The Metaconversation: The Recursive Property of Language as a Key to Organizing

Abstract

We argue that the implications of the recursivity of language largely have been overlooked in the literature exploring the role of language in organizing. Exploiting a narrative interpretation of sensemaking in language, we illustrate how the metaconversation is constituted, showing how it simultaneously admits and reconstructs the local conversations of the organization into an encompassing conversation, where the identity of the organization as a whole is generated continually. The central process at work is the production of a metanarrative that enfolds and transcends the narratives of the communities composing an organization.