Timothy Kuhn

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.

A ‘Demented Work Ethic’ and a ‘Lifestyle Firm’: Discourse, Identity, and Workplace Time Commitments

One key to understanding the contours of late modernity is to examine workers’ allocations of time to their organizations. In this article, I frame workplace time commitments as the outcome of two forces: individuals’ efforts to portray a positive and distinctive identity (identity work) and the organizational and social discourses shaping those identities (identity regulation). Analysis of interviews with 53 employees from two distinct organizations shows that identity work and identity regulation related to workplace time commitments are not the result of totalizing managerial discourses, but are influenced by the arrays of discursive resources proffered by both locales and organizational practices. Importantly, these arrays tend to ‘tilt’ toward agency or structure in the conceptions of the individual–organization relationship they afford. Based on this finding, I argue that studies of workplace control and resistance should examine the features of such arrays of discursive resources, that understanding these assemblies of discursive resources can provide insight on the institutionalization of workplace practices, and that claims about modernitys totalizing influences on identity must be tempered by considering locale-specific discourses.

Reengineering Identity: A Case Study of Multiplicity and Duality in Organizational Identification.

Recent theoretical work in organizational identification has developed two themes: that members of complex organizations have multiple social groups with which they identify and that acts displaying members’identifications contribute to the construction of collective identities. Using a multimethodological and longitudinal approach, this case study of a planned organizational change found that (a) members central in the communication network identified similarly across four social groups, whereas others concentrated on subsets of these identities; (b) members’ use of discursive resources to explain a contentious event both displayed structured interests and made claims on the collective’s identity; and (c) members’preferred identity structures were more local than distant following the event. These findings contribute to scholarship and practice by illustrating the multiplicity and duality of identification, by introducing a procedure to assess multiple identity structures simultaneously, and by calling attention to the influence of activity patterns in shaping identities, particularly during planned change.

Accomplishing Knowledge A Framework for Investigating Knowing in Organizations

This article proposes a shift in how researchers study knowledge and knowing in organizations. Responding to a pronounced lack of methodological guidance from existing research, this work develops a framework for analyzing situated organizational problem solving. This framework, rooted in social practice theory, focuses on communicative knowledge-accomplishing activities, which frame and respond to various problematic situations. Vignettes drawn from a call center demonstrate the value of the framework, which can advance practice-oriented research on knowledge and knowing by helping it break with dubious assumptions about knowledge homogeneity within groups, examine knowing as instrumental action and involvement in a struggle over meaning, and display how patterns of knowledge-accomplishing activities can generate unintended organizational consequences.

The Social Construction of Technology in Studies of the Workplace

The environment of the modern organization has always been technological, but this has been understood in a number of distinct ways. For example, seen as collections of rationalized and instrumental practices, organizations themselves have been regarded as technologies in which effective information and communication processes are critical (Taylor, 1911; Thompson 1967). Of more interest to this volume are the perspectives that have looked at information and communication technologies within organizations. Technologies have had profound effects on the way certain information work is done, such as actuarial work (Yates, 1993). With the expanding capabilities of digital computing, fields of study such as office automation (Johnson & Rice, 1984), operations research (Arnoff, 1957) and management information systems (Dickson, 1982) emerged to focus on the question of how computer-based information and communication technologies might be integrated into organizational processes to make organizations and organizational processes more efficient and effective or otherwise to fulfill unmet organizational needs. Even as organizational scholars turn increasingly to considering issues of information and communication technologies (ICTs), a complementary turn is made by technology scholars who look to social and organizational issues implicated in technology design and development. Located in fields such as the sociology of technology, computer science, and the anthropology of work, and typically organized under the general category of social construction, this research holds that technologies are and have always been social. Our interest in this chapter is to explore the intersection between social constructionism and the study of ICTs in the workplace. We begin by identifying a set of assumptions that underlie a constructionist perspective and indicate some ways in which these assumptions appear in studies of the workplace. Fundamental to constructionism is the active effort to privilege

Negotiating the Micro-Macro Divide: Thought Leadership From Organizational Communication for Theorizing Organization

Scholars of organization tend to apportion organizational phenomena into two distinct levels: micro and macro. In organization studies, efforts to overcome the problems resulting from the micro-macro split focus on locating appropriate microfoundations or engaging in multilevel theorizing, but these approaches ultimately reinforce rather than transcend the divide. In response, I argue that communicative constitution of organization (CCO) theory provides thought leadership that can both reconceptualize the micro-macro relationship and generate novel theoretical directions, with specific attention to three widely employed theories of organization: the knowledge-based theory of the firm, stakeholder theory, and Carnegie School decisional theory. Conceptions of organizing and organization offered by CCO thus hold the potential to foster strengthened relationships between organizational communication and organization theory.

Positioning Lawyers: Discursive Resources, Professional Ethics, and Identification

Critics assert that lawyers’ subject positions make them accomplices to corporate domination. Work on subject position formation, however, frequently ignores either identifications with particular organizations or the manifold discourses circulating around those organizations. To address this, I asked junior corporate attorneys at a large US law firm to reflect on the accusation of being a ‘corporate lackey’. In their responses were four forms of discursive resource that evinced varied sources of identification. The analysis shows that the discursive resources reinforced one another in a ‘reticulated’ fashion: conditioned by encompassing discourses of managerialism and legal professionalism, they supported a particular mode of subjectivation. From this finding, I argue for the need to contextualize studies of professionals in multiple discourses, the advantages of studying arrays of discursive resources and the importance of surfacing ‘submerged’ discursive resources.

Modeling High-Resolution Broadband Discourse in Complex Adaptive Systems

Numerous researchers and practitioners have turned to complexity science to better understand human systems. Simulation can be used to observe how the microlevel actions of many human agents create emergent structures and novel behavior in complex adaptive systems. In such simulations, communication between human agents is often modeled simply as message passing, where a message or text may transfer data, trigger action, or inform context. Human communication involves more than the transmission of texts and messages, however. Such a perspective is likely to limit the effectiveness and insight that we can gain from simulations, and complexity science itself. In this paper, we propose a model of how close analysis of discursive processes between individuals (high-resolution), which occur simultaneously across a human system (broadband), dynamically evolve. We propose six different processes that describe how evolutionary variation can occur in texts—recontextualization, pruning, chunking, merging, appropriation, and mutation. These process models can facilitate the simulation of high-resolution, broadband discourse processes, and can aid in the analysis of data from such processes. Examples are used to illustrate each process. We make the tentative suggestion that discourse may evolve to the “edge of chaos.” We conclude with a discussion concerning how high-resolution, broadband discourse data could actually be collected.

Negotiating Boundaries between Scholars and Practitioners: Knowledge, Networks, and Communities of Practice.

I t has become commonplace to assert that practitioners and academics compose fully distinct communities based on their contrasting worldviews, sense-making devices, goals, and preferences for data (Beyer &Trice, 1982). Under this assumption, commentators call for scholars to increase their reach into practitioner communities by either developing more comprehensible messages (Rynes, Bartunek, & Daft, 2001) or to conduct research that addresses pressing practitioner problems (Aldag, 1997). In both cases, the knowledge that is the basis of scholar-practitioner interaction is portrayed as an objective entity that can and should be linearly transferred from one side of the (supposedly) clearly defined boundary to the other to address practitioner problems. Instead of clear divisions between scholar and practitioner communities, however, it ismore likely that there existmultiple and heterogeneous communities on each side of the divide that is created by university affiliation. Activitywithin each community is significantly more complex than is often portrayed from across the boundary. For instance, analyses of social scientific paradigms and basic-versus-applied debates consistently demonstrate a wide range