Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975)

Mikhail Bakhtin is a Russian philosopher who offered a different way of viewing sociality and its representation—a recurring theme in much of his writing. This chapter discusses four interrelated aspects of Bakhtin’s work that are of particular relevance to process thinking in organization studies and offer a distinct way to understand and represent sociality: the role of dialogue in the formation and understanding of social experience, the nature of language as lived conversation and responsive utterances, synthesizing the lived world and the world of reason, and carnival and culture. It also examines the implications of Bakhtin’s philosophy for organization studies.