Nicolas BencherkiUniversité TÉLUQ · Sciences humaines, lettres et communication
Nicolas Bencherki
PhD
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75
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Introduction
I use ethnographic methods to study organizational communication in community-based organizations. I am particularly interested in the way community workers and volunteers discursively and materially constitute their organization, with a special focus on strategy-making and on the role of property in sharing action between individuals and organizations.
Additional affiliations
September 2017 - present
September 2013 - August 2017
September 2012 - May 2013
Education
September 2007 - August 2011
September 2007 - August 2011
Publications
Publications (75)
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...
Community organizations aim to promote social and environmental justice but can still reproduce injustice in their participatory and decision-making processes. To understand how that may be the case, we examine the testimonies of volunteers and citizens involved in community organizations in the province of Quebec, in Canada. These individuals, all...
Nous soutenons que la technologie permet à la possession et à la propriété d’opérer la capture et l’agrégation de l’action individuelle. Ainsi, à travers la sociologie de Gabriel Tarde, nous proposons une théorisation de la propriété et de la possession plus riche que la définition légale qui prévaut dans les études organisationnelles en général, e...
Community Health Workers (CHWs) occupy a liminal position in two senses: they are situated between the communities they come from and serve, and the health and social service professionals with whom they connect patients; and also between two forms of knowledge. In interacting with health and social service institutions, they draw on the "technical...
Au cours des dernières années, de nombreux chercheurs et cher- cheuses ont élaboré un ensemble d’approches théoriques (systé- miques, fonctionnalistes, interprétatives, critiques ou constitutives) pour penser la communication et rendre compte de son pouvoir organisant. Cependant, la majorité de ces travaux ont été publiés en anglais et peu de resso...
Dialogue is about forgoing control and possession when interacting with the Other. In comparison, the notion of instrumentality appears contrary to the very notion of dialogue. This paper suggests, however, that mutual instrumentalization is necessary for dialogue to be a space where participants express solicitude for each other and promote each o...
This paper highlights the role of materiality in legitimising art organising as occurs at festivals and performances. Through ethnographic fieldwork pertaining to art events and projects, we documented how legitimacy is accomplished through the very performance of art. We observed that artistic practices materialise the very norms by which they are...
La recherche que nous avons menée s’est initialement penchée sur les façons dont les
organisations communautaires pouvaient mobiliser davantage leurs bénévoles : en convaincre plus de donner de leur temps, mais aussi de s’impliquer sous des formes différentes. Cela dit, alors que nous menions ce projet, nous nous sommes rendu.e.s compte que, pour r...
Organization and management are the perpetual, and perpetually fraught and resisted, ordering of sense experience. However, banning the senses into the outside of thought, and of organizational analysis, was – and to a large degree still is – the default and mostly implicit and unquestioned mode of thinking and studying organization and management....
Our proposal aims at deepening the relational dynamics that participate to an idea’s solidity and to its transformation as it becomes an innovation. Specifically, we borrow from the notion of “attachment” (Hennion, 2007; Hennion & Gomart, 1999) to suggest a theory of creative attachments. To do so, we will first review some of the foundational dist...
Dans cet article nous explorons la redéfinition des rôles des intervenants-chercheurs et intervenantes-chercheuses en interrogeant leur accomplissement communicationnel dans les interactions entre les chercheurs, chercheuses et leurs partenaires de recherche. Nous portons une attention particulière à la manière dont la figure des partenaires de rec...
Cette recherche, menée par Coline Sénac (UQAM), Nicolas Bencherki (TÉLUQ) et Consuelo Vásquez (UQAM), consiste à collecter les expériences d'injustice et de discrimination vécues par des bénévoles et des citoyen-ne-s engagé-e-s dans les milieux de l'implication bénévole et citoyenne au Québec.
L’objectif de cette étude est d'identifier les différe...
