Cover not available
Part of
Studies of Discourse and Governmentality: New perspectives and methods
Edited by Paul McIlvenny, Julia Zhukova Klausen and Laura Bang Lindegaard
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 66] 2016
► pp. 209–234

Dialogue and governmentality-in-action

A discourse analysis of a leadership forum

We explore how dialogue as governmentality-in-action was both overtly challenged and unintentionally employed in an interdisciplinary leadership development forum held at a university. We study the forum as a site to explore Foucault’s understanding of the conduct of conduct combined with Agamben’s and Deleuze’s proposals to advance and nuance the concept of dispositif. We compare dispositif with Bakhtin’s and Linell’s notions of dialogicality and dialogism as sites of centripetal and centrifugal forces with heteroglossia and orientation to third parties. This methodological move makes it possible to study dialogue and dispositif as related concepts that are lived out in situated practices. We employ membership categorisation analysis (MCA) to complement a multimodal conversation analysis of the opening lecture of the forum to show the taken-for-granted nature of the setting as a dispositif.

Published online: 29 June 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.66.07bag
References
Agamben, Giorgio
2009 ‘What Is an Apparatus?’ And Other Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bager, Ann Starbæk
2013 “Dialogue on Dialogues – Multivoiced Dialogues (Dialogism) as Means for the Co-Production of Knowledge in and on Leadership Communicative Practices.” Akademisk Kvarter 6: 146-159.Google Scholar
in press). “Organizational (Auto)-Ethnography: An Interaction Analysis of Identity Work through the Study of Other-Orientation and Storytelling Practices in a Leadership Development Forum.” Tamara Special Issue on Organizational Ethnographies.
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhajlovitj
1982 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
1986 Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
1993.Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Barad, Karen
2007 Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bussolini, Jeffrey
2010 “What is a Dispositive?” Foucault Studies 10: 85-107.Google Scholar
Carlile, Paul R., Davide Nicolini, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
(eds) 2013 How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts and Materiality in Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davidson, Arnold
2011 “In Praise of Counter-Conduct.” History of the Human Sciences 24: 25-41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dean, Mitchell
2010 Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society ( 2nd edition ). London: Sage.Google Scholar
Deetz, Stanley
2001 “Conceptual Foundations.” In New Handbook of Organizational Communication, ed. by Fredric M. Jablin, and Linda L. Putnam, 3-46. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deetz, Stanley, and J. Simpson
2004 “Critical Organisational Dialogue: Open Formation and the Demand of ‘Otherness’.” In Dialogue: Theorising Difference in Communication Studies, ed. by Rob Anderson, Leslie A. Baxter, and Kenneth N. Cissna, 141-158. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles
1992 “What Is a Dispositif?” In Michel Foucault: Philosopher, ed. by Timothy J. Armstrong, 159-168. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Eglin, Peter, and Stephen Hester
1992 “Category, Predicate and Task: The Pragmatics of Practical Action.” Semiotica 88: 243–268.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman
1995 Critical Discourse Analysis. Harlow: Longman.
Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel
1972 The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock.Google Scholar
1977 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
1978 The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction [The Will to Knowledge]. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
1980 Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. by Colin Gordon. Brighton: Harvester.Google Scholar
1981 “The Order of Discourse.” In Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader, ed. by Robert Young, 51-78. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
1984 “Nietszche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 76-100. New York, NY: Pantheon.Google Scholar
1997 “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. by Paul Rabinow, 281-301. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Frimann, Søren, and Ann Starbæk Bager
2012 “Dialogkonferencer: En grundbog.” In Aktionsforskning, 193–204. Aalborg: Samfundslitteratur.Google Scholar
Garfinkel, Harold, and Anne Warfield Rawls
2006 Seeing Sociologically. The Routine Grounds of Social Action. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.Google Scholar
