Thank you like to thank you for inviting me here. I feel very honored to be here
I'd like to thank especially Dennis for extending the invitation. Sorry in mid-bite
Stefan and Gordon. Thank you very much
I've been here for been in Berlin now for a few days and Sunday and I've enjoyed it very much
I hope the next 90 minutes is enjoyable as well
Only for me not for you
So what I'm going to talk about today is what would happen if organization theory took communication seriously
And I'm willing to share what all that I've got here. I mean have the the notes the PowerPoint this is
from a paper that is still in process
for that same series that
Christensen and Cornelis and have written for this is a paper
Intended for this same series. It's a series called thought leadership and management communication quarterly
So the paper is still in process for that
Eventually will appear there. So I'm looking forward to any kind of feedback you have for me for the helpful ideas
like to start by explaining my paper to you I
I ran the entire paper through
Something called a wordle. Have you ever heard of this?
and so this is what came out and wordle what it does is
Extracts all the words and the words that you use in the paper and in terms of frequency
places them here in a diagram and
larger words appear more frequently and so obviously
organization theory organization
Communication
Communicative organizations knowledge stakeholders. You can see some smaller words like at actors
Levinasian
Organizing I hope my name is up here someplace. Oh in the middle of oh, oh really?
A lot of yes exactly a lot of self citations. It's probably at the top of each page in the header
So it's probably working anyway
um
This makes very little sense
I want to simply say this is the the jumble of stuff that's in the paper
And I hope the paper doesn't or I hope the presentation doesn't seem like quite a jumble as appears here
But perhaps what should be spray-painted over this entire thing is the word speculative
That the the arguments, I'm gonna make have to do with ordering and disordering perspectives on communication
The argument that I'd like to make is speculative in that it doesn't exist to this point as seen in
Scholarship I'm calling for a new agenda for scholarship for CCO scholarship and also for organization theory
But it's speculative in the sense. It is
Prospective it's moving in a direction, but in terms of populating my presentation with examples from research
Does not make sense because that research to a large extent doesn't exist
I do have some examples here and there, but not terribly many
Okay, so moving on oh and by the way if if anything is not clear
Please feel free to interrupt me at any time. I don't take it as a problem or
an offense to be to be interrupted
in 2008
George Marcus was interviewed in a sociological excuse me an anthropological journal
and in this interview he
Took stock of the field of anthropology, and he was frustrated with anthropology's
Effort to find intellectual stimulation in a set of ever-new
Theoretical movements and he concluded in this that there are no new ideas and none on the horizon
As well as no indication that anthropology's traditional stock of knowledge shows any sign of revitalization
That kind of claim is similar in organization studies
Broadly organization studies is seen as adrift and irrelevant
Irrelevant because it lacks the conceptual resources to understand dynamic organizations in contemporary capitalism other folks
Criticize organization studies for following fashions for its uncomfortable relationship with multiple paradigms
whatever the
diagnosis the prognosis
For many people tends to be something like this. We should salute we should
proffer solutions like
Borrowing blending concepts from other fields fostering reflexivity and representational practices following new philosophical
Liberators, which is exactly what Marcus was concerned about
Encouraging engaged scholarship if you go to amr
They publish the presidential address of at each Academy of Management
In an issue in the following year and over the past probably six or seven years
The presidential address has focused on something to do with engaged scholarship criticizing the field and and
The solution is that we should be engaged. We should be more practical
Pursuing multi-level research or overcoming theoretical conservativism
All these are fine as
Solutions to problems, but I'd like to move in a little bit different direction today
I'd like to suggest that organization theory has an opportunity
to enhance its theoretical originality and I'd like to suggest that
Communication theory in particular the CCO theory that we've been talking about has an opportunity to do that
So what is not clear however is just what counts as organization theory?
When we hear the term organization theory that often creates more ambiguity than it
Eliminates, so just what are we talking about with organization theory?
Probably the perspective most people point to when they're trying to define organization theory comes from Parsons
1965 article in ASQ
Where he says it consists of three things the relations between organizations and their environments
Interorganizational structures and processes and the role of organizations in broader social systems
Selznick and Starbuck say similar things Starbuck
In a later article said that organization theory is limited to letter a
relations between organizations their environments and relegated pretty much everything else to
Organizational behavior creating this split between OB and OT that still exist still exists today. I
Think the bigger question however is what do we want organization theory to do for us?
So I'm not so concerned about defining differences between OB and OT
I'm not so much interested in saying this is what organization theory is
There is always going to be debate over what it is
We're talking about when we talk on an organization theory so just as there's a great deal of ambiguity about the object of our study
organizations
There's a great deal of ambiguity about what we want organizational theory to do for us
And so the typical criteria the answer to that question tends to be well we want organization theory to be
Parsemonious we wanted to cover the topic we want it to be accurate
And I'd like to suggest that we can supply another response to that that
Communicative explanations what I'll talk about is communicative
Communicative explanations can serve as heuristic devices for theory development
They can present a vision of novelty originality asking new questions that organization theory might not have otherwise asked
Okay
So that's where I'm headed here today
Of
course
A couple of caveats first of course organization theory doesn't ignore
Communication of course in the American
American Sociological Association in the Academy of Management and as I just learned in the German Communication Association
I'm not sure what the term is I got but the the PR oriented the 99% PR people
What is it called?
