Communication as Constitutive of Organization: An Overview of CCO Scholarship

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Communicative Constitution of Organizations

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Communication as Constitutive of Organization

Dennis Schoeneborn, Copenhagen Business School, [email protected] &

Consuelo Vásquez, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), [email protected] [This is a pre-print version of the following encylopedia entry: Schoeneborn, D. & Vasquez, C.

(forthcoming). Communication as constitutive of organization. In: C. R. Scott & L. K. Lewis (Eds.). International encyclopedia of organizational communication. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.]

Abstract

The notion of the ‘communicative constitution of organization’ (CCO) is at the center of a growing theoretical development within organizational communication studies. CCO scholarship is based on the idea that organization emerges in and is sustained and transformed by

communication. This article presents CCO scholarship with regards to its historical origins, underlying premises, main schools of thought, key theoretical questions, methodological approaches, and critiques.

Keywords

Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO), Four Flows Model, Montreal School, organizational communication, organizational theory, systems theory

Main Text

Historical origins

The idea that communication is the key process for the emergence, perpetuation, and

transformation of organizations is the baseline assumption of a scholarly movement commonly known under the label of the ‘communicative constitution of organization’ (CCO). Its

proponents claim that communication “is the means by which organizations are established, composed, designed, and sustained” (Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, & Clark, 2011, p.1150). Based on this assumption, CCO scholarship questions the formative role of communication in the constitution of organizational processes and outcomes. These reflections rely on different theoretical origins and analytical traditions, and privilege various notions of communication.

That said, CCO scholars have been working to establish a common vocabulary to better grasp the implications of this perspective and provide a communication-centered response to the

ontological question: ‘What is an organization?’

The viewpoint that communication not only expresses social reality but also creates it is not entirely new. In organizational communication studies, the development of this constructionist understanding of organization can be traced back to the Alta conference in the early 1980s. In this conference, a group of North American scholars initiated a major paradigmatic shift in the field: the interpretive turn. This turn set the stage for a strong theoretical and empirical

development for understanding the fundamental and formative role of interactions, language, sensemaking, and other symbolic processes in the emergence of organization – an endeavor that CCO scholars continue to develop today.

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The term ‘communicative constitution of organization’ was used for the first time in an article by McPhee and Zaug (2000). The authors coined this term to present a model of four

‘communication flows’ that are, for them, constitutive of organization (i.e. membership negotiation, self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning). Although the article presented a specific view of the constitutive force of communication, which was mainly inspired by Giddens’ structuration theory, the term had broader impact because it echoed contemporary theoretical developments in the field of communication studies. For example, Taylor and Van Every’s (2000) theory of organization proposed a communicational framework for studying the constitution of organization. Mainly inspired by pragmatist and linguistic approaches, Taylor and Van Every’s theory conceptualized the emergence of organization as the interplay of discourses (what they called “text”) and interaction (what they called

“conversation”).

From the beginning of the 21st century until today, the CCO approach has moved from being associated with local (primarily North American) and scattered individual initiatives (mostly diffused in the field of organizational communication) to being a more established yet still

diverse approach that is now recognized outside its original community - most prominently in the neighboring field of organization and management studies. Various conferences, workshops, and other meetings have contributed to its institutionalization and recognition. For instance, CCO scholars regularly meet at the annual conferences of the National Communication Association (NCA) or the International Communication Association (ICA), especially in the respective organizational communication divisions of these academic associations.

One of the first events that gathered organizational communication scholars around the topic of the communicative constitution of organization was the 2002 NCA preconference in New Orleans, organized by Linda Putnam and Ann Maydan Nicotera. Through position papers and case studies, about fifty scholars attending the preconference examined the implications of the constitutive premise for research, teaching, and practice. The preconference served as a springboard for developing CCO as a theoretical endeavor: a selection of the papers presented was published in a book edited by the organizers (Putnam & Nicotera, 2009).

Another major event that unified CCO research was the 2008 ICA preconference in Montréal, organized by François Cooren, Daniel Robichaud, and other scholars from the Université de Montréal. The preconference involved more than one hundred participants to discuss the topics of materiality, agency, and communication - as a tribute to James R. Taylor’s contribution to the field of organizational communication studies more generally and to CCO scholarship in

particular. This was the first international gathering of scholars investigating the constitutive role of communication and it helped establish CCO scholarship as a stream of theorizing within organization and communication studies. A selection of the preconference papers and keynotes by Barbara Czarniawska, Bruno Latour, Linda Putnam and Haridimos Tsoukas (along with an afterword by James R. Taylor) were published in a book edited by Robichaud and Cooren (2013).

Moreover, the German National Science Foundation (DFG) funded the academic network

‘Organization as Communication’ (OaC; organized by Steffen Blaschke and Dennis Schoeneborn) from 2010 to 2013. The network featured a series of workshops that brought together junior scholars of organization studies and communication studies from the German-

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speaking countries, who were united by their interest in a constitutive understanding of the organization-communication relation. The network meetings connected members with leading international CCO scholars and helped build bridges between CCO scholarship in the North American tradition and relevant theoretical traditions from Europe. One outcome of these meetings was the panel discussion involving representatives of three schools of CCO thinking, (François Cooren, Robert D. McPhee and David Seidl) held in Hamburg in 2012. The panel was later published as a forum paper in Management Communication Quarterly (Schoeneborn, Blaschke, Cooren, McPhee, Seidl, & Taylor, 2014). Another outcome was the OaC blog (www.orgcom.org), which includes contributors from different countries publishing events, resources, and reflections related to the CCO perspective and broader research at the intersection of organization and communication studies. The OaC network’s activities have further

institutionalized CCO scholarship on the pan-European level. In 2015, CCO-based research gained the formal status of a standing working group, ‘Organization as Communication,’ at the European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS).

