Muayyad Jabri - Rethinking Organizational Change: The Role of Dialogue, Dialectic & Polyphony in the Organization

Muayyad Jabri has written an interesting and important review which explores polyphony as a significant concept in the generation and understanding of meaning in everyday converse. Students and practicing managers alike will find this a fascinating and insightful read.

Julian Randall, University of Aberdeen, UK

This is a must-read for those in the field of change management that want to develop a relational dialogue approach. Rethinking Organizational Change is well written and can help scholars and managers alike.

David Boje, New Mexico State University, USA

Rethinking Organizational Change: The Role of Dialogue, Dialectic & Polyphony in the Organization makes an important scholarly contribution to our understanding of dialogue applied to the management of change. Muayyad Jabri offers an involved assessment of the differences between dialogue and dialectic and an intriguing invitation to rely on both for managing creative interventions into the change process. The book provides a surplus of new insights that will help to promote scholarly work in the area of managing change and to develop a more creative practice associated with the processes of managing change.

The call for polyphony facilitates a crossover from sameness to diversity and from univocal to multivocal representations. In reading patterns of managing change, whether from within or across organizational borders, it is found that a vital part of the reading is, at present, unreadable because we lack involved knowledge of how diversity and polyphony are interrelated. This book seeks to change this; based on a rendition of Mikhail Bakhtins anthropological concept of polyphony applied to organizational change. The reader is treated to a cutting-edge discussion of a variety of contemporary ontological and epistemological themes centered on process, dialectic, dialogue and social construction.

Muayyad Jabri is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Business University of New England Business School, Australia.

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The Role of Dialogue, Dialectic & Polyphony in the Organization

Muayyad Jabri

First published 2016

by Routledge

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2016 Taylor & Francis

The right of Muayyad Jabri to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jabri, Muayyad, author.
Title: Rethinking organizational change : the role of dialogue, dialectic &
polyphony in the organization / by Muayyad Jabri.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015035948 | ISBN 9781138837928 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781315734774 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Organizational changeManagement. | Communication in
organizations.
Classification: LCC HD58.8 .J3273 2016 | DDC 658.4/06dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035948

ISBN: 978-1-138-83792-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-73477-4 (ebk)

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This book is based on a rendition of Mikhail Bakhtins anthropological concept of polyphony applied to organizational change. The reader is treated to a cutting-edge discussion of a variety of contemporary themes centered on process, dialectic, dialogue, and plasticity. Why Bakhtin? Bakhtins thought is a source of inspiration. His notion of utterance and his distinction between monologue and dialogue have an important role to play in the face of the monologues of managerialism and the rigidity of dialectics. This books title therefore mentions rethinking polyphony because it enacts and maintains that polyphony, applied to organizational settings, means multiple voices that are unmerged into a single or unified perspective.

I think the scholarly concept of this book began when I first came across the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, some years back. Bakhtin greatly valued the existence of others. As the title of this bookRethinking Organizational Change: The Role of Dialogue, Dialectic & Polyphonysuggests, Bakhtin was careful to distinguish between language as a self-constrained system, which he identified as a codification, and a feeling for utterance. The former is centered on a Cartesian separation. It is about positing the self against objectifying truth and upon much of the ideology on which managerialism is based. A feeling for utterance is Socratess notion that we all contribute to forming each others sense of truth.