The Routledge Handbook of the Communicative Constitution of Organization

Joëlle Basque, Nicolas Bencherki, Timothy Kuhn, Joëlle Basque, Nicolas Bencherki, Timothy Kuhn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000582826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

This Handbook offers state of the art scholarship on the perspective known as the Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO). Offering a unique outlook on how communication accounts for the emergence, change, and continuity of organizations and organizing practices, this Handbook systematically exposes the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of CCO, displays its empirical diversity, and articulates its future trajectory.

Placing communication firmly at the centre of the organizational equation, an international team of expert authors covers:

• The key theoretical inspirations and the main themes of the field
• The debates that animate the CCO community
• CCO's methodological approaches
• How CCO handles classic management themes
• Practical applications

Offering a central statement of CCO's contributions to the fields of organization studies, communication, and management, this Handbook will be of interest to organization studies and communication scholars, faculty, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students, as well as anyone associated with CCO theorizing seeking a comprehensive overview of the theoretical, methodological, and practical tenets of this growing area.

Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003224914-7/communicative-constitution-worlda-luhmannian-view-communication-organizations-society-michael-grothe-hammer?context=ubx&refId=6fe411e1-fbed-41c9-8d95-03ca74450c1d

PART I Theoretical Discussions

1 The Theoretical Roots of CCO

François Cooren and David Seidl

DOI: 10.4324/9781003224914-3

In this chapter, we will present the various theories that have influenced or even defined the three schools of CCO thinking for the past 30 years (Boivin, Brummans and Barker, 2017; Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud and Taylor, 2014; Schoeneborn, Blaschke, Cooren, McPhee, Seidl and Taylor, 2014). Regarding the four-flows model, proposed by Robert McPhee and Pamela Zaug (2000), we will describe the key role Anthony Giddens’s (1979, 1984) Structuration Theory has played since its inception. Regarding the roots of the system of self-referential communication systems proposed by Niklas Luhmann (1992, 1995, 2018), we will highlight the role of Edmund Husserl’s (1979; 1982) phenomenology, Maturana and Varela’s (1980; 1992) theory of self-referential systems and George Spencer-Brown’s (1969) observation theory. Finally, the theoretical roots of the Montreal school, initiated by James R. Taylor’s (1993; Taylor, Cooren, Giroux and Robichaud, 1996; Taylor and Van Every, 2000, 2011, 2014) text/conversation model, will be introduced through the presentation of some key authors’ works, namely pragmatists such as John Dewey (1916) and Charles Sanders Peirce (1991), but also John Langshaw Austin (1962), Harold Garfinkel (1967, 2002), Algirdas Julien Greimas (1987), and Bruno Latour (1986, 2005, 2013a). Beyond their differences, we will also insist on what unifies the theoretical foundations of these three respective schools of thought.

Anthony Giddens’s Structuration Theory as Theoretical Root of the Four-Flows Model

Although the CCO perspective can arguably be traced back to James R. Taylor’s (1988) book, titled “Une organisation n’est qu’un tissu de communications: Essais théoriques” (An Organization is but a Web of Communications: Theoretical Essays), we historically owe the label “Communicative Constitution of Organization” to Robert D. McPhee and his then PhD student, Pamela Zaug, who coined this phrase in their landmark essay, “The communicative constitution of organizations: A framework for explanation”, published in 2000 in the Electronic Journal of Communication. This article, which was later republished in a volume edited by Linda Putnam and Anne Nicotera (2009), proposes that the constitution of any complex organization requires four types of message flows or interaction processes, which they identify as membership negotiation, self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning.

Although McPhee and Zaug (2009) identify several theoretical foundations for their four-flows model (namely, Karl Weick’s (1979) sensemaking model of organizing, Ruth Smith’s (1993) root metaphors of organizational communication, Deirdre Boden’s (1994) conversational approach to organizations, James R. Taylor’s (1993) text-conversation model, as well as Stan Deetz and Dennis Mumby’s (1990) critical perspective on organizational constitution), they explicitly borrow the idea of constitution from Anthony Giddens’s (1984) landmark book, The Constitution of Society. As they point out, Giddens never explicitly defines what he means by “constitution”, but McPhee and Zaug explicitly associate this idea with his key notion of duality of structure.

Agent and Agency

To understand the notion of duality of structure, we first need to present the way Giddens (1984) conceptualizes the notions of agent and agency. To define what characterizes agents, Giddens highlights, following Garfinkel (1967) and Schutz (1973), people’s capacity to reflexively monitor activities, not only their own, but also others’. This monitoring is associated with their practical consciousness, which can be distinguished from what he calls their discursive consciousness, that is, their capacity to verbally account for their own actions, others’ actions and, more generally, the context in which they evolve. Agents, for the British sociologist, are therefore competent actors, not only because of the knowledge they practically mobilize to act in their daily life, but also because of their capacity to rationalize what they do and what others do.