In these associations there are
divisions devoted to organizational communication in the Academy of Management for example is the organizational communication and information systems
the problem is that
communication tends to be rendered as a
Counterpart of structure it tends to be seen as epiphenomenal is not the phenomenon of interest
It's on the surface and the real phenomenon phenomenon of interest drives communication
It's seen as a conduit for other organizational action or organizations are seen as containers inside of which
Communication occurs. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know
So I think the question then is just what can communication do to benefit
Organization theory or how could organization theory benefit from a real encounter with communication? Well, I'm going to talk about
six commitments of
organizational communication that are broad, but what they constitute what I would call an elastic consensus consensus among
organizational communication scholars in particular
One other thing I should mention before I talk about these is that when we talk about a communicative explanation
We can talk about we can talk about this in two ways
We can talk about a communicative explanation as either addressing some phenomenon or object of organization
claiming it is fundamentally communicative and therefore requiring a communication theory to address it or
We can say that the process of explanation itself is communicative and therefore investigate
paradigms and scholarly positions. I'm going to focus on this hand. I'm going to focus on the former of those
suggesting that communicative explanations are particular ways of
developing talk about
Organizing processes not about the task of scholarship, but the talk talking about organization processes
And so let me talk about these six commitments. Is that getting hard to see up there?
Well, let's see. Oh, that's a little bit there.
No, no, this this is the when the when the when the words are in white, I think it's all right
It's better, okay
All right, thank you
All right, so what does it mean then to take communication seriously?
This is a attempt at a nominal definition of communication and as I've mentioned to a couple people
I'm not sure that there is such a thing as a definition of communication
I mentioned this before to Stephen that a recent book. It's actually a 2006 edited book
called communication as
Perspectives on theory. I just have the table of contents here has
27 different
Conceptions of communication 27 different renderings of communication not all of these are really definitions of communication
But they all have different perspectives on communication communication considered to be
blank
27
Suggests a couple things suggests that there's not a whole lot of
agreement among members of the communication field about what communication is it also suggests that
The six criteria that I come up with here are likely to be disagreed with by quite a few people
Even within my own communication field. So what does it mean then to take communication seriously?
first
Seeing meaning construction is an ongoing accomplishment that coordinates and controls activity
The idea there is that meaning is not in the head Wittgenstein said that nothing is more wrongheaded than calling meaning a mental activity
meaning
construction is something that happens between people but it has a
product it coordinates and controls activity and knowledge and second
Communication evinces no single unitary or monolithic logic. I
wrote a paper a few years ago for
for organization studies and this is on this communicative theory of the firm idea and one of the reviewers asked
It for for me to situate to this communication perspective against
economics in particular
he or she said something to the effect of
so in economics we've got
Agency theory we've got transaction cost theory where there is a clear logic
Driving the theory. What's the logic of communication? I had to come back and say there is no logic
There are 27 different renderings of communication
Communication serves no single purpose
There is nothing underlying communication communication serves many disciplines many masters
So communication in this sense is pretty plastic can be applied to lots of different kind of perspectives
and part of the problem there is that it
it
serves many different masters it can serve that public relations master under the heading of communication and can serve CCO masters as well
third
Taking communication seriously means examining actual communication processes
actual communication processes is
is
explicit there my old doctoral advisor guy named Steve Corman is
on his on a crusade to make organizational communication scholars stop theorizing and
Start investigating real communication. He says that we do that we we
Do empirical work far too little?
