ABSTRACT

Innovation consultants belong to a professional group of people who claim that they can help organizations become more innovative by reconfiguring them in ways that can facilitate the unimpeded flow of information between as many of their employees as possible. They are thus a prime example of phatic experts, inasmuch as they present themselves as people whose expertise turns on establishing channels of communication and contact between employees. In addition to ensuring that they make their clients and their products more innovative, innovation consultants must make socially legible their own economic actions, and themselves as economic actors who are capable of such actions, as part of what sociologists call a profession’s ‘technical mystique,’ that is, expert knowledge made visibly concrete and socially recognizable. Based on fieldwork with innovation consultants in the USA, I examine what phaticity looks like in the contemporary business world; how phatic ideologies regiment what counts as appropriate ‘contact,’ ‘channel,’ and ‘communication’ between organization members; how phaticity is mediated as a socially legible genre by means of material artifacts and the built office environment; and what rhetorical functions and outcomes such a mediation has.

摘要

创新顾问属于一群专业人士，他们声称他们可以通过以能够促进尽可能多的员工之间畅通无阻的信息流动的方式重新配置组织，从而帮助组织变得更具创新性。因此，他们是爱说话的专家的典型例子，因为他们将自己表现为专长在于建立员工之间的沟通和联系渠道的人。除了确保他们让他们的客户和他们的产品更具创新性之外，创新顾问还必须让他们自己的经济行为在社会上清晰可见，并且他们自己作为有能力采取这些行动的经济行为者，作为社会学家称之为职业“技术奥秘”的一部分， ’也就是说，专业知识变得明显具体并为社会所认可。基于与美国创新顾问的实地考察，我研究了当代商业世界中的多嘴巴巴是什么样的；交际意识形态如何组织组织成员之间适当的“联系”、“渠道”和“沟通”；如何通过物质人工制品和建成的办公环境将交际作为一种社会易读的类型进行调解；以及这种调解的修辞功能和结果。