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The purpose of this paper is to provide new and deeper insight into how creative knowledge processes are facilitated in multidisciplinary groups working with innovation in knowledge-intensive organizations.

Data were collected through an ethnographic fieldwork following two groups in a Norwegian oil and gas company and one group in a Norwegian research institute working with innovation. The analysis is inductive and conducted within a qualitative framework seeking to go deeper into the complexity of the facilitation of creative knowledge processes. The analytical framework is sociocultural and underscores how new knowledge and ideas are facilitated in the tension between different voices.

Analyses show how the leaders of the groups facilitated imaginative and creative processes through open dialog by giving room for diverse disciplinary knowledge and stimulating different roles in the groups. The diverse experiences of the occupational disciplines in addition to four complementary roles that ensured group dynamics, stimulated polyphony and creative tension in the groups. This creative tension enhanced the groups’ imagination, which again enabled innovative idea development.

This contribution is limited by looking at three groups in two organizations. On the premise that model generalization depends on extensive empirical data, the current paper should be considered as preliminary/exploratory research that aims at investigating how creative knowledge processes leading to innovative ideas are facilitated in knowledge-intensive organizations.

The paper offers a practical contribution in how leaders can facilitate such creative processes leading to innovative ideas. The paper is a contribution to leadership as a relational and dialogical practice.

The way the creative knowledge processes are orchestrated is visualized in a phase model. The paper contributes to new conceptualizations and thus theory development of leadership by offering polyphonic orchestration as a concept and a way of understanding facilitation from a sociocultural perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to examine asset management in three cities. It is informed by polyphony as a theoretical perspective and draws on the fact‐building process to explore the practice of asset management in these study settings.

A comparative case study approach was adopted to have a broader understanding of the levels of complexity in the study of polyphony in asset management. With this aim, the three Scottish cities were analysed presenting a spectrum of city types.

The paper finds evidence of polyphony. The three cases show different degrees of controversies and achievements, providing a highly variegated picture of the effectiveness in pursuing an asset management policy.

Polyphony recognises the many voices of actors present in organisations. This perspective on asset management is an important, but relatively neglected facet of this aspect of city management. The paper provides an insight in this, showing the potential for the multiple voices of the many different actors within local government, all of whom may have distinct views on asset utilisation.

The aim of the paper is to understand and define how the polyphony of management is constructed in interaction and to describe this through concrete management meeting cases. Polyphony refers to the diverse voices of various organization members, and how these voices are present, disclosed and utilized in management.

The study is based on the social constructionist and discursive perspectives of management, which question the traditional, individualistic approaches of management. The issue was examined through a qualitative case study by analysing the micro‐level management discourse in three healthcare organizations.

Discursive practices that enhance or inhibit polyphony are often unnoticed and unconscious. Key moments of management discourse are an example of unconscious mundane practices through which members of organizations construct the reality of management.

The empirical results are locally contextual. In the future, research will be able to apply the approach to diverse contexts as well as link micro‐level discourses to the construction of broader health and social management discourses.

The paper increases the understanding of how to enhance participation and staff contribution, and how to utilize the knowledge of all members of the organization.

Both managers and other staff members are fully involved in the social construction of management. Micro‐level discourse should be paid attention to in management work as well as in the education of managers and staff.

The study increases the understanding of micro‐level issues of management and challenges the conventional, taken‐for‐granted assumptions behind organization and management theories.

The middle manager's role in an organization is important. The purpose of this paper is to determine how middle managers understand their roles in managing changes from the perspective of polyphonous leadership. Polyphonous leadership can be described as something that inspires decisions by listening to multiple voices within the organization.

The empirical data were collected from focus groups in the City of Tampere. Participants were middle managers (n=5) at an organization providing services for young narcotic/alcoholic families and pregnant mothers. The interviewees were selected due to their assumed ability to discuss management issues and their awareness concerning the factors affecting their workers’ capacities. The second focus group was organized for May 2010 (n=5) and the third later on in May 2010 (n=7).

In the Finnish context, middle managers understand polyphonous leadership as a process with a beginning and an end. The authors call this process the dominant narrative of polyphonous leadership, because there is a strong consensus amongst middle managers regarding it. In the first step, middle managers have to work as leaders of interaction. Second, they work as utilizers of diversity. In the third step, they act as decision makers and interpreters of polyphony. The final step gives them a role as conciliators of operating plans and personnel operations.

There is not much discussion in the extant literature of how middle managers try to act as linking persons in public services infrastructures. The model of the dominant narrative on polyphonous leadership is new in the literature.

This conceptual paper aims to respond to the dearth of theory and mechanisms for handling the inherent ethereality, multiplicity and mutability of organisational identity and organisational image.

This study considers existing approaches to organisational identity noting the diverse understandings of the paradoxical nature of identity. The authors suggest that identity is still essentially perceived as what is core and enduring about the character of an organisation with changes of identity being viewed as occurrences effectuated by events. In contrast, the authors argue that, because of the fluid interrelationships between identity and image, organisational identity is better viewed as an unstable construct.