I'm not sure I buy that but the claim is is still a good one that
that what we need to do to take communication seriously is
examine actual communication and
Communication is a process. It's a process of meaning construction. So isolating a
Single event or isolating a message is not adequate from this kind of perspective
fourth
In the legacy of the linguistic turn in the wake of the linguistic turn
Taking communication seriously means rejecting the dualism of subjects and objects and the associated vision of communication is their unproblematic
expression or representation
Knowledge and identity are neither in here nor out there. They're both
So the idea that communication expresses some interior autonomous subject speaking is rejected
if we take communication seriously
and fifth viewing communication is a historically situated always political always material social practice that produces
Entities so a couple of talks this this earlier this afternoon hit on this idea that
Communication is always political that it is is power laden
And this is certainly the case for lots of people who pay attention to communication
the idea then is that communication produces entities it produces those things that we think about as as
entities knowledge rules persons structures organizations markets are communicative constructions from a
communication perspective
and finally seeing organization theories traditional
Fundaments as ongoing contingent relational constructions things like routines
resources transaction costs contracts
Things that typically are seen as the basis or micro foundations of organization theory are reframed here as
Communicative constructs, but it can't be enough to simply say but they're communicative
it can't be enough to simply say that I
Deny you economics folks thinking that
Transaction costs are really economic and I insert instead that they're communicative. I was reading on the plane
This excellent book
I've only got halfway through it, so don't ask me how it ends
It's an ethnography of Wall Street called liquidated by Karen Ho an ethnographer
an anthropologist now at the University of Minnesota
And she starts out the book with this rationale
She says that those who have written about Wall Street
She actually worked on Wall Street and did this ethnography here
Those who have written about Wall Street don't
understand its ideology they seem to assume that a logic of the market of
for-profit of profit-based capitalism
inserts itself on all
entities on Wall Street and therefore then also shapes all of the people and
It's sort of a self-ceiling system very top-down
And she suggests that no I don't think that's the case
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to work on Wall Street
And I'll do an ethnography showing that it's much more complicated than that
That's essentially the first half of an argument and what one of the reasons I was frustrated
And I want to know how this ends is that that's
inadequate
To be able to to be able to speak back to theory we need to go beyond simply saying
But these things are communicative constructions
We need to go beyond that and say and here's why that matters for our theories of organization
Here's how my conception of communicative construction makes a difference for the way we think about
Organization theory and so that's what I want to talk a little bit about here today, okay
Back in 1994 John Law wrote a paper where he talked about the a bonfire of the certainties
he suggested that
That changes in the organizational world made our
theories of organizations
No longer relevant and that at this crisis point we could go one of two directions. We could either
pursue
ordering explanations or
disordering explanations we could either pursue better answers for the question of
Organization or we could eschew answers all together from this disordering perspective or we could eschew answers all together and
Seek to generate new questions generate instabilities in the way that we understand organizations
So I'm going to talk about both of those. Okay, so I'm going to follow law in
first talking about ordering moves and
Here I want to talk in particular about
CCO perspectives on organization
my assumption here is that most of the visions of CCO tend to want to explain order that's
That long-standing sociological question of the problem of order
CCO perspectives tend to want to explain how order is achieved how systems come to be
and
I'll just quickly mention these three visions of CCO and then I want to apply them in
relation to a few different
conceptions of organization theory, okay
First is so some three some views of CCO three views of CCO McPhee and colleagues for flows model
I I'm going to assume that people at least have heard of some of these will come back to them in those
Applications, but McPhee and colleagues for flows model Bob McPhee is at Arizona State University
He is with many colleagues is pursuing this conception of
Communication is constitutive of organization drawing on
Structuration theory a practice-based theory that has a particular view of communication communication
Is that which balances creativity and constraint it is agency and structure tied together McPhee and colleagues
therefore flows are members I've always have to read these because I never remember them membership negotiation self-structuring activity coordination and
institutional positioning
The idea is that these are they they cover
internal and external matters within organizations and they
Link members together they establish boundaries they shape operations
They adapt interaction and then they situate the organization within a field of larger organizations
And so McPhee and colleagues then suggest that you need these four flows. You need all of them
at the same time
Interpenetrating to make an organization and they in some of their work
They suggest that if you've only got one or two of these you haven't got an organization
You need all of them operating to to make an organization happen
Second one that I know many people here are familiar with as well is the Montreal school and the notion of co-orientation. I
Mentioned here that they they're drawing on a very different set of foundational assumptions assumptions that are drawn from speech act theory narrative
Especially grimace or grimace is version of narrative conversation analysis and ant actor network theory
Which of course is undergone several changes over time itself
They're interested then in so this is the school of thought largely led by James Taylor and Francois Corinne
And they're largely interested in this question of co-orientation. How is it that?
People tune into one another in conversation when they do
How do they draw upon and how are they drawn upon?
by others in conversation
By a multiplicity or plenum of agents both inside and outside artificial organization boundaries
The other thing that they talk about quite a bit is this text conversation
Dialectic the communication can be rendered as both text and conversation and then we can bracket off
One or the other of those in our analyses pay attention in particular to one of them
But of course both of them are operating at the same time. They must be to make organization happen. Okay
So I will
Again go quickly over that but then the third perspective
Is the numaniacs yes, um the term I hadn't heard until dennis came to colorado
Um, so thank you for introducing me to that
um
and so
Actually too much introduced that oh he did. Oh really?
All right, that's good well so for blaming somebody in organization theory for a term that's not a bad person to blame all right
Good. Thank you
All right
This one is very much less well known among north american scholars and so
I want your help in figuring out how this could be applied. So you you certainly are the experts here, but
Lumon is is pointing to point into the importance of decisions as communicative events
Decisions yet are seen as paradoxical
Um that the more rational and and programmed they are the less deciding actually occurs
so
I I see that most people here are familiar with with numon if you're not
Let me recommend strongly to you dennis's forthcoming piece in mcq. When is that coming out?
Okay, sometime in management communication quarterly dennis has a very good
uh
Explanation of of lumenian thinking as particularly connected to cco
So she'll read that
All right
So do I get my commission now?
