5. The dialogic organization

This paper presents three dialogic concepts developed by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin: answerability, polyphony and heteroglossia. These concepts are interpreted in relation to organizing and management and applied to data from a case study of a large American computer manufacturer. The study permits us to use Bakhtin's ideas to formulate the links between organizational change and language. We will show, using a Bakhtinian analysis of our case, how dialogue reconstructed a group of managers' understandings of their organizational reality and their identity as an organization. The analysis presents a view of organizational change as communicative, symbolic, dynamic and layered.