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Communicative Constitution of Organizations

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DOI: 10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect097

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Communicative Constitution of
Organizations
FRANÇOIS COOREN and THOMAS MARTINE
University of Montreal, Canada

James R. Taylor, the founder of the Department of Communication at the University

of Montreal, Canada, can arguably be considered the first scholar to develop a the-
ory defending the thesis of a communicative constitution of organizations (CCO). In
a book published in French in 1988, titled Une organisation n’est qu’un tissu de com-
munication (An Organization is Nothing but a Network of Communication), he showed,
echoing John Dewey (1916/1944), to what extent communication should be consid-
ered the building blocks of organizations. In other words, rather than studying how
communication takes place in organizations, Taylor invited us to investigate instead
how organization emerges from communication, that is, what could also be called the
organizing property of communication (Cooren, 2000).
As an acronym, the term “CCO” was, however, first introduced by Robert McPhee
and his doctoral student Pamela Zaug in a 2000 article published in the Electronic
Journal of Communication. In this article, McPhee and Zaug (2000) commented on
and critiqued Taylor’s constitutive theory and proposed an alternative way to conceive
of the constitutive power of communication, which they called the four-flows model,
based on Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory. As a research movement, the CCO
thesis was subsequently institutionalized through a 2009 book edited by Linda Putnam
and Anne Nicotera, titled Building Theories of Organization: The Constitutive Role of
Communication. In this volume, McPhee and Zaug’s article was reprinted, followed by
contributions by James R. Taylor and other authors.
Today, this research movement can be mainly divided into three schools of CCO
thinking (Schoeneborn et al., 2014), namely the Montreal School of organizational
communication (initiated by James R. Taylor and his colleagues from the University
of Montreal), the four-flows model, proposed by Robert McPhee and Pamela Zaug,
and Luhmann’s theory of social systems, essentially represented by German scholars,
such as David Seidl, Dennis Schoeneborn, and Steffen Blaschke. While originally
identified with the subfield of organizational communication, this movement is now
becoming more and more popular in organizational studies in general (Ashcraft,
Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009) as well as in research on language and social interaction.

Three precursors

In addition to John Dewey, whose contribution was acknowledged by James R. Taylor

in his 1988 book, other scholars can be identified as the precursors of this movement.
The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy.
Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Robert T. Craig (Editors-in-Chief), Jefferson D. Pooley and Eric W. Rothenbuhler (Associate Editors).
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect097
2 CO M M U N I C AT I V E CO N S T I T U T I O N OF OR G A N I Z AT I O N S

Cooren and Robichaud (2010) identified three: Chester Barnard, Mary Parker Follett,
and Gabriel Tarde; all authors who insisted, although each in their own way, on the
constitutive power of communication.
Chester Barnard (1886–1961), a former manager of the New Jersey Bell Telephone
Company, is usually considered one of the founding fathers of organizational communi-
cation. He was indeed the first author to highlight the constitutive role communication
plays in organizational affairs. In a famous passage of his 1938 book titled The Functions
of the Executive, he wrote,

an organization comes into being when (1) there are persons able to communicate with each other
(2) who are willing to contribute to action (3) to accomplish a common purpose. The elements of
an organization are therefore (1) communication; (2) willingness to serve; and (3) common pur-
pose. These elements are necessary and sufficient conditions initially, and they are found in all such
organizations. (Barnard, 1938, p. 82)

Instead of taking the organization for granted, Barnard thus highlighted its frag-
ile existence, since this social form depends on the cooperation of its members.
Even authority, which he defined as a “character of a communication in a formal
organization” (p. 172), depends on “the potentiality of assent” (p. 173) of those to
whom this authority is addressed. If organizing is a matter of command and control,
Barnard thus reminds us that it is also and especially a matter of negotiation and
communication.
Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933), a renowned consultant, also highlighted the key
role communication plays in organizations. In contrast with Barnard, however, she
insisted on the type of communication that needs to be nurtured and cultivated, a form
of communication based on collaboration with employees. Communication is therefore
a matter of reciprocal adjustment where relations are considered to be co-constructed,
dynamic, and, for the most part, negotiated.
Furthermore, and this is a key point for a constitutive approach, Follett insisted on the
creative power of communication, which she calls functional relating. As she points out,
“functional relating is the continuing process of self-creating coherence” (Follett, 1995,
p. 200). In other words, people in interaction have the capacity to coherently produce
new solutions, capacities, and situations, which means that forms of organizing emerge
from communication.
Echoing Barnard, Follett also argued that authority establishes itself when someone
is capable of conveying what she calls “the law of the situation,” that is, what a situation
is supposed to dictate. If authority is a matter of status and title, it is also and maybe
especially a question of negotiation regarding what a situation requires. As she pointed
out, “orders come from the work, not work from the orders. They have their roots in
the activities of the people who are obeying them” (Follett, 1995, p. 137).
Although Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) was not interested in organizations per se, his
bottom-up approach to social forms implicitly positions him as the third precursor of
the CCO movement. A bottom-up approach means that “everything in the world of
facts proceeds from small to great” (Tarde, 1899, p. 111). In other words, to understand
how an organization (the great) functions, we have to study how organizing (the small)
takes place.
 CO M M U N I C AT I V E CO N S T I T U T I O N OF OR G A N I Z AT I O N S 3

