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Mary: To begin, I think it is important that we take into account some milestones in the development of multivoiced organizing. This will also set the stage for our extension into the realm of polyvocality. For example, we owe a debt here to work that René Bouwen did with Chris Steyaert (1999) on global organizing. They were among the first to promote multivoicedness in describing how an organization might be affected through the inclusion of many voices. They distinguished four metaphors that were useful in exploring how multivoicedness could influence global organizing: “building the Tower of Babel,” “dialogical imagination,” “polyphonic chorus,” and “strangers’ meeting.”

This book focuses on the concept and role of relational practices as a way to understand, conceive, and study processes of organization, and subscribes to a processual view of organization that, since Weick's seminal book The Social Psychology of Organizing, has turned the study of organizations into one of organizing. More than 30 years later, the field of organizing has increasingly expanded Weick's interpretive framework of sense making, resulting in a rich palette of conceptual frameworks that vary between such diverse processual approaches as complexity theory, phenomenology, narration, dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, discourse (analysis), practice, actor-network theory, and radical process theory (Steyaert, 2007). These various theoretical approaches draw upon and give expression to a relational turn that has transformed conceptual thinking in philosophy, literature, and social sciences, and that increasingly inscribes the study of organization within an ontology of becoming.

The invitation in this chapter is to see or remember¹ what can be gained and achieved by turning our attention from a style of thinking and speaking that focuses on the “truth about things” and shifting it to a recognition of the contribution of our own cultural practices in how things come-to-be what they seem. We are invited to look at human social processes and the relationships of how things in the world get caught up in these, historical or current but always active, processes and in so doing create meaning.The point here is to arrest or interrupt the spontaneous, unself-conscious flow of our ongoing activity, and to give “prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook.” ( Wittgenstein, 2001, p. 43 )We are invited to indulge a little less in the apparent “nature of things” and instead give a little more attention to the practices that make things happen and the relations between their inter-actors. Rather than having the relationship between “a directly perceiving mind and reality” as our primary focus we are looking afresh at those social processes that attribute characteristics to its actors and “cause us to hold beliefs.” We might call this “relational practicing.”² I assume that the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his [sic] psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another….. …Not, then, men [sic] and their moments. Rather moments and their men. ( Goffman, 1982, p. 2 )Goffman richly points out the variety of ordinary, everyday ways in which people participate in social encounters and how they conduct the minutia of constitutive relational practices. Goffman spent a lifetime illuminating the relevance of the almost hidden inter-participant grammar in cooperative performance of coordinated meaning and structure and also had much to say about the practical relationships between the actors and those prevailing enacted structures.