Arne Carlsen

Organizational Becoming as Dialogic Imagination of Practice: The Case of the Indomitable Gauls

This paper explores the relationship between authoring of identities and organizational development through a case study of the 18-year history of a professional service firm. Drawing from process theory, narrative psychology, and practice approaches to identity, I outline a perspective on organizational becoming as dialogic imagination of practice. Conceived as such, authoring takes place as a continuous stream of suggestions of what practice is, has been, and could be, simultaneously addressing life enrichment and organizational development. Three forms of imagination of practice are identified as central in the development of the case organization: (1) the instantiating of project experiences as identity exemplars; (2) a powerful dramatizing of trajectories of practice, exemplified by use of the metaphor of the Indomitable Gauls; and (3) a subsequent reframing instigated by discontinuous changes in dominant activity sets. The three authoring forms are discussed in relation to organizational development and adaptation. Implications include increased attention to forward-looking authoring motives and hope, a reformulation of the identity question from who are we? to what are we doing? and a possible location of practices as belonging to stories beyond that of the organization.

Positive dramas: Enacting self-adventures in organizations

In response to a need for understanding the role of practice and agency in identity production, this paper establishes the concept of positive dramas. Positive dramas are particular fields of meaning and engagement constituted by people to organize experience into lived narratives; enacted self-adventures marked by a sense of something important being at stake, unpredictability, emotional engagement, and involvement of self. Based on research in four organizational settings, five main types of positive dramas are identified (The Battle, The Mission, The Mystery, The Treasure Hunt, and The Other). Their temporal levels range from peak experiences, to time-bound cycles inherent in work, to open-ended quests. These findings are situated within the tradition of positive organizational scholarship. Implications for identity production are more broadly discussed.

Valuation of Environmental Goods with Expert Panels

The present work introduces the use of decision panels to valuate environmental goods for public policy purposes as a supplement to more traditional contingent evaluation methods. It addresses problems arising from road traffic and seeks to specify the most important environmental- and health impacts in a useful way, both for valuation and policy making purposes. Particularly, we want contribute with reasonable appraisals of how much it is worth for the society to reduce the various impacts by one unit.

Playing the Cards: Using Collaborative Artifacts With Thin Categories to Make Research Co-Generative

How can collaborative artifacts mediate processes of researcher–practitioner interactions to make research more co-generative? Research on knowledge co-production has paid little attention to how joint theory building is socio-materially mediated and tends to downplay discovery and wonder as sources of generativity. This article provides an empirical investigation of the use of thin categories on hard-copy A5 cards, combining brief texts and images to communicate tentative theoretical categories and involve practitioners in theorizing. Playing these cards opened up a new discursive space in the dialogue, making it an event of tactile engagement, ludic interaction, and power symmetry. We discuss how the transformed dialogue can be understood as processes of (a) dealing–touching–receiving collaborative artifacts that invite participants into rating, comparing, and combining, and (b) thickening of thin categories by recognition/appropriation and expansion/search. The article implicates a new vocabulary for mediating collaborative research, combining visual and material elements with notions of social poetics.

First passion: Wonder in organizational inquiry

Wonder is the first passion in all inquiry and our reason to know, yet a phenomenon that is largely neglected in organizational research. Taking a relational and process approach, we develop a theory for the role of wonder in organizational inquiry. We propose that wonder in inquiry unfolds as a twofold movement between receptive appreciation and self-transcendent search, and we chart wonder’s course in four stages or “moments” of arousal, expansion, immersion, and explanation. Examples from generative experiences in qualitative research, hydrocarbon exploration, and feature journalism are used to illustrate and qualify this theory. At last, we emphasize main implications for organization studies in the importance of wondering together, of upholding the mysteries of wonder, and of keeping wonder alive in our conversations.

Using decision panels to evaluate hydropower development projects

The construction of hydropower plants in Norway is notoriously controversial. They impact rivers, waterfalls and lakes and affect activities such as hunting, angling, skiing and tourism etc. The local community is usually divided on the issues. People appreciate the income from sales of electricity and related taxes, but resent the negative environmental impacts. Usually different stakeholders take quite different stances on the prospects, making the decision process thorny. In addition, central authorities and national organizations also have their say, adding to the complexities of the decision process. The paper describes a controversial case where the object was to recommend whether or not to carry out a planned extension of an existing hydroelectric plant in the scenic Sauda valley on the west coast. A traditional cost-benefit analysis had already been carried out. To complete the picture, we employed decision panels in an extended cost-benefit analysis (ECBA) to identify a range of willingness-to-pay (WTP) for non-market environmental goods. The WTPs were supposed to be representative of important stakeholders in the controversy. They were inferred by constructing multicriteria utility functions for the panels. We also hoped that the rationality of value-focused multicriteria thinking would help mitigate controversies among the stakeholders. Three parallel and independent decision panels were created. The participants included persons from the Ministry of Environment, the Norwegian Water and Electricity Board, the local government, the regional environmental authority and the development agency. The sessions with the decision panels were computer interactive. Six criteria were selected from a list to represent the most crucial environmentally related concerns: submerged areas, river stretches with reduced discharges, new roads, transmission lines, affected cultural sites, reduced fishing and hunting activities. In addition, the costs of development was used as a decision criterion. The panels made trade-off judgments of hypothetical situations described by criteria pairs. Their responses were given on an interval scale and analyzed with regression analysis. The panels performed the trade-off analysis diligently and with high self-confidence. The implicit WTPs were computed and used as a process feedback to the participants. The process revealed systematic preference differences both within and across the panels, the largest one being of the order of 10. The differences were consistent with known stakeholder interests. The WTPs of the local panel were close to the WTPs for the local population which was estimated by contingent valuation in a separate study. This indicates a degree of consistency between the decision analysis results and the sentiments of the population. The ECBA showed that, according to the preferences of the local panel, the extension project should be built. The preferences of the two other panels, however, pointed the other way. The analysis, therefore, served to uncover and explain the roots of the existing controversy. Another conclusion was that the methodology of multicriteria decision making (MCDM) lends itself as a natural tool to systematize and valuate the external (non-market) effects of hydropower development projects. In this way, the MCDM process can be a useful instrument in extended cost-benefit analyses (ECBA).

