Theresa Castor

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.

Constructing Social Reality in Organizational Decision Making: Account Vocabularies in a Diversity Discussion

Communication during organizational decision making has often been treated as information exchange, and when social constructionist orientations have been assumed, these have focused on communication related to decision making rather than on talk during decision-making interactions. Shotter’s rhetorical-responsive social constructionist approach is applied to analyzing a faculty senate’s discussion on whether or not to implement a culture and ethnic diversity requirement. This study examines decision-making talk and how, during decision making, participants socially construct a diversity requirement. The vocabularies of diversity and requirement function to define the resolution and allow faculty to demonstrate accountability in different ways. The meanings of these vocabularies are discursively negotiated during decision making; this process reveals competing vocabularies and ambiguity. The conflict over the diversity requirement was resolved through a substitute resolution that reaffirmed the nature of the university as an institutional organization through the vocabulary of good faith. This study shows how decision-making talk constitutes organizations.

`It's just a process': questioning in the construction of a university crisis

Questioning in an organizational context is a challenging event in multiple senses. Questioning may be used to criticize the leaders of an organization. For the criticisms to be heard as legitimate, however, the questioner must operate within contextual constraints (Shotter, 1993). The main purpose of this article is to examine how questioning functions to construct a universitys crisis. Discourse within two faculty senate meetings is analyzed. Three faculty questioning strategies are described: appealing to another organizational entity, requesting either/or information; and metacommunicative commentary. Administration and senate leadership responded to questions using the strategies of appealing to a process and metacommunicative commentary. Faculty questioning functioned to challenge a current course of action while operating from within the organizational guidelines of discourse. Alternatively, leadership responses deferred any substantive change in the course of action. The strategies are related to issues of power, social action, and models of educational governance.

Metacommunication During Disaster Response: “Reporting” and the Constitution of Problems in Hurricane Katrina Teleconferences

“To anticipate and forestall disasters is to understand regularities in the ways small events can combine to have disproportionately large effects.” Taking Weick’s observation to heart, we examine teleconference calls between Louisiana local and state officials and federal officials as Hurricane Katrina gathered momentum by applying action-implicative discourse analysis (AIDA). AIDA highlights the linkages between communication dilemmas and communication practices. We analyze “reporting” as a metacommunicative speech act that implicated pragmatic communication dilemmas of how to act in the face of emerging disaster. We explicate how, during the Hurricane Katrina teleconferences, “reporting” shaped and constrained the formulation of problems and responses by creating a structure that facilitated order while inhibiting the identification of and “talking through” of confusion points, and the communicative sharing of local resources. As such, we identify how sensemaking is interconnected with interactional framing. Reporting thus constituted a “small event” that occurred with “regularity” during the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Sustainability and Textual Extensions of Institutional Discourse: Testing the Great Lakes Compact

This article examines the interplay of discourse, texts, and sustainability in the public hearing process for a Wisconsin city’s application to divert water from the Great Lakes of North America. The application is controversial and has been labeled as a ‘precedent’ setting action with respect to the Great Lakes Compact and water management. This article examines how texts are used to support positions on the diversion application and on sustainability. This analysis takes a discourse analytic approach to analyze local public hearings. The central question that is addressed is how do texts matter in sustainability efforts? The analysis indicates that texts are significant in supporting positions, but are associated with stances in different ways such that the same text may be used to support divergent positions. Meeting participants converged in agreeing on the importance of specific texts and of sustainability, but differed in how they related actions to texts.

The materiality of discourse: relational positioning in a fresh water controversy

ABSTRACT This project adds to current theorising in organisational communication on the interconnection between discourse and materiality through the refinement of a relational ontology perspective. The central proposition of this project is that in a relational ontology perspective, associations are performed such that relationships and thereby ontologies are communicatively negotiated. To illustrate the arguments of the project, a fresh water management controversy is examined by using public hearing and field research data. The case study illustrates how the materiality of discourse functions to position freshwater, communities, and organisational texts in various and shifting ways to each other.