There is a growing acknowledgement that organizations comprise a plurality of concerns and interests. Among community-based organizations, such plurality has been studied as so many tensions that impede work and that must be resolved. In contrast to such a view, we adopt the posture that the multiplicity of voices is something that organizational m...
While speaking is often contrasted with writing, this chapter considers that ambiguity between the two modalities confers to speaking its ability to affect organizing. The chapter conceptually discusses how these modalities have been distinguished, including by considering speaking as a human prerogative and writing as a derivative, and suggests th...
This paper conceptualizes boundaries as difference in internal ordering, putting communication and meaning at the forefront of the study of boundaries. Communication is not something that is added to boundaries, to pierce, displace or negotiate them. Communication happens because of boundaries and constitutes new ones just as it resolves difference...
On January 24, 2017, the Trump administration tried to censor various science-related federal agencies, most notably, the National Park Service. This case study presents the emergence of "alternative" National Park Service Twitter accounts that subverted the ban and explores how "rogue rangers" share in and resist organizational authority through c...
Au cours des dernières années, plusieurs chercheurs et chercheuses en communication organisationnelle ont mis de l’avant un ensemble d’approches proposant une vision constitutive de la communication (Brummans et al., Putnam et Nicotera, Taylor et Robichaud). Ces approches ont été fédérées sous l’appellation « communication constitutive des organisa...
Why are visual methods, and in particular video methods, so naturally associated with the study of space in organizational studies? This chapter suggests that this relationship has to do with both video and space having been shown to be relational phenomena. Combining work in relational studies of space with French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s writ...
John Durham Peters, professeur d’anglais et d’études cinématographiques et médiatiques à l’université Yale, est connu pour ses travaux sur l’histoire des médias et de la communication. Son premier livre, Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication, a connu un succès mondial grâce à son regard transdisciplinaire sur la soif de l’hu...
Different perspectives on organizations have alternatively sorted them on the side of the social / human / linguistic or that of the material / non-human / technical, reducing the question of what an organization may be to attempts to (re)connect these two realms. Literature adopting a relational view, however, has offered a way out of this opposit...
Cette recherche, menée par Coline Sénac (UQAM), Nicolas Bencherki (TÉLUQ) et Consuelo Vásquez (UQAM), consiste à cartographier les pratiques du bénévolat dans la région de Montréal et des alentours. L’étude a permis d’analyser le positionnement des acteurs impliqués dans les réseaux de bénévolat montréalais.
L’objectif de cette étude est de propos...
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...
Communication scholars, especially in organizational communication, call for a consti-tutive approach to communication that considers communicating and organizing as a single process. Yet, current theorizing seems unable to embrace that equivalence. As an alternative, we present an informationally grounded view of communication, drawing from French...
This article contributes to the discursive and interactional study of strategizing by drawing attention to the communicative practices through which strategy progressively
materializes itself. Drawing on the interactions between the partners and members of a community-based organization participating in a strategic planning exercise, our study rev...
This article explores the collective practices through which ethics is handled at the humanitarian aid organization Doctors Without Borders. As an international nongovernmental organization operating in 72 countries, many times facing extreme contexts and yet able to uphold its ethical standards, we consider that studying the practical achievement...
Bencherki, N., Bourgoin, A., Chen, H.-R., Cooren, F., Denault, V., & Plusquellec, P. (2019). Bodies, faces, physical space, and the materializations of authority. In N. Bencherki, F. Matte & F. Cooren (Eds.), Authority and power in social interaction: Methods and analysis (pp. 77-98). Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge.
This symposium embraced the premise that organizing and spaces are intrinsically interconnected and that to adequately study management and organization phenomena, researchers must take organizational spaces into consideration. Organizational spaces are the various physical and virtual locales that operate as sites for organizational actions and in...
This book takes as a starting point a polemical assertion: that current literature on authority and power does not, in fact, specifically observe authority or power. This is not to say that the literature is wrong. Existing perspectives are quite correct when they provide insight on the way income, gender or racial differences are perpetuated (e.g....