Only when I Laugh? Notes on the Becoming Interview.

This paper starts from the observation that particularly rewarding parts of a set of research interviews were all accompanied by laughter. The interviews in question inquired into organizational practice as sites for individual and collective ‘becoming’, conceived as a set of ongoing authoring acts situated in everyday work. The research interview should be considered amongst those events where such authoring takes place. Interviews constitute events of understanding within the hermeneutics of becoming. Based on two exemplifying strips of dialogues from my interviews, I identify and discuss three kinds of laughter. ‘Positioning laughter’ has the function of affirming authoring acts, welcoming elaboration and creating a general atmosphere of trust. ‘Resonating laughter’ addresses a form of pattern recognition that I suggest amounts to the tuning‐in to an unutterable ‘we’. The function of resonating laughter is that it marks and celebrates this emerging understanding and plants the seeds of a prolonged inte...This paper starts from the observation that particularly rewarding parts of a set of research interviews were all accompanied by laughter. The interviews in question inquired into organizational practice as sites for individual and collective ‘becoming’, conceived as a set of ongoing authoring acts situated in everyday work. The research interview should be considered amongst those events where such authoring takes place. Interviews constitute events of understanding within the hermeneutics of becoming. Based on two exemplifying strips of dialogues from my interviews, I identify and discuss three kinds of laughter. ‘Positioning laughter’ has the function of affirming authoring acts, welcoming elaboration and creating a general atmosphere of trust. ‘Resonating laughter’ addresses a form of pattern recognition that I suggest amounts to the tuning‐in to an unutterable ‘we’. The function of resonating laughter is that it marks and celebrates this emerging understanding and plants the seeds of a prolonged interpretive effort. ‘Liberating laughter’ addresses and potentially releases from constraints in the event of understanding: whether that be in patterns of the interview as a social event, in prior understanding or in investments into self‐conceptions. The overall function of laughter is that it may enhance implicit interpretation and maintain an open dialectic in understanding; both qualities of particular relevance in becoming interviews.

Valuation of Environmental Goods

Health impacts of emissions from automobile traffic have been valuated with expert panels in a study reported elsewhere. To investigate possible biases created by framing effects, a separate study was conducted. 200 students were given a case describing city planning options in a small Norwegian city. They formed panels of maximum three persons each. They were expected to act as concerned citizens and try and build consistent multi criteria utility functions to determine how much they think the society should spend to alleviate various health problems connected with emissions from automobile traffic. To study possible framing effects, the students were randomly handed one of two possible cases. In the one case, all health impacts and costs were half the size of those in the other.

On the tacit side of organizational identity: Narrative unconscious and figured practice

It is a paradox of research on organizational identity formation that it cannot take place without reliance upon the expressive acts people use, yet the experience of identity cannot be reduced to such expressions. People are more than they can tell. Drawing from a study of a communication agency and building on notions of self in pragmatism, anthropology, and narrative philosophy, I identify two chief dimensions of tacit organizational identity: (1) the narrative unconscious in the stories that people live by and (2) the related figuring of formative organizational practice, in particular regarding choice of and framing of projects. In the case of organization, an episode revolving around the presentation of the ‘New Bohemian Laws’ provides a window to explore both these dimensions. Implications include a refined methodological approach to identity research. It involves acknowledging ‘feelings of identity’, attending to poetics, tuning-in to refrains and styles, and pursuing a relational subjectivity.

The romance of wonder in organization studies

Wonder is the romance of all human study – a two-in-oneness of beautiful mystery and a rational inquiring mind. To wonder is to be open to mysteries beyond the known; it is to engage the largest questions of life; and above all, it is to come into being as a human person by reaching to the humanity of all peoples that resides in the transcendent. In this essay, we describe the wonder of organizational studies as literally a romance; a marriage of distinctive forms of human reasoning that, while they may show up in one and the same person, are essentially male and female. We look for wonder in a collection of stories about qualitative research in organizations in which organizational scholars at their best unite male and female aspects of human reasoning in wonder. In their stories, we find the soulful mystery and romance that delights and enchants the study of persons and organizations.