Abstract
There is a growing interest within organization studies, at least since 2000 if not shortly before, in communication, discursive practices, narratives and language in general. Nevertheless, the title of the book marks a specific interest, and it stresses ‘at work’. What is specific about language and communication ‘at work’? And therefore what is specific about the collection of chapters edited by François Cooren, Eero Vaara, Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas?
‘At work’ is the common denominator for a general tendency to connect language and communication to the various processes, activities and practices that constitute organizing and organization. Since the book is the fourth volume in the series linked to the International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, it is not surprising that the connection among the chapters is provided by a common orientation towards a process interpretation of language and communication. This view conceptualizes the constitutive role of language and communication in bringing organizations into being and in performing them day after day, instant after instant.
The editors, in explaining the meaning of ‘at work’ in their introduction, mention a ‘turn to work’ as yet one more turn in the landscape of social science studies. The ‘turn to work’ – which includes expressions such as identity work, institutional work or boundary work – is just a pointer to a constructivist view of processes in which human actors take an active part in building those phenomena that were previously seen as beyond their control. In other words, ongoing work is bound up in the construction, maintenance and change of social phenomena; and language and communication are the media through which much of this work takes place. However, the book was born from awareness that our understanding of the constitutive force of language and communication in the unfolding of organizational phenomena is still limited. Therefore the book aims to shed light on the opacity of knowledge about the ways in which language and communication actually work in taking part, enabling or constraining ongoing organizational practices. In fact the twelve chapters in the book express different traditions and perspectives on linguistics, discourse analysis and communication studies, and they take either a theoretical or an empirical perspective. Nevertheless, all of them focus on the communicational activities and practices that form the daily lives of organizations and their ongoing temporal becomings.
As in a theatrical piece the unity of the ensemble arises from the single acts but does not reside in them, so the character of the book does not spring from each chapter but from their deployment under the editors’ artistic direction. For this reason I shall not describe and present in detail the individual chapters as they follow each other in the book. Rather, I shall illustrate them as if they were the four acts of a theatrical piece. The four acts are named (after the editors’ definition of four topics): Communication as constitutive of organization; Practices of language use; Communication as timing and spacing; Epistemological and methodological reflections.
Let us raise the curtain!
Communication as constitutive of organization
The message that the first act conveys is that language and communication do not happen in organizations; rather, they build organizations (i.e. organization in communication) and are embedded in organizing, since it is through communication that we do things together and get organized. Moreover, not only do humans communicate but communication is pervasive in sociomaterial practices as well. In the first act we watch the representation of discursive agency through the chapters by Taylor, Lorino and Kuhn and Burk.
James Taylor addresses the discussion on the nature of organization. He resolves the process versus entity dichotomy and proposes use of the term ‘transaction’ (of pragmatist origins) in the place of interaction. In fact, if we think of communication as interaction, then both actors and organizations are conceived as entities, and process is only the enabler of their interaction. Instead, if communication is framed in terms of transaction, then both process and entity become mere artefacts of the constructive communicational logic. In fact, organization is repeatedly reconstructed in the conversation of members who, in authoring the organization, establish their own authority as its agents, translators and representatives.
Philippe Lorino makes an intriguing proposal. Instead of considering discourses involved in activity, we may consider activity itself as a discourse in acts. The acts involved in collective activity are not only operations which transform the world; they are also signs that point to socially built meanings, making sense through their temporal deployment. Like the previous chapter, also this one proposes a pragmatist understanding of communication, mainly through Pierce’s conception of habits as segmented blocks of partially stabilized and socially shared areas of meaning. Habits can thus be considered the language of activity.
Finally, the voices of Timothy Kuhn and Nicholas Burk tell us that ‘authoritative texts’, representing assemblages of heterogeneous elements, are both the sites of organizing and the sources of organizational agency. The authors discuss spatial design as a complex sociomaterial practice. Spatial arrangements not only enact a specific order; they also resist what others want to do with the building in which they operate. Spatial design illustrates some interests and viewpoints, while others remain disqualified and ineligible; some interests and concerns are made present while others are absent.