Tarde’s position, which could be identified as antiholistic, also led him to deny the
existence of a harmonizing force, which would miraculously hold an organization
together. As he points out, harmony, or coherence (if it ever happens), is something
that needs to be worked out, one interaction at a time. It needs to emerge from
communication.

The interpretive movement

Organizational communication as a field of studies has existed officially since 1967,

when Philip K. Tompkins organized, under the auspices of NASA, the first conference
on this topic. However, it can be argued that the premises of a reflection on the consti-
tutive power of communication date only from the 1980s. It was in 1980 that a group of
management and communication scholars gathered in Alta, Utah, to explore the role
that meaning and communication play in the constitution of organizations. This collec-
tive exploration resulted in the publication of a landmark book titled Communication
and Organizations: An Interpretive Approach, edited by Linda L. Putnam and Michael
E. Pacanowsky (1983).
The interpretive perspective promoted in this book was presented as an alternative
to functionalism, which was then considered the main approach to studying organi-
zations. According to functionalism, communication has to be treated as one variable
among many others, a variable whose influence can be studied empirically to improve
how organizations function. The interpretive movement, in contrast, proposed to focus
on meanings, that is, “the way individuals make sense of their world through their com-
municative behaviors” (Putnam, 1983, p. 31).
An influential figure of the interpretive movement was (and still is) Karl E. Weick,
with his notion of sense-making. Instead of taking the organization for granted, Weick
proposed instead to focus on organizing, which he defined as “a consensually validated
grammar for reducing equivocality by means of sensible interlocked behaviors. To
organize is to assemble ongoing interdependent actions into sensible sequences that
generate sensible outcomes” (1979, p. 3). For him, organizing thus consists of actively
reducing the equivocality of a situation, which implies that people communicate
with each other in order to figure out what to do. By grammar, he means a set of
rules, procedures, norms, or habits that people know and mobilize to make sense of a
situation and act sensibly on it.
For Weick, the organization is therefore a myth (his word) to the extent that what
really matters is the organizing: what people do to collectively make sense of situations
and coordinate their activities in order to produce sensible outcomes. Furthermore, in
keeping with Follett’s (1995) ideas, Weick insightfully showed that making sense of a
situation also consists of enacting aspects of it, which means that some of its features
will be foregrounded or retained while others will be backgrounded or discarded.
There is therefore a creative dimension in any sense-making activity, which means
that communication makes a difference in the way a situation will be treated and dealt
with. In keeping with the bottom-up perspective advocated, as we saw, by Gabriel Tarde,
we have to start from interactions to understand how organizations emerge from them.
Hence the constitutive aspect of communication.
4 CO M M U N I C AT I V E CO N S T I T U T I O N OF OR G A N I Z AT I O N S

With the interpretive movement, organizational communication scholars thus

started to analyze storytelling, listing, joking, or the use of metaphors as ways to make
sense of situations and get organized. The focus was henceforth on organizational cul-
tures, networks, and power relationships, which were identified as constitutive of what
organizations are (Ashcraft et al., 2009). Communication was not any longer reduced
to one variable among many others but was seen as the way by which organizing and
disorganizing take place.

