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Acting For, With, and Through
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 discourse. However, due to a preference for studying human discourse, many TMS studies still may give the impression that only human spokespeople can make objects talk. This paper uses data from an ethnographic case study to argue that CCO is well equipped to recognise that other sorts of objects may speak as well, and that they enter the realm of language through yet other objects (i.e. their ‘spokesthings’). In doing so, this paper advances an argument that will counter critiques of TMS scholarship that propose it reduces the role played by objects to their interpretation by humans.
This essay aims to explore the ethical consequences of conceiving communication as a form of ventriloquism. According to this perspective, we are not the only ones speaking when we converse about the weather, give orders, apologize about something, or commit ourselves, as the very reason we feel entitled, justified or encouraged to speak comes from the various figures or dummies that compose our turns of talk. The world as we know it thus manages, literally and figuratively, to speak to and through us. As demonstrated in this essay, showing such effects of ventriloquism has important consequences in terms of ontology, but it also leads us to address key questions of ethics, that is, questions related to responsibility and the conditions of right or wrong conduct. The voices we convey are indeed also always already ours, be it only because it is through us that they make themselves heard. We are our own ventriloquists as we are our own dummies. This is the condition of our heteronomous autonomy, as it is the condition, I believe, of our ethical conduct.
Although the questions of materiality and existence are often conceived in absolute terms (something is deemed as either material/existent or immaterial/inexistent), this article defends a relational view according to which materiality and existence should rather be considered matters of degree or gradation. A world where things more or less exist or are more or less material is a world where communication always matters. Communication is indeed the way by which things, animals, and people come to express themselves in a variety of embodiments, materialisations, and incarnations. Communication is therefore constitutive of the way any being happens to exist more or less since it, she, or he always exists through other beings.
This article addresses the question: why does disorder tend to simultaneously accompany efforts to create order when organizing? Adopting a communication-centered perspective, we specifically examine the role of texts in the mutual constitution of order and disorder. Drawing on empirical material from three qualitative case studies on project organizing, we show that attempts of ordering through language use and texts (i.e. by closing and fixing meaning) tend to induce disordering (i.e. by opening the possibility of multiple meanings), at the same time. As we contend, these (dis)ordering dynamics play a key role in the communicative constitution of organization, keeping them in motion by calling forth continuous processes of meaning (re-)negotiation.
In this essay, I show how the notion of ventriloquism can be used to broaden our conception of agency and understand why communication constitutes organization. I start by explaining how a ventriloqual view of agency enables us to acknowledge what human beings as well as artifacts, machines, docu- ments, and so on do. After this, I present several intellectual perspectives that can be mobilized to investigate agency from a ventriloqual viewpoint, and then show how this vantage point can be used to study agency empirically. To conclude, I discuss the payoffs of this approach for organizational communi- cation scholars.
This study explores the performative aspects of organizational rituals to explain their agentic capacity and understand how rituals participate in the accomplishment of organizational action. We develop an alternative framework of organizational rituals based on insights from communication theory and the literature on the communicative constitution of organization/ ing (CCO) and demonstrate how rituals " make present " abstract representations of organizational power and value in ways that convey authority and bear down upon the activities and decisions of organizational members. This can be understood through a logic of " attribution and appropriation " that both constitutes rituals as actants and enables them to possess the actions of their participants. This represents a departure from previous research on organizational rituals but can also enhance our understanding of rituals, agency, and symbolic action in organizations— especially in terms of exploring sources of action and agency beyond human intentionality.
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.
A poststructuralist feminist reading of Herbert Simon's construct, bounded rationality, is presented in this article. Following from this notion, it is maintained that even though bounded rationality provides a modified critique of "pure" rationality, this concept is grounded in male-centered assumptions that exclude alternative modes of organizing. Through a feminist deconstructive process, bounded emotionality is introduced as an alternative organizing construct. The premises, conditions of organizing, and implications of this alternative are discussed and illustrated. Finally, theorists are urged to move beyond the traditional dichotomy between rationality and emotionality, in order to question the assumptions that underlie traditional constructs and to create new grounds for future theoretical activities.
Organizations rely extensively upon a myriad of images and pictorial representations such as budgets, schedules, reports, graphs, and organizational charts to name but a few. Visual images play an integral role in the process of organizing. This volume argues that images in organizations are ‘performative’, meaning that they can be seen as performances, rather than mere representations, that play a significant role in all kind of organizational activities.
