The Emergent Organization

Communication As Its Site and Surface

James R. Taylor, Elizabeth J. Van Every

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781135691127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Today's organizations face a wide variety of challenges, including such contradictions as maintaining unity of action while becoming increasingly diverse. Even the definition of organization is changing and evolving. In this monograph, the authors apply their academic and professional experience to address the notion of "organization, " setting forth communication as the essential modality for the constitution of organization--explaining how an organization can at the same time be both local and global, and how these properties which give organization continuity over time and across geographically dispersed situations also come to be manifested in the day-to-day of human interpersonal exchange. As a radical rethinking of the traditional discourse approaches in communication theory, this book develops a conceptual framework based on the idea that "organization" emerges in the mix of conversational and textual communicative activities that together construct organizational identity. Applying concepts from the philosophy of language, linguistics, semiotics, system design, sociology and management theory, the authors put forth a convincing argument demonstrating the materiality of language and its constructive role in organization and society.

Part I
THEORY OF COMMUNICATION

Chapter 1

Organizational Communication: A New Look

This book develops a thesis, that communication is the essential “modality,” to use Giddens’ (1984) term, for the constitution of organization and, more generally, of society. By modality, Giddens means that which explains how those properties of a society that give it continuity over expanses of time and across many geographically dispersed situations come to be manifested in day-to-day human interaction. It is how social structures inform social systems (to again use his terminology) and, vice versa, how organization can be both local (systemic) and global (structured), bounded by constraints of space and time and yet also transcending them.

This modality has, however, two distinct manifestations, that we term symbolic and subsymbolic. In its role as symbol system, communication serves as a medium by means of which people’s thoughts, transcribed into either spoken or written form (as what are often called messages, and we call texts), may be conveyed by some persons to some other persons for them to interpret and fit into their frame of reference. This is a concept of communication that is sometimes known as transmission theory. But, communication has another role to play in the organization of people’s social interchange. That role is not so much to transmit one person’s knowledge to others as to permit both together to construct interactively a basis of knowledge, which becomes their joint property and thus cannot be said to belong to either of them individually. Although they participate in its construction, they do not separately own it.

This is a theory of communication—and knowledge—of much more recent vintage than the transmission view and has become known as the theory of “distributed cognition” (Hutchins, 1995) or “group mind” (Weick & Roberts, 1993). It borrows from a radical departure in artificial intelligence and computing known variously as neural net theory, connectionism, or parallel distributed processing (McClelland, Rumelhart, & the PDP Research Group, 1988; Rumelhart, McClelland, & the PDP Research Group, 1986). These researchers view cognition not as it is conventionally conceptualized as symbol manipulation but as the product of the interaction of the parts of a network, each of which, separately considered, is a local information processor but which, collectively considered, form a patterned representation of their environment that none of them singly can be said to hold. The intelligence is thus lodged in the configuring of the network as well as in the information processing activities of its component parts. It is for this reason that these researchers think of knowledge as subsymbolic rather than symbolic. The knowledge is a function not of the symbol processing as such, but of the way it is interconnected subsymbolically to generate a collectively synthesized image of the world that transcends the set of individual images that generated it.

On the basis of this work, the team of Weick and Roberts, and Hutchins generalize the connectionist principle to hypothesize that cognition is not contained within the skull of the brain but is a continuous phenomenon linking what goes on in the mind and what occurs in the human conversation of people engaged in practical work. However complex the operations of the brain, it is still the case that conscious thought uses language as its medium and so does conversation. Because of this, the flows of knowledge rehearsal and development that make up the sum of what a society collectively knows are not strictly boundaried by the individual cognitive system but flow out into the conversation, which is thus doing its own kind of thinking.

