Boris H. J. M. Brummans

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Université de Montréal

Purpose For more than 20 years, research on the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) has drawn on interactional data to offer novel explanations of how organizational phenomena emerge, change, and stabilize in and through communication. Accordingly, the idea of “never leaving the t erra firma of interaction” has become a tenet of CCO r...

How does agency emerge eventfully in processes of organizational becoming? This article aims to address this question by developing a process theory of agency based on Gilbert Simondon's philosophical writings on individuation as a communicative phenomenon and Brian Massumi's writings on affect. This theory views agency as an affective force, expre...

On July 12, 2012, I traveled to Tso (Lake) Moriri in Ladakh, the highest altitude plateau region of India, which crosses part of the Himalayas (see Rizvi, 1996), where I was continuing my ethnographic fieldwork on everyday interactions in a Buddhist monastery by living with monks in the remote monastery of Rizong, participating in their life, and i...

The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication is a state-of-the-art resource for scholars, students, and practitioners seeking to deepen their understanding and expertise in this dynamic field. Written by a global team of established and emerging experts, this Handbook provides a comprehensive exploration of the field’s...

This interview traces the unfolding trajectories of Boris Brummans, an organizational communication ethnographer, in conversation with Marie-Claude Plourde.

This interview traces the unfolding trajectories of Boris Brummans, an organizational communication ethnographer, in conversation with Marie-Claude Plourde.

La pandémie de la Covid-19 a demandé une capacité d’adaptation sans précédent à ces entrepreneurs qui ont souvent dû revoir leur façon de travailler et, par conséquent, collaborer dans un contexte où l’essentiel des réunions et activités de réseautage ont été annulées ou transposées dans un environnement entièrement virtuel. Afin de pouvoir mieux c...

The accusation that someone is putting words in someone else’s mouth can be heard in everyday conversations, but what does this phenomenon reveal about the ways human beings communicate? This paper aims to show that it is useful to view putting words in someone’s mouth as a form of ventriloquation. By theorising this phenomenon, this paper explicat...

This edited book takes up the challenge that process philosophy and process ontology pose to conventional, entity-based empirical research, even daring to question the relevance of ‘methodology’ in contemporary process organization studies. A process ontology demands re-imagining and ongoing re-invention of how researchers inquire into and engage w...

This edited book takes up the challenge that process philosophy and process ontology pose to conventional, entity-based empirical research, even daring to question the relevance of ‘methodology’ in contemporary process organization studies. A process ontology demands re-imagining and ongoing re-invention of how researchers inquire into and engage w...

Data we collect and use in organisation and management studies look like ‘cold cases’. We want to offer more conversations, interpretations, arguments and even disputes. The ‘Interpreters’ is a nexus where academics invite colleagues and friends to analyse and discuss freely an argument, raw data, cases and qualitative materials.

Patients with head and neck cancer report high unmet psychosocial needs as they undergo lifesaving treatments that can significantly alter their appearance and cause functional impairments. This qualitative analysis of recordings of 88 pre- and post-surgical consultations involving 20 patients respond to the need for empirical studies of patient–pr...

Comment les recherches CCO peuvent rendre compte de la contribution des chercheur.e.s à la constitution des organisations dans lesquelles ils.elles s’immergent ? Nous proposons une conception relationnelle de la pratique réflexive qui permet à la dimension constitutive de l’organisation de se manifester au fil de l’engagement des chercheur.e.s dans...

Historically, media studies and interaction studies have been estranged from each other. As John Durham Peters noted, this unfortunate situation can be traced back to the quarrel between the Sophists and Socrates, which can be summarized as the perennial opposition between the doctrine of dissemination, today represented by media studies, and the d...

How do welfare-reliant mothers enact their agency in relationships with social workers and social services? The present article addresses this question by investigating how twenty Israeli welfare-reliant mothers expressed different modes of human agency in in-depth interviews. Results show how research participants enact agency through (i) expressi...

Mediation is a widely used form of third-party conflict management for which research has primarily focused on the role of mediators, but how are the relations between disputing parties constituted in communication involving written texts, such as official letters or medical reports, during mediation sessions? To gain deeper insight into the commun...

Bien que le lien entre organisation, culture et communication soit établi de longue date, de façon surprenante, hormis quelques exceptions, peu de chercheurs semblent avoir étudié la culture organisationnelle en train de se re-produire, à partir d’une perspective résolument communicationnelle. La plupart des études qui ont tenté de le faire se sont...

