Dialogical Wisdom, Communicative Practice, and Organizational Life
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Organizational dialogue has traditionally been associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology learning organization project rooted in the work of David Bohm. As a result, dialogue is viewed as an "abnormal" form of discourse-removed from everday managerial practice-that occurs when organizations encounter crisis and need to engage in second-order learning. We offer an alternative approach to dialogue grounded in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. A Bakhtinian perspective toward dialogue views everyday communicative practice as inherently dialogic. We explore Bakhtin's notion of dialogue and offer a set of conversational sensibilities that may inform communicative practice in organizational life.