Organization and Organizing: Materiality, Agency and Discourse

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Write a customer review. Showing of 2 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. This book fills the gap of the discussion about forms of organization and organizing in a broad practice-based theories. It's an important reading for anyone who studies "organization theory". Excellent piece of work, worth reading every chapter. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway.

Materiality, Agency and Discourse. Set up a giveaway. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Learn more about Amazon Prime. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Explore the Home Gift Guide. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. His work found an audience among students of organizational communication in search for an analytical apparatus to describe the constitutive role of communication in the emergence and maintenance of organizational realities.

The conference paid tribute to the year commitment of James R. Taylor to the development of organizational communication as an intellectual site to address the issue of the nature of organizations. What is the fundamental nature of organization and organizing? Until it has been authorized it has no identity, and can exert no authority. An organization, however, once constituted, incorporates multiple practices, each of which is grounded in its own distinct logic of materiality.

Practices link to each other, communicatively, as mutually defining dualisms Taylor , Since sensemaking is inevitably tied to practice, and since every community of practice authors the text of the organization from its own grounded-in-practice perspective, the establishment of the narrative of the organization as such is inherently problematical. Other than by institutional practice or brute force, it must be continually reconstructed in and through communication.

It emerges in a search for a narrative that can transcend the particular interests of members and their communities, by incorporating the latter into a tolerable meta-narrative. The proper object of organizational communication research is precisely this process of negotiation, with the goal of understanding the empirical dynamic leading to a collectively sanctioned authorization, however imperfect, of the organization itself.

Organizational communication must thus be clearly distinguished from interpersonal communication: To what extent does the materiality of texts and artifacts ought to be accounted for in a process view of organization? Do they perform anything in the constitution of organization, and if so, in what ways? What does it mean to act, or display agency? Can discourse be a construct both flexible and strong enough to account for the ontology and durability of organization? The organization of the book This book is divided into two parts. The first part assembles essays by eminent scholars who lay out the conceptual challenges we face as we attempt to develop a way of conceiving of organization that avoids the pitfalls of two traditional solutions, i.

In Chapter 1, Barbara Czarniawska opens the discussion with a historical overview and a pragmatist exploration of the uses of the concept of organization as it reveals intricacies of organizing that have previously been obscured. Bruno Latour Chapter 3 then describes organizing as a specific mode of existence of organization in the movements of actors as they successively write and live the scripts of organizing. This book would not be complete without a body of empirical research illustrating in various ways how new assumptions on the nature of organization lead to new ways to problematize organizational processes.

The second part of the book thus offers a sampling of research as illustrations, most of them conducted by young promising scholars. In Chapter 9, Isabelle Piette takes up the issue of identity change in a study where multiple stakeholders of a single industry are led to reassess their identity as an industry as they become involved in a legislative reform process. It dwells on the key role argumentation plays as a constitutive aspect of organization and organizing.

Finally, in Chapter 11, Viviane Sergi investigates the role played by documents and various textual artifacts in the organizing of projects in a software company. Based on her ethnographic case study, she offers a repertoire of the ways documents shape both the coordination of work and the connections between organizational actors. Such studies, in turn, should lead us to rethink our assumptions and theories. Indeed, they push us to move forward on the thin line between a comforting but heuristically moribund reliance on traditional views, and the risky, costly and exhausting work innovations and new insights demand of us if we are to understand the changing world of contemporary organizing.

Last but not least, James Taylor Chapter 12 closes the book with his concluding remarks and reactions to the preceding contributions, insisting on the challenges of the road yet to be traveled. Unlike other social and organizational theorists, James Taylor cannot think of an organization as a phenomenon made of a single matter, be they objectified social relations i.

He argues that social interaction and activities, or conversation, do lead to the emergence of more or less stabilized social relations that extend their scope in time and space because actors translated them in texts forming the basis of further collective action. The originality of his work lies in his understanding of communication and language as the locus of the basic processes allowing such translation of conversation into texts, and texts into conversation.