It is the implications of this radical new hypothesis that this book explores. A bimodal theory of information as both transmission and generation of knowledge throws an entirely new light on the genesis of organization and its relation to communication. Such a theory transcends the unimodal assumption of transmission theory that holds that communication occurs in or within organization (R.C.Smith, 1993) and reveals instead that it is equally true to say that organization emerges in communication (and nowhere else). It emerges, furthermore, in two distinct ways: as described, and thus an object about which people talk and have attitudes, and as realized, in its continued enactment in the interaction patterns of its members’ exchanges. It is both locution (representation) and illocution (action, with practical consequences). Language becomes not only a way to record experience, but also a way to furnish a script for it. This theory, in other words, is both interpretivist and constructivist in its orientation. It constitutes an introduction to the study of organizational communication in a new way, and it is this novelty that inspired the preparation of the book.

PRECEDENTS

As with most new ideas, what follows is not really, in another sense, new at all. On the contrary, the symbolic/subsymbolic division has been in the literature on communicative discourse all along, but has not been identified as such, or at least has not used those terms. Instead, the two distinct perspectives are revealed by the kinds of emphases that writers adopt in their analyses of communication-mediated-by-language. The intensive study of discourse in the social sciences and the founding of disciplinary traditions dedicated to naturalistic analyses of communication can really be said to date only from the 1960s. Prior to that decade the social sciences, with the partial exception of anthropology, were largely dominated by a positivist philosophy of research, which pursued laws of behavior measured quantitatively and supported by statistical analysis. In this interpretation of how to do science, language in its naturalistic contexts of use figured almost not at all. When in the 1960s positivism began to lose its hold on research method and the framing of research questions, investigators also started to venture out to consider language-in-use. When they did so, two quite different approaches became apparent. For some, in order to see what role language was playing, studying language use meant mixing in normal contexts with people who were interacting with each other in the usual way. For others, studying language use meant the analysis of the texts people produce and read, independent of interactional context, and more concern with a rather different kind of context, that is, the universe of other texts that either tied them to historical evolutionary trends in texting or to the different genres of texts that coexist within a given time and society.

A bimodal theory of communication makes no attempt to refute either of these ways of seeing, but instead perceives them as dimensions of a complete theory of communication in language.

It is this spontaneous branching of the literature on discourse (a catchall term if ever there was one) that we consider in this first chapter. This chapter situates our whole discussion in a historical framework. But, it also takes us to a more focused consideration of where these two orientations in the literature lead when their attention is directed to the theme that most directly preoccupies us, namely, how organization emerges in communication. In this respect, we consider two contrasting perspectives: one, ethnomethodological and the other, critical.

Ethnomethodology focuses first and foremost on interaction-mediated-by-talk: conversation in its multitudinous manifestations. From this perspective, language is an instrumentality, a necessary support for the negotiated developing through interaction of an account of how the world is and how the interactants are with respect to it. It looks into the interactive mechanics of the process of making joint sense—of getting on with things and of dealing with events to produce an intelligible universe of meaning. Organization, in this view, is a constructed entity generated by people in their talk.

Critical theory, by contrast, focuses on the texts of communication or what has been called, following Foucault (1972), its “discursive formations.” Its metaphoric basis is not so much language as instrumentality, but rather, as we see in this chapter, language as colonizer. It is less preoccupied with dynamic processes of interaction and the negotiation of meaning than it is with how language subtly frames the interaction, determines its orientation, and calls into being the identities of organizational members, independent of their own willing. It sees the performance of organizational members as already shaped by language, even before it takes place.

Now let us consider in turn each of these orientations to the study of discourse.

THE REDISCOVERY OF THE NATURAL WORLD OF COMMUNICATION—ITS “CONVERSATION”

Arguably the two most influential influences on discourse analysis dating from the 1960s were Erving Goffman (1959) and Herbert Garfinkel (1967). Between them they initiated the study of conversation as a serious discipline.

Goffman made the telling point that social organization is situated. It always involves specific people in particular circumstances, and it always has a history (you and me or us and them, in a here-and-now or a there-and-then). He captured the tenuous nature of everyday life by expressing the logic of people’s interaction with each other as a “presentation of self.” Daily life is like a drama, he argued, where people realize that if their own identities are to be accomplished successfully and social situations sustained, they must improvise in playing out the plot together. There has to be an interactive order established for communication to be even minimally successful. For this reason, Goffman’s image of organization is of a collectively produced interaction, of a fragile equilibrium, vulnerable to accidents. One false step and the whole drama runs the risk of falling apart: loss of face, confusion, and embarrassment all around.

