François Cooren

1 Constitutional Amendments: “Materializing” Organizational Communication

Abstract This essay aims to “materialize” organizational communication in three senses. First, we seek to make the field of study bearing this name more tangible for North American management scholars, such that recognition and engagement become common. To do so, we trace the development of the field’s major contribution thus far: the communication‐as‐constitutive principle, which highlights how communication generates defining realities of organizational life, such as culture, power, networks, and the structure–agency relation. Second, we argue that this promising contribution cannot easily find traction in management studies until it becomes “materialized” in another sense: that is, accountable to the materiality evident in organizational objects, sites, and bodies. By synthesizing current moves in this direction, we establish the basis for sustained exchange between management studies and the communication‐as‐constitutive model. Third, we demonstrate how these conceptual developments can “materialize” ...

Communication, Organizing and Organization: An Overview and Introduction to the Special Issue

This paper provides an overview of previous work that has explored the processes and mechanisms by which communication constitutes organizing (as ongoing efforts at coordination and control of activity and knowledge) and organizations (as collective actors that are ‘talked’ into existence). We highlight differences between existing theories and analyses grounded in communication-as-constitutive (CCO) perspectives and describe six overarching premises for such perspectives; in so doing, we sharpen and bound the explanatory power of CCO perspectives for organization studies more generally. Building on these premises, we develop an agenda for further research, call for greater cross-fertilization between the communication and organization literatures, and illustrate ways in which communication-informed analyses have complemented and strengthened theories of the firm, organizational identity, sensemaking, and strategy as practice.

Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, incarnation and ventriloquism

What happens when people communicate or dialogue with each other? This is the daunting question that this book proposes to address by starting from a controversial hypothesis: What if human interactants were not the only ones to be considered, paraphrasing Austin (1962), as “doing things with words”? That is, what if other “things” could also be granted the status of agents in a dialogical situation? Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, incarnation, and ventriloquism proposes to explore this unique hypothesis by mobilizing metaphorically the notion of ventriloquism. According to this ventriloqual perspective, interactions are never purely local, but dislocal , that is, they constantly mobilize figures (collectives, principles, values, emotions, etc.) that incarnate themselves in people’s discussions. This highly original book, which develops the analytical, practical and ethical dimensions of such a theoretical positioning, may be of interest to communication scholars, linguists, sociologists, conversation analysts, management and organizational scholars, as well as philosophers interested in language, action and ethics.

The Organizing Property of Communication

What is an organization? What are the building blocks that ultimately constitute this social form, so pervasive in our daily life? Like Augustine facing the problem of time, we all know what an organization is, but we seem unable to explain it. This book brings an original answer by mobilizing concepts traditionally reserved to linguistics, analytical philosophy, and semiotics. Based on Algirdas Julien Greimas’ semio-narrative model of action and Jacques Derrida’s concept of ecriture, a reconceptualization of speech act theory is proposed in which communication is treated as an act of delegation where human and nonhuman agents are mobilized (texts, machines, employees, architectural elements, managers, etc.). Perfectly congruent with the last development of the sociology of translation developed by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, this perspective illustrates the organizing property of communication through a process called ‘interactoriality’. Jacques Lacan used to say that the unconscious is structured like a language. This book shows that a social organization is structured like a narrative.

What makes communication ‘organizational’?: How the many voices of a collectivity become the one voice of an organization☆

Abstract How is an organization constituted as an actor? This article explores the property of communication that explains how organization is able to enter the field of discourse, express an intention, and be accorded a voice there. The paper argues that communication becomes explicitly ‘organizational’ when a collective agency finds expression in an identifiable actor, and the actor is recognized by the community as a legitimate expression of such agency. This is comparable to Searles 1995 view of the institutional basis for the construction of social reality. The article develops its argument through an analysis of two contrasting theories of action in speech, one bottom-up and linguistic in inspiration, the other top-down and sociological in spirit. We show that both versions of action-in-speech are to be found in uncomfortable propinquity in John Austins original presentation of speech act theory (Austin, 1962) and that the continuing debate between the bottom-up and top-down positions, notably enunciated by Bach and Harnish (1979, 1991), and Searle (1989, 1995), can be traced to contrasting visions of communication, either person-centered or group-centered. Implications for organizational research are briefly discussed.

