So, I did not have a JetBlue experience this morning, I did have an Air Berlin experience
this morning and it was rather peculiar from a communication perspective because a screw
in one of the panels of the plane was loose-fitting and the pilot had to have that fixed first
and from the communication point of view it was quite interesting because the plane was
boarded and we only got those snippets of information and the pilot always said okay
we have an issue here, I do not know how long it will take but we are working on it and
it is interesting to see how that information costs certain reactions by the passengers.
Of course you are sitting there in your tin box, you do not know what is going to happen,
there is uncertainty and from a communication perspective people of course put out their
mobiles and called the office and said okay I am sitting here, I do not know what is going
to happen and most of those calls were rather short and just as information was given I
am sitting here, I do not know when I will be at an appointment but that was all that
was being needed in order to keep this organisation alive and keep the processes alive and this
is one of the points I want to talk about in my presentation which tries to come up
with an idea of a communicative core of institutional theory.
In some respects I will touch upon points that were mentioned earlier by Tim and I want
also to address one point that we are kind of tiptoeing around a bit, I want to try to
tackle the idea of communication a bit further and this goes back to our first meeting in
Hamburg and the second meeting in Zurich and the first meeting in Hamburg we tried to align
those different perspectives of CCO and came up with the idea to see if there is a different
take to see organisations as communication and in the second meeting in Zurich we talked
about the institutional theory discussion on the CCO perspective that was already being
mentioned in the MCQ and Simone and myself did a presentation on that we also kind of
dissected the ideas and moved away from that so this would be another take on that.
So the core problem is what is this communication we are talking about and I want to tackle
that first with an idea taken from Taylor and from Avery from the new book and the second
part is is there a communicative to an institutional theory and how can we theorise that and the
third part is how this communicative core of institutional theory can be theorised but
that is very vague and work in progress.
So you mentioned 26 or 27 different traditions of communication.
Communication scholars like Craig came up with seven or eight paradigms of communication
and I am always reminded of the book by Morgan about pictures of the organisation but these
are basic paradigms that are mutually exclusive like paradigms are and the perspective that
the CCO scholars take especially the Montreal school is the pragmatic one and Craig only
recently added the pragmatic perspective on communication in a follow up to his 99 paper.
I won't go into the details of all these different ideas of communication and I want
to focus exclusively on the pragmatic view of communication.
Essentially this is a philosophical stance.
It's not a communication theory per se but it is a more basic paradigm of how to look
at the world like most paradigms or positivistic paradigms it is anti-essentialist.
It does not take the things we see we realise as the thing they are but as a construction.
It is non-dualistic we talked about it earlier and it's positivistic as a pragmatic view.
It is however and here it comes together with the CCO perspective a rather emergent
constitutive idea and it's based around the idea of thirdness and this idea of thirdness
is rather peculiar and I'm still struggling with the idea because it's basically a philosophical
concept that is being used by Taylor and Van Emory to explain to a certain degree what
communication is and they refer to the person on your left side, Charles Saunders Purse.
The person on the right side is also important because Sherlock Holmes and Purse have something
in common.
Purse is one of the founding fathers of the American school of pragmatism and this is
a movement a philosophical movement that is against functionalistic perspectives and was
basically very fundamental in the American development of social theory.
It has nothing to do with our idea of pragmatic working which means we come, we do things
with a means to an end, we have a neutralistic perspective.
The idea of Purse is much more fundamental and I'm still struggling a little bit with
this idea or the interpretation by Taylor and Van Emory.
Purse says that there's a third model of logical analysis.
The models we know are deduction and induction.
Deduction goes from the general to the specific and induction from the specific to the general
to have to keep that very brief.
Abduction is something in between and it allows intuitive leaps that is basically the idea
of Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes is neither inductive nor is he deductive but he makes some associations
between certain facts and comes up with a solution that might be true or might not be
true but it is an idea of reasoning that's behind the idea.
The idea to put Purse and Holmes together is by Umberto Eco by the way so it's not by
Taylor.
What's behind that?
That is the idea of the way we look at reality.
