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

Abstract

Organizations have long been treated as stable and fixed entities, defined by concrete buildings, catchy names, and strategic goals neatly written on paper. The Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) school proposes an alternative, practice-grounded conceptualization for studying organizations as emerging in communicative (inter)actions. In so doing, CCO invites organizational scholars to trace back organizational phenomena to how they are communicated into existence. The concept of ventriloquism can help us explain the communicative constitutive view as it depicts how various elements of a situation are communicated into being and make a difference in interaction. However, ventriloquism lacks a proper methodological outline. Taking employee conversations about visions—a classic constituent of organizations—as our venue, we created a four-step framework for ventriloquial analyses and explored how visions are talked into existence. In this paper, we introduce and illustrate our analytical framework, showing how to identify, order, and present ventriloquial effects. We thus provide organizational (communication) scholars with a new methodological tool that facilitates the systematic inquiry into organizing and the organized from a communicative constitutive perspective.

How Artefacts Do Leadership: A Ventriloquial Analysis

“…We then related the activities that were being performed to the networks of authorship that the participants invoked and made relevant to the interaction. Finally, we selected a “powerfully illustrative” (Nathues et al, 2020, p. 10) vignette that exemplified the networks that were invoked to perform these activities. While traditional forms of conversation analysis—usually identified as a “small d” discourse perspective (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000) —tend to exclusively focus on what people do and how they do what they do (Sacks, 1992), other forms of discourse studies—usually categorized as “big D” Discourse perspectives (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000) —identify the various discursive formations or ideologies that are reproduced through what people say and do (Grant & Hardy, 2004).…”

Towards a new theory of construction innovation: a socio-material analysis of classification work

“…Exploring these concerns is important to understand how ANT studies of construction can move beyond developing broad theoretical suggestions around the role of classifications, to understand how specific classificatory acts have specific effects on the proliferation of innovations. In the next section we will develop our approach to generating such insights by combining early ANT concepts, such as enrolment (Callon 1986a, Callon 1986b, Latour 1987 with ventriloquial analysis (Cooren et al 2008, Caronia and Cooren 2014, Nathues et al 2020.…”

“…What ANT lacks is a way to analyse; (i) what these classifications accomplish within lived interactions, (ii) how they are mediated by non-human actors, and (iii) how multiple classifications interact with each other to allow innovations to proliferate. We propose ANT-informed ventriloquial analysis approaches to explore these concerns (Cooren et al 2008, Caronia and Cooren 2014, Nathues et al 2020.…”

“…Ventriloquial analysis approaches have been developed to analyse how organisations are constituted by communication that involves more than simply human to human interactions (Caronia and Cooren 2014, Clifton and de la Broise 2020, Nathues et al 2020. Ventriloquial Analysis (VA) recognises how "Humans and things mutually engage in this process whereby they make their counterpart speak, act, move or even exist" (Caronia and Cooren 2014, p. 46).…”

“…Thus, we conceptualise classification work and its consequences for construction innovation as a socio-material accomplishment. We develop our socio-material approach to classification work by drawing upon Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Latour 2005, Law 2009, Sayes 2014, particularly studies of innovations (Callon 1986a, 1986b, Latour 1987, as well as ANT-informed ventriloquial analysis that examines how organisations are constituted by communications comprised of socio-material interactions (Cooren et al 2008, Caronia and Cooren 2014, Nathues et al 2020.…”