Year
2012
Authors
LORINO Philippe, TRICARD B.
Abstract
This chapter adopts a process view of organizations, and argues that the organizing process is an abductive inquiry (i.e. including the building of new hypotheses), inherently narrative. It studies the narrativity of organizing processes per se, as a narration in acts, rather than specific narrative objects (texts) or practices (storytelling) within organizations. The chapter more precisely tries to analyze the presupposed, tacit, often invisible and generic narrative frames (“architextures”) by which narrative practices must abide to make sense in a given cultural environment. A key “architexture” is the chronotope, or time-space frame of narratives, theorized by Bakhtin, who viewed the close integration of time and space as the basis of the social intelligibility of narratives and of their belonging to a specific genre. This concept is applied here to organizing processes. Through two case studies the chapter analyzes situations in which the organizational chronotope is de-stabilized by actions which transgress usual time-space narrative boundaries. Some organizational actors may then “scream” to re-affirm and defend the normal time-space frame, defying rational discourses about organizational change. Finally, the chapter explores the theoretical, methodological and practical perspectives the chronotope concept offers to organization studies.
LORINO, P. et TRICARD, B. (2012). The Bakhtinian Theory of Chronotope (Time-Space Frame) Applied to the Organizing Process. Dans: Constructing Identity In and Around Organizations. 1st ed. Oxford University Press, pp. 201-234.