Organizational Discourse

Communication and Constitution

Francois Cooren

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745689418
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

How can we study organizations from a discursive perspective? What are the characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of each perspective on organizational discourse? To what extent do discourse and communication constitute the organizational world? This accessible book addresses these questions by showing how classical organizational themes, objects and questions can be illuminated from various discursive perspectives. Six approaches are presented and explained: semiotics, rhetoric, speech act theory, conversation analysis/ethnomethodology, narrative analysis, and critical discourse analysis. These six perspectives are then mobilized throughout the book to study coordination and organizing, organizational culture and identity, as well as negotiation, decision making and conflicts in the context of meetings. The unifying thread of this volume is the communicative constitutive approach (CCO) to organizations, as implicitly or explicitly advocated by the great majority of organizational discourse analysts and theorists today. Throughout Organizational Discourse, this theme will help readers distinguish between discursive perspectives and other approaches to organizational life, and to understand how discourse matters in organizations.

1

What is (Organizational) Discourse?

How is This Book Organized?

Let me begin this book by recalling what will certainly sound like a common-sense truth to many of you: communication matters in organizations. We all have already heard this refrain, especially when members start complaining about something that does not appear to work in their company or institution. One department fails to communicate a vital piece of information to another, and a whole project might start falling apart, with sometimes dire consequences (the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster was partly attributed to a lack of communication between engineers and managers; see Tompkins, 1993).

Communication indeed matters, but as this book will show, it should not be reduced merely to the transfer of information, as is usually implied when people deplore so called “communication problems.” Just think about what happens (1) when organizational members are celebrating an important anniversary; (2) when the representatives of a company are signing a contract with a client; or (3) when a supervisor is asking her supervisee to complete a specific task. Are these persons informing each other? Yes, to a certain extent, if we consider, in case 1, that organizational members might be informing each other of their sense of joy and accomplishment; in case 2, that the company representatives are informing their counterparts of their engagement; and in case 3, that the supervisor is informing her supervisee about the kind of work that has to be done.

But if some pieces of information were definitely conveyed (literally, informing means “giving a form,” which means that when we are informed about something, we are also transformed by what we heard, read, or more generally experienced, i.e., saw, smelled, tasted, or touched), it would be a mistake to reduce what is happening in these three cases to a sharing of information. To be convinced, we just need to focus on the verbs that are used to depict these three situations: celebrating, signing, and asking. Communicating might have something to do with informing, but it also has a lot to do with many other things that go far beyond the transfer of information: emotions in the case of celebrations, commitment in the case of a signature, power and authority in the case of what is requested.

To highlight this distinction from the “communication as information” reduction, some scholars proposed, during the 1990s, to speak in terms of (organizational) discourse rather than in terms of (organizational) communication (Keenoy et al., 1997; Oswick et al., 1997; Iedema and Wodak, 1999; but see also Mumby, 2004). Born from “a growing disillusionment with many of the mainstream theories and methodologies that underpin organizational studies” (Grant et al., 2004: 1), this academic movement – which was, at the outset, UK based, mainly in British business schools – posited that the detailed and systematic study of discourse could be a very innovative and productive path to better understand, analyze, or denounce how organizations function or fail to do so.

We are going to see shortly what is meant by discourse and communication, but before doing so it is important at this point to understand that the writer of these lines has a very broad view of what (organizational) communication means and refers to, which implies that oftentimes in this book, we will speak as much about organizational communication as about organizational discourse. The fact that today many scholars (including organizational communication scholars) tend to use the term “organizational discourse” to insist on the key role that all forms of communication play in organizational life implies for me that the term “communication” is, by definition, clearly relevant when speaking about what happens in organizations. What we need to defend, however, is a very broad conception of what we mean by communication (see, for instance, Jian, Schmisseur, and Fairhurst, 2008a, b).

Having mentioned this caveat, let us now examine the notions of discourse and communication.

What is Discourse (and, By the Way, What is Communication)?

Although the academic world is full of technical characterizations, I always prefer to start from dictionary definitions when I have to specify or explain the meaning of a word. Why dictionaries? Because they contain, especially when they are sufficiently sophisticated, all the various usages of a term, as well as its history and etymology.

Dictionary definitions

So what are the definitions that we can find for the word “discourse” in the 1995 edition of the Webster’s New Encyclopedic Dictionary?

Dis·course \’dis-_lkõrs, -_lkòrs, dis-‘\n I : verbal interchange of ideas : conversation 2 : formal and orderly and usually extended expression of thought on a\ subject [Late Latin discursus “conversation”, from Latin discurrere “to run about”, from dis- + currere “to run”] (p. 287)

We see that two definitions are thus proposed: the more ancient one, which identifies discourse with conversation (when people speak to each other, we can refer to what is happening as a form of discourse entertained by two or more persons), and the more recent one, which identifies discourse with a sort of formal speech or address on a specific topic (as, for instance, when we describe a talk by someone as a discourse on the current situation of our economy).

The etymology mentioned in this definition is also interesting, as it shows that discourse has something to do with going or moving about from place to place, which is indeed typical of both conversation and formal speech. When we discourse about a specific topic (whether conversationally or in a formal presentation), we tend to cover its different aspects, which leads us from one idea or question to another. If a discourse can be identified (it has its own unity and coherence, as well as a beginning, a middle, and an end), it is therefore also marked by a certain plurality and heterogeneity.