Imagining Organizations opens up new ways of imagining business through an interdisciplinary approach that captures the role of visualizations and their performances. Contributions to this volume challenge this orthodox view to explore how images in business, organizing and organizations are viewed in a static and rigid form. Imagining Business addresses the question of how we visualize organizations and their activities as an important aspect of managerial work, focusing on practices and performances, organizing and ordering, and media and technologies. Moreover, it aims to provide a focal point for the growing collection of studies that explore how various business artifacts draw on the power of the visual to enable various forms of organizing and organizations in diverse contexts.
ABStrACt What determines a nation's sovereignty over a particular territory? This ques-tion is now the subject of a heated debate on the international political scene, with global warming having rendered previously unreachable Arctic resources accessible to the five coun-tries that have territorial claims in the far North: Canada, the United States, Russia, Denmark, and Norway. By building on the concepts of human and material agency, I demon-strate how both human and material agents represent the collective of Canada and thus give the Canadian government a material presence in the Arctic. This presence is key to actors such as the Canadian prime minister who are making the case for Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic region. This article therefore shows that the agency of participants in deliberation over socioscientific issues is largely influenced by the action of both other humans and mate-rial entities. réSUMé Qu'est-ce qui détermine la souveraineté d'une nation sur un territoire particulier? Cette question fait présentement l'objet d'un débat sur la scène politique internationale, alors que le réchauffement de la planète rend accessibles des ressources arctiques jadis inatteignables pour les cinq pays qui ont des revendications territoriales dans le Grand Nord: le Canada, les États-Unis, la Russie, le Danemark et la Norvège. En m'inspirant des concepts de l'agence humaine et matérielle, je démontre que des agents humains et matériels représentent le collectif du Canada et donnent ainsi au gouvernement canadien une présence matérielle dans l' Arctique. Cette présence est essentielle pour des acteurs, comme le premier ministre canadien, qui revendiquent la souveraineté du Canada dans l' Arctique. Ainsi, cet article vise à montrer que la capacité d'agir des participants dans la délibération sur des questions sociotechniques est grandement influencée par l'action d'autres humains et entités matérielles.
In a recent article published in this journal, Stohl and Stohl (2011) examine the phenomenon of clandestine organizations from a communication-centered perspective. The authors draw primarily on the work of the ‘Montreal School’ of organizational communication, which stresses the constitutive role of communication for organizations. In this response, we argue that the Stohls’ paper does not make full use of the paradigmatic turn that the Montreal School offers to organization studies. In our view, the authors overemphasize the role of communication among organizational members in the constitution of organizations. In contrast, we argue that organizations can also be ‘talked into existence’ by the communicative acts of third parties (e.g., the media), a view that is consistent with the Montreal School’s work. Moreover, drawing on the Stohls’ central example of the terrorist organization al Qaeda, we suggest that the attribute ‘clandestine’ does not capture the essence of that organization because it is characterized by extreme invisibility of its governance structures and by extreme visibility of its terrorist activities. We believe it is the reversion of the relation between invisibility and visibility that differentiates al Qaeda from legitimate organizations such as private businesses and ensures its perpetuation against all odds.
Analyses of embodied interaction still appear to explicitly or implicitly defend a human-centered approach to language and body in the material world. In this paper, we propose to decenter our analytical position by acknowledging what artifacts, tools and architectural elements contribute to human activities and practices. Starting from a “ventriloqual” perspective on communication (Cooren, 2010, 2012), we demonstrate that the accountable character of people’s activities presupposes a form of material agency (Pickering, 1995) that tends to be neglected in our analyses. Far from neglecting human beings’ contributions to their own activities, we show that this approach allows us to acknowledge their capacity to skillfully react and respond to what things indicate, say, or tell them to do. It is, we contend, in this back and forth process of actions and reactions that a certain dialogicity of things can be recognized. Decentering the analytical position by focusing on how things traceably contribute to shaping human interactions has, we contend, dramatic theoretical and methodological consequences. In the discussion we argue that resistance in taking a ventriloqual perspective to analyze the social life of things partially depends on its impact on the sensitive notion of responsibility
Keywords: Actor-Network Theory; material agency; artifacts; doctors-nurses communication; embodied interaction; health care practices; interaction analysis; materiality; repair; responsibility; speech acts; ventriloquism; workplace studies.
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 and wisdom. In so doing, this article extends the literature on mindful organizing and offers practical insights into the cultivation of mindfulness in an organizational setting. In particular, this study underscores the importance of understanding how a spiritual organization is communicatively constituted by voicing a revered figure into everyday situations, illustrating the profound connections between voice, invocation, and vocation.