Other key books and special issues of peer-reviewed journals beyond those already mentioned have also been influential in shaping CCO scholarship. Cooren, Taylor, and Van Every (2006) co-edited the book Communication as Organizing: Explorations in the Dynamic of Text and Conversation. This volume was the first systematization of what would be known as the Montreal School approach, one of the most influential approaches within CCO scholarship. A few years later an extensive review article on organizational communication was published in the Academy of Management Annals, with an emphasis on the contribution of the CCO approach to organization studies (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009). This article opened a dialogue with the larger field of management and organization studies by presenting the CCO community’s interest in understanding the material dimension of communication. In 2011, a special issue of

Organization Studies on the communicative constitution of organization was published. Many of the articles came from authors outside of the CCO community and showed that CCO scholarship could be used to study an array of topics such as strategy, power, and terrorist organizations. The introductory article to the special issue (Cooren et al., 2011) summarized six main premises of CCO scholarship that will be developed in the next section.

The six premises of CCO scholarship

Despite the different understandings of the constitutive nature of communication, CCO scholars attempt to establish a common ground by focusing their attention on the ontological puzzle

‘What is an organization?’—which implies questioning the constitutive role of communication for organizational phenomena. In line with this ontological focus, Cooren et al. (2011, pp. 1151- 1154) proposed that CCO scholarship relies on the following six premises:

(1) CCO scholarship studies communication events. This premise highlights the eventful nature of communication and invites CCO scholars to study the occurrence of organizational communication events on the micro level. As an event, communication has a temporal dimension (i.e., events are marked by a beginning and an end), but also a spatial dimension (i.e., events occur in and through certain locations, architectural configurations, etc.).

Expanding on this first premise, Vásquez, Schoeneborn & Sergi (forthcoming, no page) defined communication events as “a sequence of instances of communication (i.e., texts and conversations) that are performed in a distinct space-time”. Focusing on three

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communication events taken from three distinct project organizing contexts, the authors examined the (dis)ordering properties of communication at play in the use and movement of texts. The focus on communication events allowed for grounding the analysis in situated local practices, yet also for considering the larger space-time framework in which the communication events are inscribed.

(2) CCO scholarship should be as inclusive as possible in its definition of (organizational) communication. Although communication scholarship traditionally focuses on studying the use of language and its symbolic manifestations, this premise invites CCO scholars to broaden the definition of (organizational) communication to include materials such as bodies, clothes, architecture, objects, and infrastructures that can also make a difference in the communicative constitution of organization. For example, drawing on the case of commercial airline pilots in the United States, Ashcraft (2013)outlined the shifting configurations of the images associated with this profession (e.g., terms like ‘birdman’ or

‘ladybird’) and how they put the pilots’ bodies (both men’s and women’s) on display. The author showed that the image of today’s pilots as “upper-middle class men” is a symbolic and material construction that engenders organizational effects (in this case, mostly related to professionalization).

(3) CCO scholarship acknowledges the co-constructed nature of (organizational)

communication. This premise highlights the inherently relational and performative character of communication. The relational dimension implies that communication cannot be fully controlled by a communicator’s intentions, but always entails an element of co-construction by others. Acknowledging this co-constructed nature of communication implies recognizing that ambiguity, indeterminacy, and disordering are to be expected whenever actors engage in organizing. This arises from the fact that language is by definition open-ended, so meaning overflows and must be continuously (re)negotiated. The performative dimension of

communication is grounded in speech act theory, in the tradition of Austin and Searle.

Starting from Austin’s premise according to which one does things with words, CCO scholars recognize that collective action and meaning making are always intertwined. To some extent, ‘doing things with words’ is unavoidable because organizing implies making sense of the situation, roles, tasks, goals, and orientations. In this sense, CCO scholars argue that organizations are literally ‘talked into being’ (Heritage, 1984), another way of saying that they are communicatively constituted.

(4) CCO scholarship holds that who or what is acting is an open question. This premise deals explicitly with the question of agency by opening it up to non-human actors (e.g., texts, tools, technologies, or other artifacts). Importantly, this opening up is related to the inquiry itself. CCO inquiry implies not deciding a priori who or what is acting: the answer to this question will arise from studying and questioning the empirical phenomena at hand.

According to Cooren et al. (2011), CCO scholars should therefore develop a sensibility to the various agents (humans or non-humans) that partake in communication events. One example is Cooren’s (2004) study of textual agency in which, using Searle’s theory of speech acts, he focused on the ability of organizational texts to act in their own right.

(5) CCO scholarship never leaves the realm of communication events. Closely related to the first premise, this spotlights communication events as the main building blocks of

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organizational realities. Consequently, communication events need to be considered as the primary unit of analysis in CCO scholarship. Never leaving the terra firma of communication events means following the ongoing stream of actions by focusing on what the actors are performing by communicating, how they do so, and the consequences of their

communicative actions. A consequence of this premise has been the difficulty of zooming out of the communication event in order to account for more generalized forms of

communication and organizing processes without leaving the realm of situated action.

(6) CCO scholarship favors neither organizing nor organization. This premise highlights the importance of equally acknowledging both organization (as a noun/entity) and organizing (as a verb/process). Accordingly, CCO scholars study both collective processes of ‘getting things organized’ (i.e., organizing as a verb) and, at the same time, as an organized structure of people, things, rules, and positions (i.e., organization as a noun). Challenging the

distinction between organization and organizing is key to answering the ontological question

‘What is an organization?’ In this sense, CCO scholarship embraces paradoxical ways of imagining organizations (i.e., as entity and process, at the same time) and thus opens itself to dynamic ways of imagining organization.

These six premises, as Cooren et al. (2011) noted, are not to be seen as a checklist for CCO scholars, but rather as a manner of defining the CCO perspective in an inclusive way. Despite the identification of this common ground, however, important differences between CCO scholars’

theoretical approaches need to be considered.

