The Varieties of (More or Less) Formal Authority

Ventriloquial Authority in Management Learning and Education: A Communication as Constitutive of Learning and Education Perspective

“…(Bencherki, et al, 2020) in the management classroom. It may be assumed that it is the teacher/educator (Dean & Forray, 2021;Vasilyeva, Robles, Saludadez, Schwägerl, & Castor, 2020), playing an identifiable formal role, who decides what is to be taught and how learning is to be accomplished. However, a CCO lens dictates that we will only be able to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of who/what decides MLE if we examine how teaching and learning unfold as communicational accomplishments.…”

Authorial Incongruity and Organizational Presence(s): A Ventriloquial Analysis of Shadowed Organization

“…Our analysis is guided by a ventriloquial approach, which “focuses not only on speaking and doing, but also, and maybe especially, on making one speak or making one do something” and whose figures “often act as a source of authority ” (emphasis in original; Bencherki et al, 2020, p. 89). Theresa Castor and Jean Saludadez (in a section, titled, “The Varieties of (More or Less) Formal Authority,” of a larger chapter by Vasileyva et al, 2020) suggested a three-step process when conducting a ventriloquial analysis: (1) record interactions as they happen or collect recorded interactions; (2) identify markers through which a variety of figures recurrently and iteratively express themselves in interaction; and (3) interpret or make inferences about what the figures are made to say or do (Vasilyeva et al, 2020). While Castor and Saludadez’s ventriloquial analysis approach focuses on situated interactions, we found that the approach also lends itself to the identification of different sources, or levels, of authority in documents and texts.…”

“…At the same time, as authorship multiplies, so, too, do the opportunities for figures to contradict or clash with each other, which produces tensions (Cooren et al, 2013). A ventriloquial approach, therefore, views authority not as something people "have" but as a situational, interactional accomplishment (Vasilyeva et al, 2020). As such, authority can be observed in processes of presentification, whereby sources of authority are materialized or made present in interaction (Benoit-Barné & Cooren, 2009).…”

“…Informed by a ventriloquial approach (Bencherki et al, 2020; Cooren, 2012; Vasilyeva et al, 2020), we examine how spaces, documents, and websites materialize organizational authorities to produce the organizational presence of a crisis pregnancy center (CPC), Faith Pregnancy Center, 1 in the southeastern United States. CPCs are particularly interesting sites for examining the relationships between authority and organizational presence because of the hidden nature of many of their organizational practices.…”

“It’s Not Enough to Hold That Power”: The Gendering of Advice in Corporate Discourse

“…The authors' technological proficiency is grounded in their "professional vision" (Goodwin, 1994), a term which captures how experts circumscribe the area of knowledge which they then proceed to occupy. Like Benoit-Barné (2020), we consider authority as a relational dynamic: "a property of relationships communicatively generated and negotiated in the process of organizing" (p. 149) (see also Vasilyeva, Robles, Saludadez, Schwagerl, & Castor, 2020). As Cooren (2010) pointed out, authorship and authority are closely connected, first, etymologically and second, discursively, for authors claim expert ownership of their words in the text-reader conversation (Smith, 2005).…”