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” in empirical study, proposing three streams of research designed to examine communication as a central organizing process that manages the intersection of symbolic and material worlds.
What relation is there between the existence of a work of art and that of a living being? Between the existence of an atom and that of a value like solidarity? These questions become our own each time a reality-whether it is a piece of music, someone we love, or a fictional character-is established and begins to take on an importance in our lives. Like William James or Gilles Deleuze, Souriau methodically defends the thesis of an existential pluralism. There are indeed different manners of existing and even different degrees or intensities of existence: from pure phenomena to objectivized things, by way of the virtual and the "super-existent," to which works of art and the intellect, and even morality, bear witness. Existence is polyphonic, and, as a result, the world is considerably enriched and enlarged. Beyond all that exists in the ordinary sense of the term, it is necessary to allow for all sorts of virtual and ephemeral states, transitional realms, and barely begun realities, still in the making, all of which constitute so many "inter-worlds."
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 lack of theoretically grounded, empirical research on this question, this study investigates how the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation (Tzu Chi), one of the largest Taiwan-based civil and spiritual nonprofit organizations among the Chinese diaspora, is co-constituted by various social actors as an operationally closed system through their mediated communication. Based on an innovative theoretical framework that combines Maturana and Varela's notion of 'autopoiesis' with Cooren's ideas of 'incarnation' and 'presentification', we provide a rich analysis of Tzu Chi's co-constitution through organizational leaders' appropriation of digital and social media, as well as through mediated interactions between Tzu Chi's internal and external stakeholders. In so doing, our research expands upon the catalogue of common economic and relational behaviors by overseas Chinese, advances our understanding of Chinese spiritual organizing, and reveals the contingent role of digital and social media in engendering transnational spiritual ties to accomplish global humanitarian work.
Cooren here applies his model of ‘ventriloquism’ to law and to the performances of legal speech, which allows him to detect the slight shifts in agency so characteristic of legal argumentation, and which helps reveal the complexity and polyphony of the apparently homophonic judicial utterance. From the Latourian notion of distributed action and the structure of faire faire – a theorem that consistently earns a central place in Latour’s oeuvre , Cooren launches his study by problematising anew canonical givens such as the binaries of passivity/activity and autonomy/heteronomy. We must not forget that ventriloquism involves not only the ventriloquist’s manipulation of the puppet but also the puppet’s manipulation of the ventriloquist, insofar as the latter says things that she, quite frankly, would never say were the puppet not attached to her hand. It is this strange loop of action and passion, autonomy and heteronomy, animation and inanimation, that characterises not only the puppeteer’s performance but also the lawyer’s and the judge’s performances, and, indeed, the structure of communication in general. What, then, does it mean to speak in the name of the law? Without succumbing to the snares of spontaneous hypostatisation, Cooren argues, in contrast to numerous theorists, that the law indeed possesses a sort of agency of its own. A host of legal and non-legal beings (prior judgments, witness testimony, documents of all kinds, emotions like frustration and anger, balances of power, statutes, healthcare reform policies, duplicity, etc.) are figured and mobilised to say certain things in the saying of the law: they are voiced by lawyers and judges, of course, but they also lend their own voices to the latter, shaping the means through which the law may pass.
The development of relational sociology is a positive step forward for sociological theory through its emphasis on the key category of the relation and its refusal to engage in individualistic reductionism, central conflationism, or substantialist inflationism (Archer 1995, 2000, Crossley 2011, Donati 2011). Despite the move toward the concept of relation, relational sociology maintains a reactionary humanist social ontology acting as though social relations are limited to the relations that are obtained between humans and denying the existence of those relations that are obtained between humans and nonhumans such as animals, plants, and things. As a result, relational sociology brings us no closer to understanding what has been called the “missing masses” of social scientific explanation (Latour 1992). Relational sociology does nothing to advance the sociologist’s ability to study these “missing masses” and, more troubling, relational sociology denies that the sociologist should be interested in these “missing masses” at all. The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate that relational sociology must shed this residual reactionary humanism and embrace a concept of relation that extends beyond the arbitrary and artificial boundary of “the human” if it is to be at all useful for sociological analysis in the twenty-first century.
