ABSTRACT
I was visiting John Shotter’s home patch, the University of New Hampshire; it was the late 1990s. We were giving papers at a conference in the newly built conference centre – a glass and steel shard, as I recall, which peered loftily above the woods. I took a seat in the seminar room as John, the next speaker, was introduced by Sheila McNamee, a close colleague. She drily and teasingly positioned him as the author of Images of Man (see Shotter, 1975) – stressing the word ‘Man’. Totally unphased, John lightly responded that his title was entirely appropriate – the literatures he had presented in that book were indeed about Man! Thinking of this humorous exchange reminds me of John’s long and continuing explorations around the question of ‘what it is to be human’. In particular, I recall studying and much enjoying Human Action and its Psychological Investigation (Gauld and Shotter, 1977) when doing background preparation for my first book A Social Psychology of Organising (Hosking and Morley, 1991).