McPhee and Zaug’s four-flows model

Another key figure of the interpretive movement is the British sociologist Anthony Gid-
dens, with his notion of duality of structure. In an attempt to reconcile macro and micro
perspectives on sociology, Giddens proposed what he called structuration theory in an
attempt to demonstrate the structuring properties of interactions. By duality of struc-
ture, he means that structures are both “the medium and the outcome of the practices
they recursively organize” (1984, p. 25).
In other words, rules and resources (which are what Giddens meant by structure) are
certainly enabling as well as constraining individuals in their practices and interactions,
but people also have agency, that is, a capacity to make a difference in the way these rules
are interpreted and resources mobilized. As knowledgeable agents, people thus have the
ability to alter the way a social form reproduces itself.
Strongly influenced by Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory, McPhee and Zaug
(2000) proposed what they called the four-flows model in order to demonstrate their
version of CCO. For these authors, organizational forms, in order to exist, have to be
constituted through four types of message flows, addressed to four different types of
audience. McPhee and Zaug identified these flows as (1) membership negotiation, (2)
self-structuring, (3) activity coordination, and (4) institutional positioning.
Membership negotiation, the first flow, corresponds to what these authors identified as
“the communication that establishes and maintains or transforms [the organization’s]
relationship to its members” (McPhee & Zaug, 2000, p. 8). In constituting its members,
this flow of communication thus constitutes the organization itself to the extent that an
organization, in order to exist, must have members, that is, define who is considered
included in or excluded from the organization. It is therefore a matter of recruitment,
but also of identification, status, and positioning for individuals.
Self-structuring, the second flow, corresponds to communication that brings the orga-
nization into being by structuring it. McPhee and Zaug gave the example of the con-
stitution of charters, organizational charts, policies, procedures, budgets, units, control
systems, and so forth. All these elements have the effect of setting up the structure of
the organization and will determine how people work and coordinate themselves.
Activity coordination, the third flow, corresponds to the necessary adjustment and
negotiation that need to take place when people work with each other. In other words,
what results from self-structuration (the policies, procedures, charts, statuses, etc.) can
never anticipate all the problems and disruptions that individuals will eventually face
in working, which means that some adaptation and cooperation will always need to
take place.
 CO M M U N I C AT I V E CO N S T I T U T I O N OF OR G A N I Z AT I O N S 5

Institutional positioning, the fourth flow, links the organization to its environment,
that is, to its suppliers, stakeholders, customers, competitors, collaborators, and more
generally any entity with which the organization wants to or has to communicate.
This type of communication thus has to do with how the organization positions itself,
whether in terms of identity, image, or legitimacy.
In keeping with Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory, McPhee and Zaug note, “a
pattern or array of types of interaction constitutes organizations insofar as they make
organizations what they are, and insofar as basic features of the organization are impli-
cated in the system of interaction” (2000, p. 4) These four flows therefore configure
organizations to the extent that they mobilize and produce the structures that recur-
sively organize them.

The Montreal School

Although it is McPhee and Zaug (2000) who popularized the acronym “CCO,” their
version of the constitutive power of communication was proposed in response to
a program of research that had been developed earlier by James R. Taylor and his
colleagues and students at the Université de Montréal. In 1996, Taylor, Cooren, Giroux,
and Robichaud published a landmark article entitled “The Communicational Basis
of Organization: Between the Conversation and the Text,” which proposed a theory
based on the identification of two key translations that, for these authors, take place
in communicational processes: from text to conversation, and from conversation
into text.
By text, these authors meant what is said, or the content of a conversation, which
can also be the content of a document, Web site, form of expression, and so forth. It is
mediated by, and based in, language and has, by definition, a material component (the
human voice, but also intonations, phrasing, gesture, or body movements to the extent
that all these forms of expression need to be interpreted, i.e., textualized, in order to be
understood).
By conversation, Taylor and colleagues meant what they call a string of texts, which is
more or less orderly and produced by participants who communicate with each other.
The texts that are produced in a conversation are thus supposed to coherently respond to
each other, even if disagreement takes place. Conversations are therefore (inter)actions,
or even transactions, to the extent that they amount to the collective production of texts.
They are thus made of speech acts.
The first translation that these authors analyze—from text to conversation—consists
in the way the production of texts is meant and understood as action by the partic-
ipants. The world of conversations is indeed a world, as John L. Austin pointed out,
where people do things with words, that is, where texts are mobilized to perform spe-
cific actions—assertions, promises, directives, apologies, declarations—that need to be
recognized, and reacted to, by the interlocutors.
The second translation—from conversation into text—involves what these authors
identify as the narrative framing of the conversation. As they point out, “The conver-
sation must be transformed into a story to be understood” (Taylor et al., 1996, p. 15).
6 CO M M U N I C AT I V E CO N S T I T U T I O N OF OR G A N I Z AT I O N S

