What Is Dialogue? Outline of a Theory

Abstract

Over the past century, a new meaning of the term dialogue has gained ground in areas like interreligious relations, peace studies, organizational development, conflict resolution, and others. According to this new meaning of the term, dialogue is a conversation conforming to certain standards and ideals, like fairness and openness and with a unique capacity to realize significant organizational and societal goals. For instance, dialogue is today employed to promote collective learning, improve workplace democracy, resolve conflict, and more. So far, however, few examples of systematic or coordinated theory development or research addressing the dialogical practice corresponding to this new understanding of dialogue have emerged. Valuable theoretical contributions exist, however, in sum they represent for the most part a fragmented landscape, with few examples of coordinated theory development, or systematic or cumulative research. This paper seeks to ameliorate this shortcoming by proposing a theory of dialogue – as the term is here being used – with the aim of promoting more systematic and coordinated theory development and research addressing dialogue as practice. Drawing upon contributions from pragmatic linguistics and cooperation theory, it defines dialogue as cooperation through the medium of language. Further, it identifies three basic dialogical skills: empathy, imagination, and flexibility. The article addresses researchers who seek a better theoretical basis for research on dialogue, as the term is being used in this article, as well as practitioners seeking to better understand and improve their dialogical practice.