Who should do the talking? The proliferation of dialogue as governmental technology

Abstract

This paper investigates the recent proliferation of appeals to ‘dialogue’ as a solution to problems in a broad spectrum of different organisational settings Instead of top‐down management and expert‐driven public services, we are told we need ‘dialogue‐based’ management, health treatment, elder care, social counselling, and so forth. Dialogue is often presented as a tool that will reverse the stifling dominance of authoritative expertise and leadership, liberating the energy of employees, clients and patients. However, by viewing the dialogue as a ‘governmental technology’, we emphasise that it is not simply a tool that can be used by some to liberate or govern others, or to dominate nature. A technology is rather a structuring of actions that implies that also ‘the governors’ inevitably exercise power over themselves. The paper demonstrates how dialogue technology re‐structures organisational domains of speech and hereby contributes to reconfiguring inter‐relations and self‐relations within key institutions of modern society.

Keywords:

• dialogue
• management
• governmental technology
• Foucault
• critical organisation studies

Acknowledgements

We wish to warmly thank the members of the Research Group on Political Management at Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy, CBS, for fruitful comments on an earlier draft, and to thank Martin Rauff‐Nielsen and Thomas Basb⊘ll for language assistance.

Notes

1. As an example, Foucault (2006) in the History of madness shows how techniques such as cleansing bathes and the ‘rotational machine’ in the eighteenth century were used as treatments of the mad; that is to say as a technology of cure. In the early nineteenth century, the same techniques begin appearing as a technology of punishment. The technique is the same, but the rationality in which it is unfolded has changed, because of which a new technology has arisen.

2. In ‘The discourse on language’, Foucault shows how discursive production is ordered by a number of defined procedures. The reflected listening acts with its summaries partially in the same manner as one of these procedures – the procedure of commentary. The procedure of commentary is described by Foucault (1972, 222) like this: ‘The commentary limits the hazards of discourse through the action of an identity taking the form of repetition and sameness’.

3. This sections draws upon literature collected for an assignment supervised by Villadsen (Miljevic et al. 2006).

4. This is the case in the local administration in the municipality of H⊘je Taastrup, which – to further support the openness of the dialogue – has made it possible for the employees to disclose parts of their evaluation to the manager, so that it may be included in continuous Employee Development Review.