Turning to Discourse

Turning to Discourse

Barthes finds this description of discursus to be perfectly fitting the actions of a lover. But isn't it a fair description of the actions of an organizer as well? Running here and there, coming and going, taking measures, plotting and planning… True, organizers do more than that–they become involved with things and bodies, not merely plots and plans–but it is nevertheless a good beginning.

The ‘discursive turn’ brought many good things into organization and management studies. Let me enumerate a few.

The interest in discourse turned the attention of communication studies away from the mechanical model of information transfer, with its three heroes–‘the sender’, ‘the addressee’ and ‘the message’–and its villain, ‘the noise’. The perfect communication was assumed to occur when the message sent by the sender arrived at the receiver in its identical shape. As pointed out by Umberto Eco (1979), such a theory assumes that the information carried by a message is the negative of entropy and is equivalent to meaning. Accordingly, language is an order (a code) imposed upon the disorder of noise. Consequently, reiteration (redundancy) increases the possibility of the message being received and understood. Herein lies the hitch: ‘the very order which allows a message to be understood is also what makes it absolutely predictable–that is, extremely banal. The more ordered and comprehensive a message, the more predictable it is’ (Eco, 1979, p. 5). In a real interaction situation (as opposed to a machine simulation), information is additive: its value depends on its novelty to the receiver. The new text cannot be interpreted according to previously accepted rules; it is open to new interpretations, and new interpretations tend to be called misunderstandings. In time, some of these interpretations may win over others and acquire legitimacy; a new order is established and the information becomes predictable. Temporarily, however, meaning and information are opposed to each other. It is ambiguity that makes the world go on; perfect information is redundant. George Steiner takes this reasoning to the extreme, claiming that mistranslation is a source of human creativity. The Tower of Babel is a frustrating situation but, he says, perhaps the [Page 400]right way of managing such a situation is pidgin rather than Pentecost (Steiner, 1975/1992, p. 495). Running here and there, translating and misunderstanding, sowing order together with chaos: all of this becomes visible once discourse is in focus.

Steiner's reasoning is in tune with Latour's (1986) suggestion that each translation is a transformation, and as such injects energy into the translator and that which is translated. The picture of the organizer as someone who runs in between also helps to corroborate the point that Latour (2004) is making so forcefully: they are mediators, not intermediaries. An intermediary, in his vocabulary, is what transports meaning or force without transformation (an ‘ideal’ messenger); mediators transform, translate, distort and modify the meaning–or whatever they are supposed to carry. In the 1971 Joseph Losey movie, The Go-Between, the young messenger transports letters–but also bridges worlds and changes destinies, including his own. Class discourses clash with love discourses and with generation discourses, but it is Leo Colston's organizing that activates them and transforms them simultaneously.

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