Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

conclusions of the coordination team the apparent neutrality was removed. Inez
Reker, rather indifferently for our alternation, maintained her interpretation in the
report. Inez really took the role of the disentangled and objective researcher who does
not interfere in her data.
We discussed the way we had to interpret the ‘ownership’ of the values. We wavered
in an interpretation in which the core values alternately appeared to be experienced as
personal characteristics, as one of the many ambitions of the management, or as
something for the employees that comes from elsewhere (the team, faculty, the UAS).
At the end we concluded that management and employees live in different realities. At
first I discussed this with Inez Reker, as this reality difference was my interpretation of
the preliminary and later versions of the report. I searched for her confirmation. In a
memo of 27th September to the coordination team I emphasized the existence of
different realities. Cees Corte stressed the fact that this difference was not apparent
regarding the familiarity with the core values. In the formal meeting of the 26th October
we concluded that both things were true: familiarity and different realities, meaning
that everybody uses the same words but in practice experiences something
different. Marc Claassen saw this difference in the way communication from the
management to the employees is practised. For instance the board communicates its
decisions in a rather detached language, coupled with more or less public evaluations
of the proposals, and supposes that the consequences of the decisions are clear to
everybody when the communication is done. Communication by the board is done
from a perspective of openness but experienced by employees as formal and closed.
Another shift is to be noticed from an internalization approach in which employees are
seen as objects to be changed, towards an approach in which open conversations are
introduced as a way of discussing all kind of concerns. The internalization approach of
Inez Reker was not seriously discussed. The shift towards open conversations was
already discussed before the publication of the report. After the meeting with the
board the conversational approach became to be seen as a way of stimulating an open
and inspiring working environment. For Marc Claassen the emphasis was upon the
possibility of reciprocal communication. For Cees Corte open conversations have
become the most important way he sees possibilities of attaching the core values
firmly to the acting of our employees. Henk Rademakers saw a connection with
becoming an excelling organization, in line with the results of earlier done research
into labour satisfaction of our employees (Toetenel and Voogt, 2010). I felt happy
because I strongly belief in a conversational approach for successful working together.
In former meetings with Cees Corte I had introduced the concept of a conversational
approach for development and this was now formally accepted as a boost for organizational
development.
4. Sense making in and of the internal branding project | 95