Building Theories of Organization

The Constitutive Role of Communication

Linda L. Putnam, Anne M. Nicotera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135619794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume explores the concept of communication as it applies to organizational theory. Bringing together multiple voices, it focuses on communication's role in the constitution of organization. Editors Linda L. Putnam and Anne Maydan Nicotera have assembled an all-star cast of contributors, each providing a distinctive voice and perspective.

The contents of this volume compare and contrast approaches to the notion that communication constitutes organization. Chapters also examine the ways that those processes produce patterns that endure over time and that constitute the organization as a whole. This collection bridges different disciplines and serves a vital role in developing dimensions, characteristics, and relationships among concepts that address how communication constitutes organization. It will appeal to scholars and researchers working in organizational communication, organizational studies, management, sociology, social collectives, and organizational psychology and behavior.

1
INTRODUCTION

Communication Constitutes Organization

Linda L. Putnam, Anne Maydan Nicotera, and Robert D. McPhee

Organizational communication scholars have long been fond of claiming that communication is the essence of organization. Influenced by the work of Karl Weick (1969, 1979) to treat the concept of “organization” as a verb and not a noun, scholars have focused on how communication is the means by which human beings coordinate actions, create relationships, and maintain organizations. Thus, for decades, organizational communication scholars have claimed in our scholarship, pedagogy, and practice that organizations are communicatively constituted. This claim appears in a broad multidisciplinary body of work that examines the ways in which communication (often conceptualized and discussed as discourse) constitutes organization (e.g., Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris, 1991; Boden, 1994; Boje, 2001; Bougon, 1992; Bruner, 1991; Czarniawska, 1997; Grant, Keenoy, & Oswick, 1998; Heracleous, 2006; Pentland, 1995; Pentland & Reuter, 1994; Weick, 1995; Weick & Roberts, 1993). Communication scholars have also contributed significantly to the development of these ideas (see, for example, Browning, 1992; Browning, Sitkin, Sutcliffe, Obstfeld, & Greene, 2000; Cooren, 2000; Cooren & Taylor, 1997, 1999; Cooren, Taylor, & Van Every, 2006; Fairhurst, 1993; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004; Kuhn & Ashcraft, 2003; McPhee & Zaug, 2000; Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001; Putnam, Philips, & Chapman, 1996; Stohl, 1997; Taylor, 1993, 1995, 2000; Taylor & Cooren, 1997; Taylor, Cooren, Giroux, & Robichaud, 1996; Taylor & Van Every, 2000; Van Every & Taylor, 1998).

Despite the extensive and multidisciplinary nature of this literature, scholars have not satisfactorily explicated the claim that communication is constitutive of organizing (hereafter known as CCO). Some of the problem stems from rooting the claim in “unanchored abstractions, borrowed pretensions … and the myth that organizing starts from zero” (Weick, 2002, p. 1). Specifically, both communication and organization are abstract constructs that are difficult to anchor individually as well as interdependently. Thus, unpacking one concept often leads to anchoring the other one as an abstraction. Borrowed presumption refers to the taken-for-granted response to the CCO claim—a response that says, “of course,” without trying to explicate what this means. Scholars in other disciplines for whom communication processes are not as readily taken-for-granted have become more preoccupied with explicating CCO than have many communication scholars. But these efforts often treat organizations as if they were zero-history (Boden, 1994) and few organizations fit this specification.

Another reason that CCO has not been fully explicated is that the claim vacillates between superficial simplicity and confused complexity (Weick, 2002). CCO scholars recognize that communication is more than social exchange, information processing, or a variable that occurs within an organizational container. This treatment is too simple and lacks subtlety (Weick, 2002). Yet, when scholars theorize about CCO, they often become mired in complexity, immersed in abstract language, and unable to articulate similarities and differences among perspectives. Hence, scholars have not fully articulated the different processes of CCO, particularly as they become manifested in different perspectives.

The notion of the “communicative constitution of organization” has a variety of theoretical roots, among them (and in no particular order) speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969); rules theory (Cushman, 1977); systems theory (Luhmann, 1995); ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967); phenomenology (Husserl, 1964, 1976; Schutz, 1967); conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974); frame analysis (Goffman, 1959); critical discourse analysis (see Fairclough, 1995); structuration (Giddens, 1984); semiology (Barthes, 1954/1967); narrative theory (Greimas, 1987); and critical theory (Derrida, 1988; Foucault, 1972; Heidegger, 1959).