Garfinkel originated a school of thought known as “ethnomethodology.” Given its importance as an element on which our own work builds we shall devote a longer discussion to it. Its roots are in a turn-of-the-century philosophy called “phenomenology” whose spokesperson was Edmund Husserl.

Phenomenological Reduction: Edmund Husserl

Husserl (1964, 1976) built on the philosopher Kant’s perception that there are features of experience, such as our perception of time, space, and causality, that must already be present, a priori, in categories of the mind. Otherwise, the familiar shapes of the world around us would not appear to us to be shape-like (but merely a meaningless array of uninterpreted information). A chair is a chair because it looks like a chair, no matter what angle we see it from or in what light. It is our seeing it as a chair that makes it a chair, not just its intrinsic natural properties, as they are recorded on the retina. The subjective structures of meaning do not just come into play, passively, at the moment of perception, as a filter, but rather actively participate in the constitution of the perceived world (something that Karl Weick, much later, would call “enactment”). We are, in this view, not a neutral material on which signals from the world out there are physically sensed and cognitively recorded; we are actively engaged with a world of objects that we know about, have feelings about, and manipulate—objects that are of our own making. The result is to change the focus of attention from the world (positivism) to our knowing of the world (phenomenology).

Husserl thus emphasized the primacy of the constitutive role of consciousness: not to study how psychological factors intrude into perception and bias it, as did his contemporary Freud, but how perception is normally accomplished. To this end, he distinguished between what he termed the natural attitude, which is to take the phenomenal world as it comes, as “just there,” as most people do and as positivism does, and what he called a phenomenological reduction in which the researcher sets aside—temporarily brackets out—the question of whether what is perceived as natural is truly a representation of the world in order to focus on the process by which perception of it is accomplished. When such a change of focus has been accomplished, there will be two things to consider: the experiencing process itself (which Husserl called noesis) and the content of what is experienced (which he called noema). It was the first of these, the constructing of an experienced world, that would become the object of study of ethnomethodology. But to be interpreted as relevant to communication theory, there had to be an intermediate step of translation, and that step was taken by one of his students, Alfred Schutz (1962, 1964, 1967, 1970).

The Intersubjectivity Riddle: Schutz

Suppose that we accept Husserl’s idea that the ability of ordinary people to function effectively in normal circumstances depends on their adopting a natural attitude. Ordinarily, the objects and events that surround us do not seem to be filtered by complex procedures of deliberate consciousness on our part. The world is simply there. The problem, Schutz realized, arises elsewhere—when someone wants to communicate their experience to others. We can never have immediate access to what someone else is experiencing. The instrument of communication we have is language, and language is made up of a network of typifications that we inherit along with our learning of language in the circumstances of daily life: commonsense constructs of typical actions, events, motives, identities, and contexts that arise not out of personal experience but are inherited from the community where we learned to speak. Such typical constructions inevitably fall short of an understanding of this particular action, this event, this context. Because the categories of language are typifying, rather than specific to any single individual or experience, they always underspecify the individual’s experience. No matter how clear you try to make yourself, there is always a residual ambiguity.

Yet, Schutz said to himself, people do communicate easily, naturally, without any sense of artificiality. How can this be? How can something as problematical as communication be pulled off so effortlessly, on a routine everyday continuing basis?

Part of the answer, he thought, is that the commonsense categories and constructs that we unthinkingly employ to experience our personal world were already social to begin with and that they are part of what we learn when we begin to speak. It is not just that we can only communicate the unique character of our experience through a code that turns it into generalities, that is, typifies it; it is that even the original experience had to have already been mediated by that code. So one thing that makes the mundane intelligibility of social life possible is that our experience was framed in a shared language from the start.

