How and when does speech-acting generate social innovations

Abstract

Speaking is a normal, a special and ubiquitous human activity. Speaking or writing as a subjective and willful activity directed at others takes place within a dense set of behavioral norms. Speaking also activates selectively resources, concepts, logics and rules in language. We investigate the power of the language institution, speech-acting, constructed narratives and deliberations in creating social innovations. We look at new organizations, especially the constitution of new groups with operative collective intentions as social innovations. We ask how speech-acting theory can add or deepen insight into the constitution, the creation, the sustainability and the breakdown of organizations. Speech-acting theory has a focus on rationality as reasoning. Both Amartya Sen and John Searle have delved into reasoning – as creative subjectivity in multi-institutional settings. We try to exploit critically some of their philosophical findings into the field of empirical organization and social innovation studies.

Keywords:

• speech-acting
• narratives
• language institution
• power
• organization
• social innovations

Acknowledgments

This work has been presented and commented on at the WINIR conference in London September 2014, at the Social Innovations Seminar in Pavia January 2015, in the PGI research group in Bergen in June 2015, at the EU Social Innovations conference in Vienna in November 2015, at the political science conference in Kristiansand and at the Department of Political Science in Oslo, both in January 2016. We are thankful for the invitations. We thank Geoffrey Hodgson, Ugo Pagano, Marit Skivenes, Line Marie Sørsdal, Audun Offerdal, Rafael Ziegler, Alex Nicholls, Gudrun Schimpf, Bernhard Bauer, Jan Thorsvik, Robert Huseby, Knut Midgaard and Elin Lerum Boasson for valuable comments.

Notes

1. Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University.

2. Barth (1966, 1) suggests a parallel but more material tension driving choice, the tension between constraints and incentives.

3. Port (2010) supports the Searlean conception of language: (languages) are social products created by a human community. Searle: it is through speech-acting and agreements that such communities are (gradually) created and recreated. A speaker community is a “complex adaptive system”. Searle: allowing for and developed through speech-acting. But to perceive spoken language, a speaker has no choice but to induce his own idiosyncratic auditory version of linguistic conventions, a lexicon, phrases, idioms, constructions, etc. Searle: speech-acting is exactly continuously finding that idiosyncratic interpretation.

4. A reactive analysis is “looking backwards” studying time specific deliberations with explicit knowledge of later developments and happenings.

5. Devold held his command up to 1970. Even after 1970 it took some five years before international regulation of herring stocks became effective (Kolle 2009, 113).

6. Howard Becker 2010 says

Searle describes the nature of human society and the mode of existence of its parts as the consequence of Status Function Declarations, that is, statements people make (collectively, one supposes) which change the nature of social reality by declaring that it is changed and then collectively recognizing that change as real. Such declarations can create new social institutional facts, but it is hard to find Searle saying that such acts change the nature of social reality.