Organizational Discourse

Author: Francois Cooren
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745689418
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Book Description
How can we study organizations from a discursive perspective? What are the characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of each perspective on organizational discourse? To what extent do discourse and communication constitute the organizational world? This accessible book addresses these questions by showing how classical organizational themes, objects and questions can be illuminated from various discursive perspectives. Six approaches are presented and explained: semiotics, rhetoric, speech act theory, conversation analysis/ethnomethodology, narrative analysis, and critical discourse analysis. These six perspectives are then mobilized throughout the book to study coordination and organizing, organizational culture and identity, as well as negotiation, decision making and conflicts in the context of meetings. The unifying thread of this volume is the communicative constitutive approach (CCO) to organizations, as implicitly or explicitly advocated by the great majority of organizational discourse analysts and theorists today. Throughout Organizational Discourse, this theme will help readers distinguish between discursive perspectives and other approaches to organizational life, and to understand how discourse matters in organizations.

Organization and Organizing

Author: Daniel Robichaud
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415529301
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
This timely collection addresses central issues in communication theory on the nature of organizing and organization. It contributes to the conception of materiality, agency, and discourse in current theorizing and research on the constitution of organizations. Representing scholarship in various parts of the world, it features contributions that overcome traditional conceptions of the nature of organizing by addressing the difficult issues of the performative character of agency; materiality as the basis of the iterability of communication and continuity of organizations; and discourse as both textuality and interaction.

The Organizing Property of Communication

Author: François Cooren
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027299048
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
What is an organization? What are the building blocks that ultimately constitute this social form, so pervasive in our daily life? Like Augustine facing the problem of time, we all know what an organization is, but we seem unable to explain it. This book brings an original answer by mobilizing concepts traditionally reserved to linguistics, analytical philosophy, and semiotics. Based on Algirdas Julien Greimas’ semio-narrative model of action and Jacques Derrida’s concept of écriture, a reconceptualization of speech act theory is proposed in which communication is treated as an act of delegation where human and nonhuman agents are mobilized (texts, machines, employees, architectural elements, managers, etc.). Perfectly congruent with the last development of the sociology of translation developed by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, this perspective illustrates the organizing property of communication through a process called ‘interactoriality’. Jacques Lacan used to say that the unconscious is structured like a language. This book shows that a social organization is structured like a narrative.

Communication as Organizing

Author: Francois Cooren
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136683771
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
Communication as Organizing unites multiple reflections on the role of language under a single rubric: the organizing role of communication. Stemming from Jim Taylor's earlier work, The Emergent Organization: Communication as Its Site and Surface (LEA, 2000), the volume editors present a communicational answer to the question, "what is an organization?" through contributions from an international set of scholars and researchers. The chapter authors synthesize various lines of research on constituting organizations through communication, describing their explorations of the relation between language, human practice, and the constitution of organizational forms. Each chapter develops a dimension of the central theme, showing how such concepts as agency, identity, sensemaking, narrative and account may be put to work in discursive analysis to develop effective research into organizing processes. The contributions employ concrete examples to show how the theoretical concepts can be employed to develop effective research. This distinctive volume encourages readers to discover and develop a truly communicational means of addressing the question of organization, addressing how organization itself emerges in the course of communicational transactions. In presenting a single and entirely communicational perspective for exploring organizational phenomena, grounded in the discourse of communicational transactions and the establishment of relationships through language, it is required reading for scholars, researchers, and graduate students working in organizational communication, management, social psychology, pragmatics of language, and organizational studies.

Building Theories of Organization

Author: Linda L. Putnam
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135619808
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
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.

The Routledge Handbook of the Communicative Constitution of Organization

Author: Joëlle Basque
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780367480721
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This Handbook offers state of the art scholarship on the perspective known as the Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO).

The Emergent Organization

Author: James R. Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135691134
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
This volume explores communication in organizations and advances the theory that an organization is both a pragmatic and cognitive construction. It is written for scholars in organizational communication, org studies, management, and related fields.

Dis/organization as Communication

Author: Consuelo Vásquez
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429960557
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
This book accounts for the transformation of organizations in a post-bureaucratic era by bringing a communicational lens to the ontological discussion on organization/disorganization, offering a conceptual and methodological toolbox for studying dis/organization as communication. Increasingly, scholars acknowledge that communication is constitutive of organization; because meaning is always indeterminate, communication also (and simultaneously) generates disorganization. The book synthesizes the major theoretical trends and empirical studies in communication that engage with dis/organization. Drawing on dialectics, relational ontologies, critical theory, systems theory, and affect thinking, the first part of the book offers communicational explanations of how dis/organization unfolds. The second part of the book grounds this theoretical reflection, providing empirical studies that mobilize diverse methodological and analytical frameworks (e.g., ethnography, situational, interactional and genre analysis) for studying the practices of dis/organization. Overall, the book exposes organizations (and organizing processes) as significantly messier, irrational (or a-rational), and paradoxical than scholars of organization typically think. It also offers readers the conceptual and methodological tools to understand these complex processes as communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars in organizational communication or management and organization studies, together with senior undergraduate and graduate students studying organizational communication, organizational discourse, discourse analysis (including rhetoric, semiotics, pragmatism, narratology) and courses in management studies. It will also be richly rewarding for organizational consultants, managers and executives.

The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Communication

Author: Linda L. Putnam
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1483309975
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 849

Book Description
Organizational communication as a field of study has grown tremendously over the past thirty years. This growth is characterized by the development and application of communication perspectives to research on complex organizations in rapidly changing environments. Completely re-conceptualized, The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Communication, Third Edition, is a landmark volume that weaves together the various threads of this interdisciplinary area of scholarship. This edition captures both the changing nature of the field, with its explosion of theoretical perspectives and research agendas, and the transformations that have occurred in organizational life with the emergence of new forms of work, globalization processes, and changing organizational forms. Exploring organizations as complex and dynamic, the Handbook brings a communication lens to bear on multiple organizing processes.

Action and Agency in Dialogue

Author: François Cooren
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027288194
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
What happens when people communicate or dialogue with each other? This is the daunting question that this book proposes to address by starting from a controversial hypothesis: What if human interactants were not the only ones to be considered, paraphrasing Austin (1962), as “doing things with words”? That is, what if other “things” could also be granted the status of agents in a dialogical situation? Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, incarnation, and ventriloquism proposes to explore this unique hypothesis by mobilizing metaphorically the notion of ventriloquism. According to this ventriloqual perspective, interactions are never purely local, but dislocal, that is, they constantly mobilize figures (collectives, principles, values, emotions, etc.) that incarnate themselves in people’s discussions. This highly original book, which develops the analytical, practical and ethical dimensions of such a theoretical positioning, may be of interest to communication scholars, linguists, sociologists, conversation analysts, management and organizational scholars, as well as philosophers interested in language, action and ethics.