Resonant Listening: Embracing vulnerability as generative in dialogic organizing

Organization and management are all about visions, brands and presentations. Speech is everywhere while listening lives in the shadows. In this article, we inquire into listening, which has only received sparse attention in organization studies, just as Western thought on democracy has been preoccupied with (human) voice and arguments rather than with listening. Drawing on enactive experiments with listening, which we analyse along the (post-)phenomenological philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Rosalyn Diprose, we propose the notion of ‘resonant listening’ to (1) emphasize vulnerability as generative for listening, (2) move listening beyond the horizon of a stable human subject and (3) attend to how different spatial compositions condition listening in particular ways. Based on ‘resonant listening’, we encourage organizations to think about how they can diversify and intensify spaces for listening and suggest that we, as an academic community, could use our privileged position to experiment with spaces for more plural bodies to resonate and be listened into speech.