Okay
So
the idea
In each of these is to suggest
In presenting these is to suggest that each of these comes from different places each of them has different foundations for advancing
constitutive claims
Each of them has different bodies of work that they're drawing on to be able to say that communication is
constitutes organizations
Each of them I think lines up perhaps in different ways perhaps puts inflection on different elements of those six commitments I mentioned before
but each of them
Attempts to explain the constitution of an organizational system
Each of them is trying to explain how it is that these things that we have organizations come to exist
Each of them also suggests that those that that organizational systems are always in process. They are of course
discursive or communicative constructions
And we if we see them as solid we are fooling ourselves, but at the same time
Their task has is generally has generally been to come down on the order side of that problem of order
Each of them
Is
a
Compelling way to understand communication and they certainly have their adherence
But I would suggest that none of them has made much of a significant impact on organization theory
But that begs the question why should they why should organization theory pay attention to
Cco so I I know that we're hit. We have been talking a little bit about that, but
We should answer that question. Why should organization theory pay any attention to Cco what does Cco have to offer?
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about three visions of organization theory
I'm going to try to talk about three, you know, well established organization theories
And I'd like to see any comments that you have on either these theories or on the Cco application to these theories
um
In so do as I do this
I am not going to do a very detailed explanation of what these theories are about
I'm going to talk about a knowledge-based theory of the firm
I'm going to talk about a decision-making model and talk about stakeholder theory
I've chosen these three because there are a couple others that other folks have addressed
And so I think much of the strategies practice literature has
gesturing to our representative
Um has talked about strategy and strategic work from a communicative perspective and there's a recent
special topic forum in
Management communication quarterly on institutional theory and so I think there are certainly other opportunities
Or other theories that could benefit from a cco perspective. I'm going to have to let some of those go
so a knowledge-based theory of the firm first
Some some basic assumptions of the knowledge-based view are that firms are settings
They're often seen as communities or communities of communities where individuals integrate their specialist knowledge
okay
And that manager's responsibility
Is to do that integration to accomplish that integration through
These supposedly shared identity symbols and rules and the idea then is that if we
Generate these these identities shared identities and rules that we reduce the costs of coordination
Uh, we reduce the cost of communication
Here again, we see communication has situated inside the organizational container
Communication is something that has a cost that can be reduced very transmission based
Conception and we reduce the cost of learning
Okay
I'd suggest that there are some problems with this from a view that takes communication seriously
So what are some problems with this view first is the stability of cultural rules?
I'm going to read a quote to you
That the assumption that cultural rules either are stable or can be made stable by management
Simply avoids this is from chia and holt simply avoids the empirical experience of managers acting in situations
Where any such rule is constantly negotiated through an entire weave of habits norms and emotional dispositions?
The suggestion then is that rules are not stable that's empirically unverifiable
second
Commodification of knowledge knowledge here is seen as something that a person or by analogy an organizational person
Has possesses it is inside me you and I can extract it from gordon's head
Take it out and move it from place to place
Transmission of knowledge makes perfect sense. You can't have it back
All right here, um even cases where knowledge is supposedly tacit
The idea is that that tacit knowledge should be shared somehow should be
Socialized into people. So even in this this perspective then commodification of knowledge then
neglects the inherent complexity and heterogeneity of organization
Where values are central to knowledge negotiation separates knowledge from action from situations
It overlooks politics
In particular forms of knowledge being seen as desirable and it depicts then communication as information transfer
a third problem is that we've got this assumed desirability of integration and if
from the cco perspective we see organizations as
clearly complex and heterogeneous
Places boundaries are often open to negotiation as I mentioned just a second ago interest alignment across members is temporary and fragmented
And meanings are continually renegotiated
So from a cco perspective there are some key
problems with the assumptions of a knowledge-based theory of the firm in particular issues of knowledge and how
Organizations come to exist and how they come to manage knowledge
It's easy to mount critiques it's not so easy to suggest that there might be another path
And because it's not easy, I can't say with certainty that i've done it
But drawing on the claims of the montreal school i'd suggest that cco might have something to say there
so the idea
Then is we could start with the question of materiality
so to address these we could we could begin by acknowledging that
Materiality has the potential to create create heterogeneity in organizing processes
françois
Who I know many of you have read has been arguing for quite a while that organizations are comprised of?
