scholarly journals Fiction and Organization Studies

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (7) ◽  
pp. 975-994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Savage ◽  
Joep P. Cornelissen ◽  
Henrika Franck
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Basic Operation ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Philosophy Of Fiction

The topic of fiction is in itself not new to the domain of organization studies. However, prior research has often separated fiction from the reality of organizations and used fiction metaphorically or as a figurative source to describe and interpret organizations. In this article, we go beyond the classic use of fiction, and suggest that fiction should be a central concern in organization studies. We draw on the philosophy of fiction to offer an alternative account of the nature of fiction and its basic operation. We specifically import Searle’s work on speech acts, Walton’s pretense theory, Iser’s fictionalizing acts, and Ricoeur’s work on narrative fiction to theorize about organizations as fictions. In doing so, we hope that we not only offer an account of the “ontological status” of organizations but also provide a set of theoretical coordinates and lenses through which, separately or together, the notion of organizations as fictions can be approached and understood.

scholarly journals Property and Organization Studies

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 497-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bencherki ◽  
Alaric Bourgoin
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Crack Open ◽  
Legal Definition ◽  
The Many ◽  
Property Changes ◽  
The Individual

Property is pervasive, and yet we organization scholars rarely discuss it. When we do, we think of it as a black-boxed concept to explain other phenomena, rather than studying it in its own right. This may be because organization scholars tend to limit their understanding of property to its legal definition, and emphasize control and exclusion as its defining criteria. This essay wishes to crack open the black box of property and explore the many ways in which possessive relations are established. They are achieved through work, take place as we make sense of signs, are invoked into existence in our speech acts, and travel along sociomaterial networks. Through a fictionalized account of a photographic exhibition, we show that property overflows its usual legal-economic definition. Building on the case of the photographic exhibit, we show that recognizing the diversity of property changes our rapport with organization studies as a field, by unifying its approaches to the individual-vs.-collective dilemma. We conclude by noting that if theories can make a difference, then whoever controls the assignment of property – including academics who ascribe properties to their objects of study – decides not only who has or who owns what, but also who or what that person or thing can be.

Tentative Sprechakte

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-201
Author(s):  
Donata Schoeller
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Felt Sense ◽  
Eugene Gendlin

Abstract This paper introduces speech acts that I denote as tentative, which means they do not make sense as single propositions. The meaning they make depends on the attempt to formulate something which seems difficult to put in words. There is no finished intention, feeling or idea to be represented; neither can one construct whatever one wants to say. Tentative speech acts make sense by literally speaking into a felt complexity, as Eugene Gendlin demonstrates. What needs to be understood in regards to these speech acts is a development of meaning occurring during the formulation and not the ontological status of inner entities. A happy outcome of tentative speech acts is a clarification of some aspect of a situation, problem, puzzlement or vague idea, at times involving complex implicit contexts, backgrounds and what Dilthey termed “Lebenszusammenhänge”. In order to speak of these kinds of complex points of reference, John Dewey introduced the term of the „quality of a situation“ and Eugene Gendlin the term „felt sense“. The paper explores ways to approach these speech acts and to consider their philosophical relevance.

Fictional Discourse

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Predelli
Keyword(s):  
Proper Names ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Narrative Time ◽  
Literary Characters ◽  
Fictional Names ◽  
Philosophy Of Fiction

This book defends a Radical Fictionalist Semantics for fictional discourse. Focusing on proper names as prototypical devices of reference, it argues that fictional names are only fictionally proper names, and that, as a result, fictional sentences do not encode propositions. According to Radical Fictionalism, the contentful outcomes achieved by fiction are derived from the outcomes of so-called impartation, that is, from the effects achieved by the use of language. As a result, Radical Fictionalism pays special attention to fictional telling and to related themes in narrative fiction. In particular, the book proposes a Radical Fictionalist approach to the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic fiction, and to the divide between storyworlds and narrative peripheries. These ideas are then applied to the discussion of classic themes in the philosophy of fiction, including narrative time, literary translation, storyworld importation, fictional languages, inconsistent fictions, nested narratives, and narrative closure. Particular attention is also given to the commitments of Radical Fictionalism when it comes to discourse about fiction, as in prefixed sentences of the form ‘according to fiction F, … ’. In its final two chapters, the book extends Radical Fictionalism to critical discourse. In Chapter 7 it introduces the ideas of critical and biased retelling, and in Chapter 8 it pauses on the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and talk about literary characters.