Giroux, Henry A
2010 “Public Values, Higher Education and the Scourge of Neoliberalism: Politics at the Limits of the Social.” Culture Machine. Available at: [URL]. Accessed 27th January, 2014.Google Scholar
Gustavsen, Bjørn
2004 “Making Knowledge Actionable: From Theoretical Centralism to Distributive Constructivism.” Concepts Transform 9: 147–180. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hull, Richard
1999 “Actor Network and Conduct: The Discipline and Practices of Knowledge Management.” Organization 6: 405-428. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Iedema, Rick
(2007) "On the Multi-modality, Materially and Contingency of Organization Discourse." Organization Studies 28 (6): 93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jayyusi, Lena
1984 Categorization and the Moral Order. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Jørgensen, Kenneth Mølbjerg, and Nikolaj Klee
2014 ”Artisan Storytelling and Management Dispositifs.” In Critical Narrative Inquiry – Storytelling, Sustainability and Power, ed. by Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen, and Carlos Largarcha-Martinez, 15-34. New York: Nova Science Publishers.Google Scholar
Karlsen, Mads Peter, and Kaspar Villadsen
2008 “Who Should Do The Talking? The Proliferation of Dialogue as Governmental Technology.” Culture and Organization 14: 345–363. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewin, Kurt
1946 “Action Research and Minority Problems.” Journal of Social Issues 2: 34–46. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lindegaard, Laura Bang
2012  Automobility at the Intersection of Discourse and Governmentality: A Study of the Accomplishment of rationalities that Co-Constitute Car-Dependent Mobility in the Face of Climate Change. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Aalborg University.
Linell, Per
2009 Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically: Interactional and Contextual Theories of Human Sense-Making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.Google Scholar
McHoul, Alec, and David Rodney Watson
1984 “Two Axis for the Analysis of ‘Commonsense’ and ‘Formal’ Geographical Knowledge in Classroom Talk.” British Journal of the Sociology of Education 5: 281–302. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Märtsin, Mariann, Brady Wagoner, Emma-Louise Aveling, Irini Kadianaki, and Lisa Whittaker
2011 Dialogicality in Focus: Challenges to Theory, Method and Application. New York: Nova Science Publishers.Google Scholar
Pålshaugen, Oeyvind
2004 “Knowledge at Work: New Stories from Action Research.” Concepts Transform 9: 113–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Phillips, Louise
2011.The Promise of Dialogue. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Phillips, Louise, Marianne Kristiansen, Marja Vehviläinen, and Eva Gunnarsson
2012 Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research: A Reflexive Approach. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Raudaskoski, Pirkko
1999  The Use of Communicative Resources in Language Technology Environments . Doctoral dissertation. University of Oulu. Available at: [URL].
2011 “When Lives Meet Live: Categorization Work in a Reality TV Show and ‘Experience Work’ in Two Home Audiences.” Text & Talk 31: 619-641. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ryle, Gilbert
1945 “Knowing How and Knowing That: The Presidential Address.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 46: 1–16. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scollon, Ron, and Suzanne Wong Scollon
2004 Nexus Analysis. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Silverman, David
1998 Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Speer, Susan, and Jonathan Potter
2002 “From Performatives to Practices.” In Talking Gender and Sexuality, ed. by Paul McIlvenny, 151-180. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stokoe, Elizabeth
2009 “Doing Actions with Identity Categories: Complaints and Denials in Neighbour Disputes.” Text & Talk 29: 75–97. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Turner, Kevin
2014 Governing To-Day: Towards an Analytics of the Contemporary. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Aalborg: Aalborg University.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Bager, Ann Starbæk, Marita Svane & Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen
2018. Ethics Perspective on Entrepreneurship. In The Palgrave Handbook of Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Entrepreneurship, ► pp. 457 ff. DOI logo
du Plessis, Erik Mygind
2022. Speaking truth through power: Conceptualizing internal whistleblowing hotlines with Foucault’s dispositive. Organization 29:4 ► pp. 544 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.