Narrativization is a form of textualization to the extent that a conversation, in order to

be understood and recalled, has to be summarized through the staging of protagonists
trying to achieve specific objectives while facing obstacles and opponents and getting
the support of various helpers (collaborators, instruments, etc.).
Through the textualization of a conversation, a form of objectification takes place
where events are described and narrativized, events that can later be mentioned,
invoked, and mobilized in a subsequent conversation, which will itself be textualized,
that is, narrativized. Communication can thus be conceived as a cycle made of texts
and conversations, a cycle that forms the basis of the way people get organized, that is,
divide their labor while at the same time trying to integrate their activities.
Organization according to this approach is both a described and a realized object
(Taylor & Van Every, 2000). It emerges through communication in two different ways:
as described in a textual form and as realized through a conversational form. Because of
their materiality and their symbolic dimension, texts allow “organization to transcend
the strictly local conditions of its own production and, through its agency, to organize
many conversations, in many places, and at many times” (2000, p. 31). It is therefore
what Taylor and Van Every call the surface of the organization.
In contrast, conversations, because of their subsymbolicity and relative unpre-
dictability, are considered the site of the organization, that is, the locus where
organizing actually takes place. It is “a lived world of practically focused collective
attention to a universe of objects, presenting problems and necessitating responses to
them” (Taylor & Van Every, 2000, p. 34): a process these authors also call coorientation.
While conversations are essential to organizations’ continuance and endurance, texts
are what allow these organizational forms to be identified, stabilized, and constituted
in their relative unity, a unity that always needs to be reaffirmed. Texts can therefore be
artifacts, buildings, and many other materializations.
The textual world, as a product of conversations, is therefore a world where orga-
nizations can be identified as full-fledged actors. It is a world where institutions make
decisions, companies release announcements, and governments declare wars, with all
the narrative features that these kinds of action imply (heroes, opponents, objectives,
helpers, qualifications, performance, closure, etc.). The conversational world, with its
evanescence and fragmentation, is what allows this textual world not only to reproduce
itself, but also to evolve and be transformed.
In the translation from text to conversation, Taylor and Van Every (2000) also observe
that a participant not only is an actor, but also, and especially, becomes an agent acting
for a principal, a principal that can be the organization itself. The source of authority is
thus understood as the recognition that someone is allowed to act on another’s behalf.
Several authors (“authority” and “authors” have the same Latin root: auctor) can thus
be identified in a conversation depending on the various sources of authority that are
staged.
While conversations tend to be understood as involving human participants, and
human participants only, this perspective thus enables other authors with variable
ontologies to be identified as also communicating: organizations, departments, facts,
principles, values, procedures, and so forth. Instead of having a clear separation
between conversations and their contexts, this CCO approach shows that many aspects
 CO M M U N I C AT I V E CO N S T I T U T I O N OF OR G A N I Z AT I O N S 7

of these so-called contexts are actually expressing themselves in what people say to
each other, in their conversations, a phenomenon that Cooren (2010) identifies as a
form of ventriloquism.
Communication is therefore constitutive of organizations, but it is also constitutive
of many other things—values, cultures, procedures, principles, facts, identities, and so
forth—to the extent that speaking in their name amounts to providing them with a
mode of existence in our conversations.

Luhmann’s theory of social systems

A third school identified with the CCO approach revolves around the contribution of
an important German sociologist, Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998), and has been recently
developed by German scholars such as David Seidl, Dennis Schoeneborn, and Stef-
fen Blaschke. Based on the idea of autopoiesis (self-production or self-creation), this
approach highlights the capacity of systems to reproduce themselves distinct from their
environment. The systems’ operations are therefore determined not by the environment
but by the operations themselves, which produce, and reproduce, their own orders out
of, and in response to, the perturbations coming from the environment. This is a phe-
nomenon identified as operational closure.
One of the key aspects of this theory is that social systems have to be understood
as made not of human beings, but of communication. Human beings should therefore
be conceived as belonging to the environment of social systems, which have their own
mode of self-production, based on communication. Furthermore, communication,
according to Luhmann, consists of three acts of selection: (1) selecting something
from the environment, a thing that he calls information; (2) selecting what will be
said about what was selected, which results in the production of an utterance; and
(3) selecting how what is said will be interpreted, an act of selection that he calls
understanding.
Communication thus “happens when information that has been uttered is under-
stood” (Luhmann, 2006, p. 47). In the case of organizational systems, a specific type of
communication takes place, which Luhmann calls decision communications. An orga-
nization, as a system, is made only of decisions interconnected with each other. It is also
characterized by what he calls uncertainty absorption, which results from this intercon-
nection of decisions and characterizes the operational closure of organizations.