CCO scholarship in the “three schools” and beyond

Three major theoretical approaches have been identified as part of CCO scholarship: the

Montreal School, which draws strongly, but not exclusively, on actor-network theory by Latour, Callon, and others; the Four Flows model, which is primarily rooted in Giddens’ structuration theory; and the Social Systems Theory approach, which is based on the work of Luhmann and his followers. These three schools of thought agree on the assumption that communication

constitutes organization, but differ in their understanding of organization and communication and the relation between them. This section briefly presents these different orientations and goes beyond by also discussing the contribution of other scholars who have focused their inquiries on the fundamental role of communication in organizations and organizing.

The Montreal School approach

Pioneered by the work of James R. Taylor, the Montreal School of organizational

communication primarily involves scholars who are currently, or used to be, affiliated with the Université de Montréal (e.g., Nicolas Bencherki, Boris Brummans, Mathieu Chaput, François Cooren, Elizabeth van Every, Frédérik Matte, Daniel Robichaud, and Consuelo Vásquez, among others). Generally seen as one of the leading schools of thought in CCO scholarship, the

Montreal School’s work is characterized by influences from European philosophers such as Derrida, Greimas, and Ricœur, and by its pragmatic standpoint, which follows the American pragmatist tradition of Peirce, Mead, Dewey, and others. Following these traditions, proponents of the Montreal School focus on narratives, texts, speech, conversations, and other linguistic forms to explore their organizing properties. For example, they analyze how rules and

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conventions of conversation, such as turns of talk, take part in the organization of a meeting, or how the structure of ‘language-in-use’ establishes status and roles. The main premise driving these inquiries is that communication has organizing properties and that these properties are the basis of its constitutive force.

In general, proponents of the Montreal School define communication as the recursive articulation of interaction and discourse, what Taylor and Van Every (2000) referred to as text and

conversation. For these authors, text is associated with a “string of language” (p. 37) that

materializes human sensemaking. However, this does not imply that texts are necessarily written, given that any discursive resource that enters meaning making can be considered a text. In turn, conversation refers to the situated activity of interaction in which text is reflexively and

retrospectively created. Hence, for Taylor and Van Every (2000), organization emerges in communication as described in text and realized in conversation. When described, organization becomes an object toward which organizational actors will co-orient their actions: they tune in to one another as they engage in coordinated activity. When realized, organization is enacted through interaction and is related to processes of meaning negotiation. Following this idea, Taylor and Van Every argued that there is already an ‘embryo’ of organization – as long as organization means ‘getting organized’ – when individuals are engaged in interaction.

Communication, conceived in these terms, implies a process of mediation: a series of translations between conversations, which are articulated by mainly textual objects. The outcome of this process of mediation is the organization as a collective actor, or ‘macro actor.’ From this definition, one can see that the constitutive role of communication is twofold: first, as a sensemaking process it helps build a sense of place by creating a framework to understand organizational situations, and second, through the articulation of conversations it creates the possibility for organizational actors to speak on behalf of the organization, transforming a collection of individuals into a collective actor.

Another particularity of the Montreal School’s definition of communication is the attention given to materiality and to the many agents (not only human) that take part in the communicative constitution of organization (see also premises 2 and 4 in the previous section). This attention has mainly been driven by Cooren’s work. Inspired by actor-network theory, as developed by Latour and others, Cooren defines organization as a plenum of agencies, which implies that we consider action to be an association of human and non-human contributions. Following this idea, Cooren (2010) has developed a ‘ventriloquial’ model of communication to further explore the

constitutive role of communication. Cooren’s version of CCO scholarship suggests that a variety of forms of agency are always at play in interaction, a phenomenon that he metaphorically called

‘ventriloquism.’ Similar to the interaction between a ventriloquist and a dummy (what

ventriloquists call a ‘figure’), organizational agents constantly invoke (or ventriloquize) policies, organizations, rules, norms, ideologies, values, and so forth in their daily activities. These same figures can also be seen as driving or making the organizational agents speak and act in a particular way. Ventriloquism entails a constant vacillation between the ventriloquist and the figures invoked in the interaction. This vacillation is at the basis of Cooren’s definition of the constitutive nature of (organizational) communication: it allows him to explain how an organization is talked, written, and acted (i.e., ventriloquized) into existence.

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The Montreal School’s approach has been used in several empirical studies in organizational communication as well as organization and management research. For example, following Taylor and Van Every’s text/conversation theory (2000), Anderson (2004) explored the role of writing in organizational change. Focusing on several meetings of a project team in a high-tech corporation, the author showed that writing practices have a key function in enabling change:

they document, set, and stabilize ideas developed in conversations and allow them to move from one meeting to another. Anderson suggested that ‘textualization’ (i.e., the process that puts together conversations and writing) explains the constitutive role of writing in organizational change. Another application of the Montreal School’s approach, inspired by Cooren’s theory of ventriloquism, is Bergeron and Cooren’s (2012) analysis of emergency exercises in three crisis management teams. Interested most specifically in understanding how the members of these teams collectively framed a (fictitious) crisis situation, the authors focused on the ‘figures’ that the participants mobilize in these interactions. Their analysis showed that what matters for the participants (i.e., what becomes the object of preoccupations, interests, and expectations) frames and constitutes what drives the discussion. Moreover, the authors suggested that for a discussion to evolve collectively toward a decision, these ‘figures’ must be voiced, accounted for, and negotiated.

