Jenny Helin

Family business succession in dialogue: The case of differing backgrounds and views:

This article develops a greater understanding of family business succession as a process taking place within emergent conversations. Based on a real-time qualitative study of an owner family’s conversations during succession and Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘utterance’, three dimensions of dialogic transformation are elaborated: the role of differences during conversations, the role of multi-voiced conversations and the role of listening during conversations. When these dimensions are viewed together, they contribute to current family business research by emphasizing the need to better understand the present moment during succession conversations. We are conceptualizing the present moment as a ‘living moment’, as a reminder of the once-occurring, unique and momentary transformation that can take place between family members in such encounters. Implications for research as well as practice are elaborated upon.

Dialogic listening: toward an embodied understanding of how to “go on” during fieldwork

Purpose – In recognizing that we have different modes of listening, just as there are different ways of talking, the purpose of this paper is to explore how a greater awareness of listening can be a resource during fieldwork. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a collaborative study of a family business as a starting point and focusses on a meeting held in the owner family where emotional issues concerning conflicts were discussed. Detailed illustrations from this two-hour meeting show how listening guided all participants, including the author in her role as a researcher. Findings – Based on Bakhtins work on dialogue as well as literature on listening the notion of “dialogic listening” is developed. This notion emphasizes four dimensions of listening: relationality and conversations as a shared activity, listening as an active process, the polyphonic nature of listening, and listening as an embodied activity. The paper illustrates how dialogic listening can create a feeling of an “us” where we ...

Writing Process After Reading Bakhtin From Theorized Plots to Unfinalizable “Living” Events

This article focuses on the process of writing where the purpose is to explore how it is possible to write a research account that is inviting and “alive” so that, in reading, novelty unfolds. The account includes an illustration of how I struggled with writing and eventually found a way forward in reading Bakhtin’s work on the polyphonic novel. Inspiration from this genre opened up a kind of “listening writing”: an embodied and prospective form of writing that questions the traditional role of plot, because it calls for a letting go of predesigned structures. Instead, it suggests a writing driven by the interplay of voices, curiosity, and openness to the next possible word. The article contributes to the discussion on how writing matters and, in particular, how “unfinalizable” writing practices, in which the author tries not to be the final mediator of meaning, can enrich organization studies.

Dialogical writing: Co-inquiring between the written and the spoken word

ABSTRACT The foundational view of discourse as a descriptive mode of representation and writing as a retrospective stabilizing tool has been criticized in organization and management research. The purpose of this paper is to inquire into a more emergent, unfinished, and relational writing used throughout the research processes. To that aim, I develop the notion of ‘dialogical writing’ by drawing on the literature on performative utterances and a collaborative fieldwork project where writing became an integrated part of the research process. I come to understand this form of writing as one in situ where addressivity, responsiveness, and unfinalizability are emphasized. This enables writing to be part of a conversation; writing as a response to that which has been said and in anticipation of the next possible utterance. I close with implications for writing in organization studies, such as the possibility of thinking of writing as an offering of the tentative.

Stabilizing Movements: How Television Professionals Use Other People's Voices to Cope with New Professional Practices During Times of Change

Abstract Based on an extensive qualitative study, this article explores how professional workers in an organization, in this case television programme makers at a public broadcaster, cope with the complex changes that occur when their professional practices as well as their organization are in the midst of turbulent times. Departing from a process perspective to organizational change and insights from Bakhtins notion of ‘double-voicing’, which means that people borrow other peoples words in their own talk, two main contributions are offered. First, we show how stability cannot be taken for granted but rather takes continuous work. This work is conceptualized through the notion of ‘stabilizing movements’ in which other peoples voices can be used to legitimate ones own practices and thereby create a space for ones own actions. In this way, stabilizing movements can create a feeling of stability, and a sense of a stabilized platform for action. Second, the research shows the need for inquiring into the contextualizing work carried out by professional workers during change. Thus, we find that there is no context ‘out there’ as a given. Rather, this study points at the importance of studying the contextualizing work people continuously do in various ways where different contexts are created and re-worked in the professionals practices.