It is our hope that this book will help theoreticians, researchers and practitioners navigate in this turbulent world, the only one we have. List of Figures and Tables Table 4. Organization as chaosmos Figure 7. The Activity Coordination Flow model. Comparison of the actantial structures of the sectorial narratives Table.

Comparison of narratological components of the sectorial narratives Table 9. Work dynamic in Graph project Table His research looks at Buddhist organizing in various parts of Asia. His research and teaching interests include the communicative constitution of organizations, the rhetoric of political parties, and the analysis of interactions. His research interests lies in organizational communication, language and social interaction, and communication theory. He is the author of two books, close to 20 book chapters, and more than 40 articles published in international peer-reviewed journals.

She takes a feminist and constructionist perspective on organizing, recently exploring the connections between popular culture and practice of management, and the organization of the news production. Her interest in methodology focuses on techniques of fieldwork and the application of narratology to organization studies. Recent books in English: How news agencies produce news His research interests include organizational communication and structuration theory, particularly in the areas of organizational knowledge, mission, volunteers, and risk.

He is a Professor and vice-president for research at Sciences Po Paris since He authored close to articles and 15 books, translated in several languages. He has published theory and research articles on organizational and group communication in journals including Management Communication Quarterly, Organization, Communication Monographs, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Human Communication Research, and the Communication Yearbook. Her research is grounded in a constitutive perspective and focuses on culture and conflict, diversity, race and gender, and aggressive communication, with a particular interest in healthcare organizations and institutional forms.

She has published her research in numerous national journals, has published five books, and is a frequent contributor to edited volumes. She has developed a theory and associated measurement tool for a construct called structurational divergence, which describes the intractable organizational conflicts that can result from the simultaneous application of multiple meanings in intra- and inter-professional interactions. She is also an experienced organizational training and development consultant. Isabelle Piette is a Ph. Her research focuses on inter-organizational collaboration, organizational identity and narrative approach.

Her research focuses on negotiation and organizational conflict, organizational discourse, and gender in organizations. His research focuses on the role of communication, discourse and narratives in constituting organizational identity, managing organizational change, and acheiving interorganizational collaboration. His work has been published in numerous international journals and he is currently Associate editor of Communication Theory.

Her research interests include project organizing, leadership, materiality and methodological issues related to the practice of qualitative research. She has conducted qualitative fieldwork in various settings, including public organizations hospitals, universities and arts organizations and an IT company.

Organization and Organizing - E-bok - Daniel Robichaud, Francois Cooren () | Bokus

She is currently exploring project organizing and leadership from a practice perspective. A, is the author, co-author or editor of eight books, including The Emergent Organization: Case Studies in the Pragmatics of Communication Research He received his Ph. His research interests include knowledge-based perspectives on organizations, organizational becoming, practical reason in management, and epistemological issues in organizational research.

Her research looks at the constitutive role of communication in spacing and timing. Czarniawska, ; but see also Shenhav, Here, I repeat my argument in brief. In Dwight Waldo, then a central figure in administration theory, wrote a review essay entitled "Organization Theory: It was published in Public Administration Review, at the time a leading journal in the field. Among the most frequent contributors were Herbert Simon, James G. In short, … there is no doubt that organization theory and research are in a boom period.

One was a transition from administration theory to organization theory. Such an approach did not sit well with the notion of administration, which was "an applied science — if it is not indeed a profession, an art, or something less. Organization theory was, on the other hand, a theory not of action, but of a unit existing "out there". What, then, was the object of "organization theory"? In his thorough etymological investigation of the meaning of the word, William Starbuck discovered that: The word "organization" derives from an ancient Indo-European root that also spawn the words "organ" and "work".

The Roman verb "organizare" meant initially "to furnish with organs so as to create a complete human being," but later Romans gave it the broader meaning "to endow with a coordinated structure". Organizare migrated from Latin into Old French. In , the French language included the word "organization," which an ancient dictionary defined self-reflectively as "the state of an organized body.

This last usage persisted for another years; "organization" was employed as a noun denoting a state of being organized and was used in the plural only to denote voluntary associations, as distinct from firms and public service offices. The application of systems theory required a creation of "organizations" — separate units divided by "boundaries" from their "environments" and related to them by "adaptation".

