Communicative Constitution of Organizations

Abstract

The notion of the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) is at the center of a growing theoretical development within organizational communication studies. CCO scholarship is based on the idea that organization emerges in and is sustained and transformed by communication. This entry presents CCO scholarship with regard to its historical origins, underlying premises, main schools of thought, key theoretical questions, methodological approaches, and critiques.

Shared Responsibility for Societal Problems: The Role of Internal Activists in Reframing Corporate Responsibility

“…Previous studies have suggested that companies may talk themselves into commitment and action (Christensen et al, 2013; Haack et al, 2012). For instance, these studies highlight that CSR communication may involve elements of autocommunication: That is, external communication not only addresses external stakeholders but also entails elements of self-talk that may—in theory—constitute changes in business practices (Christensen et al, 2013; Schoeneborn & Vásquez, 2017). By opening the black box of intraorganizational dynamics, this article offers an empirically grounded understanding of the constitutive processes that fueled internal activists’ meaning making and enabled them to construct a strongly aligned framing of their company’s responsibilities.…”

Process Studies of Project Organizing

“…In most of the articles, we see that the unfolding nature of the phenomena studied is intimately linked with communication, and that communication is more than simply what happens between two human actors: it is through and in communication that phenomena emerge and are constituted. This processual redefinition of communication is at the heart of a stream of research coming from the field of organizational communication, called the communicative constitution of organizations (Cooren et al, 2011;Schoeneborn & Vásquez, 2017, provide good introductions to this perspective). While the studies in this special issue do not directly build on this perspective, noting the central place of communication in materializing projects can be interpreted as an invitation to turn to such perspectives to not only push forward process studies of project organizing, but also to get closer to the emergence and production of projects.…”

Ventriloquial reflexivity: Exploring the communicative relationality of the ‘I’ and the ‘it’

“…Conceived by François Cooren (2010Cooren ( , 2012Cooren ( , 2015Cooren ( , 2016, ventriloquism subscribes to the idea that any organized phenomenon is constituted in and through communicative events (Boivin et al, 2017;Cooren et al, 2011;Schoeneborn and Vásquez, 2017). It addresses how speakers in conversations stage figures as well as their potential for agency, and how, as agents, such figures may themselves be understood to animate speakers in conversation.…”