This paper presents a view of interaction analysis that departs from the intersubjectivist assumptions that underlie its ethnomethodological tradition. Adopting a pragmatist perspective, we propose to treat phenomena as being composed of relations; that is, as being constituted by passing through various things and beings. Extending Latour’s work o...

This paper presents a view of interaction analysis that departs from the intersubjectivist assumptions that underlie its ethnomethodological tradition. Adopting a pragmatist perspective, we propose to treat every phenomenon as being composed of relations, that is, as being constituted by passing through various things and beings. Extending Latour's...

How can interprofessional health care teams be more patient-centered in their team talk in the clinical backstage? This article addresses this question in the practice of an acute care team to achieve a twofold purpose. First, we develop the notion of joint emplotment to conceptualize our observations of how acute care teams work out understandings...

Religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs) are becoming powerful organizational actors, but how are these organizations enacted through the communicative practices of their members? To address this question, this article offers a conceptual framework for investigating how the terse retelling of an inspirational organizational story, encapsula...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to question and reflect on the spatial metaphors that inform Matts Alvesson’s (2009) conception of an organizational home in his description of at-home ethnography. (Cultural) hybridity is proposed as an alternative metaphor because the concept of hybridity can be used to highlight the complex nature of the rel...

Mindful organizing focuses on cultivating organizational members' collective ability to notice unexpected events and correct errors. Hence, it is typically found in high reliability organizations (HROs). This Western perspective on mindful organizing is increasingly complemented by an Eastern perspective that centers on cultivating organizational m...

This article presents an empirical analysis of the communicative constitution of organization (CCO) literature to demonstrate how, and to what extent, CCO scholarship is becoming established within organizational communication studies and related fields. We assess the trajectory of CCO research from 2000 to 2015 and, via the application of a neo-in...

Based on a brief autoethnographic account of my interactions with persons whose responsiveness is questionable, this essay offers a critical reflection on the challenges of trying to dialogue with those who are not interlocutors in the strict sense of the term and thus provides further insight into the mysterious nature of dialogic communication.

Information and communication technologies are often cited as one major source, if not the causal vector, for the rising intensity of transnational practices. Yet, extant literature has not examined critically how digital media appropriation affects the constitution of transnational organizations, particularly Chinese spiritual ones. To address the...

Ethnography is grounded in the belief that we can produce sensible knowledge about a social collectivity by carefully textualizing members’ lived experience, which is inextricably linked to our own. Yet how can we teach students the skills necessary to inscribe everyday life without instilling in them an obsession with writing that propels them out...

Management and organisation scholars infrequently turn the lens through which they study others on themselves. To exemplify the importance of practicing this reflexivity, which is at the centre of Bourdieu’s work, this chapter examines how twelve senior organisational communication scholars constitute a relationship of ontological complicity with t...

This volume considers the implementation difficulties of researching religion online and reflects on the ethical dilemmas faced by sociologists of religion when using digital research methods. Bringing together established and emerging scholars, global case studies draw on the use of social media as a method for researching religious oppression, re...

This study explores the framing patterns of disputants in four different intractable environmental conflicts. In particular, it examines how disputants form interpretive communities through the ways that they frame these conflicts. The research reveals a complex picture in which interpretive communities form around disputants' conflict roles and ex...

Information and communication technologies are often cited as one major source, if not the causal vector, for the rising intensity of transnational practices. Yet extant literature has not examined critically how digital media appropriation plays into the constitution of transnational organizations, particularly Chinese spiritual ones. To address t...

Tension-centered analyses are increasingly popular in organizational communication studies. Hence, how tensions emerge and are dealt with by organizational members in their work activities are key issues of debate in our field. The purpose of this article is to develop a ventriloqual approach for investigating how organizational tensions (whether e...

This article examines how those who hold leadership positions in an internationally renowned Taiwanese Buddhist humanitarian organization establish themselves as legitimate authors of their organization by invoking a spiritual leader in their daily interactions and use this invocation to author their organization with a shared sense of compassion a...

This article demonstrates the value of a Buberian approach to relationships between professional caregivers and residents in nursing homes. Extant research on relationships between professional caregivers and residents typically distinguishes between task-centered and person-centered communication yet tends to privilege either the perspective of pr...

Purpose ‐ The purpose of this paper is to investigate how business executives perceive and account for their use of paratextual cues as a means of managing their professional impressions in business e-mails on their smartphone (i.e. BlackBerry, iPhone, etc.) and office computer. Design/methodology/approach ‐ Semi-structured, audio-recorded telephon...

