The Communicative Constitution of Organization, Organizing, and Organizationality

Dennis Schoeneborn, Timothy Kuhn, Lars Karreman

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Abstract

Although the lion’s share of scholarship in management and organization studies conceives of organizations as entities within which communication occurs, “Communication as Constitutive of Organization” (CCO) scholarship has attracted interest because it makes a productive reversal, that is, by asking how organization happens in communication. Over the past decade, Organization Studies has become the key scholarly outlet for CCO thinking in the management and organization studies field. Accordingly, in this paper we discuss seven articles that have appeared in this journal as evidence of its centrality. We first situate CCO theorizing within the linguistic turn, and position CCO with respect to other lines of scholarship underwritten by a rich conception of language and discourse. We examine the varied ways CCO thinking has found organization in communication, locating in the seven articles productive tensions between the process of communication, on the one hand, and organization, organizing, and organizationality, on the other. We contribute to CCO scholarship with reflections on these three theoretical orientations and provide a set of possibilities for its further development.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)475-496
Number of pages22
JournalOrganization Studies
Volume40
Issue number4
Early online date18 Jul 2018
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Apr 2019

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