Perspectives to management language games and social interaction in self-managing organizations

Abstract

This essay identifies a theoretically interesting area, i.e. language and social interaction in self-managing organizations. By building upon earlier work in Wittgensteinian language games, we show that despite some existing research on management language games (inside and outside pragmatic constructivism), not much is known about language games in self-managing organizations. The essay brings together ideas concerning language games in general management and pragmatic constructivism, making a novel contribution in the area. Furthermore, we present an ethnomethodological perspective on analysing language and social interaction: conversation analysis (CA). We suggest that CA could be utilized to analyse social interaction within self-managing organizations in more detail, showing how the specific institutional characteristics of this type of organization are talked into being in this particular context. Several further research questions are proposed for future studies in management language games and language and social interaction.