Regarding the question of agency, Giddens (1984) defines it as people’s capacity of doing things, noting that it is especially characterized by the possibility that they could “have acted differently” (p. 9). Although many philosophers tend to associate agency with intentionality (e.g. Davidson, 1980), Giddens takes care to point out that “agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place” (p. 9). This allows him to insist on the key role unintended consequences of intentional conduct play in sociological phenomena, but also to make an important connection between power and agency. As he points out, “action depends upon the capability of the individual to ‘make a difference’ to a pre-existing state of affairs or course of events. An agent ceases to be such if he or she loses the capability to ‘make a difference’, that is, to exercise some sort of power” (p. 14).

This conception of agency thus calls into question any sociological theory, which Giddens (1984) associates with what he calls “objectivist social science” (p. 16), that would reduce human agents to docile bodies acting like automata. On the contrary, he insists on agents’ capacity to resist forms of domination and norms of action, a resistance that he associates with what he calls “the dialectic of control in social systems” (p. 16). Giddens then points out that in order to act, agents draw upon rules and resources – which he captures with the umbrella term “structure” – that are presented as “the means of system reproduction” (p. 19). Rules and resources, which Garfinkel (1967) would associate with ethnomethods, tend to be tacitly known by agents, which is why the latter can be identified as competent actors. When these rules and resources are called into question (like in Garfinkel’s famous breach experiments), the agents’ ontological security appears threatened, that is, the sense of orderliness and continuousness that they usually rely on with regard to their experiences and activities seems to be called into question (Giddens, 1991).

The Duality of Structure

Structure is preserved, according to Giddens, as memory traces and is considered “out of time and space” (p. 25) and “marked by an ‘absence of the subject’ ” (p. 25). People thus draw upon these memory traces to conduct themselves in their daily life, as structures (under the form of signification, domination, and legitimation) both constrain and enable their social actions. In contrast, social systems (organizations, for instance) are considered reproduced social practices. They reproduce themselves across time and space through human agents’ situated activities, activities that recursively draw upon the rules and resources that define structure. There is therefore structuration to the extent that these social systems are (re-)produced through the multiple interactions by which human agents knowledgeably mobilize these rules and resources. To account for this phenomenon, Giddens speaks about the duality of structure, according to which structures are both the medium and outcome of human action. He contrasts this notion of duality with that of a dualism. In his definition, a dualism would imply the existence of agents and structures as completely independent, while a duality entails that structures, through the form of the rules and resources, are internal to agents and their actions. They indeed exist as memory traces and are constantly mobilized in social practices by constraining and enabling them.

McPhee and Zaug (2009) draw upon this notion of duality of structure to put forward their four-flows model. As they point out, they use Giddens’s sense of “constitution” according to which “a pattern or array of types of interaction constitute organizations insofar as they make organizations what they are, and insofar as basic features of the organization are implicated in the system of interaction” (p. 27). Communication thus has constitutive force, but they specify that not all communication can be called organizational as that this constitutive force can only express itself if “a complex relation among organizational communication processes” (p. 29) exists. Echoing Mintzberg (1979) and Lash and Urry (1994), they propose to call these processes “flows” to emphasize that communication is about “circulating systems or fields of messages” (29).

According to their model, any organization is constituted through four flows of communication that make it what it is: (1) agents negotiate their membership of an organization through recruitment, socialization, and the (re-)definition of what it means to be a member of this organization (Membership Negotiation); (2) some members are in charge of structuring activities through various media such as procedures, protocols, organizational charts, directives, which all materialize the formal structure of the organization by dividing labor and allocating resources (Organizational Self-structuring); (3) within this division of labor, members still have, however, to coordinate their activities in order to get things done by adapting to specific situations (Activity Coordination); and (4) some members are in charge of communicating on behalf of the organization to deal with other entities such as suppliers, consumers, competitors, governmental bodies, a form of communication that position the organization vis-à-vis its environment (Institutional Positioning).

The Theoretical Roots of Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Self-Referential Communication Systems

In developing his particular communication approach to the social world in general and to organizations in particular, Luhmann drew inspiration from a wide range of different disciplines, including sociology, philosophy, linguistics, law, cybernetics, biology and even mathematics. Amongst these many influences, however, there are arguably three bodies of theory that had a particularly important impact on Luhmann’s approach, which we will focus on in the following: Husserl’s phenomenology, the theory of self-referential systems and Spencer-Brown’s observation theory.

Husserl’s phenomenology

Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological work had a profound influence on Luhmann’s communication approach – according to Nassehi (2012) even more profound than any of the other influences – although Husserl himself was more concerned with human consciousness than communication. As founding father of phenomenology, Husserl was interested in the phenomena in our mind and, thus, how we subjectively experience the world around us. He thereby distinguished clearly between the way that things appear in our mind (i.e. the phenomena) and how things might be in themselves. That is, the perceived star, the perceived cow or the perceived weather in contrast to the star, the cow or the w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: The Emerging Paradigm of Communication Constitutes Organization (CCO)
• Introduction
• Part I Theoretical Discussions
• Part II Opening Up CCO’s Methodological Approaches
• Part III How CCO Handles Classic Management Themes
• Part IV What Difference Does CCO Make for Practice?
• Index