From Container to Concerns

This chapter interrogates the relationship between the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) and criticality using leadership development as its vehicle. As a starting place, it contests the critique of CCO as uncritical at worst and lacking criticality at best, and points to CCO's capacity to be alternatively and complementarily critical, offering traditional critical theory ways of uncovering how agencies and authorities come about. The result is an exhortation to transfer attention from “containers” (analyst preoccupations and frames) to “concerns” (what participants/ practitioners orient to in interaction) in a bid to strengthen the voices of non-researcher agents (both human and more-than-human-) in research critique and analysis. Overall it aims to provoke more thought about what criticality is, where it starts, what it looks like in motion, and what it does and could do.