Practices of language use
The second act puts discursive practices on stage and conveys the message that ‘talk is the lifeblood of all organizations’. We understand this message with reference to a variety of contexts in which the study of discourse and interaction reveal how power, control and ideology are performed though language and communication.
Decision-making in EU meetings is the process that Ruth Wodak analyses in order to show ongoing power struggles and discursive dynamics. She identifies the discursive strategies that characterize those organizational situations: (i) bonding to create cooperating identities; (ii) establishing salience through urgency (iii) mobilizing via threat and scenarios of danger.
Decision-making practices, this time in healthcare contexts, in situations of recurrently emerging moral dilemmas again form the field investigated by Gkeredakis, Nicolini and Swan. They analyse how decision-making panels engage and cope with difficult, morally perplexing situations like funding or not funding healthcare for atypical patients. It is interesting to understand how a practice-based approach makes it possible to conceptualize moral judgements as organizational responses to moral dilemmas. The collective exercise of judgement is presented as an effortful accomplishment in accordance with moral expectations of fairness. It entails three types of practice: aligning with procedures, emplotting (i.e. creating a narrative order) and testing the solidity of the emerging arguments.
Strategic change in a multinational corporation, where Whittle, Housley, Gilchrist, Muller and Lenney conducted action research, is the scenario for power and politics in organizational communication. The authors illustrate how power and politics are associated with category-bound reasoning about external customers and the internal hierarchy. In fact, talk in interaction constitutes the customer and the firm as particular types of actors endowed with specific category-bound predicates, and this stock of knowledge influences key strategic decisions.
Talk-at-work – a conversation between a professional coach and a middle manager – is the situation that Florian Schulz and Chris Steyaert propose for our consideration on how discourses are constituted through situated discursive practices such as reformulating, assessing and orienting. In following the conversation, we become able to see how the use of specific discourses develops during the course of the conversation. For example, we appreciate how the coach is able to enrol the manager in a set of predefined discourses about the management of emotions through empathetic persuasion.
The 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech by Steve Jobs is the scenario for Ganzin, Gephart and Suddaby’s analysis of how myths of heroic leaders are created and maintained. The speech can be seen as narrative work – myth-making – that reveals rhetorical processes at work. There are three layers of myth-making: stories found in the speech, a monomyth structure describing the hero’s journey, and mythemes that are the mythological archetypes sustaining it.
Communication as timing and spacing
A key theme in a process approach to communication is how language and communication enact specific times and spaces and how the disruption of time and space is accommodated and repaired. This is the meaning of the third act in our theatrical piece. It transports us to an enchanted land where the creation of a metric for the measurement of time and distance breaks usual conventions.
During a forty-day expedition in the Cordillera Darwin in Patagonia, a new linguistic expression – ‘a crow’s flight’ – was forged in situ and became the symbolic appropriation of time and space in a remote land and in difficult situations. The authors – Musca, Rouleau and Fauré – illustrate the birth of a chronotope that sustained the situated processes of meaning-making in different phases of the expedition. It became the expression of a new construction of time, space and calculation; it provided a means to calculate and reframe the objectives of the expedition; and most importantly it became part of a wider narrative about space and time in the Cordillera.
In another extreme organizational context, active temporal work is manifest in language, and it sustains co-orientation practices in the hospital emergency department studied by Jeanne Mengis and Katharina Hohmann. When multiple professional groups in the resuscitation bay co-orient their activities around a critically ill patient, they engage in three interrelated temporal practices: fabricating the present, re-performing the past in the present, and expanding the future present. This chapter points to the non-linearity of the temporal unfolding of coordination. Time is understood neither subjectively nor objectively, but as continuously reconfigured in the dynamic, material and conversational practices within which it emerges.