The Four Flows approach

The second school of CCO thinking, the Four Flows approach, primarily involves the work of Robert D. McPhee and his colleagues (e.g., Joel Iverson and Pamela Zaug, among others). These scholars ground their considerations in the tradition of Giddens’ structuration theory. McPhee and Zaug (2000) propose a model that understands organizational phenomena as being constituted through the joint occurrence of four communication processes (or ‘flows,’ in their terminology):

(1) Membership negotiation consists of interactions that link individual members to each other and create and maintain an organizational boundary. This communication process occurs especially during the socialization of newcomers. During this process, people set or maintain boundaries by using the pronoun ‘we’ in an exclusive way or by establishing who can speak on behalf of the organization. In both cases, people make indirect reference to ‘the

organization,’ thus contributing to its constitution.

(2) Self-structuring consists of self-reflexive interactions that serve the purpose of designing or controlling organizational processes. This communication process enables people to

represent themselves as part of an organization and allows them to create a form of collective coherence. In this coherence lies the constitutive dimension of self-structuring.

(3) Activity coordination consists of interactions through which organizational members or groups dynamically adapt to situation-specific demands and expectations. This

communication process involves the negotiation of tasks and roles, as organizational

members develop a sense of each other’s activity in order to make their contribution fit with the others. The constitutive dimension of this communication process lies in the integration of interaction and work task.

(4) Institutional positioning consists of interactions that shape an organization’s relation to its institutional environment, for instance, vis-à-vis other organizations or stakeholders. This

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communication process entails the management of public relations, investor relations, labor relations, etc. The constitutive dimension of this communication process lies in its capacity to place the organization in its institutional environment for it to be recognizable.

Importantly, in this view, the organization is only created when all ‘four flows’ come together (see also Browning, Greene, Sitkin, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld, 2009). The Four Flows approach has been empirically applied, for instance, as an analytical framework to examine the communicative constitution and deconstitution (dissolution) of extreme forms of organizations such as al-Qaeda (Bean & Buikema, 2015). This study examined the publicly available communication of al- Qaeda leaders (i.e., documents and letters that were found during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound). The authors showed that in these documents all four communicative flows are visible, especially in the leaders’ attempts to coordinate and control these flows through the strategic use of texts. Bean and Buikema concluded that attempts to inhibit al-Qaeda’s terrorist activities and organizational existence would require interventions aimed at hindering the occurrence of one or more of the ‘four flows’ and thus al-Qaeda’s communicative constitution.

Framed like this, the Four Flows approach deviates from classic conceptions of organization in important ways. For example, the model implies that individual (human) organizational members do not constitute organizations but instead that communicative processes and dynamics such as membership negotiation constitute organizations.

The Social Systems Theory approach

In recent years, Niklas Luhmann’s sociology of organizations has been acknowledged as a third school of thought within CCO scholarship (see Cooren et al., 2011; Kuhn, 2012). Luhmann and his followers (e.g., Steffen Blaschke, Tor Hernes, Dennis Schoeneborn, and David Seidl, among others) share the idea with other CCO scholars that communicative processes and events

fundamentally constitute organizations. Luhmann’s sociology of organizations, however, is part of a larger theoretical endeavor to describe society as the dynamic and complex interplay of social systems. For his theory of society, Luhmann took inspiration from the notion of

autopoiesis that was originally coined by the Chilean biologist Maturana and his former disciple Varela to define and explain the nature of living systems. Luhmann applied the notion of

autopoiesis to the social realm, arguing that, like living biological systems, communication constitutes systems that produce the very elements they consist of, in a self-referential way.

For Luhmann, organizations are one form of such social systems that are constituted by interconnected and recursively related events of communication (what he refers to as

‘communications’). However, organizations differ from other forms of social systems (e.g., interactions on the micro level or society-at-large on the macro level) by perpetuating their existence through a specific type of communication, what he calls ‘decisional communication.’

In his words, organizations are social systems “made up of decisions, and capable of completing the decisions that make them up” (Luhmann, 2003, p. 32, emphasis in original). Importantly, Luhmann noted that decisions are communication events that occur for a certain period of time and then disappear. Organizations thus need to be understood as precarious accomplishments that can only exist if they ensure a continuous perpetuation and interconnection of decisions as communication events (see also Schoeneborn, 2011). Such interconnections are made possible by giving a social collective one single ‘social address’ that serves as a common reference point and allows for decision making on behalf of that collective.

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Recent studies inspired by Luhmann’s approach demonstrate its usefulness for guiding empirical research by combining it with insights from other schools of CCO thinking. For instance, in their study of the hacker collective Anonymous, Dobusch and Schoeneborn (2015) examined how hackers maintain Anonymous’ status as an organizational entity despite the collective’s fluid and contested membership and permeable boundaries. The authors argued that Anonymous ensures its continuous perpetuation as an organization (understood here in the Luhmannian sense as a

‘decided order’ of interconnected hacker attacks, held together by the label ‘Anonymous’ as a

‘social address’) through the public performance and dynamic negotiation of identity claims (i.e.

speech acts that aim at demarcating what Anonymous is or is not).

CCO scholarship beyond the three schools

The previous discussion of the three approaches, however, does not cover the full range of CCO scholarship. Accordingly, it is also important to acknowledge relevant works by scholars not directly affiliated with one of these schools, but who share a focus on communication as the key modality for explaining social reality. In their overview article, Ashcraft et al. (2009, p. 9) argue that CCO scholarship is a much broader theoretical endeavor and involves scholars who follow what they call “embedded” or “implicit” forms of CCO thinking (i.e., works where claims about the constitution of organization are not the primary focus). As examples, the authors mention works in the critical tradition by Dennis Mumby and Stan Deetz, or the network-analytical research by Peter Monge and Noshir Contractor. Besides these ‘embedded’ forms of CCO thinking, there are various important lines of work beyond the three schools that can be seen as

‘explicit’ variants of CCO scholarship. In the following, four of them are discussed in more detail.