As work and organizational reality become increasingly “post-bureaucratic,” the conventional and stable bases of a person’s authority—their position, their expertise, or the acquiescence of a subordinate—are eroding. This evolution calls us to revise our understanding of authority, and to consider more deeply how it is achieved in contexts that are...
Open Strategy, both as a set of processes and practices, and as an emerging academic field, "promises increased transparency and inclusion regarding strategic issues, engaging both internal and external stakeholders" (Hautz et al., 2017: 298; see also Whittington et al., 2011). Open contexts, by involving greater transparency and inclusiveness, str...
This chapters proposes to reverse the conventional assumption regarding research methods, according to which researchers follow their object of study. When studying an organization, researchers must let themselves be followed – we voluntarily use the passive voice – and make their body available as a surface where different principles, artefacts, s...
Bruno Latour reconnaît l’influence de Gilbert Simondon sur son oeuvre, en particulier quant à sa compréhension de la technique. Latour semble ainsi réaliser en grande partie le programme de « non-anthropologie » de Simondon. Mais une apparente contradiction existe dans le traitement de l’énonciation par Latour : sa compréhension de la matérialité e...
Anchored in a ‘communication as constitutive of organization’ approach, this article aims to develop a theoretical framework for understanding the performativity of strategy through an organizational lens. We define the performativity of any form of knowledge as a communicational praxis, involving theories or ideas, actors and texts, through which...
Where do new organizations come from, and how do they persist? Based on an ethnographic study of two creative hubs in Amsterdam, in which creative independent workers rented studio space, we show how space plays a role in constituting new organizations and making them last. Focusing on challenging moments in the development of these two creative hu...
In this interview, Anita Pomerantz and Robert E. Sanders, professors emeriti at the University at Albany, SUNY’s department of communication, discuss their views on conducting language and social interaction (LSI) research. They share their understanding of the connection between LSI research and the discipline of communication, and explain what we...
Writing objects/Letting the objects write themselves
Calls are multiplying for qualitative researchers to ‘position’ their knowledge. They are invited to exercise more reflexivity (Harding, 1991 ; Rose, 1997). Positionality is presented as an ethical imperative, guarding the researcher against the temptation to impose their own categories or forms...
As researchers and consultants, we’ve spent the last few years helping a dozen major public and private organizations understand what went wrong with their strategic planning. We discovered that executives have a hard time doing strategy because they are at a loss when the time comes to engage in strategic dialogue. Either their teams debate the or...
Dans cette entrevue, Anita Pomerantz et Robert E. Sanders, professeurs émérites au département de communication de la University at Albany-SUNY, discutent de leurs perspectives quant à la recherche sur le langage et l’interaction sociales. Ils partagent leur compréhension du rapport entre la recherche LSI et la discipline de la communication, et ex...
While organization studies and sociology have put considerable effort in attempting to explicate the way individual and organizational action are related, this paper proposes to borrow from the insights of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, and to begin with action first by thinking of it as pre-individual, i.e. logically prior to any individual....
Property is pervasive, and yet we organization scholars rarely discuss it. When we do, we think of it as a black-boxed concept to explain other phenomena, rather than studying it in its own right. This may be because organization scholars tend to limit their understanding of property to its legal definition, and emphasize control and exclusion as i...
Using the case of Dongguan (or Guan), known for a long time as China’s sin city, we present different communicative strategies used by businesses in the sex industry to gain legitimacy. We show that legitimation is not solely based on discursive practices, as current literature suggests, but also on other forms of communicative practices such as cl...
Actor–network theory (ANT) began at the end of the 1970s as an attempt to account for scientific activity without distinguishing a priori between its so-called social and technical aspects. The concept of actor–network captures the idea that for any actor to act, many others must act as well. In other words, action is shared with a multitude of peo...
