Abstract
Theorizing is a risky business; creativity and courage are needed. The chapters in Professor Boris H. J. M. Brummans’s edited volume exhibit both at full tilt. I recommend the book for the advanced and serious student of organizational communication and organization studies.
The collection of chapters places the incredible diversity of assumptions in contemporary organizational communication scholarship on display to read and compare. As the title implies, “agency” is the focus of the book. Yet, the number of ways chapter authors define—and redefine—agency is at times traditional and nuanced and at other times revolutionary and encrypted. I applaud Brummans for gathering leading minds to contribute their expertise on agency—the disjuncture of current organizational communication philosophy. As an avid reader of communication constitutes organization (CCO) theory pieces, I especially appreciate how the volume includes some dialogue among authors who represent Montréal, Four Flows, and Luhmann Schools. Within the pages of the volume, dialogues between the Montréal and Four Flows Schools are exciting and enlightening. Iverson, McPhee, and Spaulding write directly and reaffirm much of the Four Flow’s structurational view of agency. In addition, the authors take on the idea of nonhuman agency without giving an inch, relying on the ideas of knowledgeability and reification (among others) in their refutation. The authors conclude the chapter by discussing the practical implications and diagnostic potential of their theorizing.
Meanwhile, Cooren offers fascinating counter-points to the Four Flows authors that expand traditional notions of agency to include prepositional qualifiers (acting for, with, and through) and describes relational ontology. Cooren’s chapter is emphatic that a relational ontology does not downplay the importance of human agency but also focuses our attention on the ways “anything” can communicate “with anything else.” He reassures us that we can still make distinctions among types of agency within this perspective. I was pleased to read Cooren’s position that existence and constitution are a matter of degree, as in “more or less,” and not merely a matter of complete presence or absence, as in “all or nothing.” Cooren engages with the Four Flows authors by inviting us to “reify all the time,” instead of avoiding reification. A chapter by Ashcraft and Kuhn seconds many of Cooren’s points and illustrates them via the case of the U.S. political debates about transgender individuals and access to public bathrooms. The authors play with the idea of combining a transmission model with a constitutive model of communication in which constitution occurs through the transmitting of energies and affects.
The edited volume concludes with a chapter from Cheney and Ritz who “dare to disturb the universe.” I was impressed that the authors are direct in their rejoinder: On one hand, Cheney and Ritz identify a great deal of agreement among chapter authors that agency should be understood in a robust sense and in “relational, dynamic, [and] cross-cultural” terms. In addition, a concern with ethics, rights, responsibility, and values were important across the authors’ discussion of agency, no matter what school of thought was represented. On the other hand, the rejoinder warns against succumbing to our own disciplinary mythos that “communication is everything” and then directs attention back to basic ideas about intention and goals in communication. In sum, the cross-talk among chapters suggests to me that reification will be a site of important conceptual winnowing in ongoing CCO debates.
Although the chapters by these well-known CCO theorists will no doubt receive a lot of (deserved!) attention, I encourage the reader not to overlook other rich and original contributions within the volume. Blaschke offers an analysis of decision rights as a means of illustrating the Luhmannian perspective on agency—a contribution which is especially important given that the perspective is relatively new to the CCO scene and not many works exist yet. In another chapter, Nicotera explains and expands on her structurational divergence and convergence work. Here, agency is at once traditionally defined, while also overlaid with competition, contradiction, and paradox. The chapter shines where it connects lofty theorizing to practical implications. A chapter by Mumby gets us to think about how personal branding, social media participation, and markets suggest that capitalism is communicatively constituted and yet can be widely distributed among humans. Mumby explains the humorous case of “Alex from Target,” which illustrates how such forces do not necessarily flow from human agent’s intentions or plans—elbowing the intentionality assumption in the proverbial ribs. Likewise, a chapter by Broadfoot, Munshi, and Cruz encourage the reader to rethink the entire intellectual project surrounding agency by asking us to question the implicit antonyms of our vocabulary of agency and action. The chapter draws from postcolonialism and the case of Liberian Market Women to encourage deeper reflection on passivity, situationality, and stance. In doing so, it helps us to confront our assumptions at every turn. I predict the chapter will become primary reading in this developing literature.
Over the years, colleagues expressed to me that some of the coolest new ideas in communication come from organizational communication circles. I certainly agree and this book is another example of that reputation.