First, on a meta-theoretical level, works by Putnam and Nicotera, as well as Ryan Bisel have played an eminent role in establishing CCO scholarship as an area of academic inquiry. For example, the Special Topic Forum in Management Communication Quarterly edited by Bisel (2010) has helped embed CCO scholarship within larger theoretical developments since the interpretative turn and add an important layer of reflection to the ontological assumptions underlying CCO scholarship.

A second important stream of theorizing has been proposed by scholars affiliated with what could be called the ‘Boulder School’ of CCO thinking (e.g., Karen Ashcraft, Matt Koschmann, and Timothy Kuhn, among others). Though drawing on distinct theoretical origins, their work is similar in that it adds a critical edge to the question of the communicative constitution of

organizations. Furthermore, their work exhibits a clear affinity with the Montreal School by emphasizing the role of materiality, texts, and other (non-human) agencies in constituting organizations. Central to the Boulder School’s approach are questions of organizational identity and professional identity, the role of bodies in materializing gender differences, the authoritative status of texts in marshaling consent in organizations, and more general questions relating to the co-constitution of organizations in its communicative relations with stakeholders and larger society.

Third, in the tradition of cognitive linguistics, Joep Cornelissen and his colleagues have explored the formative role of language use in imagining organizations and organizational realities. One important line of Cornelissen’s research is concerned with the role of rhetorical figures such as

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metaphors (which establish analogical comparisons between a source and a target domain, e.g., understanding organizations metaphorically ‘as’ machines) or metonymies (which establish part- whole substitutions, e.g., reducing a firm to its brand name). Cornelissen’s work makes a distinct and meta-theoretical contribution to CCO scholarship by inviting researchers to inquire about the constitutive role of language use not only in the communicative construction of organizational phenomena but, even before that, in our (cognitive) conceptions and imaginations thereof.

Fourth, one further line of CCO scholarship has explicitly explored the performative effects of communication in organizational contexts. Like CCO research, these works understand the notion of performativity in the tradition of Austin and Searle’s speech-act theory by investigating the ‘action’ dimension of linguistic utterances. For instance, Christensen and his colleagues (Christensen, Morsing & Thyssen, 2013) hypothesized that firms’ engagement in practices of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication should not be prematurely condemned as a mere façade or ‘greenwashing.’ The authors argued that CSR communication could be a form of

‘aspirational talk.’ Publicly expressing a commitment to CSR activities, even if the current business practices might not live up to these aspirations, at least depicts a statement to which a firm can be held accountable later on. By engaging in ‘aspirational talk,’ firms talk themselves into a new reality and this performative communication becomes a crucial resource for

organizational (and societal) change. These considerations highlight the ‘autocommunicative’

dimension of organizational talk, i.e., that organizations’ external communication usually does not only address the wider public, but also entails an element of self-talk, with potentially crucial performative effects (as the example of ‘aspirational talk’ demonstrates).

Key questions

Current debates in CCO scholarship usually center around three core themes: first, the

ontological question ‘What is an organization?’ second, the ‘composition problem” (i.e. ‘How to scale up from interaction to organization?’); and third, the question of agency ( i.e., ‘Who or what is able to act on behalf of the organization?’). These three questions are only a selection of prevalent themes in which the heterogeneity of CCO scholarship becomes most clear, but they do not fully encompass the larger range of debates that CCO scholars cover (for a broader overview, see Ashcraft et al., 2009).

The ontological question

One of CCO scholarship’s main contributions is to provide a communication-centered response to one of the fundamental concerns of organization theory: What is an organization - and how do organizations come into being, continue to exist, change, or decline? CCO scholars (across the three schools and beyond) agree that organizations do not predate communication, but are instead processual phenomena repetitively talked into being ‘for another next first time’ (an expression coined by Garfinkel). In the same vein, CCO scholars favor neither organization nor organizing (see premise no. 6, as discussed above). One important implication of this assumption is that CCO scholars imagine organizational phenomena as being both process (organizing) and entity (‘the’ organization); in other words, the idea here is to understand organizational

phenomena as ‘processual entities’ that gain a perpetuated existence through communication events.

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To better understand this paradoxical way of imagining organizations it makes sense to delve into the differences between the three schools by asking how communication actually constitutes organizations as ‘processual entities.’ Luhmann’s theory of social systems provides the most specific answer to the question. For Luhmann (2003), only decisional communication has the capacity to let organizations emerge. In his view, an organization is created when decisions are made on behalf of a social collective (requiring one and the same ‘social address’ as a reference point) and when these decisions get communicatively interlinked over time; that is, when an earlier decisional communication serves as a premise for further decisional communications.

Proponents of the other CCO approaches object to this view by arguing that it depicts a narrow and reductionist conceptualization of organizations as communicative phenomena. For instance, McPhee and Zaug (2000) differentiated between four specific flows of communication that need to occur together to form organizations. The Montreal School, in turn, puts forth a rather broad and inclusive idea of what makes communication organizational. In this view, since

communication has organizing properties, all communication – even the simplest interaction between two individuals – is a form of implicit organizing. For example, in Cooren’s (2010) theory of ventriloquism, various kinds of speech acts can evoke the organization as a ‘figure’ in talk and texts, thus constituting its existence and agency.

The composition problem

Another key question in CCO scholarship is what Kuhn (2012, p. 559) called the “composition problem.” If one assumes that organizations ultimately consist of nothing more and nothing less than communication events, how are these scattered events interconnected to form the more or less coherent social entity called organization? Or, in other words, how do various events of communication come together to jointly produce organizational phenomena?

