When Birds of Different Feather Flock Together

Abstract

In the German-speaking countries, organizational communication has no distinct tradition as a separate field within communication studies, where it is often subsumed under the field of public relations (see Theis-Berglmair's contribution in this forum). Consequently, and apart from rare exceptions, among German-speaking scholars (e.g., Theis-Berglmair, 2003; Weder, 2010), organizational communication is primarily understood as "communication in organizations," that is, as internal communication (e.g., Buchholz & Knorre, 2010; Mast & Huck, 2008; Schick, 2010), by following the "container metaphor" with regard to the relationship between organization and communication (Putnam, Phillips, & Chapman, 1996, p. 125). A consequence of this rather narrow focus is that German-speaking research on organizational communication is somewhat disconnected from international debates in the field, which over the last decades have shifted from the container metaphor to a more holistic understanding of organization as communication, that is, to the idea that organizations essentially consist of Forum 304 Management Communication Quarterly 27(2) interconnected communicative practices (see Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009; Taylor & van Every, 2000). Recently, however, a group of young German-speaking scholars has emerged, whose members are particularly interested in the idea of the organization as communication. These scholars not only have their academic home in communication studies but also come from neighboring disciplines such as management studies or organizational sociology. Their heterogeneous research activities have found a forum where ideas can be exchanged in the interdisciplinary young scholars' network "Organization as Communication" (OaC; http://www.orgcom.org), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The network, launched in 2010, has organized several workshops over the past two years that were dedicated to the "communication constitutes organizations" (CCO) perspective (Ashcraft et al., 2009; Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, & Clark, 2011). The idea that organizations are essentially constructed in and through language use fell on fertile soil in German academia. Its impact was amplified by the fact that the CCO perspective shares a basis in social-constructionist epistemology with various research strains prevalent in Germanspeaking management studies and organizational sociology, notably,

The Institutionalization of CCO Scholarship: Trends from 2000 to 2015

“…Many of these publications appear in journals with low impact factors (or no impact factor at all) and are rarely cited in the main peer-reviewed journals that publish CCO research. For these reasons, we limited our analysis to English-language publications, which did include English-language publications by scholars from French-, German-, and Spanish-speaking countries who have been making significant contributions to CCO research’s emergence and institutionalization (e.g., see Schoeneborn & Sandhu, 2013).…”

Government.com? Multifunctional cabinet portfolio analysis of 201 national governments

“…Niklas Luhmann’s organizations are communicative systems (Teubner, 1987; Brans and Rossbach, 1997; Hernes and Bakken, 2003; Luhmann, 2003, 2005a, b; Hernes and Weik, 2007; Kuhn, 2008; Schoeneborn, 2011; van Assche et al , 2012, 2014; Blaschke et al , 2012; Collm and Schedler, 2014; Schoeneborn and Sandhu, 2014; Valentinov et al , 2018; Will et al , 2018). These “organizations consist of decisions” (Nassehi, 2005, p. 186) and not of humans, people or actors.…”

Political Organizations and their Online Communication

“…Within the CCO perspective, three basic approaches can be distinguished that differ greatly both from their starting point and the degree of their theoretical elaboration: the linguistic-based "Montréal School" (Cooren et al, 2011;Cooren & Taylor, 1997;Taylor et al, 1996;, the "four-flow model" of communication (McPhee & Zaug(McPhee & Zaug, 2009), and the "system theory" set forth by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (Blaschke, Schoeneborn, & Seidl, 2012;Schoeneborn & Sandhu, 2013). While these approaches differ greatly from their starting points and the degree of theoretical elaboration, they share the axiom that communication is the basic unit of an organization.…”