On “Relational Things:” a New Realm of Inquiry — Pre-Understandings and Performative Understandings of People’s Meanings (original) (raw)

It is still far too easy in organizational studies research to assume (1) that words stand for things; (2) that we put our thoughts into words; and (3) that when we enter into a new situation, we can begin straightaway to act within it to achieve our own ends. But as Todes (2001) makes clear, things are not that simple. Much of our everyday activity begins, “with the sense of an indeterminate lack of something-or-other, but nothing-in-particular” (p.177). So that initially, we need to direct our explorations, not towards “what we want, but to discover what we want to get” (p.177). In other words, we cannot immediately embark upon studying emergent processes for we first need to “get oriented,” to calibrate (Bateson, 1979) our bodies — “the setting of [our] nerves and muscles” (p.211) — to a sufficient extent to be able to relate our outgoing anticipatory activities in an intelligible way with their incoming results, in order gain a sense of what might be relevant to our study. In other words, we need to understand what is around us, not as objects, but in terms of their meanings. But to do this, a new ontological realm of inquiry would seem to be required, concerned not with acquiring new knowledge as such, but with developing our embodied sensitivities to previously unnoticed aspects of circumstances troubling us. My aim will be to outline both the nature of this new realm of inquiry, and what — if we relinquish our concern with objective facts and the patterns amongst them — we need, initially, to focus on in our studies instead.