In this chapter, we first examine what it means to say “communication constitutes.” Second, we present a historical picture for understanding CCO. Then we offer a framework for examining CCO processes and their underlying assumptions (McPhee & Zaug, 2000). Each chapter in this book then responds to this framework and explores different theoretical orientations to CCO. The final chapter of the book compares each of the orientations and develops a matrix to demonstrate similarities and differences among the approaches. Overall, the book aims to unpack different ways to conceptualize the beguiling phrase of “communication constitutes organizations.”

Definitions of Communication Constitutes

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “constitute” refers to:

1. Setting up, establishing, founding (an institution, etc.)
2. Giving legal or official form or shape to an assembly, etc.
3. Framing, forming, or composing (by combination of elements) …
4. Making (a thing) what it is; giving it being, forming or determining.

(Compact Edition, 1971, p. 529)

In a similar way, the Oxford English Dictionary defines constitution as:

1. The way in which anything is constituted or made up; the arrangement or combination of its parts or elements, as determining its nature and character; make, frame, and composition.
2. The mode in which a state is constituted or organized; especially, as to the location of the sovereign power, as a monarchical, oligarchical, or democratic constitution.
3. The system or body of fundamental principles according to which a nation, state, or body politic is constituted and governed.

(Ibid.)

Thus, the typical definition of “constitute” and “constitution” highlights the forming, composing, or making of something in addition to describing the phenomenon that is constituted. These definitions also emphasize the mode or state in which something is formed. In effect, part of the attraction of the CCO term is the connotation derived from several of these definitions.

A related approach to the concept of “constitutive” is Hacking’s (1999) discussion of “social construction.” Constitutive and social construction are similar concepts in that both focus on forming, making, and composing. Both concepts also highlight the process or dynamic elements of a phenomenon. Yet, the two constructs differ in the role of the social as the primary factor that drives the forming of a phenomenon. In some ways, social construction is one form of constituting organizations. Moreover, an analysis of constitution tends to “unmask” a phenomenon, thus revealing the contingency of and work required to sustain an organization or to reveal the multiple forms of organizing. Specifically, constitution connotes one or all of the following notions of an organization, i.e., its historical emergence and contemporary reproduction, practices of organizing and participating, a body of knowledge about organizing, and the organization as a reified thing.

Thus, communicative constitution presumably embodies the material (composition or elements), the formal (framing or forming), and the efficient causes (principles or rules for governing) that bring organizations into existence. These definitions also call attention to the essence of a concept (those processes that make a thing what it is). When organizations routinely (and supposedly successfully) take on a variety of mutant forms, and when all or most forms of organization fail at an alarming rate (Starbuck & Nystrom, 1981), claiming that there is an essential character to this form is risky.

Herein lies the conundrum: “communication” is clearly more than an element of organization; just as an organization cannot exist apart from the communication process, but the broad claim of CCO essentializes both “organization” and “communication” in a dangerous way. To assume that an organization is constituted by (or “made of”) communication is to treat “communication” and “organization” as equivalent. This philosophical position makes for engaging classroom discussions—but it becomes overly generalized and leads to the implicit assumption that an “organization” means “formalization”—another dangerous effect of essentializing this relationship (Taylor, Cooren, Giroux, & Robichaud, 1996).

This book employs communication theory as an explanatory mechanism for unpacking the ontology of organizations. We contend that organizational communication scholars are particularly situated to provide a deeper theoretical understanding of the CCO claim, conceptually, theoretically, and historically. Taylor, et al. (1996) summarize this task by challenging the assumption that organizations can exist independently of communication. “We err in thinking of communication as a transparent window on organizations; the properties that we recognize as organizational are in the communicational lens, not in the object they are focused on” (Taylor, et al., 1996, pp. 2–3, emphasis added).

The main reason for examining different orientations to CCO is theoretical. Namely, we say that communication is constitutive of organizations without fully understanding what this means, conceptually or empirically. We embrace it as an assumption that embodies disparate orientations, different theoretical roots, and different aims for organizing. We also talk about communicating and organizing as dynamic activities without unpacking the nature of these processes and how they are related to the elements that form an organization. Thus, to avoid essentializing, we treat constitutive as a faceless process or an inevitable outcome of organizing. Unpacking different ways that communication is constitutive adds to the theory construction process.

