Dialogue: Sensing Relational Encounter Amidst Complexity

The previous three chapters have used three different concepts Buber identified as fundamental to dialogue — turning, being rather than seeming and mutuality — as lenses to analyse the data. The themes surrounding these three areas — presence, façade, rules of the game, judgements, role expectations and power — emerged clearly to me through my interpretation of the transcription data. The final theme, ‘definition of dialogue’, represented in this chapter, I find less easy to articulate and identify. It concerns the quality of dialogue. It concerns the sense that we made of the term ‘dialogue’ individually and as a group, and it concerns the challenge of conveying this felt experience of being in dialogue to others. It concerns also how dialogue emerges in the midst of, and despite, the complexity of a moment. I suggest that the analysis in this chapter might invite RLT to further theorize the quality of the leader-follower between space. It might do this through examining the sense of encounter between leader and follower; an area little examined to date.