Discourse vs. discourse

If we now turn to what scholars have been saying about discourse for the past 60 years (the linguist Zellig S. Harris, from the University of Pennsylvania, is usually credited for having coined the term “Discourse Analysis” as early as 1952), we see some interesting overlaps with these dictionary definitions. The sociolinguist Michael Stubbs (1983), for instance, wrote that discourse refers to “naturally occurring connected spoken or written discourse,” which, as he says, amounts to saying that discourse is “language above the sentence or above the clause” (p. 1).

Before the 1950s, linguists indeed did tend to focus exclusively on language at or under the sentence level. Although this tendency remains very strong (for instance, Noam Chomsky (1957, 1997), the famous linguist and activist, spent his entire career figuring out the right way to analyze sentences like “John is intelligent” or “John put the book on the shelf”), more and more scholars (not only linguists, but also sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and communication scholars) began to realize that discourse also had its own logic and organization and that it was consequently worth studying.

Interestingly, they realized that there were at least two ways to conceive of discourse – two ways that, in many respects, echo the dictionary definitions that we have just discussed. James Paul Gee (1990, 1999), for example, proposed to establish an important distinction between “Discourses,” with a capital “D,” and “discourse” with a small “d” (see also Alvesson and Kärreman, 2000). To explain what he means by Discourses (with a big “D”), he writes:

The key to Discourses is “recognition.” If you put language, action, interaction, values, beliefs, symbols, objects, tools and places together in such a way that others recognize you as a particular type of who (identity) engaged in a particular of what (activity) here and now, then you have pulled off a Discourse (and thereby continued it through history, if only for a while longer). Whatever you have done must be similar enough to other performances to be recognizable. However, if it is different enough from what has gone before, but still recognizable, it can simultaneously change and transform Discourses. If it is not recognizable, then you’re not “in” the Discourse. (Gee, 1999: 18)

As Gee notices, when you identify a Discourse with a big “D,” it means that you are able to recognize its typical form or content (what he calls the what), as well as its typical context of production (who said it and in what circumstances).

Think, for instance, of the typical Discourse of a doctor, manager, professor, environmental activist, or right-wing politician and you will have an idea of what a Discourse might look like. It does not have to be in the context of a formal speech (you can easily recognize how doctors typically speak during a simple consultation, or how someone speaks “like a teacher,” sometimes even outside the classroom), but what is crucial is that you are able to recognize or identify something you think you already heard, read, or know.

As we will see later, this type of Discourse analysis is usually associated with the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1977a, b, 1978), who became world renowned for his contribution to the study of the typical discursive forms associated with specific historical periods of time and disciplines (medicine, education, justice, etc.). At this point, it is also noteworthy that people who are reproducing specific Discourses can literally be seen as their carriers, which means that we could almost say that not only are these persons expressing themselves when they are talking, but also the (typical) Discourses they represent. In this connection, Gee (1999) has no hesitation in writing that:

It is sometimes helpful to think about social and political issues as if it is not just us humans who are talking and interacting with each other, but rather, the Discourses we represent and enact, and for which we are “carriers.” The Discourses we enact existed before each of us came on the scene and most of them will exist long after we have left the scene. Discourses, through our words and deeds, carry on conversations with each other through history, and, in doing so, form human history. (p. 18)

This is what happens when we witness two types of Discourses confronting and/or responding to each other. Think, for instance, of the typical Discourse of union representatives responding to the typical Discourse of top managers and you will have an idea of what Gee means here.

So what is a small “d” discourse in comparison? It is “language-in-use or stretches of language (like conversation and stories)” (Gee, 1999: 17). In other words, we more or less find here the other dictionary definition, which identifies discourse with “a verbal interchange of ideas,” a practice associated with conversation (although we will see that discourse (even with a small “d”) cannot be reduced to the mere “interchange of ideas,” which sounds like the “interchange of information,” which we criticized earlier).

Beyond the identification of typical formats, contents, styles, and contexts (associated, as we saw, with Discourses), studying discourse (with a small “d”) thus requires that we analyze the interactional event in itself, with its complexity, but also its peculiarities. By this, I mean that however typical, emblematic, representative, or characteristic what someone said or wrote might be, it will always be an event in itself, to the extent that the activity of saying or writing what she said or wrote will just have happened once in the whole history of the universe.

Although this might sound a little (too) philosophical, it is important to understand this point, to the extent that this whole book will be (directly or indirectly) addressing it throughout the remaining chapters. Discourse analysts can indeed be divided into two broad categories:

1. Scholars who tend to be mainly interested in Discourses with a big “D” and who focus on the repetition, reproduction, or iteration of specific topics of discussion, styles of communication, and rights to speak. These scholars are, as mentioned earlier, usually associated with Foucault’s work, although not exclusively, and tend to be interested, as we will see, in questions of power, ideologies, and domination.

2. Scholars who tend to focus on the eventful character of conversation and interaction, i.e., what we also call discourse (with a small “d”) and who are more interested in what people are up to when they communicate with each other (what they do and how they do what they do), as well as how the conversation itself functions and is organized. These latter will usually be associated with the work of Harvey Sacks (1992), an American sociologist who, in the 1960s, founded a field of study called “conversation analysis.”

Conversation analysts, as we will see, are typically interested in the detail of what they call “naturally occurring interactions” and focus their attention on what is done or accomplished by the people who communicate with each other. Although they too are also...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• 1 What is (Organizational) Discourse? How is This Book Organized?
• 2 Analyzing Organizational Discourse: Six Perspectives
• 3 Coordination and Organizing
• 4 Organizational Culture, Identity, and Ideology
• 5 Meetings: Negotiation, Decision-making, and Conflicts
• 6 By Way of a Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Access to Companion Site
• Download CD/DVD