Abstract for: 11th Organization Studies Summer Workshop & Special Issue — Sprituality, Symbolism, and
Storytelling, Mykonos, Greece, May 19th-21st, 2016.
Portraying ‘lived experiences’ in ‘narrative accounts’ that not only
challenge prevailing ‘thought styles’ in one’s ‘social community’, but
provide enticing openings to change them.
John Shotter
“Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view.
Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously
supersedes them as life proceeds” (James, 2003/1912, p.72).
“I will describe this experience in order, if possible, to make you recall the same or
similar experiences... when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then
inclined to use such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how
extraordinary that the world should exist’” (Wittgenstein, 1993, p.41).
“What actually thinks within a person is not the individual himself but his social
community. The source of his thinking is not within himself but is to be found in his
social environment and in the very social atmosphere he ‘breathes’. His mind is
structured, and necessarily so, under the influence of this ever-present social
environment and he cannot think in any other way” (Fleck, 1979/1935, p.47).
What is it to think rationally? To think reasonably? To think? Clearly, there are at least two ways, not just
the one based in or modelled on mathematical and/or logical modes of thought. As Chia (1996), along
with many others, makes clear, we can distinguish between what we can variously call, intellectual vs.
intuitive (Bergson, 1911), downstream vs. upstream (Chia, 1996, Bortoft, 2012, Shotter, 2000), ‘reason’ vs.
‘reasonableness’ (Toulmin, 2001), or after-the-fact vs. before-the-fact (Shotter, 2011, 2014) modes of
thought. Rather than a mode of thought that gives primacy to already eternally existing things, this
second way gives primacy to a still developing world of flowing movement, in which ‘things’ as dynamic
stabilities can come into existence for a while, but which eventually disappear. But to think in this second
way — which involves our entering into living relations with the others and othernesses around us — is
not at all easy. This is especially so because we have all grown up within the pervasive modernism at work
within our Western cultures, pervasive because it works to provide an unmentioned, taken-for-granted
foundation or background of already separately existing ‘things’, not only to our research and deliberate
inquiries, but also to our more spontaneous everyday thought, talk, and action.
Thus it is still the case, no matter what we might intellectually claim, that many of us think like
Laplace in 1812, that one day science, especially a properly mathematically expressed science, will explain
everything. Clearly, however, that modern age, in which representational ideals have played such a
prominent part, is coming to an end. Crucially, it has depended upon, as both Heidegger (2002) and
Wittgenstein (1953) have put it, our becoming subjected to, or held captive, by a “picture” — a picture of
our own fashioning that we cannot easily “get outside it, for it [lies] in our language and language [seems]
to repeat it to us inexorably” (no.115). Indeed, we take the nature of this world-picture (or Weltbild) as an
unmentioned, matter-of-fact basis, not only for our more disciplined inquiries, but even more
importantly, for most our everyday thinking, whether as an ordinary person-in-the-street, a politician, the
CEO of a company, or a physical or social scientist. It determines for us, as Heidegger (2002) puts it, the
“ground-plan” of what we take reality to be, such that all our aboutness-thinking (Shotter, 2005, 2006),
our deliberate, self-controlled thinking, is done from within it, without our being aware of the fact of it
being a cultural-historical artifact.
Central to such a Weltbild, as Kant (1786/2004) made clear long ago — in his claim that “in any
special doctrine of nature there can be only as much proper science as there is mathematics therein” (p.6)
— is a world of already separate, countable and nameable ‘things’. And it is still the case that, as
Heidegger (2002) points out, in our “observation of beings and things, [we act as if already know in
advance] the corporeality of bodies, the vegetable character of plants, the animality of animals, the
humanness of human beings. [And] along with these, belonging to the already-known, i.e., [to the]
"mathematical," are the numbers” (p.59). Indeed, nothing is more obvious that in all our research in the
human and social sciences, we are seek ‘results’ that can be stated in terms of nameable, general, timeless,
truths.
Yet, as the conveners of the 11th Symposium make clear: “The global crises of the past decadeeconomic, financial, food, energy, health, migration and security have called into question extant
institutional and organizational configurations. These crises have also exposed the weaknesses of the
dominant imaginaries underpinning such configurations and symbolic norms they come to represent.”
We cannot continue with ‘business as usual’. Another way (Gr ~ hodos) of thinking that avoids the use of
such pervasive, taken-for-granted Weltbilden, ground-plans, or conceptual frameworks — that predetermine the ontological character of what we take our background reality to be — is badly needed.
It is to be found, I think, in our taking it, as Chia (1996) makes clear, that we live our lives
immersed within an indivisible but stranded stream of flowing, swirling, turbulent activities, in which
stabilities occasionally occur, some of which can be sustained for a while, whilst others cannot. In line
with an emphasis on upstream or before-the-fact thought and talk, what I would like to add to Chia’s
account, is the importance of the wordings that we bring to our at first vague experiences. For not only
can they work to make the whatness of our experiences clear both to ourselves and to the others around
us, but in their especial capacity to ‘point forwards’, i.e., of arousing anticipations within us and others as
to what should come next in our expressions (Bakhtin, 1981), the different particular words we choose
can work to structure our ways of life ethically and politically in different ways. Thus our task cannot
simply be that of seeking ‘truths’, whilst thinking ‘from within’ a priori conceptual frameworks, but of
doing justice to every detail of each unique circumstance within which we find ourselves called to act
As I see it, the current rise of interest in Spirituality, Symbolism, Storytelling, and the attention to
anthropological accounts of different people’s often very different ways of acting and of making sense of
their life worlds, is a symptom of the fact that we all have a sense of that something more that fringes our
fields of experience, as James (1912) puts it above. And that further, we all also, from time to time,
experience, as Wittgenstein (1993) puts it, a sense of amazement that we, along with everything else
around us, should ever have come into being.
Thus, if we are to overcome the limitations of our current modelled-on-mathematics “thought
styles” (Denkstilen), as Fleck (1979/1935) termed them, which position us far too far downstream in an
already-made world to do justice to processes-in-their-organizing. We need to move back upstream to a
focus on our everyday movements and activities, and on the speakings that make their nature shareable
with others — for we need to focus, not upon how what is said corresponds with concepts already within
us, but with how our sayings can arouse unique movements of feeling both within us (and others) that can
provide us with the appropriate action guiding anticipations (Shotter, 2005, 2008) enabling us to coordinate our actions in with those of the others around us, and they with ours.
All this means, of course, as Nayak (2008) puts it, that we cannot ever have fully finalized, general
theories of organizational processes; we will always be “on the way to theory.” Indeed, as I see it, rather
than theories or theoretical frameworks, as such, from within which to see and to think about events
occurring around us, we will continually need quite specific “narrative accounts” (Mills, 1940; Lyman &
Scott, 1968), whose function in their telling (Shotter, 1981) will be, as “reminders” or “objects of
comparison” (Wittgenstein, 1953, nos127&130), working to direct our attention to unique details of
importance in our surroundings, i.e., to possible openings for next steps, that we might otherwise miss. It
is in the shift from a static, general representational function to moving, unique-feeling-arousing function,
that such situated accounts will have a crucial role to play.
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