Globalization

21 Pages 5164 Words

s what they want and you and your company and your country are gone” (hereafter called The Globalisation Story). Simple. Logical. Inexorable. Until we started telling it to ourselves and to each other. Then, with remarkable alacrity, we shifted from a reliance on causal explanation to an emphasis on interpretive understanding.

Putting yourself inside the picture
With many of us ‘experts’ in different stories - some were macroeconomists who understood globalisation theory, some of us were labour or industry economists who understood the theories of work and industry change, some were organisation researchers who knew about change management - we started to pick holes in other people’s stories and they picked holes in ours, many with the preface, “Your story doesn’t work for me because ...” We were forced, many of us for the first time, to look reflexively at our own stories about how the world works, and also at how the various stories fitted together into the one that we delivered with such assertive nonchalance at the many workplaces we visited. Mikhail Bakhtin had a way of describing this. Morson and Emerson (1989: 17-18) point to the distinction Bakhtin draws between knowledge and acknowledgement. Many writers, as my colleagues and I had done, take theories and ‘knowledge’ as representative of our world but with ourselves outside of it. It is only when we find ourselves within that world - when we are put in the position of having to acknowledge that knowledge as forming the content of our particular and singular worlds - that we hesitate and question. We refuse to ‘sign on’, as it were. As Bakhtin argues, “any sort of practical orientation of my life within the theoretical world is impossible: it is impossible to live in it, impossible to perform answerable deeds” (1993: 9). He describes the distanced possession of ‘knowledge’ that ‘experts’ display as an ‘alibi for being’, an ...