Epistemological and methodological reflection
In the closing act, we are approaching the end of the story. Therefore our desire to grasp an overview on how to understand language and communication with a processual approach is at its height. Thus we find a methodological contribution, offered by David Boje and Rohny Saylors, and an epistemological one offered by Bjørkeng, Carlsen and Rhodes.
The first contribution aims at advancing narrative analysis by focusing on the processual dimension in narrative and storytelling research. The authors propose ‘quantum storytelling’ as a new kind of ontological perspective for organizational narrativity based on a three-part model of the storytelling process: epistemic stories, epistemic narratives and ontological living stories. The authors argue that theorizing that looks for the beautiful ways in which ideas might hang together is quantum, as opposed to theorizing, looking for the logic and true constructs.
The second contribution directly challenges the process perspective by applying process principles to the researcher–researched relation. In other words, the authors ask how the ‘primacy of a becoming-realism’ in the study of a ‘reality constituting practice’ can be turned back from the object of study to the process of that studying. Researcher reflexivity is questioned, and the authors explore the possibilities that open to researchers when the research process is approached from a position of other-vulnerability. This chapter is the final one in the book. But instead of closing the book, it raises new questions by contesting the subjectivity/objectivity divide that is key to the process philosophy of pragmatism. In focusing on the limitation of the distinction between ‘saying’ as an ongoing movement in-between the researcher and the researched, and ‘said’ as the frozen interpretation made by the researcher, the authors argue for an ethical dimension in the research process in which researchers and researched are seen as participating in joint saying, with no final nor absolute known, but a continuous openness to be taught by the other.
What have I learnt in-between the written and its reading?
I must confess that I read this book three times. The first time I followed the implicit script inscribed in the sociomateriality of the book and obediently read from the first page to the last one, while I tried to imagine how the editors had decided the order of the chapters (but I failed in the attempt). The second time I used the book as an hypertext, trying to identify key words, inspirations or influences by one author on another, recurrent topics, and so on. I found the exercise very enjoyable, but in the end I lacked a linking narrative among the chapters. The third time I read the chapters following the four topics in the editors’ introduction, and I had the feeling of being seated in the theatre waiting to grasp the unity of the book.
What I gained from the readings, apart from the pleasure and the enjoyment, was an understanding of how a process approach to language and communication at work (in the dual meaning of its working and the workplace as its situatedness) holds promise for changing the more traditional ways of studying communication or language. At the same time, I had the feeling that this promise has yet to be fully realized. In fact the chapters – taken together – share a sense of experimentation and exploration; they highlight diversity and complementarity; and they offer a feeling of liminality as if they are on the threshold between the solid soil of more traditional communicative methodologies and the wetland where they challenge them. To quote the expression by Bjørkeng, Carlsen and Rhodes, the chapters are poised between the said and the saying.
Nevertheless, in coping with my feelings as a reader, I asked myself how it could be different. In fact there is a difficulty and a tension in adopting a process approach. It is not enough to say that organizations and organizational phenomena are dynamically constituted, so that we need to study them not as things made, but as things in the making; nor is it enough to say that we substitute the ontology of being with an ontology of becoming. Thinking processually is a challenge to the way we conceive the distinction between the knower and the known, the subject and the object, and more generally how we draw the distinctions that later imprison us. When knowledge is something that we do collectively, it is a practical activity ‘in the making’; our experience of the world is always plural, equivocal and ongoing, so that there are no steady places where we can rest. How can we represent this flow? Language is the easiest way to capture thought and convey it to others in a communicative relation, but we continue to wonder whether other possibilities are available or can be imagined.
Thinking processually is the challenge addressed by this book (and the other three previously published in the series on process organization studies). Its message should therefore be regarded as an indication of what it means to face the implications of a process approach, more than looking for ready-made solutions. The strength of this book consists in its unfinished task, and its merit is that it provides a good starting point for researchers and students wanting to understand the debate on the process approach to organization studies in general, and to language and communication as organizational phenomena in particular. Moreover, it furnishes a valuable update on recent developments in methodologies for approaching ‘fleeting objects’.