One can construct a strong counterargument to my thesis, or at least to my dating, in the form of one of the classics of organization theory, The Functions of the Executive by Chester I. Also, as Kenneth R. This conceptual move must have seemed appealing in the s, as it provided a kind of middle ground between mechanistic Taylorism and idealist administration theory, and permitted close bonds with the most attractive branch of science at the time — cybernetics Wiener, It must also have been a relatively easy conceptual move, because it imitated a much earlier step made by Darwin.

As Lewontin pointed out, by introducing "organism", "environment", and "adaptation", Darwin sought to mechanize biology, which was still all too prone to mystification and idealism. Alas, as suggested in the quote that became the heading of this section, this loan has become a burden — both for organization theory and for biology. Indeed, at present — that is, in the s — this set of metaphors is serving neither human biology nor organization theory well. The environment is not a preexisting set of problems to which an organism, or an organization, must find solutions: The environment of organisms consists largely of other organisms, and the environment of organizations consists almost entirely of other organizations Perrow, By the same token, the notion of adaptation is misleading as a tool for understanding the relationship between an organism and its environment.

New concepts and metaphors are constantly being sought, and administration theory has been revisited, together with many other forgotten ancestors. After all, as Waldo pointed out, while dutifully noting the triumphant entry of "the scientific study of the American business organization", the beginnings of organization theory could be found in Plato and Aristotle, and could be traced through Machiavelli and Hobbes to Fayol and Urwick. I do not wish to imply that the presence of systems theory was a year mistake, a hiatus in the development of the body of organizational knowledge.

On the contrary, systems theory, and cybernetics in general, has been and remains the main inspiration for organization theory. But if organization theory itself was shaped to fit systems theory 50 years ago, at present it is systems theory that is adapted and selectively used by organization theoreticians. And returning to forgotten roots takes place on another, more sophisticated plane, and adduces more interesting results.

It could be that after a half-century foray into systems theory, organization theory may return to administration theory now called "management", however , not so much contrite as wiser. New questions have been posed, two of them especially pertinent and provocative. If organizations are rational tools for the realization of collective interests, why are there so many different types of organizations? Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio, and many other new institutionalists represented in the edited volume, The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis , asked the opposite question: Why are organizations increasingly similar?

Perhaps, said James G. March and Johan P. Olsen in Rediscovering Institutions , organizations are best considered neither as "rational tools" for the realization of collective interests nor as "natural and organic systems", but as modern institutions. Their conceptualization changes, as do the practices and normative justifications of their existence change. In what follows, I first ask if the changes in organization theory influenced the practice of organizing; that is, I try to evaluate the performativity of organization theory.

In the end, I review several ways in which organizations can be obstacles to organizing. Their claim was, in short, that the difference between micro actors and macro actors is due not to their "nature", but to the negotiations including wars and associations that built them. However, the process of creating the alliances that eventually form macro actors is poorly understood, as macro actors obliterate any traces of their construction, presenting themselves through their spokespersons as being indivisible and solid.

Social scientists contribute, often unwillingly, to this construction process, by increasing this solidity and consistency in their descriptions. Donald McKenzie et al. In their view, it is the science of economics that creates markets. Do organization theorists create organizations? Perhaps they do create certain types of organizations, but no doubt in association with some macro actor: This phenomenon can be seen in Philip Selznick's The Tennessee Valley Authority, published in — before the boom of systems theory — but already preparing a transfer from administration theory to organization theory.

This "scholarly study of a complex organization" represents, on the one hand, everything from which the natural science-oriented researchers attempted to cut themselves free: On the other hand, it announces all the major trends to come: The TVA — the complex organization under study — was conceived as a rational tool, implanted in the midst of institutional fields: In order to survive, said Selznick, the TVA had to co-opt local forces and adapt itself to them.

Selznick's study remained unique for a long time, in its simultaneous focus on an "organization" and its "environment", and its interest in both intra- and interorganizational processes. At the same time, it became a marketing device for TVA, leading, as Albert Hirschman pointed out, to a situation in which, for a number of years after the World War II, any country that had a river valley had to have a copy of TVA.

