“Dialogue – possible between leader and follower?” - Ashridge

• Organisation, (e.g. Bohm, 1996; Deetz and Simpson, 2004; Isaacs,
1999; Karlsen and Villadsen, 2008; Oswick et al., 2000; Senge, 2006;
Tsoukas, 2009)
• Political process and community dialogue, (e.g. Heath, 2007;
Heidlebaugh, 2008; Kim and Kim, 2008)
• Therapeutic, (e.g. Ventimiglia, 2008)
• Race relations, (e.g. McPhail, 2004; Simpson, 2008; Strine, 2004;
Tsutsumibayashi, 2005)
• Education, (e.g. Morrell, 2004)
• Philosophy, (e.g. Buber, 1958; Gadamer, 1989; Habermas, 1984)
• Media and technology, (e.g. Pauly, 2004)
These contexts of course overlap and there are a number of authors who write
about dialogue more generally and as applicable to any interpersonal
communication event in everyday life (e.g. Friedman, 1983).
Figure 1 illustrates five philosophers fundamental to the dialogue literature who
are “among the most frequently referenced philosophers of communication
whose works foreground the term dialogue” (Stewart et al., 2004:22) and
summarises the different perspective each brought to the field. Buber was the
first to coin the term ‘dialogue’ specifically and his influence can be explicitly
observed in the writing of Gadamer (1989), Bakhtin (1981) and Freire (1990),
(Gadamer refers frequently to I and Thou although he makes no
acknowledgement of Buber, whilst Bakhtin, and Freire openly recognise Buber’s
influence on their own work. Bohm (1996), given his background in physics,
drew predominantly on very different sources of inspiration such as Einstein).
More recent prominent authors are also mentioned in Figure 1 (see Anderson et
al. 2004a and 2004b; Stewart et al., 2004) connected to the authors who appear
to have influenced them most. The diagram is highly simplistic since the network
of influences is complex and authors have been influenced by a plethora of
others. Nevertheless the diagram illustrates how wide the field is and how the
current writing is influenced still very significantly by the ‘original’ authors last
century and in particular Buber whose “appropriation of [the term dialogue] has
been most influential” (Stewart et al., 2004:32).
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