Nonhuman agency has become an increasingly important issue in communication theory. While the approach proposed by the Montreal School has advanced research in the subject to a remarkable degree, it does not take reflexivity of actors into account. On the one hand, this makes the identification of actors to a certain degree arbitrary and the concept of actors too wide. On the other hand, it underestimates actors as it neglects actors' capacity to propose their own ontology. In order to cope with these issues while maintaining the notion of nonhuman agency as proposed by Cooren et al., I would like to propose a de-ontologized notion of communication and agency based on the work of Gotthard Günther (e.g. 1976a, 1979a) and Niklas Luhmann.
When Organization Fails: Why Authority Matters develops the study of authority as an area of investigation in organizational communication and management. As a research topic, authority has rarely been addressed in depth in the management and organizational communication literature. It is critical, however, to maintaining unity of purpose and action of the organization, and it is frequently cited by organizational members themselves. Utilizing two case studies, examined in depth and based on the accounts of the individuals involved, authors James R. Taylor and Elizabeth J. Van Every explore the pathology of authority when it fails. They develop a theoretical foundation that aims to illuminate authority by positioning it in communication theory. This volume sets the stage for a new generation of scholars who can make their reputations as experts on authority, and is intended for scholars and graduate students in organizational communication, leadership, and discourse analysis. It also offers practical insights to consultants and management experts worldwide.
Discursive Leadership: In Conversation with Leadership Psychology presents a new, groundbreaking way for scholars and graduate students to examine and explore leadership. Differing from a psychological approach to leadership which tries to get inside the heads of leaders and employees, author Gail Fairhurst focuses on the social or communicative aspects between them. A discursive approach to leadership introduces a host of relatively new ideas and concepts and helps us understand leadership’s changing role in organizations.
This article presents an overview of different fields of research devoted to the study of organizational discourse. Four main courses of inquiry are identified: (1) the analysis of organizational communication genres (memos, work orders, meetings, etc.), (2) the study of organizational narratives and storytelling, (3) the analysis of organizational interactions and conversations, and (4) the constitutive question, related to the work of James R. Taylor and Elizabeth Van Every. While the first three approaches problematize the role organizational discourse plays in the functioning and dysfunctioning of organizations, the last one shows to what extent texts and conversations constitute the very foundations of organization as a form of life.
'Simultaneous invention' has become commonplace in the natural sciences, but is still virtually unknown within the sphere of social science. The convergence of two highly compatible versions of Critical Realism from two independent sources is a striking exception. Pierpaolo Donati's Relational Sociology develops 'upwards' from sociology into a Realist meta-theory, unlike Roy Baskhar's philosophy of science that works 'downwards' and 'underlabours' for the social sciences. This book systematically introduces Donati's Relational Sociology to an English readership for the first time since he began to advance his approach thirty years ago. In this eagerly awaited book, Pierpaolo Donati shifts the focus of sociological theory onto the relational order at all levels. He argues that society is constituted by the relations people create with one another, their emergent properties and powers, and internal and external causal effects. Relational Sociology provides a distinctive variant upon the Realist theoretical conspectus, especially because of its ability to account for social integration. It will stimulate debate amongst realists themselves and, of course, with the adversaries of realism. It is a valuable new resource for students of social theory and practising social theorists.
The Situated Organization explores recent research in organizational communication, emphasizing the organization as constructed in and emerging out of communication practices. Working from the tradition of the Montreal School in its approach, it focuses not only on how an organization's members understand the purposes of the organization through communication, but also on how they realize and recognize the organization itself as they work within it.
This chapter considers the question of commensuration - the process of comparison according to a common metric - and how it is accomplished on online social media websites. When commensurability is produced through the distributed reviews and ratings of thousands of user-generated postings, and transformed through filtering and weighting algorithms into ratings and rankings, it may be expected that different things will be paid attention to, connected, and compared. The chapter is interested in understanding these differences and the implications of online user-based evaluation mechanisms for how commensurability is organized and achieved.
This introduction to the special issue describes hidden organizations, offers several reasons for the lack of research on these collectives, and explains how this collection of articles helps move us forward in efforts to empirically study hidden organizations. After providing background information on the history of this special issue, the five articles published here are described in terms of the type of collective examined, the theories and methods used, and the key research questions addressed. Three observations about the published pieces are made: being hidden requires communicative effort; hiddenness is usefully understood in terms of identity management; and any discussion of hidden organizations raises ethical considerations. The piece closes with acknowledgements and a call for continued conceptual/theoretical and empirical research into hidden organizations.
