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The purpose of this paper is to examine the contribution by the Russian social philosopher and cultural theoretician M.M. Bakhtin to the development of social sciences and, particularly, the author's relevance for the issue of agency.

The article provides some details about Bakhtin and discusses his theories and their influence.

Agency is always directed towards the other axiological position, in which the Self‐Other relationship is always a cross‐over or a transgredient relation. The active role of the Other in the act of communication is the very reason why “the utterance of the Other” is not only the topic of speech but also why it enters speech and its syntactic construct as a particular constructive element.

In this way, Bakhtin's philosophy of language can find an equally constructive use in the interdisciplinary theoretical discourse within the context of the development of post‐Cartesian human sciences as well as in the new practical determination of human agency in an era of globality.

Bakhtin's theory of speech as human agency provides a tool for constructing new mental models, the realization of which relies on the assumption of the organizing culture.

The purpose is to inspire a more Bakhtinian perspective of conversations in change communication. Inspiration is drawn from Bakhtin and argue that change management has, for too long, focused on monologic implementation of predetermined change, i.e. how to develop the “best plot”. Change agents need to consider their anthropology are argued and ask themselves whether the people in their organizations are the objects of communication or subjects in communication. Furthermore, the argument about one's anthropology and one's espoused communication theory are intrinsically intertwined: how one communicates depends entirely on whether one views people as participating subjects in the process or as objects of the process.

Consensus‐as‐monologue and consensus‐as‐dialogue are distinguished. Under the former, the notion of a single speaker is emphasized (expectations of response are low). But under the latter, consensus becomes saturated with the self as the other (polemic, but born between people).

Change agents need to consider their anthropology are argued and ask themselves whether the people in their organizations are the objects of communication or subjects in communication.

Seeing conversation among people as a never‐ending process. A different perspective on participation – a perspective whereby one person's message joins with that of another and one person's meaning joins with that of another is offered.

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 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.

Narrative and dialogic modes of theorizing identity are both premised on textuality. However, theories of narrative identity tend towards unity and coherence (in accordance with the notion of narrative as constant and pre‐given), whereas the dialogic mode is more aligned with the postmodern novelistic literature (thus drawing heavily on dispersion, voice, disorder, and otherness). In accordance with the approach of Mikhail Bakhtin, the present study attempts to remedy the shortcomings of narrative identity by proposing change as involving shifting identities that are achieved through the transposition of utterances. Only through the recognition of the undecidable, unfinalizable nature of utterance can change be conceived as being shaped and reshaped through shifting identities. Such an approach reveals the interlocking relation between change and the varied texts people inhabit as they contemplate change.

This paper aims to discuss the notion of carnival laughter in Bakhtin's examination of Rabelais's literary works. The paper suggests that what may be called, after Rabelais, the agélaste ethos, the ethos of the men and women without laughter, remains a strong influence in some domains of critical management studies (CMS) as well as mainstream organization theory.

The literature review discusses Russian literature theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of the writings of François Rabelais and related his concept of the agélaste to contemporary social and organization theory.

Some proponents of CMS praise the critical thinking and the outlook on society established by its foundational writers Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse. As a consequence, CMS tends to exclude the sources of joy, laughter and transgression and regard such social and human gestures and events as being frivolous and ephemeral. Therefore, CMS remains trapped within its own sphere of critical thinking and fails to address and understand significant components of everyday life.

The paper suggests that the notion of “critique” needs to be explored within the community of CMS researchers.

Discusses the concept of critique so central for both the CMS tradition of thinking and other domains of management studies in new terms.

With the emerging global culture of education as multicultural, multilingual, and plurilingual, higher education is becoming a more contested and complex space for both teachers and students at different localities and contexts. Such complexities create possibilities as well as challenges for educators who should address these diversities yet maintain the quality of teaching and learning. Both local scholars/educators and transnationally mobile academics/teachers face these challenges in different ways. This chapter focusses on the affordances of the latter: academics who have been engaged in diverse teaching/research contexts and developed certain perceptions of ‘Being’ in ‘intercultural’ spaces within and without boundaries and across time. In particular, the experiences of a female academic, from the Middle East, involved in teaching and researching English Literacy pedagogy transnationally, as a former academic at an Iranian university and then in a Western university, will be examined through autoethnography and in reflection upon her positioning, both as a student and a teacher in these local and global contexts. Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of insided-ness, outsided-ness, and in-between-ness, and Hermans and Hermans-Konopka’s (2010) Dialogical Self Theory (DST) will inform this chapter philosophically. Recent work in higher education on ‘complexity thinking’ and ‘relationality’ (Beckett & Hager, 2018) will ground this chapter too. These conceptual frameworks enable the author to scrutinise diverse perspectives on ‘Being’ and ideologies (ontologies), and diverse formation of knowledge (epistemologies) which result in diverse teaching and learning practices. The author links these diversities to the notion of ‘literacy’ in global times and shows, through her narratives, how her particular cultural, social, historical, and embodied literacies position her pedagogically as a non-Anglo academic in English education within a Western university. This affords her to construct her in-between position by not fully assimilating the target culture, nor fading her Middle Eastern identities. Instead, she brings affordances of her intercultural Being in creation of the ‘third space’ for her own teaching and learning practices. In turn, this has led to how her students across subjects are encouraged not to dissolve into the dominant frame of thinking; but to search for their own ‘Being’ through reviving individual, local stories and to express themselves globally, yet act as ‘glocally’ literate people who are able to make particular changes in their own life and in the lives of others.

This chapter concludes with challenging the implicit ideological position in global higher education which promotes a unified and homogenised epistemology (often Western/Anglo) within the multicultural, multilingual, and even plurilingual context of education. The author, echoing Yun and Standish (2018) specifically questions how internationalisation of education has led to a reductive dichotomisation of local students versus international students (through a deficit lens) rather than of establishing a rich platform for bringing to the fore heterogenous voices, diverse narratives, and plural/multiple knowledge platforms to argue, create, reflect, narrate, and collaborate more fruitfully. Instead she claims for expanding, extending, and extrapolating ways in which knowledge can be (de/re) constructed by people (both learners and teachers) as active agents of change, inter/trans-culturally.

Michael Holquist (1990), one of the commentators on Mikhail Bakhtin’s monumental work, stated flatly that “human existence is dialogue,” and Ivana Markova (2003) declared that “dialogism is the ontology of humanity.” Bakhtin (1985;1986) himself said that such dialogues are conducted by using “speech genres.” From another angle Kenneth Burke asked, “What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?” and claimed – and showed – that this question can be best answered by using what he called the “grammar of motives,” which consisted of a hexad of terms: act, attitude, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. In this chapter, I examine, by using various examples, how the Burkean grammar is used in the construction of one speech genre or the other to achieve rhetorically effective dialogic communication.

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.

Architectonics is proposed as a dialogic theory and method to research three discursive spheres: McDonald's corporation, McDonaldization, and McDonaldland.

Bakhtin proposed architectonics as a new method for the human sciences, one that interanimates cognitive with ethical and aesthetic systemness. This essay develops architectonics further, and applies it to the study of globalization and localization of the McDonald's and Wal‐Mart corporations, which now cohabits with each other in New Mexico (and elsewhere).

A general inquiry system is suggested as a framework to analyze the architectonics of other organizations, in future international studies.

Through the application of the notion of architectonics to the McDonald's and Wal‐Mart corporations the authors develop an innovative approach to understanding organizations.