This study describes how a small group of Buddhist monks and nuns in a remote monastery and nunnery in the Indian Himalayas interacted during and after a landslide. In so doing, it provides rare insight into an actual case of Buddhist mindful organizing in the face of natural disaster.

Purpose Shadowing is becoming an increasingly popular method in management and organization studies. While several scholars have reflected on this technique, comparatively few researchers have explicated the specific practices that constitute this method and discussed their implications for research on processes of organizing. The purpose of this a...

In this essay, I conceptualize incarnation from a communicative point of view by juxtaposing it with the concept of transcension. Subsequently, I reflect on the potential value of studying these concepts for communication research.

Concerns for organizational identification (OI) are recurrent in organizational communication research. However, few studies show how this process unfolds during everyday interactions. To address this issue, OI is conceived in this article as a process of “consubstantialization” that plays a central role in the coproduction of an organization’s sub...

Teachers have recently started to introduce wikis into their courses. However, comparatively few studies have looked at the actual experiences of students who are engaged in building a wiki community for a particular course. To address this limitation, this exploratory self-report study examined student experiences with using a wiki in an upper-lev...

Executive Summary For 35 years, the Alliance for Children and Television (ACT) has been monitoring the quality of Canadian children’s television and all screen‐based content and actively contributing to the vitality of the industry. The ACT also actively undertakes research projects to further understand children’s television and multi‐platform iss...

This article examines the language of numbers as it is used in talk within a contemporary organization to provide a better understanding of the ways speech acts, performed during the construction of accounts, contribute to the process of organizing. Based on an in-depth case study of the site budgetary control process in a French construction firm,...

Scholars have recently begun to reflect on the potential benefits of ‘‘Buddhist organizing’’ for organizational theory and practice. However, relatively few scholars have empirically studied what people actually do to put a Buddhist philosophy into organizational action. To address this issue, this study examines how Mahayana (Madhyamaka) Buddhism...

On August 1, 2007, I returned to Ladakh, the highest altitude plateau region of India, which crosses part of the Himalayas and is situated in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (see Rizvi, 1996), to carry on my ethnographic fieldwork on everyday interactions in a Buddhist monastery by living with monks in the remote monastery of Rizong, particip...

In this article, we develop an analytical perspective to examine how an organization's mode of being is constituted and experienced through ongoing processes of communication. To show the use and implications of this perspective, we analyze how members and partners of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, a.k.a.`Doctors Without Borders'), a renowned human...

In this autoethnographic essay, I reflect on my brief personal experiences of conducting field research on ways in which way a small group of Tibetan Buddhist monks enact a monastic total institution in Ladakh, India. More specifically, I analyze my experiences in view of the relationship between dual and nondual mind, as discussed by Henry Vyner (...

Intractable multiparty conflict is omnipresent in social life, but how do individuals in this type of dispute make sense of their situation and therefore enact it in a particular way? The current study investigated this question by examining how disputants from different stakeholder groups framed conflict situations in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota...

On July 26, 2006, I left Ladakh, the highest altitude plateau region of India, which crosses part of the Himalayas and is situated in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (see Rizvi, 1996). This region is also known as “Little Tibet” because of the close geographic and cultural proximity between Tibet and Ladakh. Accordingly, many Ladakhis study a...

This nonanthropological poetry was brought to life by tracing the agency of my father's euthanasia declaration through a reconstruction of its confessions. I follow the poetry with reflections on the role of this textual agent in the unfolding of my father's last days.

Recent debate in the social sciences and the communication discipline has considered the value of ambiguity and uncertainty in a variety of contexts. This research considered the context of a community‐level change regarding health care, and investigated the impact of perceived ambiguity on beliefs about the likely success of the initiative. Interv...

This anthropological poetry was brought to life by reconstructing my grandfather's last diary accounts. I follow the poetry with reflections on reconstructing my grandfather through writing, reading, and numerous dialogues with him and a “model reader” (Eco, 1992, 1994).

Between the years 1993 and 2000, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation sponsored the Comprehensive Community Health Models (CCHMs) Initiative in three Michigan counties. CCHMs was comprised of three closely related community initiatives carried out in the midst of a failed national health care reform effort and the continued penetration of managed care arra...

In this dissertation, I explicate how scholars implicate themselves in the subfield of organizational communication studies by engaging in antinomic language-games which make the conduct of research (and textwork in particular) possible. My analysis suggests that the studied scholars enact these games to understand a more or less common object of k...