Departing from Bakhtin’s logic of dialogism, this study proposes that identity–image result from dialogic relationships which in turn construct a system of polyphony. This study devises a preliminary polyphonic model which has the capacity to incorporate diverse stakeholder associations and fluctuating interpretations as well as situational understandings of organisational messages.

This study’s proposed model allows to trace how organisational identity–image is continually co-constructed recursively and cyclically and to systematise the various voices that are important for an organisation’s strategic objectives.

This paper aims to use the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin to reveal new insights into the role and impact of social media in health-care settings.

With the help of Bakhtin’s constructs of dialogism, polyphony, heteroglossia and carnival, the power and influences of the social media phenomenon in health-care settings, are explored.

It is apparent from the in-depth analysis conducted that there is a delicate balance between the need to increase dialogue and the need to safeguard public health, in the use of social media for health-related communication. Bakhtin‘s constructs elucidate this delicate balance and highlight the need for health-care providers that use social media to find the right balance between these competing communicational priorities.

This paper advances a nascent theoretical approach to social media research. By applying Bakhtinian ideas to consumer health informatics, this paper has the potential to open a new approach to theorizing the role of social software in health-care settings. Stakeholders in digital health will find this paper useful, as it opens up dialogue to further discuss the role of social media in health care.

This paper aims to look into changing future landscapes of business interaction, relationships and networks using the lens of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his key notions of polyphony, heteroglossia and dialogism.

This is a conceptual paper exploring the complex dualities of Bakhtin’s approach involving eternally competing, paradoxical forces of unity and fragmentation; continuity and change; and coherence and incongruity.

Bakhtin’s approach suggests that all phenomena at all levels involve a complex struggle between organizational unity and dis-organizational fragmentation. Bakhtin provides theoretical support for David Boje’s notion of “antenarratives” as key in the making of socially constructed futures. Antenarratives are bridging “tropes” between unifying narratives and fragmented stories.

Antenarratives need to be a focal interest in researching Bakhtinian dualities because they are a catalyst and chiasmus traveling between and inter-animating relations between narratives and stories.

The Bakhtinian schema suggests that practitioners need to maintain a reliance upon “phronesis” or practical wisdom and dexterity that allows them to adapt and improvise in fast-changing and multiple situations and contexts. To enable them to do this, such practical capabilities need the combined cultivation of appropriate embodied skills, capabilities in communicative and symbolic persuasion, as well as analytical reasoning.

Bakhtin’s concepts provide a unique and operationalizable approach to encompassing duality, which addresses the increasing need in business marketing to understand and adapt within increasingly complex and changing landscapes of business interaction, relationships and networks.

The concept of polyphony, taken from music and extended by literary critic Bakhtin to describe the world of Dostoevsky′s novels, provides a metaphor for understanding patterns of organizing among those who hold beliefs and values from a variety of backgrounds. Addresses organization as multiple discourses. Describes Bakhtin′s work and uses it to generate ideas about how people organize to perform complex tasks and change their patterns of interaction.

This chapter explores the potential for musical medievalism within metal, exploring the ways in which metal musicians have sought to include ‘authentic’ medieval musical languages within their music. The medieval repertoire poses many challenges even for early music specialists, and the musical idioms of metal and medieval music rarely overlap, leading many medievalist metal bands to rely instead on normative metal styles with occasional references to specific identifiable melodies. The chapter focusses particularly on the American metal band Obsequiae, who have drawn inspiration particularly from the medieval polyphonic repertoire, which required creating much more oblique musical connections. Obsequiae’s albums feature acoustic guitar and harp arrangements of medieval polyphonic works, but their metal songs likewise adopt some general qualities of medieval polyphony. The obscure nature of the connections is likely beyond many listeners, but paradoxically the lack of obvious musical medievalism can also cultivate the appearance of a deeper connection.

This paper aims to argue that the value of social media in knowledge management (KM) can be evaluated on the basis of how social media helps to overcome four generic knowledge problems – i.e. uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity and equivocality. Drawing upon the relevant KM and social media literature, the paper discusses the four knowledge problems surrounding the KM and presents a framework for overcoming them through social media.

A literature synthesis involving inductive interpretation of qualitative research was used.

The paper shows how different knowledge problems can be approached through social media: uncertainty can be reduced by decent problem formulation and effective information acquisition, complexity can be simplified by increasing knowledge process capacity and decomposing problems, ambiguity can be dissipated by sensemaking and equivocality can be encountered by creating trust and allowing polyphony of perceptions.

The paper contributes to the KM research by providing a theoretically founded framework which illustrates the relationship between social media and knowledge problems.

The framework can be used not only for identifying and understanding epistemological differences between knowledge problems but also for developing social media guidelines for KM purposes. The paper provides a categorisation of knowledge problems, which can be applied in the crystallisation of an organisation’s knowledge strategies in terms of codification and personalisation.

Social media means not only new possibilities but also new threats to organisations’ KM practices. The paper establishes the association between social media and the management of fundamental knowledge problems not previously discussed.