Human and non-human entities and that when we get this plenum of of agencies, we also get with that
some inherent
Heterogeneity we get fragmentation. We do not have any kind of clear
stable existence in an organization
What could be one outcome of that is novelty in knowing and i've chosen the term knowing here knowingly
cute
Knowing signifies something different from knowledge in this literature
If you're familiar with this people who are focusing on knowing are focusing on
organizing practices they're they're focused on the process of accomplishing knowledge and not so much knowledge as entity
So if we start with that kind of assumption, we then might be able to examine local responses to heterogeneity
we might be able to
see that there's
potential heterogeneous
that heterogeneity potentially produces
Novelty or innovation in processes of knowing it disturbs the way that we typically proceed in our organization in our organizational processes
and
One of the possibilities then is to trace that out
So if we're going to link this up with the constitution of larger systems to trace that out foreign organizations authoritative text
It's a term i've used in some of my work to try to depict the representation of the whole of the organization as a whole
We also might then investigate how the author that authoritative text that again in this text conversation
Dialectic that the montreal school is interested in how that authoritative text becomes a resource for actors
In the way that they deal with heterogeneity given
This penchant for integration given the fact that managers are expected to achieve an integrated culture through stability
rules and routines
How is it that actors might use that authoritative text that is an outcome of our organizing processes to fight against?
Battles for heterogeneity or for homogeneity. Excuse me. How might they use it to enhance?
The way that heterogeneity is enforced or homogeneity is enforced
I think those are questions that we might pursue that in the end
could change the way that we see
The knowledge-based theory of the firm the idea there is that pursuing these could enable this knowledge-based view to come to become more
sensitive to these questions of heterogeneity and contingencies of power
In its efforts to describe the constitution of an organization. It also could loosen it from its cognitivist and integrationist assumptions
so
moving on first
Uh, excuse me
I didn't skip over anything there
um decision-making theory the second organization theory to address here
largely associated with the Carnegie or Carnegie school depending on how you like to pronounce that
of march and simon and followers, so
From this perspective organizations are seen as information processing choice-making systems that are characterized by bounded rationality and coalition-based battles for control
It's a mouthful
Uh another author named chun wei chu suggests that
boils this down to suggest that organizations are then networks of decisions and decision makers
And that strategic and ideological
Consistency is the aim across this network of
of decisions and decision makers
And so this view sees organizations also as decision-making entities as information processing entities, but decision-making entities
Such that we don't just look at decisions in organizations. We also see organizations as decisional
entities and systems themselves
okay
So a couple of problems with this view if we take communication seriously first is the recursivity of decisions as many
communication scholars have have suggested
The carnegie view fails to account for the ways in which decisions act back upon themselves
Not just that we rethink or rework our decisions going prospectively that our very definition interpretation of decisions
We have made is open for revision recursion over time. Okay, and then secondly
The notion of framing of situations as central to the trajectory of decision-making
quite frequently
People writing from this perspective from this decision-making perspective suggest that situations are important
Situations are important and they leave it there. Of course situations are important anybody who's read golfman or garfinkel ever
Acknowledges that situations are important, but we need to go beyond
this
Simple assumption that situations matter to be able to say well
What is it about situations matter and how and why do they matter in what in other words? What kind of situational resources?
Are appropriable
For organizational problem solving decision-making. How is it that situations get inserted or drawn upon by decision makers?
So I think that's an open question that decision-making theory tends to elide
Okay
So if we apply lumon and here's another place where i'm going to be expecting your help
If if we take lumon seriously and we suggest that
Decisions are paradoxical, but organizations are seen as having an ongoing need to
deparadoxify
their activity
We can see a couple of possibilities
Are you familiar with this work by anderson this the social temporal or factual temporal and social deep paradoxification?
So i'll just read definitions here factual
Deep paradoxification. I don't want to have to say deep paradoxification many more times. I
Take up the rest of my my time my time
Factual is the presentation of alternatives that signals the facts of the case
Demanding that a decision be made temporal
Deparadoxification is when the moment of decision is seen as requiring resolution. It's now time to make a decision
Do it
Or social
deparadoxification where powerful actors interests are imputed as a decisional premise and then a decision is seen as imperative
Okay, so some interesting issues here
Come when we start to see group based
influences which is key to this carnegie school vision group based group based influences as
Shaping participants reflexivity about that paradox about these forms of paradox and these mechanisms for
deparadoxification
So we might see how proceeding decisions alter boundaries to open up decisional possibilities. We might see
How conflicts between groups foster or impede these forms of deparadoxification
We might see how the forms of deparadoxification
Create boundaries that shape remote control
Authorities control over decisions from a distance. We might see how they
Create that very possibility
these are pretty prospective I
Actually, I'm going to skip over an example
I had I can come back to that later if we need to just in the interest of time want to keep going on to
stakeholder theory
Stakeholder theory largely associated with a guy named Freeman Freeman is interested in
Describing stakeholder theory as a strategic theory of organization
Stakeholder theory like each of these other theories is a contested terrain
people
appropriate stakeholder theory in a variety of ways
Freeman has suggested that he never intended it as anything but a strategic theory
but stakeholder theory is
all over the place but
Freeman's essential claim was that paying attention to the claims of stakeholders beyond just
Shareholders the claims of groups beyond just shareholders by the organization
Produces an alternative logic for value creation and in his vision a better logic than just paying attention to shareholders
It's also been used to describe an ethical stance on business operations has also been used
As a theory of management that gives new directions on human resources firm imputations project management, etc
Okay
I could come up with one problem here
This hub and spoke vision of the organization
The can I
So the idea here is that the organization
Exists at the center of a variety of other groups and organizations
so the organization of interest here is at the center organization is clearly a for-profit organization and
the organization's managers then are responsible for identifying and to some extent controlling managing
and
Pushing away in many cases the claims of stakeholder groups. These could be competitors
They could be suppliers. They could be consumers. They could be governments. They could be interested environmental parties
They could be neighborhoods. It could be a variety of groups
But managers are responsible for managing the stakes and the stakes that they claim over the organization
okay
So if we took McPhee's model and suggested that we've got a way to think about
Stakeholder theory from a cco perspective. What might we look for?
