Speaking with One Voice

Abstract

The idea of organizations as polyphonic sites where the voices of heterogeneous members are articulated to become the voice of their organization, has been widely addressed by scholars taking a discursive approach to organizations. In this study we investigate the multivocality of organizational decision-making and meaning-making in the context of a sit-in demonstration called the Right to Live. The seven-month long demonstration was held in Helsinki, Finland, as a response to government politics during the so-called European refugee crisis. The protest collective consisted of three groups with diverging ethnolinguistic backgrounds: Afghans, Iraqis and Finns. Using interviews, ethnographic field notes and public statements communicated by the protest, we examine the interplay between the different voices within the protest. We explore processes of building an organizational voice that were involved in the constitution of RTL as an organization: formulating demands and external statements, and communicating about the protests online. The negotiations by which the voicing processes were sustained highlight that the activists cherished the idea of multicultural polyphony, yet regarded it necessary to filter the multiplicity of voices into univocality in order to create a recognized entity and to communicate strategically and effectively. Our findings show how authority was established and negotiated in communication: in an organization in which no authority seemingly or allegedly exists, authority was revealed through the process of generating the voice of the organization and forming a textual representation of it. The more traditional forms of authority such as meritocracy becomes intertwined with communicative authority in the process of authoring the organization.

The communicative constitution of organizational continuity and change in, through and over time

“…Continuity and change are therefore not stages, as conventional models may have suggested, but different rhythms and paces afforded by different communicative modalities. Second, the fact that conversations reflexively concern texts, which are themselves stabilizations of prior conversations, means that any utterance or writing already folds into itself other temporalities, in a polyphonic manner (Benoit-Barné & Martine, 2022). Organizational time, then, does not flow from the past to the future, but rather takes a multitude of twists depending on the layering of text and conversation.…”