The Communicative Achievement of Collective Minding

Abstract

Based on an in-depth analysis of excerpts from a board meeting in a drug rehabilitation center, this article shows how a group of managers displays a form of intelligence that cannot be reduced to the simple sum of their respective contributions. Although this phenomenonhas been illustrated so far in the context of high-reliability organizations, this analysis extends previous findings by showing that a form of collective intelligence can be found more generally in patterns of conversational behavior. The managers are shown to be constructing, amending, and adding a series of textual blocks that ultimately represent the heedfulness of the group. Although it can only be achieved on the “terra firma” of interactions, collective minding is shown to be a phenomenon that always transcends the “here and now” by interrelating this latter with the “there and then,” a phenomenon of translocalization that can be identified as a form of organizational intelligence.

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