well
One way to go is to actually move away from the organization as the center and to see instead
issues
as the center
One of the moves that has been made
Against this hub and spoke model in communication and an organization studies is to start to see
Stakeholder networks as networks and not as wheels to see them as complex networks
where issues connect people connect groups and then they they come together for an amount of time and then they disband
one
Approach this or a couple different approaches are cross-sector partnerships collaborations and alliances
Where the idea is that participation by the members can unite them
On this particular issue can can unite their work for a short amount of time
But it can also require divided loyalties if I work for organization a and yet i'm also a member of this cross-sector partnership
that
Excuse me can also require sophisticated forms of accounting
Accounting to my group and accounting to my home organization
So I I suddenly have more than one group to pay attention to
So if we then go back to McPhee et al's model
And i'm I started to think through this with a dissertation. I directed a few years ago by a woman named Renee heath
And in her dissertation, she looked at a cross-sector partnership that involved representatives from the business community from
the local educational community in denver
um and the government so
Involved several different sectors and involved participants coming together sitting around a table and trying to reform the educational system in denver
okay
We can start to think about perhaps criteria for legitimate participation contribution as a problem of membership negotiation
One of McPhee McPhee's four flows we start to look at the stories that craft more or less shared identities
As a form of institutional positioning we might look at power in self-structuring
We might see how particular groups particular actors encode their interests into constitution
interesting paper by
By a guy named pencelet who looked at the european group for
for environmental change
Which was a cross-sector partnership involving business government and environmental groups
And one of the things he found is that business groups imposed their means of talking their forms of talk
The words they use too, but they didn't impose their will on the organization
They imposed their forms of talk. So everybody started to talk in that businessy jargon
And that started to then shape the way that they packaged their environmental claims
Okay, and finally stakeholders use of of home organizations
Demands affecting activity coordination and the ability to display the value of the partnership
Externally one of the things that my student renee found is that people frequently would come to these meetings saying
I'm getting a lot of pressure from my home organization. I'm getting a lot of pressure from my manager
You've got to let me do this in ways that shape agendas in ways that were not appreciated by other members
But they felt justified in saying it because it came from someplace else
So i'm going to transition into
What i'm going to call disordering moves, but i'd still like to see any ideas you have
For these ordering moves but disordering moves communicative conceptions of difference. What? Oh, yeah, go ahead
Is there a reason why you've chosen to to to take a particular cco view for a particular organization view?
Not much except lumen made good sense for decision making
the original version of this
Had all three of those conceptions of yeah, which was way way way too long. Yeah
um
So it's just one for each but not there's no real rhyme or reason to it other than I wanted each one present
Yeah
Um conceptions of disorder in in communicative thought
Not
Frequently
People accuse the cco perspective of not paying enough attention to disorder to not having a theory of conflict
To not understanding contradictions and tensions
So there are two ways to take this first is to suggest that we could pay more attention to tensions contradictions paradox unless and orderly
We can pay more attention to the lack of smooth
Coordination and control
we
Could overcome this tendency the tendency of organizational communication research is to seek communication as constituting order
Order and coordinated action rather than disorder and inability to coordinate action
The problem however, is that this is not a clearly different perspective. This is simply paying attention to the flip side
Of organization or of communication at least
And certainly each of those three theories that I talked about before the McPhee the Montreal school in lumen
they have very clear conceptions of
tensions contradictions
interruptions
disorder in the theories any good system of any good systems theory going back all the way to
Benson 1977 suggests that any good systems theory has a theory of conflict built into it
Marx did as well
That's not necessarily a different vision of communication
A different vision of communication could be one that operates on a logic of difference
I'm going to talk about two theorists in particular who see events as discrete idiosyncratic irreducible
And productive that events are not necessarily tied together in any simple way
And and that we often produce that desire to we often produce order through our desire to see it
The ambiguity fragmentation indeterminacy are inescapable in our attempts to systematize
