Dostoevsky's Poetics of Modern Freedom: Against Bakhtin's "Polyphonic" Moral Truth

In an influential treatise, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) asserts that the aim of Dostoevsky's distinctive poetics is to advance a revolutionary, "polyphonic" model of moral truth. In this paper, I argue that while Bakhtin correctly identifies essential features of Dostoevsky's poetics, these features are better understood as oriented toward meeting the free modern individual's need to test ultimate moral ends and concomitant virtues in order to determine their truth. An Aristotelian poetics intended to educate audiences only in how to be virtuous to achieve moral ends that are given by tradition will have different essential features than will a modern poetics whose purpose is to help individuals determine what the virtues are. It is this latter purpose, I argue, that drives Dostoevsky to create the new stylistic devices that Bakhtin observes in Dostoevsky's work, rather than the purpose of realizing a philosophically problematic "polyphonic" model of moral truth.

The role of innovation narratives in accomplishing organizational ambidexterity

Persistent tensions arising from the exploration–exploitation paradox continuously threaten the accomplishment of organizational ambidexterity. Structural, contextual, and sequential solutions designed to alleviate these tensions dominate the ambidexterity literature. None of these adequately explains how top executives implement tension-alleviating managerial initiatives or how they respond in real time to tension-induced organizational perturbations. In this article, through analysis of top management team speeches at Procter & Gamble over a 15-year period, we show how the construction and communication of four innovation narratives—contextualizing, mutualizing, dramatizing, and focalizing—reduced tensions and enhanced organizational ambidexterity. We demonstrate the importance of top management team reflexivity in devising and communicating performative narratives, illustrate the polyphonic model of narrative strategizing, and present a cyclical model suggesting that the accomplishment of organizational ambidexterity is an ongoing dynamic process.

A Tool for Discourse Analysis and Visualization

In this paper the authors present a system that combines the cognitive and socio-cultural paradigms in the field of discourse analysis in order to analyze both texts written by only one author (for example narrations) and those written collaboratively (chat conversations, blogs, wikis, forums). The novelty of their approach is that the majority of the existing applications are oriented on analyzing only one of these two types, an adaptation being necessary for the analysis of the other type. Another advantage of the presented system is that since it is centered on a dialogistic polyphonic model considering topics as inter-animated voices, it could show the difference between coarse- and fine-grained coherence in discourse, therefore allowing the analysis of a text from two different viewpoints: a) its intrinsic structure and cohesion and b) how well this text fits in a stream of texts (whether it is or not cohesive with the texts before and after it). The dialogistic polyphonic model was used as a starting point for a method for analyzing collaboration and social construction of knowledge in groups and communities using textual interactions, and for several implemented systems for providing computerized support to the analysis method through visualizations and feedback generation.

The Polyphonic Model of Hybrid and Collaborative Learning

This chapter presents a model for hybrid and collaborative learning based on an analogy with musical polyphony, starting from Bakhtin’s ideas of dialogism. The model considers different voices (participants) inter-animating and jointly constructing a coherent tune (a solution, in problem solving), enabling other voices to adopt differential positions and to identify dissonances (unsound approaches). This chapter introduces also software tools, which visualize the discussion threads in a chat and the influences that an utterance has on the subsequent ones. Such tools help both teachers and learners to evaluate and enhance the learning process. The model helps to understand how learners inter-animate when they participate to collaborative chats for problem solving or other learning activities, including Hybrid Learning.