Moreover, having different orientations to CCO will aid in deciphering what goes wrong when organizing fails. By unpacking interrelationships among processes across perspectives, we can develop insights as to the arenas that need in-depth investigation. The goal of this volume, then, is to explicate different theoretical understandings of the claim that communication is constitutive of organizations.

Historical Background of CCO

Initial research in organizational communication treated organizations as objects, reified identities, or containers in which messages were sent up and down channels through superior–subordinate interactions and through internal communication networks (see Putnam & Cheney, 1983 and Redding, 1985 for a review of this work). Scholars presented definitions and characteristics of organizations based on administrative management, bureaucracy, or systems theory in which communication was cast as a separate, discrete phenomenon (see Tompkins, 1984, for a review of the role of communication in traditional organizational theories).

Other scholars began to question the very existence of organizations (Albrow, 1980) and cast them as interlocking behaviors or socially constructed processes (Barnard, 1938; Thompson, 1980). One particular theorist, Karl Weick (1969), viewed organizations as coordinated behaviors in which double interacts or act–response sequences formed the basic building block. These coordinated behaviors had the capacity to create, maintain, and dissolve organizations. In a similar way, Hawes (1974) urged communication scholars to examine “how organizations come into being in the first place, how such patterned behavior evolves, how the collectivities maintain themselves, and how they disengage” (p. 500).

The Conference on Interpretive Approaches to Organizational Communication in 1981 questioned the nature of organizations (Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983). Through embracing a process view of communication, scholars challenged the notion that organizations were “social facts” that resided “out there.” Adopting a social construction lens, they viewed organizations as emanating from communication. Communication, then, was not simply a variable or the transmission of information, “it created and recreated the social structures that formed the crux of organizing” through the use of language, symbols, and coconstructed meanings (Putnam, 1983, p. 53). Communication processes, then, enacted the ongoing, interlocking behaviors that constituted organizational life.

Other scholars also challenged the reification of organizations by treating them as systems of interacting individuals who were actively creating and recreating social orders (Conrad, 1985; Deetz, 1982; Johnson, 1977; Mumby, 1988; Tompkins, 1984). Yet, even though theorists embraced this new conception of organizations, very little research focused directly on unpacking the relationship between communication and organization. In 1993, Ruth Smith presented a conference paper that identified three major types of relationships between communication and organization. The first one, containment, treated organizations as objective, reified entities in which communication occurred. Thus, organizations were physical entities with height, depth, breadth, and fixed boundaries. Fixed boundaries provided an easy way to examine communication within the container or to focus on an organization’s messages and audiences external to the corporation.

The second type, production, breaks into three sub-categories: communication produces organization, organization produces communication, and the two co-produce each other. The idea that communication produces organization is similar to treating social interaction as creating and recreating organizational structures. The view that organization produces communication also embraces a social construction lens, but conceives of the organization as being enacted before the communication. Finally, the notion that the two co-develop each other casts them as separate processes that are mutually constitutive. The production relationship treats communication and organization as distinct concepts in which one of them has a priori existence over the other or in which both of them develop concomitantly. The third approach, equivalence, takes a different tack and purports that the two constructs are the same phenomenon or a monastic unity. This perspective differs from the production relationship that views the two as distinct or separate processes. In the equivalence approach, communication is organization and organization is communication; the two processes are one and the same.

Other scholars have taken issue with Smith’s categories and her notion of equivalence (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004; Taylor, Cooren, Giroux, & Robichaud, 1996; Taylor & Van Every, 2000), but her thinking about these relationships paved the way for theorists in the field to develop different perspectives and ways to unpack...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• 1 INTRODUCTION: COMMUNICATION CONSTITUTES ORGANIZATION
• 2 THE COMMUNICATIVE CONSTITUTION OF ORGANIZATIONS: AFRAMEWORK FOR EXPLANATION
• 3 AGENTS OF CONSTITUTION IN COMMUNIDAD: CONSTITUTIVE PROCESSES OF COMMUNICATION IN ORGANIZATIONS
• 4 CONSTITUTIVE COMPLEXITY: MILITARY ENTREPRENEURS AND THE SYNTHETIC CHARACTER OF COMMUNICATION FLOWS
• 5 DISLOCATION AND STABILIZATION: HOW TO SCALE UP FROM INTERACTIONS TO ORGANIZATION
• 6 ORGANIZING FROM THE BOTTOM UP?REFLECTIONS ON THE CONSTITUTION OF ORGANIZATION IN COMMUNICATION
• 7 THEORY BUILDING: COMPARISONS OF CCO ORIENTATIONS