Everyday conversations

Abstract

My position in this paper is that talk is the primary medium of making sense of and constructing our social and organizational realities. In particular, I suggest we need to incorporate the discourse of everyday conversations into critical management theory because it opens up conventional research to new possibilities. Social poetics offers a way of exploring how, in the flow of our embodied dialogical activity, we link ourselves to our surroundings and make sense of our experience. As a form of inquiry, social poetics elevates everyday, imaginative ways of talking; for example, metaphors, storytelling and instructive statements. I explore how the practice of social poetics influences our research, how it may help us understand how managers live their organizational lives, and why it is important to Critical Management Studies. I incorporate extracts from research conversations with managers to illustrate this approach.