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When Eugene O'Neill died, theatre critic Brooks Atkinson said of him, “A giant writer has dropped off the earth….He shook up the drama as well as audiences and helped to transform the theatre into an art seriously related to life.” (New York Times, 30 December 1953).

In Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean draws attention to the influence that James M. Buchanan’s work has had on the political economic discourse of the past half century. Buchanan and his collaborators in the Virginia Political Economy tradition have provided intellectual firepower for efforts to delegitimize democratically sanctioned policies aimed at alleviating the dysfunctional consequences of market activity. While MacLean’s account contains some well-documented inaccuracies, her characterization of Buchanan’s agenda is broadly accurate. This chapter assesses Buchanan’s economics in light of the themes raised by MacLean. His work, we shall argue, is a modern manifestation of what Marx termed “vulgar economy,” that is, ruling-class ideology posing as science.

Drawing from a social constructionist theory and its related practices, we propose the realization of transformative dialogue, a form of dialogue that may bring conflicting communities into more viable forms of coordination. We outline a range of conversational resources stressing relational responsibility, self-expression, affirmation, coordination, reflexivity, and the co-creation of new realities. The analysis is further extended through a case study of improvisation and organizational change. There is no attempt in the present article to suggest a set of relational rules. The attempt is to generate a potentially useful vocabulary of action, rather than a set of rules for negotiating among incommensurate realities.

Conventional wisdom locates the origins of modern dialogue in the Classical Greek polis. The legacy of classical models of dialogue offer a continuum of philosophically compelling models that draw on distinctive aspects of Classical Greek ideals. Attention turns to three schools of thought as they relate to dialogue through the work of their leading exponents, Gadamer, Dewey, and Habermas, respectively. Each supports a distinctive model of dialogue and each has particular shortcomings and inconsistencies. The intent is to give readers a better appreciation of the requirements and resources available for grounding one's particular version of dialogue and for anticipating its potential difficulties.

Dialogue is a special way of thinking and talking that invites people to open a space for learning together. Its purpose is to bring out change at the source of people's thoughts and feelings rather than at the level of results their ways of thinking produce. A case study illustrates how dialogue creates “collective intelligence” — a “field” of shared meaning and energy. The chapter then outlines the basic elements of an “action theory” of dialogue: the face-to-face obstacles in the creation of the field; the four basic phases in dialogue's evolution; and a strategic map of interventions to guide future dialogic practice.