our our own
Hang-ups that communication doesn't achieve that and that organization and disorganization imply one another the analysts choose to attend to only one
Okay
Zygmunt Bauman suggests that social systems are a
Kaleidoscopic, they're Kaleidoscopic. Excuse me. They're kaleidoscopes
Momentary and contingent outcomes of interaction all order that can be found as a local emergent and transitory phenomenon
What this means is that we get an orientation to distances heterogeneity
Pandemonium irrationality or a rationality disjuncture a non-systems view
So i'm going to talk quickly about two perspectives here and I know i'm sort of at my close to the end of my time
Should I i'll try to i'll try to finish up quickly i'll skip over a couple things here
First is grant's communicative porosity grant collin grant is a communication theorist
Who suggests that and by the way a couple of the theorists in here in that that communication as book I mentioned
See communication fundamentally as failure that the idea that communication creates intersubjectivity
Is just wrong
Grant has been the most systematic here. So he's this is why i'm choosing him suggest that first
It's impossible to gain access to the contents of other people's minds
We simply cannot do that
Second
That our linguistic statements invoke a penumbra of unselected information and therefore always subject to interpretation reflexivity revision enrichment and critique
In other words when we speak there is so much more
That is shadowy indefinite marginal
That is possible in our statements that we should not expect our reference to have any single
Alignment with with our conversational partner and then third interaction interactants know these full well
But they overcome them by opera by by these operative fictions of collective knowledge
Okay
that
I studied an airline called jet blue for a few years and they had this notion of the jet blue experience
and this was what they intended to differentiate them from other airlines the the jet blue experience and the jet blue experience
Was hopelessly ambiguous
It was never defined anywhere and it was never defined anywhere for a reason that it was strategically ambiguous
It allowed people to work together. It was an operative fiction
Of collective knowledge everyone was supposed to direct their efforts to enhancing the jet blue experience
But when you'd ask someone what it meant you'd at first get a blank look
They didn't really know what it meant and they expected everyone else to know what it meant
and
So from this perspective then communication is porous the silences and voids between references are ever present and they're key to any system's existence
So to go on quickly
Uncertainty is key
Interruption is a second vision of communication that sees communication as clearly
non-systemic
It's very much about disorder about disorganization
levanasian interruption
Emmanuel levanas suggests that communication is our ethical relations with others
That our subjectivity
Is not our own
And our subjectivity is not merely what we achieve in interaction with others that gordon is not merely my interactional foil
But that others are already present within our subjectivity all the time
He focuses on two things and I recognize going quickly over these is probably not a very good idea but
I'll need to do it in short order the said and the same
The said for him is the content of the read here again the content of language and cultural codes
identifying things as
constituting knowledge so
cultural codes organizational codes
Legal codes religious codes are all the discourse of the said for levanas
He's then suggests
Alternatively that the same is our mode of giving
ourselves to and our relation with others there should be a genuine relation with others that
That relation escapes codification in language
One simple way of understanding this is to suggest that the same is
The doing that cannot be captured by language and that we and when we attempt to capture
Encodes or even in any kind of language that we miss much of that authentic relation with the other
Okay
Oops, so, oh, I forgot to mention that last
Slide there confronting the said with the same requires interruption much of what what he is about here
this levanas guy is about is
interrupting is
Inserting the saying into the said is
Suggesting that we should break the codes by which we operate including ethical codes including religious codes to achieve that
more real authentic ethical relation with others and that
Recovers uncertainty risk and ambiguity and one of his compatriots this Bauman guy
Suggests that ambiguity is the only place where true morality can thrive
Okay, so I'll talk just about the knowledge-based theory of the firm and then I'm going to wrap up
Okay, so from this
Levanasian view the knowledge-based theory the firm's efforts to commodify
Reify knowledge will clearly be discourses of the said
Elevanosian view would probably direct our attention then to how forms of materiality allow sane to interrupt the said especially with respect to
Expertise expertise is part of that cultural code of the organization
Not that it's necessarily bad, but levanas would suggest that if we want ethical relations again
He's talking about ethics. He's talking about morality. He's not talking about organizational productivity
How is it that we might interrupt?