Conclusion

The CCO movement, more broadly, testifies to a maturing of the field of communica-
tion, a field that no longer hesitates to position communication as the starting point
for the apprehension and study of social and organizational forms. In keeping with
Robert T. Craig’s (1999) position, the constitutive model of communication should be
understood as a metamodel capable of providing scholars with a communicational per-
spective on the world.
8 CO M M U N I C AT I V E CO N S T I T U T I O N OF OR G A N I Z AT I O N S

SEE ALSO: Action and Agency; Activity Theory; Actor-Network Theory; Collab-
oration and Cooperation; Coorientation; Discourse Theory; Ethnomethodology;
Functionalism; Organizations—Made by Communication, Makers of Communica-
tion; Social Construction of Reality; Structuration Theory; System Theory; Traditions
of Communication Theory

References and further readings

Ashcraft, K. L., Kuhn, T., & Cooren, F. (2009). Constitutional amendments: “Materializing” orga-
nizational communication. Academy of Management Annals, 3(1), 1–64.
Barnard, C. I. (1938). The functions of the executive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cooren, F. (2000). The organizing property of communication. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John
Benjamins.
Cooren, F. (2010). Action and agency in dialogue: Passion, incarnation, and ventriloquism. Ams-
terdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Cooren, F., & Robichaud, D. (2010). Les approches constitutives [Constitutive approaches]. In
S. Grosjean & L. Bonneville (Eds.), La communication organisationnelle [Organizational com-
munication] (pp. 140–175). Montreal, Canada: Chenelière.
Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9(2), 119–161.
Dewey, J. (1916/1944). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education.
New York, NY: Free Press.
Follett, M. P. (1995). Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of management. Ed. P. Graham. Washington,
DC: Beard Books.
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Luhmann, N. (2006). System as difference. Organization, 13(1), 304–333.
McPhee, R. D., & Zaug, P. (2000). The communicative constitution of organizations: A frame-
work for explanation. Electronic Journal of Communication/La revue électronique de commu-
nication, 10(1/2), 1–16.
Putnam, L. L. (1983). The interpretive perspective: An alternative to functionalism. In L. L.
Putnam & M. E. Pacanowsky (Eds.), Communication and organizations: An interpretive
approach (pp. 31–54). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Putnam, L. L., & Nicotera, A. M. (Eds.). (2009). Building theories of organization: The constitutive
role of communication. New York, NY: Routledge.
Putnam, L. L., & Pacanowsky, M. E. (1983). Communication and organizations: An interpretive
approach. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Schoeneborn, D., Blaschke, S., Cooren, F., McPhee, R. D., Seidl, D., & Taylor, J. R. (2014). The
three schools of CCO thinking: Interactive dialogue and systematic comparison. Management
Communication Quarterly, 28(2), 285–316.
Tarde, G. (1899). Social laws: An outline of sociology. London, UK: Macmillan.
Taylor, J. R. (1988). Une organisation n’est qu’un tissu de communication [An organization
is nothing but a network of communication]. Montréal, Canada: Cahiers de recherches en
communication.
Taylor, J. R., Cooren, F., Giroux, N., & Robichaud, D. (1996). The communicational basis of orga-
nization: Between the conversation and the text. Communication Theory, 6(1), 1–39.
Taylor, J. R., & Van Every, E. J. (2000). The emergent organization: Communication as site and
surface. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Weick, K. E. (1979). The social psychology of organizing. New York, NY: Random House.
 CO M M U N I C AT I V E CO N S T I T U T I O N OF OR G A N I Z AT I O N S 9

François Cooren is professor of communication at the University of Montreal, Canada.

He was president of the International Communication Association (ICA, 2010–2011)
and is the current president of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis
(2012–2017). He is also an ICA fellow. His research interests are organizational
communication, communication theory, and language and social interaction. He is
the author and/or editor of eight books, as well as more than 50 articles and 30 book
chapters.

Thomas Martine is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the communication

department of the University of Montreal, Canada. He holds a PhD in organizational
communication from the Technology University of Troyes, France. His current research
interests focus on the development of a communicational approach to creativity.

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