Organizational creativity literature has overlooked the body as one of the loci of creativity and has focused on its cognitive accomplishment. This has prevented a sustained engagement of communication studies with the notion of creativity, and for the most part reduced the role of communication to the sharing of allegedly creative ideas. We would...
The relationship between communication and action and agency is discussed. Crucial themes pertaining to action are presented in their intersection with communication. The question of intentionality is contrasted with the pragmatic view of communication. The role communication plays in providing alternative descriptions of action is also discussed,...
In this paper, we suggest that the Montreal School (TMS) tradition of organizational communication offers a fruitful analytical framework that allows us to better take into account the way people practically deal with plurilingual situations as they go on with their daily activities and contribute to shaping their organizations. We identify six cor...
While organisational communication research has traditionally limited talk to human beings, a trend within the Montreal School (TMS) of the Communicational Constitution of Organizations (CCO) perspective acknowledges that ‘things do things with words’ as well, and criticises the ‘bifurcation of nature’ into two distinct realms: materiality and disc...
Organizational communication theory and research tends to assume the practices of organizational “members” are relevant to the study of organizational phenomena, without reflecting on how those members were identified in the first place. This issue is particularly relevant to perspectives that view communication as constitutive of organizations bec...
The rise of modern corporations has been accompanied by an expansion of salaried executives who have replaced owner-managers. With this expansion, the new class of managers/executives came to regard themselves as stewards of large and complex corporations, and not principally or exclusively as agents for the owners. Emerging as a self- styled ‘prof...
This text suggests that adopting a particular version of affect theories, which are still lacking recognition in
organizational communication, allows overcoming the dilemma of organizational action – is it the individual
or the organization that’s acting – not by resolving it, but by allowing a totally different understanding of the
constitution an...
This chapter develops a communicational approach to strategy and strategy-making as an attempt to dialogue with the Strategy-as-Practice literature and its latest development on talk and text. Based on a “communicative constitution of organization” approach (CCO), it provides a conceptual framework to define strategy-making as a series of communica...
Ce texte présente l’ethnométhodologie, approche développée par le socio-logue américain Harold Garfinkel au courant des années 60, telle qu’elle a été reprise par un courant de la communication organisationnelle appelé École de Montréal. Celle-ci a été initiée par James R. Taylor à l’Université de Montréal et compte parmi ses figures de proue un gr...
Writing a bibliographical article on the topic of the philosophy of communication is not an easy task. The works that have been written under that umbrella range from critical assessments of media to discussions of public debate. “Philosophy of communication” combines two ambiguous disciplines, philosophy and communication. Communication is commonl...
In this paper, we propose Wittgenstein’s concept of language game as a theoretical lens for analyzing organizational culture. Language games understood as “forms of life” emerge through the discourse and actions of organizational actors . The concept of language game offers a holistic lens, which highlights the multiplicity of sub-cultures, while a...
This paper discusses how authority is concretely performed through interaction, and how this performance contributes to the constitution of organizational boundaries. Through the case of a six-month consultancy assignment at a large French energy group, we show how authority is established, challenged and reaffirmed as everyday work unfolds. Rather...
How does an organization act? Can it be considered an actor on its own or does it need organizational members who act on its behalf? We would like to suggest our own take on the issue by suggesting a genuinely communicative approach to the issue of organizational action. Using the narratology of AJ Greimas to make apparent in talk some of process p...
Existant literature on organizational action is hazy with respect to the precise way an organization may act. It tends to vacillate between the affirmation that the organization acts by itself and a reduction of organizational action to that of its members. In both cases, the organization is already presumed. I suggest here a properly communication...
Penser l'organisation doit se faire sur le mode de la relation plutôt que celui de la substance : chercher à comprendre ce qui compose l'organisation - discours, matière, humains, ... - ne peut être une démarche productive puisque l'organisation est hybride et inclut tous ces éléments. C'est donc la manière dont ces éléments se combinent qui sont d...