Handbook of Management Communication

François Cooren, Peter Stücheli-Herlach, François Cooren, Peter Stücheli-Herlach

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501507953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Management communication encompasses a wide range of practices that define modern organizations. Those practices are, in many respects, constituted, formed and contextualized by the use of language. This handbook traces the theoretical modelling of these practices by contemporary research. It explores their linguistic features and performance in specific situations of value creation and in various modes. It is a companion for students and scholars of applied linguistics and organizational communication as well as management and strategy research.

Part I: Practices of management communication

1 Speaking

Nicolas Bencherki

Abstract

While speaking is often contrasted with writing, this chapter considers that ambiguity between the two modalities confers to speaking its ability to affect organizing. The chapter conceptually discusses how these modalities have been distinguished, including by considering speaking as a human prerogative and writing as a derivative, and suggests that such distinctions are hard to justify. The chapter calls for greater attention to the performative power of speaking and to the emancipatory facet of talk, and suggests that closer attention to how people speak would reveal how they constitute a shared world. After questioning whether distinguishing talk and text is useful, the chapter shows that the two are in fact blended, especially when viewing speaking as situated action, when paying attention to conversational dynamics or when exploring its performative dimension, which leads to recognizing its critical implications in terms of giving a voice to all in constituting a collectivity.

Keywords: speaking, orality, talk and text dynamics, social interaction, performativity,

Speaking is often compared to writing and deemed to have effects of its own. This chapter begins by summarizing the key distinctions that have been established between these two modalities before suggesting that, on the contrary, it is precisely the ambiguity over this distinction that grants speaking its organizing power. Several analytical perspectives are then reviewed - ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, conversational lamination, conversation/text dynamics, and speech act theory - that, each in their own way, take advantage of this ambiguity to reveal talk’s contribution to organizing. Then, speaking in management is analyzed in how it offers a closer look at the distribution of voices within and around the organization. Finally, the implications of speaking for management research are considered in a concluding section, in particular by calling for greater attention to the concrete interactional practices that underly management communication.

Text and writing are often either celebrated or decried as the sine qua non condition of bureaucracy and rational organizing (Derrida 1996; Hull 2003; Vismann 2008) and as tools to manage complexity and stabilize change (Anderson 2004; Callon 2002; Fayard and Metiu 2013). While it is an important topic of study in literature and linguistics, orality seems to be left on the curbside of organization and management theory, including within organizational and management communication studies. This is all the more surprising given that the opposition between talk and text, or orality and literacy, is at the core of philosophical debates surrounding communication (Ong 2012).

Communication has not always defaulted to writing, as it seems to do now (Peters 1999). In Plato’s Phaedrus (2002: 69), writing is described as “the appearance of intelligence, not real intelligence”, whereas good rhetors would learn to deliver their speech orally. This tradition continues today in the United States with public speaking curricula (Boromisza-Habashi, Hughes, and Malkowski 2016). More recently, Walter J. Ong (2012: 73) similarly advocated for the priority of orality over writing:

Because in its physical constitution as sound, the spoken word proceeds from the human interior and manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as persons, the spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups. [… When] each reader enters into his or her own private reading world, the unity of the audience is shattered, to be re-established only when oral speech begins again. Writing and print isolate.

Ong thus intimately associates talking with humanity and in particular with belonging to a community. He considers writing to be at once less connected with one’s “interior” and as a solitary activity. While talking would engage with the body, writing, for its part, would reduce all sensations to visual analogues, thus impoverishing the communication experience.

In the study of organizational and management communication, literature on talk as such remains scarce. Most of it uses the notions of “talking” or “speaking” in a metaphorical sense, in particular to describe how people engage with a topic (for instance, “talking about diversity” in Auger-Dominguez 2019). Over the next few pages, we will see that this scarcity may not simply be an oversight. In fact, a clear distinction between talking and writing, or between orality and literacy, is difficult to draw. We will see that it is precisely the inability to untangle the two that makes communication so relevant to the study of organizations and management practices.