The three main approaches of CCO thinking again vary in their answers to this question. First, based on the Four Flows model, Browning et al. (2009) have suggested that the four

communication processes that constitute organizations come together through what they call

“syncretic encounters” (p. 109). Using the notion of syncretism, the authors describe the cognitive-linguistic mechanism of ‘seeing together’ diverse elements as forming some kind of unity. Applied to the context of organizations, syncretism implies that it is in through language use that the four flows of communication are coming together to form the organization as one identifiable entity. The authors understand such ‘syncretic encounters’ as a communicative and cognitive accomplishment by individual human actors who, involved in organizational

communication, tend to see the ‘four flows’ (although analytically distinguishable) as forming one unity. Browning et al. empirically illustrate this idea by describing the organizing processes by United States Air Force technicians as such ‘syncretic encounters’. The authors showed that the technicians were able to see the four flows as forming one unity; this individual experience of

‘syncretism”, in turn, served as the springboard for initiating organizational change, for instance, by blending military, technical, and economic logics of organizing.

Second, scholars from the Montreal School deviate from this emphasis on human agency by instead highlighting the pivotal role of non-human agents in the composition of communication events (what can be called “scaling up” from single communication events to the organization).

In this sense, non-human agents such as texts, technologies, or other artifacts are important 11

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because they provide organizational phenomena with a ‘staying capacity’ (a notion that links back to the works of Derrida). For instance, texts (e.g., meeting minutes) can travel across space and time and thus allow communication events (like a meeting) to constitute organizational realities in a sustained form. Organizations thus emerge as hybrid forms of interconnected

(human and non-human) agencies. With his notion of ventriloquism, Cooren (2010) has provided CCO scholars with a theorization of the generative mechanism leading to the interconnection of these agencies and thus serving as a response to the “composition problem.”

Third, scholars drawing on the Luhmannian variant of CCO scholarship provide yet a different explanation for how communication events collectively form an organization. In this view, communication events are special in that they tend to have an built-in capacity and generative mechanism to trigger the occurrence of next (follow-up) communication events. This links back to Luhmann’s focus on decisional communication as the particular type of communication that constitutes organizations. Decisions are special in that they leave the future open to choice and thus provoke their own contestation, thus creating the necessity to execute follow-up decisions.

Accordingly, organizations are understood as an emergent network of self-referential decisional communications in which a past decision becomes the ‘premise’ for further decisions. In this way, the Luhmannian variant of CCO scholarship provides a process-based explanation of the

‘composition problem.’

The question of agency

The question of agency is another central theme in CCO scholarship. One of CCO scholarship’s fundamental premises is to leave open the definition of who and what is an agent (see also premise no. 4 above). Accordingly, CCO scholarship tends to decenter the agency of human actors and account for the role played by non-human agents in the constitution of organization.

However, the three schools tend to differ in their explanation of human and non-human agency.

The Montreal School, for instance, engages with non-human agency by focusing on the role of artifacts, texts, technologies and other architectural agents that ‘make a difference’ in the

unfolding of actions, i.e., that are invoked and mobilized in interaction to exercise some form of power. Agency is associated here with a capacity attributed to the association between human and non-human actors in everyday communication. In turn, scholars drawing on Luhmann’s theory of social systems put forth a different idea of non-human agency. Luhmann theorized organization as an autopoietic system of ongoing and interlocking processes of communication.

As Schoeneborn (2011) highlighted, these self-referential communication processes tend to develop a system-inherent logic and agency in their own right. In a Management Communication Quarterly Special Topic Forum dedicated to the topic of agency, Blaschke argued that in a Luhmannian perspective, agency is presumed to lie on the systemic level, that is, in the network of interconnected communication events. For instance, Luhmann’s approach implies that it is the (communicatively constituted) social system that attributes decision rights to the participants in communication (e.g., in a business meeting). Finally, for scholars following the Four Flows approach, agency is recursively attributed to human agents and to established structures, practices, and institutions that enable and constrain the agency of humans.

The question of who or what can act on behalf of an organization has been one of the main themes triggering new interrogations by CCO scholars about agency and organizational

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communication. Some of those include the individual or collective nature of agency, or the agentic status of social movements, corporations, and NGOs. Others address methodological issues by highlighting the importance of reflecting on the researcher’s role in defining, framing, studying, and attributing agency. More radical approaches to this subject question the concept of agency itself by showing its shortcomings, for example, in considering the actions of other agents such as climate, earth and sky, which do not enter the human or non-human agent categories. For these scholars, a search for alternative ways of naming and understanding the active power of objects, collectives, or individual human agents is thus needed to avoid the trap of thinking in solely binary opposition, such as human and non-human, or social and material.

Methodologies

The methodological approaches adopted in CCO scholarship are multifold. This said, a majority of CCO scholars favor naturalistic, qualitative, or (quasi) ethnographic approaches. This focus can be explained by the natural fit between these approaches and the ontological positioning of CCO scholarship, which proposes starting (and staying) at the level of communication events (see premise no. 1 above). CCO scholars have thus favored methodological approaches based on abductive (i.e. back-and-forth movements between a body of knowledge and an observed

phenomenon) or inductive (i.e. taking the starting point in the empirical observation of an observed phenomenon) modes of reasoning. For their data collection, they have employed participant or non-participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and the collection of documents (e.g., from archives) – or a combination of these techniques. Primarily driven by the work of the Montreal School, there has also been an increased interest in shadowing, a data collection technique in which a researcher follows a person ‘like a shadow’ for a certain period of time while taking extensive notes, or audio or video recordings. The advantages of this technique for studying organizations from a communication-centered perspective are numerous.

It allows researchers to understand the perspective of the person being shadowed and build on the shadower-shadowee relationship to make sense of the communication events. It also enables researchers to capture daily and mundane work activities in their normal course of action, offers a longitudinal approach to studying organization, and creates a space-time in which researchers reflect on the ways they co-construct the phenomena they are studying (cf. Vasquez, Brummans,

& Groleau, 2013).

