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This chapter looks at the Bakhtinian account of language that Michael Brown presents in his The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences and suggests that it is in tension with his Rousseauean description of human sociality. Like Rousseau, Brown claims that human sociality derives from a recognition of mutual dependence that cements the disparate wills of individuals into a general will which enforces social equality and protects the rights of all. Brown argues that this fundamental human sociality is instantiated in language itself which he describes not as communication but as “an anti-telic moment of collective enunciation,” and he identifies this collective enunciation with Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. In doing so, however, he downplays the drama of individual and social struggle that is at the center of Bakhtin's work and thus underestimates its power as a force for social change.

This chapter offers a critique of the affirmative forms of thought that attempt to ground the ontology of social being through subjective-idealist terms. Some recent examples came in the form of notion of truth grounded in subjects' experience and in rationality of language and discourse. The first part of the chapter demonstrates the perilous implications of such an approach for social theory tasked with ontology and for the conception of truth necessary for its task. The second part scrutinizes the paradigm of society that stems from this subjective-idealist notion of truth and social ontology that adopts discourse, language, and literary metaphors to comprehend social being. As an alternative, the final part of the chapter offers a preliminary sketch of the relation of ontology, normativity, and mediation, as well as the notion of critique necessary for social theory tasked with ontology.

This paper presents three dialogic concepts developed by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin: answerability, polyphony and heteroglossia. These concepts are interpreted in relation to organizing and management and applied to data from a case study of a large American computer manufacturer. The study permits us to use Bakhtin's ideas to formulate the links between organizational change and language. We will show, using a Bakhtinian analysis of our case, how dialogue reconstructed a group of managers' understandings of their organizational reality and their identity as an organization. The analysis presents a view of organizational change as communicative, symbolic, dynamic and layered.

Human agents are constantly using “symbols,” according to G. H. Mead, or “signs,” as C. S. Peirce called them, to engage in what Mikhail Bakhtin has called “dialogues” with each other or with the environment. Such vehicles of communication are not freestanding ones but are drawn from specific and demarcated discursive formations. So drawn, these vehicles are then put to use, as Kenneth Burke has shown in his dramatistic perspective on human social life, as agencies used by human agents to construct acts, in defined situations or scenes – that is social situations and physical locations – to display given attitudes, in order to fulfill one purpose or another. Every human move that an individual makes has these Burkean features. Such moves are used to engage in either convivial dramas or confrontational ones.

Set in the Indian context, this chapter speaks of the wider concern expressed in teacher education more generally, that of increasing the efficacy of preservice teacher education for social justice. In India, equity in education has been a central concern within the striving for social justice since independence in 1947. Schools now include vast numbers of culturally diverse students, who were once excluded. However, notions of “standardization” and “homogenization” that tend to ignore their diverse voice, make transaction in the classroom an alienating experience for them. These normative ideas are challenged by emerging multicultural and critical perspectives in education which recognize linguistic and cognitive diversity and the need to create spaces for learners’ self-expression by nurturing their cultural identities in school. My chapter analyzes the effect of the collision of these two perspectives on an in-service ESL teacher and the culturally diverse learners she teaches. It then examines in what ways this pedagogy is promising for preservice teacher education that seeks to promote teaching for social justice.

Arthur W. Frank's dialogical narrative analysis (DNA) has been a recent addition to the plethora of methods in analysing stories. What makes this method unique from the rest is its concern for both the story's content and its effects. Stories are seen as selection/evaluation systems that do things for and on people. This chapter aims to provide the reader a heuristic guide in conducting DNA and emphasises learning through exemplars as the way of learning DNA. It provides an outline of DNA and reviews how researchers have applied it in different disciplines. Then, DNA will be applied in in the current ‘war on drugs’ in the Philippines. The stories of the policy actors – for and against the drug war – will be analysed to explore how stories affect policy choices and actions, call actors to assume different identities, associate/dissociate these actors and show how they hold their own in telling their stories. Finally, the potential of using DNA in criminology and criminal justice will be discussed.

The death-positive movement can be described as a de-centralised contemporary social movement originating and operating predominantly in the global West, specifically the United States, connecting death workers, educators, artists, journalists, etc., and geared towards encouraging open dialogue about death and dying. It has succeeded in capturing significant media attention over the last few years and is largely driven by its strong social media presence. This chapter looks at ‘playfulness’ within the death-positive movement. Examining the dimension of ‘playfulness’ addresses the affective aspect of communication that in this movement is inseparable from the message. First, the author investigates the aesthetics of representation through death-positive merchandise, produced and advertised by The Order of the Good Death’s (subsequently – The Order) core members. Second, the author considers some of the cultural output produced under the umbrella of death-positivity, but not by the core movement members, specifically taking the first video game to be explicitly marketed as death-positive – A Mortician’s Tale (Laundry Bear Games, 2017) as a case study. Finally, the author analyses the role of entertainment value in the movement’s leaders’ discourse on death, taking leader of The Order Caitlin Doughty’s playful rhetoric on her YouTube channel, Twitter profile, and Instagram pages. The manifesto, found on the movement’s official website (http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/) encourages its participants to break the ‘culture of silence’ around death, indicating that the whole premise of the movement is based on the supposed presence of death denial in Western countries. Ultimately, the author argues that by eliciting playfulness, this challenge to the social climate becomes a somewhat jovial and enjoyable endeavour and generates response from outside the movement.