The Ethics of Silence: The Sense of the Meeting

Introduction This paper is about the relationship between talk and silence, with a particular focus on the role of silence in business meetings. We suggest that this is an important but neglected area of focus in Organization... [ view full abstract ]

Introduction
This paper is about the relationship between talk and silence, with a particular focus on the role of silence in business meetings. We suggest that this is an important but neglected area of focus in Organization and Management Studies. Our paper aims to contribute to understanding the constitutive role of silence in organizations through a discussion and analysis of the ‘Quaker Business Method’.

We argue that that there has been limited attention to silence and silent practices in Organization and Management Studies (see Kuhling et al. 2003). Our intention is to open up silence as a concept worthy of further study in the field of management (see Law 1998 for a study of Quaker meeting practices, and Spivak et al. (1996) on how the subaltern cannot speak). We focus on the way in which silence is deployed in the business meetings of the Religious Society of Friends—more commonly known as Quakers.

We begin the paper with an overview the relevance of silence in Organization and Management Studies. This is followed by an introduction to the Religious Society of Friends and how silent meeting is the central feature of Quakers’ practice: the central feature of Quakers practice is the combination of silence and collective meeting. In terms of empirical material, we draw upon what others have said about their experience of a Quaker Meeting for Business, observation at a Quaker clerk workshop, and our experience of organising a ‘Quakerly’ silent meeting at an academic conference.

Theory
There is much discussion about the over-abundance of information and unending stimulation in contemporary organisations. Best-selling books such as Levitin’s (2014) The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload speak to this zeitgeist, a concern intensified by digital technologies. Such innovations are often associated with ‘being ahead’ of current legal frameworks or challenging taken for granted societal conventions—presaging, we suggest, the question and practices of ethics. In our context, universities and academics have played a role in this through the generation and increasing commitment to publishing in academic journals.
The Society of Friends have had a particular response to such excesses—silence. Contra such popular preoccupations we want to argue for a much longer time frame to such concerns and show how one organisation—the Quakers, notable for their early influence on business and management—responded to this excess through a focus on collective silence and “letting your words be few”. Zizek (2006: 224) suggests that excess as noise is at the centre of our sense of the world. This means that silence is as such not something to be overcome or that it is an absence, but rather that it is something which has to be actively constructed: ‘[t]he primordial fact is not Silence (waiting to be broken by the divine word) but the noise, the confuse murmur of the Real in which there is not yet distinction between a figure and its background. The first creative act is therefore to create silence” (Zizek, 2006, p. 224). Silence is then the constitutive supplement (Derrida 1997) that is always bound up with letting others or other things speak. Similarly, Scott (1993) has challenged the concept of silence as lacking meaning, suggesting that silence has different forms and purposes. As we will show throughout the paper, for Quakers, silence can be discerned as having qualities such as: active, redemptive, nourishing, prayerful expectancy, an intensified pause and as a form of liberation that constitute a particular and explicitly ethical approach to making decisions.

Research Focus
Quakers have been organising their meetings in the same way for over 350 years. The Society of Friends are a small (around 350,000 worldwide today) and little known Christian religion. Though small in numbers many have suggested this relative invisibility belies their impact both historical and contemporary (Furtado 2013) with a disproportionate number of scientists, thinkers, campaigners for peace and businesspeople since the 1650s. Despite the freedom to practice their religion granted by the Act of Toleration in 1689, Quakers remained excluded from many professions at the birth of the industrial revolution. They often focused on entrepreneurship and business and made a significant impact on industrial society founding banks such as Barclays. Technology companies such as Thomas Watson’s IBM, and perhaps more surprisingly Sony in Japan, were founded by Quakers. In the UK, Cadbury’s, Rowntree’s and Fry’s were well-known Quaker companies. As part of a commitment to social action, Quakers founded civil society organizations such as Oxfam, for example. Less is known, however, about the role of silence in Quaker business practice—and this is the focus of our paper and the contribution to this conference.

Findings
Our paper discusses the preparations undertaken before a meeting, the role of the clerk during the meeting, corporate discernment and the writing of minutes during a meeting, the role of listening and waiting, and “the sense of the meeting”.

The term ‘Meeting’ is at the centre of Quaker practice—nearly every form of interaction is denoted as a meeting—from the first days of the Early Friends in the seventeenth century. For Quakers meeting denotes a noun—a Meeting House—and a verb—something they do. Our focus in this paper is on Meeting for Worship for Business as it is known—a regular monthly meeting, which decides upon matters including, for instance, the type of seats for a meeting house, who can use the meeting house and which charities to support. Because all meeting have the same format and premise, business meetings are termed ‘Meetings for Worship for Business’ and are also conducted with silence as a central feature.

Quaker business meetings are very different from more typical meetings because it is the silence that is ever present: typical business meetings are rarely characterised by long period of silence, but silence is central to a Quaker meeting. Law (1998: 20) writes about the particular character of this silence at a Quaker meeting: ‘It is not heavy and preoccupied, like the desperate hush of the exam room … Instead it is, as they say a ‘centred’ silence’. Many things have to be in place, arranged in a particular manner for a Quaker meeting to constitute an active silence. The distribution of silence takes a number of forms—at the beginning and end of meeting, as well as during a meeting between speakers. Those assembled are sitting, listening and waiting. Quakers do not wear special robes to signify role and status, they have no altar, there are no ministers, and no formal hierarchy. These specific arrangements seek out and produce the active silence of a Quaker meeting. In this way, the constitutive silence cannot do without arrangements of people, paper, chairs and books, as well as other logo-centric devices. In this way the silence seems to be everywhere at a Quaker Meeting, it performs the entirety of the meeting, and yet the silence is nowhere in no one person in particular.
Quakers do not vote at meetings, they discern “the sense of the meeting”: agreement is ‘sensed’ and not voted on. Sitting in collective silence is directed at becoming ‘gathered’. Molina-Markham (2013: 171) argues that the process of decision-making is more important than the decisions made: ‘The process of meeting for business is more important than the decisions that result. Relying on ‘‘sense of the meeting’’ offered a possibility for creating and sustaining community in decision-making that may not be possible in other contexts when voting is relied on’.

Implications
We conclude by suggesting that there is an ethics of silence the constitute Quaker business meetings: that silence plays a constitutive role at Quaker business meetings. The talk, listening, waiting and silence ‘speak the experience’, the active event of sitting together communally. Quaker meetings perform the experience community decision-making in a particular way, and in so doing disclose an ethics which can, we think, be part of re-imaging business practices and the role of ethics in the twenty-first century.
 
References
Derrida, J. (1997[1967]) Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Furtado, P. (2013) Quakers. Oxford: Shire Publications.
Kuhling, C., Keohane, K and Kavanagh, D. (2003) ‘Talk and silence: Instantiations and Articulations’, Ephemera, 3, 4, 288-305.
Law, J. (1998) ‘After meta-narrative: On knowing in tension’, in R. Chia (ed.) In the Realm of Organization: Essays for Robert Cooper. London: Routledge.
Molina-Markham, E. (2014) ‘Finding the “sense of the meeting”: Decision making through silence among Quakers’, Western Journal of Communication, 78: 2, 155-174.
Scott, R. L. (1993) ‘Dialectical tensions of speaking and silence’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 79, 1–18.
Spivak, C.G., Landry, D. and MacLean, G.M. (1996) The Spivak Reader: Selected Works. London: Routledge.
Zizek, S. (2006) ‘Burned by the sun’, in S. Zizek (ed.) Lacan: The Silent Partners. New York: Verso.

Silence Meetings Decision-Making Quakers [ view full abstract ]

Silence
Meetings
Decision-Making
Quakers