In the majority of CCO-based research, data analysis methods are grounded in a combination of conversation, discourse, and interaction analysis, whereas studies drawing on other methods of qualitative data analysis, such as thematic or narrative analysis, are less frequent. The popularity of these methods can be explained by the fact that they (implicitly or explicitly) promote a constitutive view of (organizational) communication. Moreover, these methods are particularly useful for keeping researchers grounded in the communication events so that they can explore the ways in which speech acts, rhetorical tropes, conversations, and figures create, maintain, or transform organization. By focusing on acts of communication, these analytical methods allow for the observation of the constitutive processes and mechanisms of organizational

communication while remaining at the level of communication events.

To complement these qualitative approaches, some CCO scholars suggest employing

quantitative forms of data collection and analysis, as well. For instance, Blaschke, Schoeneborn

& Seidl (2012) argued that a majority of CCO-perspective research analyzes single conversations 13

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on the micro level, but fails to provide a theoretical explanation for the emergence and perpetuation of large and complex organizations. Accordingly, in order to bridge the micro- macro gap in CCO methodologies, Blaschke et al. (2012) proposed a communication-centered form of network analysis that allows for studying organizations as networks of interconnected communication events. However, the application of quantitative methodologies can also raise issues of compatibility with the underlying epistemological and ontological assumptions of CCO scholarship (e.g., avoiding oversimplified assumptions of linear causality).

Critiques

The development of CCO approaches has also come along with a variety of critiques. This section outlines four major critiques that question the conceptual and political dimensions of the argument that communication is constitutive of organization. First, CCO approaches have been criticized for lacking ‘truly novel’ contributions regarding the constitutive premise. Asserting that communication is constitutive of organization is a bold claim, but what is even more problematic, following this critique, is that similar arguments have been made by scholars long before the emergence of CCO scholarship. More generally, this critique has also been voiced by organizational discourse scholars, who have been studying the role of rhetoric, speech acts, tropes, and discourse in organizational phenomena for more than forty years, as well as by management scholars interested in the formation and negotiation of meaning. The common ground with these various disciplines and research trends ‘outside’ of organizational

communication are various. Yet, one important source of novelty in CCO thinking it is that it puts to the fore an ontological inquiry: what is an organization? Whereas other discourse- oriented perspectives do not question the ontology of organization, CCO approaches take it as starting point. The constitutive premise can be seen as a preliminary answer to what could be considered as a programmatic agenda: unfolding and detailing the role of communication (in its various forms) to develop an answer as to how communication constitutes organization.

Second, the CCO perspective has been criticized for employing too broad a notion of communication – what ultimately undermines the analytical and explanatory power of the concept. The main direction of critique is that the concept of communication in itself is

insufficient to explain the constitution of organizations: it reduces to a simple explanation what is complex. Moreover, in a similar vein, CCO scholarship has been criticized because it tends to lose sight of further ‘missing elements’ that play an important role in the constitution of organizations (e.g., financial transactions, contractual agreements, etc.). For instance, Sillince (2010) argued that if we assume that organizations are constituted through (something as broad as) communication, CCO scholarship has difficulties in upholding a distinction between

organizations and other forms of social collectives (such as markets, networks, communities, or social movements). Accordingly, Sillince called for more precision regarding what forms of communication are distinctively organizational and what additional elements need to be in place for the (communicative) constitution of organizations as a particular form of social collective.

Dobusch and Schoeneborn (2015) tried to turn this supposed weakness of CCO scholarship into strength. In a nutshell, the authors suggested that a communication-centered perspective on organizations allows researchers to assess various social collectives (e.g., loose and fluid

networks, communities, or social movements) regarding their ‘organizationality’, i.e. the degree to which decision-making, identity, and actorhood is attributed to a social collective. Another way of responding to this critique can be found in the Montreal School’s emphasis on artifactual,

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architectural, and technological arrangements in the communicative constitution of

organizations. This emphasis allows for the incorporation of those missing elements, but it implies interpreting them first and foremost through a communication-centered lens (e.g., by understanding contracts as texts, or financial transactions as a form of meaning negotiation).

Third, the explanatory power of the concept of communication can be criticized in yet another significant way. Even though Sillince’s critique at least shared the baseline premise of CCO scholars on the fundamental importance of the communicative dimension for the constitution (and thus existence) of organizations, other scholars tend to doubt the importance and

consequentiality of communication in the first place. This line of critique can be traced back to studies (e.g., from the field of economics) that are based on the assumption that talk is cheap, merely symbolic, easy to do, and ultimately tends to lack material consequences. However, it is important to note that this line of critique is usually based on a transmission view of

communication that tends to neglect the dynamics of meaning negotiation inherent to language use (see also Ashcraft et al., 2009). In turn, the ‘cheap talk’ critique can be countered by pointing to various empirical studies that demonstrate the performativity and the ‘action-like’ character of communication (e.g., Christensen et al., 2013) or that highlight the agentive capacities of talk and texts (e.g., Cooren, 2010). As CCO-based research illustrates, communicative events and their materializations (e.g., in form of texts) can gain a life of their own and exceed beyond their authors’ full control. It follows that communication and its consequentiality for organizations needs to be taken seriously as a mode of explanation in its own right (see also Kuhn, 2012;

Vasquez et al., forthcoming).

Finally, CCO scholarship (especially the three schools of CCO thinking) can be criticized for being primarily descriptive in character and for neglecting the political and ethical implications of a constitutive understanding of the organization-communication relation. More fundamentally, some critics point towards the ‘apolitical’ nature of the research developed in CCO scholarship, as it evades questions of power dynamics, class, gender, race, sexuality, colonialism, and so forth. For instance, as Reed (2010) highlighted, the CCO perspective falls short in considering the material, discursive, and relational power in the larger political context in which

organizational practices are embedded. Reed explained this absence of power and politics by the epistemological and ontological opposition between (some of) the CCO standpoints and those of critical and/or institutional perspectives in organization studies. However, it must be noted that there is an increasing interest in combining the CCO perspective with the work by critical theorists such as Foucault, Habermas, or Honneth and to develop new concepts, such as the notion of authority (Taylor & Van Every, 2014), for articulating power dynamics to the communicative constitution of organization.