That being said, we will also propose a few avenues for a better study of talk in organizational settings. A well-established tradition in this sense is conversation analysis (Goodwin and Heritage 1990; Sacks 1992), although researchers are also pointing out that just studying talk is insufficient to fully account for interactional situations, which are inherently multimodal (Mondada 2007). We will also suggest shedding a new light on Austin’s (1962) notion of “locution” as part of his speech act theory, and explore ideas of speaking up and voicing. Through a review of these research avenues, we will see that much of what goes on in organizations is done through talk, an insight that Mintzberg (1973) already suggested decades ago. More precisely, we want to argue that organizations are constituted as voices are distributed among beings (Cooren 2010). We conclude by inviting researchers to be more precise regarding the concrete practices that underlie communication, in order to discover the richness of what happens when people speak.

1 Blending talk and text

Jean-Dominique Bauby (1997) was a successful journalist until he suffered a massive stroke that left him entirely paralyzed except for his left eyelid. As he could not speak, he dictated his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by blinking his eyelid to select one letter at a time on a board that his speech therapist would show him, until he completed the book’s 139 pages.

In Jordan, Doctors Without Borders renovated a hospital where a French nurse oversaw the construction of an operating theater by local workers who only spoke Arabic. She relied on informal translation by other colleagues. Over time, the workers and she developed a repertoire of gestures that allowed them to relay simple ideas even though they did not share a common tongue (Bencherki, Matte, and Pelletier 2016).

The two cases above crack open the seemingly airtight distinction between orality and writing. Neither did Bauby (1997) utter a word nor did he scribble a letter, and yet he wrote a book. As for the nurse, she did not technically “speak” or write with the construction workers. Communication is richer than implied by the either/or alternative often established between talking and writing. In both cases, Ong would surely consider that Bauby and the nurse resorted to visual analogues, and yet it would seem unfair to think of them as less in touch with their interiority or humanity than if they had actually spoken. Similar questions on what counts as talk or text could be raised with signed languages (e. g., Hodge, Ferrara, and Anible 2019) and non-verbal features of communication (e. g., Acheson 2008).

It is also not quite correct to assume that writing (in the broadest sense) requires a “medium”, be it a sheet of paper or a computer, while writing oral communication would be immediate and would not need the intercession of a medium (as suggests Ong 2012: 172). The fact is that any communication situation, even in an oral form, involves some sort of mediation, at the very least because the speaker must express herself using a language that may more or less faithfully convey her intention (Derrida 1998). Her words may even betray her: she may say things she didn’t mean or that could be used against her. These breakdowns are evidence of the mediated nature of oral communication (Cooren 2018a).

Furthermore, actual studies of the way people speak tend to suggest that people rarely do so in isolation. People are not just talking heads; when they talk, they do so in an embodied way (Goodwin and LeBaron 2011). To name just a few examples, they gesture to get their argument across (Brassac et al. 2008), or they refer to documents and look at blackboards together (Cooren and Bencherki 2010; Vásquez et al. 2018). Research methods now attempt to account for the “multimodal” character of interaction, for instance by developing new transcription strategies, recognizing that talk is but a portion of what occurs (Mondada 2018).

Even Ong, in what may seem like a self-contradiction, acknowledged that orality and literacy are not entirely separate domains. For instance, he recognized that “Writing serve[s] largely to recycle knowledge back into the oral world” (Ong 2012: 117), which does give primacy to orality, but also stresses the interplay between the two. Similarly, while Ong initially appeared to argue that orality better expresses interiority and humanity, he also conceded that writing produces characters with introspection and “elaborately worked out analyses of inner states of soul and their inwardly structured sequential relationships” (Ong 2012: 149). It thus appears that the prerogatives of orality and those of literacy are not as opposed as one might think. This is made all the more true in the context of secondary and digital oralities, where people write for others to recite on television or radio, and ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introducing
• Part I: Practices of management communication
• II. Forms of management communication
• Part III: Contexts of management communication