In Great Britain after the war, the government promised expert support to any company that needed help in restructuring. The leading names were Eric Trist, Albert K. Rice, Elliot Jaques, and Wilfred R. The concept of sociotechnical systems assumed that every production system contained a technological organization equipment and process layout and a work organization people and their tasks. The two must fit together to fulfill their function, as judged by the economic viability of the production system.

Consequently, the environment blurred into a generic provider of energy in return for fulfillment of the primary tasks, defined by the same environment. Yet within this frame, "organization" is still a state of a system or a subsystem, such as "enterprise" or "utility". In , James G. March and Herbert Simon published Organizations.

The first edition of the book begins as follows: This book is about the theory of formal organizations. It is easier, and probably more useful, to give examples of formal organizations than to define the term. The latter organization is, of course, part of a larger one — the New York State government.

But for the present purposes we need not trouble ourselves about the precise boundaries to be drawn around an organization or the exact distinction between an "organization" and "nonorganization. Organizations are systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences, information, interests, or knowledge differ. The "coordinated action" part has been omitted by most of their followers, with the exception of Taylor and Van Every Organizations were seen as systems of mechanical or organic parts, in which people were either cogs or body parts heads and hands. March and Simon were primarily interested in brains, and reached out to the growing wealth of artificial intelligence studies to create a theory of decision making as attention allocation; the conceptualization of an organization as a computer an information processing machine came close.

Then and later see e. Scott, , there was a lively debate between the two schools as to whether organizations were more like machines technical systems or more like organisms natural systems ; but nobody seemed to question the proposition that organizations had to be seen as systems. Stalker's The Management of Innovation , a book that reviewed 20 cases of post-war Scottish and English firms 15 in the growing electronics industry , arriving at the conclusion that "mechanistic" organizational structures were appropriate and effective in stable, simple environments, whereas dynamic and complex environments call for "organic" structures, flexible and self-adaptive.

A work that strongly supported Burns and Stalker's thesis, although it had been developed independently, was Joan Woodward's Industrial Organization By the s, the idea launched by Burns and Stalker had developed into what was later called a "contingency theory". By then it was forgotten that Burns and Stalker's notion of a sociotechnical system was grounded in the observation that "the social structure of the factory interlocked with, and often mirrored, that of the small isolated town in which it was situated" , p.

Contingency theory, in all its variations, matched some attributes of the internal organization with those of the environment. Lawrence and Jay W. Lorsch took up this thread in the USA; and because it was easy to operationalize, it lent itself readily to empirical studies and intellectual cooperation. The British Aston Group became a paragon for collective research on organizational structures. Contingency theory ran out of power by the end of the s, however, for at least three reasons. First, all environments seemed to be "turbulent", demanding innovation and changing rapidly.

Second, the oil crisis galvanized the turbulent western economies. Third, more and more studies revealed structures to be a result of processes, as an epiphenomenon produced by static research methods. In James D. Thompson published Organizations in Action, a book that is still enormously popular in fields outside organization theory; and through its use as a teaching text, it has likely influenced generation after generation of practitioners.

Both works are "propositional inventories", to use March and Simon's term from the introduction to the second edition, but whereas Organizations set an agenda for research in the years to come, Thompson's book attempted to close it, by presenting the "final theory of organizations". Aiming to be exhaustive, to combine the incompatible the rational tool vs.

Teachers from other disciplines are seduced by the simplicity and the transparent structure of the book, which seems to incorporate the ideal of a theory. Among theorists, however, there is an increasing feeling that if organization theory intends to maintain its objective of reflecting and explaining the actual practice, it must resign from the ambition of simplicity and dedicate itself to complexity Thrift, Breaking Golem into pieces: The garbage can, the net, and other fragmented theories Garbage can and loose couplings By the s, Richard M.

Cyert and James G.