Conclusion and Outlook

On a final note, several avenues are available for future development of CCO scholarship. First, CCO scholarship can benefit from further engagement in dialogue with other streams of

theorizing such as those that consider organization as process, practice, or institution. In this regard, CCO scholarship provides opportunities for further unpacking the role of communication and meaning negotiation in these neighboring theoretical approaches, while also being

challenged by them. For instance, CCO scholarship is well prepared to respond to recent

developments in institutional theory towards ‘communicative institutionalism,’ an approach that 15

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puts communication front and center when studying the emergence and sustained existence of institutions. Engaging with institutional thinking can also be a way for CCO scholarship to respond to the composition problem and seek new ways of scaling up from the communication event to broader forms of organization.

Second, CCO scholarship can also benefit by investigating several emerging topics of inquiry that provide important prospects for refining the understanding of the constitutive role of (organizational) communication. Two promising topics are presented here: the notion of

authority and its relation to authorship and text, and the disordering features of communication.

The question of authority and its centrality to the communicative constitution of organization has recently emerged in CCO scholarship as a way of accounting for the asymmetrical relationships in organizing. Along with neighboring notions such as power, domination, and legitimation, authority has long been recognized as a key phenomenon in organization, yet empirical studies dealing with how it works in organizational practice are scarce. Taylor and Van Every (2014) proposed a communicative explanation of authority that stands on the following premises: (1) communication plays a constitutive role in generating the system of authority that holds organization together; (2) organization is constituted by a transaction linking agents to a

beneficiary and the latter is associated with the organization, its purposes, and its values; (3) the beneficiary (the organization) is a source of authority for those who represent it, yet it can only act through their voices and agencies. Authority can thus be understood as a property of communication, one that is key for the emergence, endurance, and transformation of organizations. It is through communication that organizational members will (or will not) negotiate and create consensus on who (or what) is authorized to speak on behalf of the organization. It is also through communication that expertise, hierarchy, and positions will be recognized and authorized (or not). Even though the notion of authority has naturally been associated with authorizing, it has less often been related to authoring, and consequently to text—and yet, as Taylor and Van Every recalled (2000, 2014) the words ‘author’ and ‘authority’

share the same root. An important line of inquiry can be developed in future research around the connection – and disconnection – between authority and text. What is the role of text in

constituting authority? How can texts or other writing devices authorize and legitimize? Who and what gets to authorize the organizational text?

Another topic that offers intriguing insights into the constitutive role of communication relates to the disordering properties or features of communication. Although the majority of CCO

scholarship places emphasis on the capacity of communication to create social order, CCO scholars have recently begun arguing that the actual practice of communication is as much about fixing certain meanings through language and texts (i.e., a form of ordering) as it is about

opening up multiple meanings and interpretations. Exploring the disordering properties of communication and its effects on organizational phenomena opens up an interesting avenue that accounts for organization as a heterogeneous site of conflicted (socio)material practices (Kuhn, 2012), where irrationality, paradox, disruption, and irony coexist with rationality, stability, and unity. In this view, disordering and dissensus are at least as important as ordering and consensus in driving the communicative constitution of organizations. Future CCO scholarship will need to empirically explore how organizational phenomena are constituted and perpetuated in the

continuous interplay between ordering and disordering.

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A third avenue for CCO scholarship’s development concerns methodology: CCO scholars must systematize the heterogeneous and sometimes scattered methodological approaches they use. As shown above, the methodological backgrounds, strategies, and data collection and analysis techniques are numerous and not always compatible with the ontological premises of CCO thinking. CCO scholars rarely explain their methodological approaches or reflect on the epistemological standpoint of their inquiries – a practice that should be greatly encouraged.

Thus, in order to strengthen CCO thinking in this regard, meta-theoretical reflection on the methodologies used for exploring the constitutive role of communication is needed.

Finally, an additional avenue worthy of exploration in the development of CCO thinking

concerns the practical implications of this (mostly) philosophical and theoretical endeavor. CCO scholarship is grounded in communication events: ‘real’ and ‘actual’ organizing situations.

Theorizing from communication events would logically imply that CCO research could offer answers to practical issues. However, only few CCO scholars (e.g., Bergeron & Cooren, 2012) have yet gone in this direction. In order to create a dialogue with practitioners, CCO scholars must translate their sometimes obscure and abstract vocabulary into more concrete and practical terms. An alternative would be to explore more intersubjective approaches, such as action research or participant observation, which would be based in the co-construction of insights brought about by collaborations between scholars and practitioners.

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Author bios

Dennis Schoeneborn (Dr. rer. pol., Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany) is Professor (MSO) in the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His current research focuses on the constitutive and formative role of

communication for partial and rudimentary organizational phenomena. From 2015-2018, he is serving as head coordinator of the Standing Working Group “Organization as Communication”

of the European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS). His research has been published in Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Journal of Management Inquiry, Journal of Management Studies, Management Communication Quarterly, and Organization Studies, among others.

Consuelo Vásquez (Ph.D., Université de Montréal) is Associate Professor in the Département de communication sociale et publique at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. Her current research investigates the constitutive role of spacing and timing in project and volunteer

organizations. Her work has been published in Communication Theory, Communication

Measures and Methods, Discourse and Communication, Human Relations, Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Scandinavian Journal of Management, and other

international peer-reviewed journals. She has also served as an editorial board member of Revue internationale de communication sociale et publique and Studies in Communication Sciences.

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