016; Cooren et al, 2012). Yet, voices do not multiply by themselves and need to enter an interaction through an action, condition, or experience , that is, through a verb.…”

“…Understanding visions appeared to be imperatively coupled with a process of translating visions’ broader abstractions into more tangible and comprehensible aspects (e.g., doctors’ and management’s behaviors in vignette 4; see Kopaneva & Sias, 2015), even if this translation concerned yet-to-exist realities (e.g., future doctor behavior in vignette 2; see Bencherki, Matte, & Pelletier, 2016). Our participants looked for what (un)substantiated or (de)materialized their organizations’ visions by ventriloquizing figures of everyday practice to show what they have to say about what is envisioned by management.…”

Being Followed by an Organization

“…In fact, the researcher is regularly himself or herself a part of the data analyzed by CCO scholars (e.g. Bencherki, Matte, & Pelletier, 2016;Cooren, Bencherki, Chaput, & Vásquez, 2015;Vásquez et al, 2017). By taking seriously the researcher's participation in the field, and recognizing him or her, as we did here, as a witness from the inside, but also as an object of the organizing articulation, and as letting himself or herself be possessed by the organization, then the dummy/ventriloquist interplay, which we referred to as passivity/activity, becomes a central engine in the researcher's work, not only as an outside analyst of discursive data, but also as an embodied experimenter of organizational reality.…”

1 Speaking

“…She relied on informal translation by other colleagues. Over time, though, the workers and she developed a repertoire of gestures that allowed them to relay simple ideas even though they did not share a common tongue (Bencherki, Matte and Pelletier 2016).…”