Well, we couldn't interrupt with the conceptions of expertise with tech in technological ways and spatial arrangements
Colleague of mine in Laurie Gossett has his paper on counter institutional websites like Walmart sucks org
Actually, no
Although that might appear there, but the counter institutional websites are
appropriate they appropriate the actual name of the organization and their places for
Members of the organization to voice what has happened to them
So Walmart the humongous retailer largest
Organization corporation in the world or at least it was as of last year
There's a Walmart sucks website Walmart sucks org not affiliated with Walmart in any way
But many Walmart employees go there to tell their horror stories of their maltreatment at the organization
This can be a venue for not just trading stories
but for getting discursive resources that could be used against the code of
Of expertise at Walmart spatial arrangements another colleague of mine a
German
But went to MIT and then went to Colorado
Studied spatial arrangements in an open office arrangement and found that what what frequently excuse me would frequently occurred
Is
That when in these open open office arrangements suddenly the mystique of expertise
Faded away that I start to see that Stefan is
He claims expertise, but he sits around on his computer all day
Maybe that's true. Yeah, he sits around on his computer playing Angry Birds and
And so the veneer of expertise is stripped away
Okay, levanasian view might suggest that this is a way to
To interrupt our conceptions of expertise given the cultural code of the organization, okay
Of course that would require a willingness on the part of scholars and practitioners to engage in that interruption to
disrupt those sources of intellectual capital and
organizational stability
That is quite a risk
Okay, I'm gonna move ahead to my conclusions. We can talk about these other things if you'd like, but I'm just going to skip
What would you I'm comfortable either way
All right
Okay, well, let me talk about this grant fella then and then I can skip that last one that's more levanas
I
Grant's conception of communication in relation to decision-making theory
Excuse me again
Grant's conception of communication
Would suggest that we examine that would start with that network of operative fictions that jet blue experience and other things connected to it
for example
You would suggest that we would need to interrogate that with the ways in which that shapes decisions
But also the relations of authority and representations of the organization
Okay
He would suggest that we would investigate how decisions change in form when and where fictions operate differently than in the context of their production
This is something that is noticed in organizational communication or organization studies
Quite a bit that a decision made in place a when transferred to place B doesn't get enacted in quite the same way
And so grant would suggest that well part of that has to do with the ways in which operative fictions are understood and used as
Discursive resources we could also study how actors employ
Decisional porosity is a discursive resource boy. That's a mouthful to challenge the network of operative fictions
We'll give you an example from my own experience to
In that study of jet blue we had
there the top level
marketing team including the president of the of the company got together on a quarterly basis and
The second meeting I went to the president would they they flew everybody down to Orlando
No, this is to Miami, Florida flew everybody down to Miami, Florida for this meeting
Airlines can fly you ever wherever they want
And I gave a short talk and then the president asked me Tim
Have you had the jet blue experience yet?
And I had I had done
Something like 15 focus groups. I had flown on on the airline. I had talked to a lot of people
I knew this term the jet blue experience and
I I paused for a second and I said no
I don't think I've had the jet blue experience because what I've experienced has been the same as every other airline
I've been on as a passenger
I have seen pretty much the same thing
They they did have leather seats and little TVs in the back of every seat, but that's all that was different
That statement I just thought I was being honest I didn't think that was all that important that
Statement became something that other folks picked up on other members of that larger team picked up on Tim
Not having the jet blue experience and telling the president that he hadn't had the jet blue experience
in ways that then
Penetrated the future discussions that maybe this notion of the jet blue experience wasn't as solid and convincing as
They had thought
I'm not taking credit for this. I certainly didn't intend for this to be some radical interruption, but
What became clear is that?
Actors members of this group then used my that statement in future jet blue experience product or project meetings
They used that in ways to suggest well
Maybe we had either redouble our efforts or some suggested we jettison the idea altogether
But it at least shook up the way that organizing happened around this marketing concept of the jet blue experience
No, they didn't they're still operating they're doing okay
They had some real troubles, but all airlines did yeah
Yeah, not my fault. Don't blame me for that yeah
So decisions from this perspective do not produce agreement. They don't produce learning. They don't produce a
System they produce operative fictions that destabilize subsequent organizing from grants conception
We need to understand the organization as the decision-making system as
Fundamentally ambiguous uncertain contingent, okay
So I'm going to skip ahead to my conclusion. We can talk about stakeholder theory if you want, but
Oops, sorry
Oh, did I see a hand?
To the conclusion
in that
Interview that I mentioned at the beginning where George Marcus talked about the state of anthropology
He suggested that anthropology was in a state of suspension theoretical suspension
And I think the same claims are found in organization theory as well those desires to
Pursue all those solutions that I talked about the desire to find some new philosophical liberators suggest that the suspension that we
Organization theorists find ourselves in is frustrating to a lot of people
I'm not suggesting that communication is a new concept that can be employed in
Ma in existing models and that you simply insert this concept and then the structural equation model will suddenly make sense
I'm not suggesting that a new discipline called communication is going to be that philosophical liberator
Rather I'm suggesting that these questions that I've asked in relation to each of these theories
Suggest the possibility for novelty. They suggest the possibility that we can disrupt
Organization theory decision-making theory stakeholder theory and knowledge-based theory the firm we can disrupt them
But we shouldn't expect organization theory
to appropriate communication
As a radical new vision of organizing or organization. It's not radical. It's not new it presents
through the vehicle of
ordering and disordering moves presents some possibility for novelty for innovation for
rethinking some of the assumptions of these theories, but on its own communication does not present some savior
second
Or in response to that communication then becomes instead of a savior with a particular kind of new logic
Communication instead is a novel point of departure with respect to those traditional
Fundaments and micro foundations routines decisions
stakeholders
And my claim here is that orienting to communications ordering and disordering
Perspectives holds the potential to stretch those three theories allowing them to address new topics to challenge their assumptions of organizational
existence and action to encourage attention to alternative explanatory possibilities my claim then
here is a heuristic one that communication as
Seen through the vehicle of ordering and disordering views has the potential to generate new ways of
Thinking about the problem of organization new ways of thinking about our theories our assumptions in the very practice of theorizing
So thank you. Sorry that I went longer, but I'm looking forward to our conversation