March's A Behavioral Theory of the Firm had taken yet further the notions present in Organizations, and portrayed firms as coalitions of multiple, conflicting interests. In , Michael D. Olsen published an article entitled "A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice", soon to be followed by March and Olsen's Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations , featuring the simulation tests of the garbage can model. Some readers suspected a hoax, a joke, but the garbage can model was seriously intended to be a model of decision making in "organized anarchies" — organizations where preferences are problematic, the technology is unclear, and participation in decision making is fluid.

One of the concepts they introduced was that of loose couplings, a notion that was developed simultaneously by other scholars. The idea of loosely coupled systems was first borrowed from cybernetics by psychologist Robert B. It was then introduced to organization theory by Karl E. Weick, who originally applied it as a tool for understanding the erratic organizing typical of educational institutions , and later for grasping the occurrence of disasters in high-reliability organizations that tend toward tight coupling Weick, As the attention of organization researchers turned from hierarchies toward networks, many researchers studying various organizational contexts adopted the idea.

Its attraction lies in allowing for the simultaneous existence of rationality and indeterminacy in the same system. Legitimacy and institutions On the other side of the Atlantic, David Silverman published The Theory of Organizations , in which he was trying to develop a version of organizations, "not as some clear, fixed reality, but as a set of legitimated rhetorics" Silverman, , p. Thus the authors who perhaps contributed the most to problematizing the notion of "organizations" as separate entities — March, Simon, and Silverman — simultaneously did the most to stabilize the concept, not least by the titles of their successful books.

The s witnessed another pivotal event — the publication of Markets and Hierarchies by Olivier E. This was a critical reminder, not least because it made it obvious that organization theory cannot focus on either intraorganizational or interorganizational processes, but needs to address both, simultaneously, and in connection with one another.

Yet the move accomplished by Williamson was even more important to the history of science. He was the first to use the phrase "new institutionalism", and he used it to characterize his approach, thereby legitimizing the return of interest in "old institutionalist" works by Veblen, Polanyi, and Selznick Hodgson, Organizing Among the works that borrowed extensively from systems theory, one was especially prominent: Daniel Katz and Robert L.

Rather than an original contribution, it was a summary of all systems-theory-inspired work and therefore an enormously popular textbook.

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In , Karl E. Weick published a book titled The Social Psychology of Organizing. The book remained unknown, and misunderstood, until its re- publication in Weick, , when it became a bestseller Lundberg, Weick pointed out that "the substance of organizing, the raw material that supplies the stable elements for the grammar, is interlocked behavior ….

The concept of open systems became the mainstay of organizational analysis, but remained underdeveloped. Weick undertook its development while simultaneously transcending it through the adoption of concepts related to autopoietic, i. The result of organizing is interlocked cycles, which can be represented as causal loops rather than as a linear chain of causes and effects. Organizing runs through stages reminiscent of biological evolution, and is triggered by a change in environment followed by an enactment: This stage corresponds to variation.

The subsequent treatment consists of selection — attempts to reduce the ambiguity of ongoing events by applying accessible cognitive schemes to them, which makes it possible to temporarily assemble them. Bracketing at first reveals but later obscures, when the resulting insights begin to be taken for granted. Organizing is thus an ongoing encounter with ambiguity, ambivalence, and equivocality, part of a larger attempt to make sense of life and the world. Weick, like March, cherishes ambiguity and gives it a central place in evolutionary processes.

Although organizing is an effort to deal with ambiguity, it never completely succeeds. Furthermore, the ordering it involves does not consist merely of imposing the rules of rationality on a disorderly world; it is a far more complex and inherently ambiguous process of sensemaking Weick, Action nets You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: Such institutions determine organizing in the sense that certain connections between actions are legitimate while others are not — or not yet.

In earlier institutional orders, those who produced could be consuming their products or bartering them; those who had money could put them under a pillow. Such people still exist, of course, but they no longer prevail; in fact, they are considered eccentric. I have no analytical ambitions for the term action net; to the contrary, it minimizes the a priori assumptions before the study can begin.

Many studies begin with the location of actors or organizations; what I wish to emphasize is that such entities are outcomes rather than inputs of organizing. The notion of action nets goes beyond new institutionalism, however. When Powell and DiMaggio compared the "old" institutionalism represented by Selznick, to their new variation, they noted that Selznick intended the term interorganizational field to cover all actual connections between the Tennessee Valley Authority and all other organizations.

