The Institutionalization of CCO Scholarship: Trends from 2000 to 2015

Abstract

This article presents an empirical analysis of the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) literature to demonstrate how, and to what extent, CCO scholarship is becoming established within organizational communication studies and related fields. We assess the trajectory of CCO research from 2000 to 2015 and, via the application of a neo-institutional perspective, show that CCO scholarship is gaining legitimacy within organizational communication and is becoming increasingly recognized in fields such as management and organization studies, although it has not focused extensively on formalizing its approaches to investigating how organizations are produced in communication. Our analysis reveals key questions and challenges that future CCO scholarship should address to strengthen its institutional legitimacy and influence.

Beyond Entanglement: (Socio-) Materiality and Organization Studies

“…This reference to CCO scholars is not trivial, in my opinion, as it illustrates the affinities that link from its inception the sociomaterial perspective with the communicative constitutive approach, especially its Montreal representatives. While the CCO movement has been historically represented by Luhmannians (Schoeneborn, 2011, Seidl & Becker, 2006), Giddensians (McPhee, 2004McPhee & Iverson, 2009;McPhee & Zaug, 2000), and Taylorians (Taylor, 1988;Taylor, Cooren, Giroux, & Robichaud, 1996;Taylor & Van Every, 2000, only this last branch, often identified as the Montreal School of Organizational Communication (Boivin, Brummans, & Barker, 2017;Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud, & Taylor, 2014;Schoeneborn et al, 2014), embraces, from its beginnings, a decentered vision of agency where humans' and other-than-humans' 2 contributions can be acknowledged (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004;Taylor, 1988). 3 But what does it mean to understand materiality communicatively (or communication materially, for that matter)?…”

The Communicative Constitution of Organization, Organizing, and Organizationality

“…Proponents of the “Montreal School” of organizational communication, which is commonly seen as one of the key and leading groups of CCO scholarship (see Brummans et al, 2014), shape the visions of communicating and organizing upon which these three articles draw. Much of the Montreal School thinking is based on seeing communication as a dialectic between conversation and text, although more recent works tend to draw on this concept more implicitly than earlier theoretical works did (see Boivin, Brummans, & Barker, 2017). “Conversation” is understood as the (relatively) observable interaction between interdependent actors, while “text” is the topical, conceptual, or thematic substance upon which conversations draw and to which they contribute.…”

Speaking about vision, talking in the name of so much more: A methodological framework for ventriloquial analyses in organization studies

“…Our paper addresses recent critiques and calls for further explication of methods, outlines, and systematicity in communicative constitutive theorizing more generally (Boivin et al, 2017) and ventriloquism specifically (Kuhn, 2014). The framework's straightforwardness promotes its application, also among scholars less familiar with CCO.…”

“…Yet, ventriloquism's intuitive appeal as a metaphor for unpacking organizational talk is in need of concrete means for identifying ventriloquial acts (Boivin, Brummans, & Barker, 2017;Kuhn, 2014). To our knowledge, no methodological framework is available that (1) provides guidance for showing how a person is led to say what she is saying or what voice can be recognized in what she is saying, and that (2) allows us to systematically substantiate the claim that people are both ventriloquists and dummies while they talk (Cooren, 2010a(Cooren, , 2018.…”