What is it about?
This is the second in a series of papers developing the notion of the pending account and the practice of pending accounting. The term ‘account' signifies account of (‘can you give an account of what happened?') as well as account for (‘can you account for these actions?'). The term ‘pending' connotes ‘unfinished’ and ‘due to be finished’ (i.e. urgent). Pending accounting is thus a speech genre used for commissioning action. But what has to be done to make a pending account authoritative at a moment of strategic organisational change? It’s not always enough to provide clear instructions by referring to established procedures and other institutionalised scripts, and Peircean and Greimasian semiotics suggest two different ways in which feelings, emotions or passions are convoked to co-produce this authority. With Peirce it’s a matter of fixing belief: feelings are hypotheses which imply action (hypothesis-testing), whose effects we might then verbalise (give an account of) as we adjust our beliefs to the situation as newly perceived. All this takes place in a continuous learning cycle, since belief is a ‘rule for action’ and action inevitably provokes new doubt. The idea I take from Greimas is that of passions as animating forces to which we position ourselves passively - as implied by the etymology of the word - or as competent actors enlisted as helpers. The authors of pending accounts try to engage their audience in a publicly defensible narrative contract (to set up an account for). They convoke passions (e.g. telling us to ‘rejoice’) as well as scripts (e.g. telling us to perform ‘rule-making’) to presentify sanctionable expectations regarding the implications of strategy for participants. Passions, understood either as hypothetic inferences or as animating forces, are used to guide ongoing strategic action together with instructions and procedural scripts. The example I use to demonstrate these propositions is the Brexit withdrawal agreement.
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Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash
Why is it important?
One of the aims of this paper was to try to blend communicational theories of organising with semiotic theories and methods - a fertile, but underexplored interdisciplinary zone.
Perspectives
With astonishing serendipity, the photo bank came up with this image when I searched it using the key terms ‘conversation’ and ‘text’. The image of passion leading us somewhere (and perhaps then guiding us somewhere else) captures the idea of passions as hypotheses, animating forces or competences, which is crucial to an understanding of how passions can become (alongside procedural scripts) the driving forces of pending accounts.
Simon Smith
Univerzita Karlova
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: What we meant by that was “let’s do this”The interpretive metatext as pending account, Actes Sémiotiques, February 2022, Universite de Limoges,
DOI: 10.25965/as.7451.
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