But this still does not solve the problem of the categorial underspecification of individual experience.

The key to the puzzle, he reasoned, is that people treat understanding each other not as a technical or a scientific or a philosophical problem, but as a practical problem to be solved in a practical way. They, unlike a philosophical movement of the 1930s known as logical positivism, do not try to invent a new language to eliminate ambiguity. Instead, they assume that, for all practical purposes, their world is intersubjectively shared with others, that the standpoint of the person they are talking to is reasonably interchangeable with their own (if you were in our position you would be feeling pretty much what we do), and that the world other people talk about is one that we do, or at least could, share. Now when someone speaks to you and you do not quite grasp what they are saying, you still are convinced that you could get the drift, and perhaps will later, as the conversation unfolds, or that you already have enough background information to fill in most of the unstated but intended meanings. You can live with the ambiguity in the interest of getting on with the conversation. Although a risk is involved, you assume you understand enough, until shown otherwise. Communication is thus inevitably elastic. As the conversation analyst and sociologist Heritage puts it:

[T]he type constructs with which the actors navigate the natural and social worlds and with which they communicate through natural language are inherently approximate, open-ended and revisable. They may undergo change, elaboration or qualification at any moment subject to local contingencies. Their development and use is shaped by the practical experiences and relevancies which arise in the course of the actors’ engagement with the world around them.¹ (1984, p. 53)

Communication, then, is not just messaging; it is instead a continuous process of adjustment in which each participant’s speech provides the material for the interpretive skills of the hearer to fill in the gaps, to guess at the speaker’s meanings and motives, to verify assumptions, and to correct misapprehensions. To speak is to open oneself up to inferences, to make one’s own capacity to express oneself contingent on others’ understandings and sanctions. Intersubjectivity is something to be achieved: Its maintenance is a practical problem, routinely solved in social interaction through an ongoing process of mutual adjustment of perspectives. There is no external guarantee of success. But there is a payoff: “[A] world of shared experience—extruded, as it were, through language—is brought into being” (Heritage, 1984, p. 60).

Garfinkel and Accountability

This is the platform on which the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel (1967) built. Garfinkel was a doctoral student of Talcott Parsons, a reigning authority in sociology of the time. Parsons, a complex figure who had tried to marry a voluntaristic view of human action with a general theory of social systems and structures, felt obliged by his preoccupation with the systemic to postulate that people internalize social norms. Only in this way could he explain the sociality of human action that was necessary to make it functional for the achievement of collective social action. Garfinkel reacted against this way of reasoning because he considered that it reduced people to “judgmental dopes,” or mere tools of society in the realization of its objectives. There must be a better way, he argued, to explain the stability of social life than by this essentially patronizing mainstream social science view. To support his position he turned for inspiration to Schutz, who by this time had immigrated to the United States. Through his famous breaching experiments, Garfinkel was able to display, convincingly, the taken-as-given basis of human intersubjectivity that Schutz had hypothesized: how much of how we make communication work depends on unspoken assumptions of normality and shared typifications. There was no need to postulate the rule of norms other than those we use to successfully interact in society and establish ourselves as persons.²

Garfinkel developed the idea of intersubjectivity in an important new way: He showed the centrality of “accounting.” People in interaction, he suggested, are engaged in making what is occurring around them accountable to each other, in the sense of furnishing comprehensible descriptions and explanations of what is going on (they are in effect generating a jointly accessible text through their shared speech). The accounts people d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Part I Theory of Communication
• Chapter 1: Organizational Communication: A New Look
• Chapter 2: Communication as Coorientation
• Chapter 3: How the A Priori Forms of Text Reveal the Organization
• Chapter 4: Language as Technology and Agent
• Part II Theory of Organization
• Chapter 5: Reinterpreting Organizational Literature
• Chapter 6: From Symbol Processing to Subsymbolic Socially Distributed Cognition
• Chapter 7: Conversation Transformed: Organization
• Chapter 8: Reenacting Enactment
• Chapter 9: Why ‘In’? Of Maps, Territories, and Governance
• References