Inquiring into how routines unfold increases our understanding of organization. This article critiques current positionings of organizational routines as practices and offers an alternative framing based on routines as communicatively constituted performatives. Two central arguments are advanced. First, present constructions of routines as comprising structurationist interpretations of Latour’s ostensive and performative are challenged and an alternative is advanced that draws from an Austinian understanding of performative as constitutive of organization. Second, bodies are brought into routines research as they are conceptualized as embodied accomplishments, extending existing research that typically neglects the body. An alternative definition of organizational routines is offered that constructs them as citational patterns of embodied conversation and textual dialectics that performatively co-orient toward an object.
A very accessible introduction to ethnomethodology: this book presents the nature and aims of ethnomethodological research in a clear and uncompromising way, faithful to the work and intentions of its practitioners.
Within the micro-macro debate, ethnomethodology is generally cast as microsociology. This is misleading given that ethnomethodology is indifferent to structure at any level. Instead, ethnomethodology transcends the terms of the debate with a focus on empirical social practices whereby both microstructure and macrostructure are produced by and for the membership. This is also true of conversation analysis. Modifying Collins's "interaction ritual chains" to include this indifference to structure expands ethnomethodological understanding as well as Collins's theory.
This first-of-its-kind textbook familiarizes students with the field of organizational communication--historically, conceptually, and practically--by examining where the field has been, as well as challenging students to reconsider their thoughts and beliefs to prepare for success in today's organizational settings. Revealing how management theory and research have been the key to understanding how corporations seek out methods of constructing our identities in ways that are consistent with corporate goals and values, Organizational Communication: A Critical Approach skillfully links theory and practice to provide relevance for student's daily lives. Key features: A thematic critical perspective on organizational communication provides a fresh lens to examine traditional theory and research, focusing on connections between communication, power, and control; Critical Case studies in each chapter provide practical applications of theoretical perspectives, showing students how theories can be critically applied to everyday organizational life; "Critical Technologies" boxes in each chapter give students a critical lens for observing how communication technologies impact organizational life; A chapter on branding and consumption (12) extends analysis of organizational communication beyond the workplace to examine the societal impact of organization on consumption and identity issues; A chapter on gender and feminism (9) and a chapter on difference (10) provide comprehensive accounts of gender and differences that illustrate how they are constructed through communication processes.
Although Bakhtin's ideas have been mainly explored in the realm of literature and linguistics, his ideas of ventriloquation and polyphony could be mobilized to study the communicative constitution of reality, more generally. Using an excerpt taken from a conversation between two administrators, we show how various forms of ventriloquism actualize themselves in what they say and the way they say it. This kind of analysis amounts to questioning our traditional way of conceiving of discourse and interaction in general, especially in terms of their roles in the constitution of our world. The world we live in is a speaking and personified world; a world that comes to speak through us because people make it speak in a specific way.
This article pursues the constitutive premise of communication line of inquiry; using a space‐time perspective to examine the ways that communication is constitutive of organization. Articulating a Communicative Constitution of Organizing approach with postmodern geography theories, it proposes a concept of space as an ongoing construct of multiple and heterogeneous sociomaterial interrelations. This results in an unfolding vision of organization, constructed through communication as an extended configuring of space‐times. The article reflects on the spacing practices through which agents of a Chilean science and technology diffusion program “space” their organization. This focus allows us to specify the constitutive role of communication in (a) materializing organization, (b) distributing actors in space and time, and (c) creating a sense of coherence.
First published in 1895: Emile Durkheim's masterful work on the nature and scope of sociology--now with a new introduction and improved translation by leading scholar Steven Lukes.The Rules of the Sociological Method is among the most important contributions to the field of sociology, still debated among scholars today. Through letters, arguments, and commentaries on significant debates, Durkheim confronted critics, clarified his own position, and defended the objective scientific method he applied to his study of humans. This updated edition offers an introduction and extra notes as well as a new translation to improve the clarity and accessibility of this essential work. In the introduction, Steven Lukes, author of the definitive biography Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, spells out Durkheim's intentions, shows the limits of Durkheim's view of sociology, and presents its political background and significance. Making use of the various texts in this volume and Durkheim's later work, Lukes discusses how Durkheim's methodology was modified or disregarded in practice--and how it is still relevant today. With substantial notes on context, this user-friendly edition will greatly ease the task of students and scholars working with Durkheim's method--a view that has been a focal point of sociology since its original publication. The Rules of the Sociological Method will engage a new generation of readers with Durkheim's rich contribution to the field."