The example that Taylor and Van Emory use is your garden.
When at the first order of looking at a piece of soil in your backyard, it's just a piece
of soil.
There's no meaning to it.
Nothing to it.
There's brute reality that's there.
When you start to work on your farm or your garden, then you're acting on the soil, you're
putting things in there, you hope that it's growing but this is just a material relationship.
There still is a rather non-meaning to it.
The meaning only exists when their thirdness comes in and the thirdness is knowing how
to do gardening.
You make certain generalizations, laws and sense-making that gives this idea between
you working in your garden a deeper sense of what you're doing there.
This thirdness affects the way you're looking at your piece of soil and you're doing the
things you're doing.
It's a rather peculiar concept and I need to read more on the original ideas of person
which I didn't do now but I think this is rather useful to tackle the concept of communication
because as Taylor and Van Emory claim, thirdness is what gives meaning to activities and the
context they occur in.
For Taylor and Van Emory, what keeps the organization together is this idea of thirdness,
that acting becomes a meaningful practice by relying something that is beyond the material
act or the specific act you're doing.
The JetBlue experience is a good example for the thirdness.
Nobody knew what a JetBlue experience is but everybody knew when you experienced one.
So this is the thirdness that holds together the organization and what keeps the organization
as a sense together and for Taylor and Van Emory, this is at the core of their idea.
It integrates all the activities making up a complex organization by giving them sense
and this basically what the thirdness makes is communication.
It's a concept I'm still struggling with if we can equalize communication with the thirdness
but at least it's a way of getting the idea of communication to a more down-to-earth idea
and making it a little bit more concrete.
That's the idea I want to pursue here and when we look at institutional theory, then
we see a development that scholars recently claimed that institutional theory is a theory
of communication.
Of course this is specifically aimed at diffusion but if you look at the different turns of
schools of institutional theory, we clearly see a trend towards more discursive, towards
more rhetorical and towards more discursive points of institutionalism.
But what is happening here is they are using all the terms we used before for communication
from the discourse, from the language point of view, from the rhetorical point of view
and added in to explain meaning processes that are happening and that they are at the
core of institutional theory.
Is there a communicative turn of institutional theory on the surface?
Yes, but they're using tools and ideas that are being brought in to explain the meaningful
structure that John Mayer and Rowan put at the very forefront of institutional theory.
But for me that's not sufficient.
I think these are certain ways of using communicative tools or toolboxes to explain institutional
processes.
My idea is to use this thirdness to explain organizational field structures.
As you know the organizational field is one of the few original ideas of institutional
theory, also influenced by Baudrill and Giddens of course, but those fields develop by the
interaction and mutual recognition of organizational actors.
And recent ideas by Kennedy and others use this idea or move over the organizational
actors towards issues.
So it's not only the actors that constitute the field but its issues.
How are those issues being institutionalized or recognized?
I think exactly here is the idea of thirdness happening.
The thirdness can be transposed properly by media which allows those issues to be recognized
by the actors and constitute the organizational field as a communicative field.
That's binding those organizations together by the idea that they have a shared reality,
they have a shared perspective on a certain part.
And this is basically the idea I'm working on right now and the working plan for the
paper would be or goes into a similar idea like Tim presented.
I want first of all trace the different takes of discursive means, rhetorical ideas, meaning
structures in organizational institutionalism and see if they are similar or if they're
really different.
How are they used?
Are they distinctively different or are they specific?
And the idea which I briefly sketched out is can we hypothesize this idea, this concept
of thirdness that constitutes for talent and every the process of organization for institutionalization
theory.
And that's very briefly the point and I was struck by this quote and I think it's important
to go back to the idea of communication which makes it very clear that it's much more than
a dualistic idea of information exchange.
It's performative, it's emerging, it's mediated by language and I was a bit struck by that
term because they threw in everything that makes up the communication and I think that's
one of the key issues we are dealing with when we are dealing with CCO.
It pulls in together a lot of different perspectives and takes them as a basis, I think a fruitful
basis to analyze different theories like the institutional theory.
Thanks.