The Communicative Constitution of Organization, Organizing, and Organizationality

Abstract

Although the lion's share of scholarship in management and organization studies conceives of organizations as entities within which communication occurs, "Communication Constitutes Organization" (CCO) scholarship has attracted interest because it makes a productive reversal, that is, by asking how organization happens in communication. Over the past decade, Organization Studies has become the key scholarly outlet for CCO thinking in the management and organization studies field. Accordingly, in this paper we discuss seven articles that have appeared in this journal as evidence of the perspective's centrality. We first situate CCO theorizing within the linguistic turn, and position CCO with respect to other lines of scholarship underwritten by a rich conception of language and discourse. We examine the varied ways CCO thinking has found organization in communication, locating in the seven articles productive tensions between the process of communication, on the one hand, and organization, organizing, and organizationality, on the other. We contribute to CCO scholarship with reflections on these three theoretical orientations and provide a set of possibilities for its further development.

Seeing the potentialities at the intersection: A reflection on performativity and processuality mindsets

“…See e.g. Schoeneborn, Kuhn and Kärreman, (2018) for an overview of CCO thinking in organization studies.…”

Metaphorical and Interlingual Translation in Moving Organizational Practices Across Languages

“…The linguistic turn in organizational studies has advanced the understanding of organizations as being constituted through communication (Schoeneborn et al, 2019). Acts of metaphorical translation can be seen as part of this tradition, which to date has been based on the implicit assumption of monolingualism.…”

Confidential Gossip and Organization Studies

“…We suggest that since confidential gossip, like gossip in general, is a form of communication in organizations, then the way to understand its significance is by engagement with the idea that communication is constitutive of organizations, also known as the CCO perspective (e.g. Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009;Schoeneborn, Kuhn, & Kärreman, 2019). However, since unlike gossip in general confidential gossip is a form of secrecy, its contribution to CCO is of a distinctive sort.…”

“…Schoeneborn and colleagues (2019) make the point that CCO implies a 'low threshold' view of what an organization, or organizing, may be. From a CCO point of view the organizationality, as Schoeneborn et al (2019) label it, of collectives can emerge in almost any fashion, whenever collective action is called upon (see also Taylor & Van Every, 2000). Importantly, this means that the 'organizationality' of a social phenomenon is not a yes/no question but rather a matter of degree (Blagoev et al, 2019;Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015).…”