The Expressive Dimension and Score-changing Function of Speech Acts from the Evolutionist Point of View

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maciej Witek
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Expressive Power ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Verbal Interaction ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Illocutionary Acts ◽  
Change Context ◽  
Expressive Dimension

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, the author examines Mitchell Green’s (2009) account of the expressive power and score-changing function of speech acts; second, he develops an alternative, though also evolutionist approach to explaining these two hallmarks of verbal interaction. After discussing the central tenets of Green’s model, the author draws two distinctions – between externalist and internalist aspects of veracity, and between perlocutionary and illocutionary credibility – and argues that they constitute a natural refinement of Green’s original conceptual framework. Finally, the author uses the refined framework to develop an alternative account of expressing thoughts with words. In particular, he argues that in theorising about expressing thoughts with words – as well as about using language to change context – we should adopt a Millikanian view on what can be called, following Green, acts of communication and an Austinian approach to speech or illocutionary acts.

scholarly journals Behavioral Visibility: A new paradigm for organization studies in the age of digitization, digitalization, and datafication

2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (12) ◽  
pp. 1601-1625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul M. Leonardi ◽  
Jeffrey W. Treem
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Learning Algorithms ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Important Phenomenon ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
The Way

The digitization, digitalization, and datafication of work and communication, coupled with social and technical infrastructures that enable connectivity, are making it increasingly easy for the behaviors of people, collectives, and technological devices to see and be seen. Such digital connectivity gives rise to the important phenomenon of behavioral visibility. We argue that studying the antecedents, processes, and consequences of behavioral visibility should be a central concern for scholars of organizing. We attempt to set the cornerstones for the study of behavioral visibility by considering the social and technological contexts that are enabling behavioral visibility, developing the concept of behavioral visibility by defining its various components, considering the conditions through which it is commonly produced, and outlining potential consequences of behavioral visibility in the form of three paradoxes. We conclude with some conjectures about the kinds of research questions, empirical foci, and methodological strategies that scholars will need to embrace in order to understand how behavioral visibility shapes and is shaped by the process of organizing as we catapult, swiftly, into an era where artificial intelligence, learning algorithms, and social tools are changing the way people work.

scholarly journals Writing Responsibly: Narrative Fiction and Organization Studies

Organization ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 467-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Rhodes ◽  
Andrew D. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Organization Studies

scholarly journals Deconstructing Questions: Reanalyzing a heterogenous class of speech acts via commitment and engagement

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-82
Author(s):  
Johannes M. Heim ◽  
Martina E. Wiltschko
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Direct Link ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Syntactic Form ◽  
Pragmatic Function ◽  
The Common

Direct and indirect characterizations of the relation between clause type (syntactic form) and speech act (pragmatic function) are problematic because they map oversimplified forms onto decomposable functions. We propose an alternative account of questions by abandoning any (in)direct link to their clause type and by decomposing speech acts into two variables encoding propositional attitudes. One variable captures the speaker’s commitment to an utterance, another their expectation toward the addressee’s engagement. We couch this proposal in a syntactic framework that relies on two projections dedicated to managing common ground (GroundP) and managing turn-taking (ResponseP), respectively. Empirical evidence comes from the conversational properties of sentence-final intonation in English and sentence-peripheral particles that serve to manage the common ground.

Categorization for occasioned semantics: Reanalysis of a Japanese Yamagata 119 emergency call

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 495-521
Author(s):  
Reiko Hayashi
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Call Center ◽  
Conceptual Knowledge ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
List Structure ◽  
Definitive Evidence ◽  
Taxonomic Analysis ◽  
Indirect Speech Acts ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
Asking Questions

Without making any reference to traditional linguistic disciplines such as presupposition, implicature and indirect speech acts, this article analyzes how and what implicit meanings were constructed, structured and negotiated through an ambulance request call to the119 call center in Yamagata, Japan in 2011, while enhancing the cogency of the empirical approach independent from analytical theories. Through the occasioned taxonomic analysis of the occasioned semantics of the caller and the call-taker regarding the dispatch, the analysis captured definitive evidence on how a negative response was created from the call-taker’s categorization process. It reveals the process in which the rejection was determined from the talk by the call-taker that was oriented toward and constructed by the conceptual knowledge of motion, which was formulated as ‘walk’. A three-part-list structure was created, which formulated ‘emesis’ into the category of a symptom, but not into that of an illness. The analysis reports that the call-taker’s method of occasioned semantics was operative and systematically patterned. Based on the results of the analysis, with linguistic evidence, the article critically argues that the rejection of an ambulance request was due in large part to the call-taker’s method of categorization when asking questions, which provides an alternative account to that of a previously reported analysis.

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