My Reflections on Mercer's Words & Minds

I enjoyed reading Mercer's book for two reasons: 1) as I am a phd student in Organization & Strategy, I could connect different topics covered in the book with the topic areas of interest in organization and management; 2) as a non-native English speaker who lives in an English-speaking country, many of the cases that were brought up in the book regarding the role of language as "culture", conflicts that might occur due to misunderstandings across communicators, etc. sounded very familiar to me.

   The main idea presented in chapter 1 is that language is a tool for thinking together and making sense of the experience, as nicely referred to by Mercer as "inter-thinking". This is something of crucial importance in organization literature because, almost everything in organizations go around communication, exchange of information and negotiation of meaning which all involve interpretation. A piece of information disseminated in a meeting, does not necessarily invoke the same interpretations in the meeting participants and this might cause problems afterwards. So a big challenge in organizational settings is to convey information to members in a way that at least invoke similar interpretations in members which is easy to say but hard to execute.
This even becomes harder when participants try to influence each other and compete with each other in controlling the flow and outcomes of information exchanges. This has been nicely elaborated by Mercer in Chapter 4 when he talks about persuasion, control and influence.
The main idea discussed in chapter 4 is that shared knowledge and understanding is achieved through conflict and debate as well as through cooperation. This is also a controversial topic in organization literature especially in areas of negotiation, power and influence. Organizational behavior text books are filled with prescriptions presented by organizational scholars about the processes of negotiation, winning the negotiations, compromising some advantages in negotiations and conflict resolution techniques. A point of contrast that I can see between what I read in Mercer's book and what I know about organizational literature is that negotiations in organizations do not necessarily end up to "shared knowledge and understanding" because there are many instances in which the more powerful party - which is usually the one with more valuable resources- dominates the weaker party to come to some reconciliations or even to accept  its loss and this does not necessarily involve the development of shared knowledge and understanding. 
         While I was reading Mercer's chapter 2 in which he talks about the importance of "context" as necessary for understanding, I recalled many instances in organizations where people use communication techniques regardless of the context and how problematic it could be. Also, in this chapter, Mercer talks about "shared knowledge" as a a "context" which reminds me of all the research in organization and management that addresses the challenges posed when employees from various organizational departments try to communicate with each other with the same "technical jargon" used in their departments and how this makes misunderstandings (Marschan- Piekkari, et al., 1999). This people ignore the fact that they are using their department context - specialized language- to communicate with people who don't know that language and this is problematic and makes them seem as if they are not on the same page. Another point brought up in chapter 2 that resonates with what occurs in organizational settings is the use of  gestures and drawings in conjunction with language to convey meaning. That's very true. We are always expected to behave in a certain way in organizations which is indicative of the importance of gestures and also, every organization has a "chart" that develops a shared understanding in organizational members in terms of their positions in the organizational hierarchy, the line of authority, etc. This chart is nothing more than a bunch of boxes and arrows; however, they together have a vital role in organizations. 
           I loved this part of Mercer's book in chapter 3 in which he argues that we have to take calculated risk about how much “context”- shared knowledge- to provide. This leads me to think that communication is all about the "risk" and "language" is a tool we use to bear the risk. Some techniques introduced in Mercer's book about the ways to more thoughtfully bear this risk  - this is just my interpretation- are elicitation, recaps, repetition, reformulation and exhortation. 

   An interesting point presented in chapter 4, is the prevalence of "metaphors" as providers of the frames of reference for sharing thoughts among human beings. Organizations have been metaphorically described as machines, brains, cultures, organisms, psychic prisons and instruments of domination (Morgan, 1997). 

      The main idea presented in Mercer's chapter 5 is how language for collective thinking depends on shared continuing activities of established groups with common interests and goals. In this chapter he talks in detail about communities of practice which were used to be a hot topic in organizational literature in 2000s. As wisely elaborated by Mercer, members of communities can organize language into particular, specialized tools- the genres- that make up the repertoires of the discourses of the communities. This is relevant to communities of practice within and across organizations (Brown & Duguid, 1991). These genres differ from one community of practice to the other. For instance, the community of practice developed across a group of firms in a high-tech industry might be dominated with "product innovation" genres where as in a community of practice including NGOs, the dominant genre might be human well-being.  

In addition, in this chapter Mercer argues that language enables members to construct an identity for their group and to develop roles and identities for themselves within it. Th identity clashes in organizations is another topic of controversy because organizational members are usually members of more than one community within and across the firm. Any of these communities has its own language and identity and bearing all these identities and languages at the same time for one individual is challenging (Wenger, 1998). 

       And finally, chapter 6 of Mercer's book reminds me of myself when he argues that in societies, young people are expected to discover or infer important cultural knowledge for themselves or to live their social lives without it. I think to some extent, new comers to a society are very similar to "young people" in that they should figure out the majority of cultural knowledge on their own which is adventurous but at the same challenging. I would never forget the feeling of embarrassment and detachment when I was sitting on a dinner table with some American friends. They kept talking about the movies and TV shows that were popular in their teens and I, feeling like a "stranger" in their conversations,  was thinking: "Should I watch ALL these movies and TV shows to be able to be part of their conversations?". 

References:

Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation.Organization science, 2(1), 40-57.

Marschan-Piekkari, R., Welch, D., & Welch, L. (1999). In the shadow: the impact of language on structure, power and communication in the multinational.International Business Review, 8(4), 421-440.

Morgan, G. (1997). Images of Organization. NY: SAGE Publications. 

 Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge university press.