The Communicative Achievement of Collective Minding: Analysis of Board Meeting Excerpts

Based on an in-depth analysis of excerpts from a board meeting in a drug rehabilitation center, this article shows how a group of managers displays a form of intelligence that cannot be reduced to the simple sum of their respective contributions. Although this phenomenonhas been illustrated so far in the context of high-reliability organizations, this analysis extends previous findings by showing that a form of collective intelligence can be found more generally in patterns of conversational behavior. The managers are shown to be constructing, amending, and adding a series of textual blocks that ultimately represent the heedfulness of the group. Although it can only be achieved on the “terra firma” of interactions, collective minding is shown to be a phenomenon that always transcends the “here and now” by interrelating this latter with the “there and then,” a phenomenon of translocalization that can be identified as a form of organizational intelligence.

Discursiveness, Contradiction, and Unintended Consequences in Successive Downsizings

In this study, the authors explore the idea that organizations perform in contradictory ways because they must satisfy contradictory expectations. The authors present a case study of three successive downsizings within a single organization, the last two of which involved contradictory downsizing strategies. These included a voluntary-involuntary downsizing strategy and a velvet boot strategy. The article also examines several internal organizational contradictions over missions, values, job expectations, and resources and shows how their management yields both contradictory solutions and unintended consequences. Finally, the authors adopt a contradiction centered view of organizations that focuses on the oppositions organizational members construct as their organizational realities, evidence for which can be found in their situated discourse.

The Three Schools of CCO Thinking: Interactive Dialogue and Systematic Comparison

The idea of the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) has gained considerable attention in organizational communication studies. This rather heterogeneous theoretical endeavor is driven by three main schools of thought: the Montreal School of Organizational Communication, the Four-Flows Model (based on Giddens’s Structuration Theory), and Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems. In this article, we let proponents of all three schools directly speak to each other in form of an interactive dialogue that is structured around guiding questions addressing the epistemological, ontological, and methodological dimension of CCO as a theoretical paradigm. Based on this dialogue, we systematically compare the three schools of CCO thinking and identify common grounds as well as key differences.

Organizationsas Hybrid forms of Life: The Implications of the Selection of Agency in Problem Formulation

In line with recent theorizing on the communicative constitution of organizations, this project seeks to expand the notion of agency within organizations to include human and nonhuman agents. The formulation of problems and solutions is examined as an ideal discursive site in which organizational participants negotiate the role of various agencies in organizational action. The authors’ thesis is illustrated through a discourse analytic examination of a university faculty senates discussion of a problematic decision made during a budget crisis. This analysis illustrates how problem formulation can be conceptualized as an interplay between various agents including human, textual, and other nonhuman agents. Implications are discussed more generally regarding the role of human and nonhuman agents in the construction of organizational realities.

Leadership as the Hybrid Production of Presence(s)

Leadership scholars and lay actors often attribute a certain presence to great leaders in describing a commanding style or a charismatic personality. However, leadership presence and its mirror concept, absence, have been difficult concepts for researchers to study. This article proposes to redress this short coming using actor-network theory (ANT). In ANT, the focus is on human and nonhuman agents, their hybrid forms, networked socialaction, and macro acting, the latter of which enables leaders or followers to speak on behalf of their organizations. Together with ANT’s emphasis on the role of narrative, this approach directs analysts to the situated construction of actor networks in which leadership presence or absence is attributed. An emphasis on discourse also shows how various actants are imbued with meaning, enabling analysts to unravel networks andflows of power associated with leadership presence/absence. Leadership discourses involving charismatic/transformational leadership are considered as well as the disaster management networking associated with two US Governors, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kathleen Blanco, for their respective handling of the California wildfires and hurricane Katrina.