DiMaggio and Powell borrowed their concept of organization field from Pierre Bourdieu who in all probability borrowed it from Kurt Lewin , and endowed it with a more symbolic significance — rightly so, as information technology now plays an important role in creating virtual organization fields. They ceased to speak about organizations having relationships with other organizations; instead, they noted that a frame of reference is shared by organizations dedicated to the same type of activity — including the consulting and normating organizations that advise them.

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These different actors need not know each other or meet in reality in order to be models, competitors, or idols for one another. A university must contract one or several cleaning firms; but although cleaning firms do not belong to the organization field of higher education, a cleaning firm on strike will seriously disturb the functioning of any university.

The notion of action net permits the capture of both actual and virtual connections; there is no reason to differentiate between them a priori. Why a net rather than a network? The difference between action net and network lies not in space but in time. One becomes a publisher when one starts to publish books or journals, which means that connections have already been made with such actions as writing and printing. The affinity between the notion of action net and actor-network theory is much stronger than the affinity between action net and institutional theory.

Actor-network theory does not share the assumption of network theories; to the contrary, one of its main tenets is that connections create actors — not the other way around. But because of its original purpose — to show how the winning scientific theories and technologies gained their advantage — the studies that take this approach have not focused on organizing processes that did not construct macro actors. The focus of attention in studies employing the perspective of action nets should be different: A few organizational forms were tried; some proposals were conceived centrally and others arose spontaneously, but this connection has never been properly stabilized.

It survived in some municipalities and vanished in others. The concepts prevailing within organization theory are those of "actors and their networks" nothing in common with actor-network theory — some version or another of network theory. The picture that results from such an approach lacks explanation for the existence of these actors and not others, and for the connections they have with one another.

Why are they in the same network? By design or by default? Because they were forced to connect, or simply because they liked one another? It is much easier to begin a study with such a picture as a starting point, because the actors are clearly visible.

It is easy to find a City Hall, and the door on which "Mayor" is written. In the latter case, one must go from an existing actor-network back in time, when there was nothing more than some tentatively connected actions. Yet another possible study, joining the insights of the actor-network approach and the action net approach, could start disassembling an actor-network: All these approaches give no special status to the existing organizations, treating them as stabilized fragments of wider action nets.

Here are some examples. We borrowed the concept from the field of education where, following Foucault's suggestions, the scholars pointed out that a discourse not only creates its object, but also constructs or reconstructs the identities of its users: We applied this notion to the results of three field studies of organizing. The Joint Team The first case was an example of a planned construction of a discourse community. As the consultants did not speak Swedish, the community of reformers became the same as an English- speaking community. The self-defined identity of the so-called Joint Team has spread widely within Swedish Rail, whether the reaction was derision or admiration.

The team itself worked hard to circulate an image of "those who know, and who are able to introduce new ways". A counter-image of "the others" helped to construct their own difference: There was also some irony and distancing with which their self-promotion was met, but such ironic comments were unofficial and were made in private. The members themselves were fully aware of the fact that the Joint Team was constructed to serve as a symbol and a model for the "new" Swedish Rail: The change of language — where the literal change of language solved a practical problem and served a symbolic function — was strengthened and accompanied by changes in style: The symbolic utterances had a ritual character — that is, their contents were not relevant.

What mattered was that the members of the team felt that they belonged to a community. Connerton claimed that social memory resides in rituals and bodily practices, not in individual heads or collective minds.

Organization and organizing : materiality, agency, and discourse

All revolutions start with a change of ritual and the introduction of a dress code. What is said is not as important as how it is said. The car project The second case is similar to the first; and although a creation of a discursive community was not the goal of the project studied, it was considered to be the important means. English had been Volvo Car Corporation's official language for many years, and they had settled into a comfortable "Swenglish" that might be difficult for foreigners including those from the new owner, Ford to understand, but not for Volvo natives.

A new discourse community has been created around a project creating a new SUV Bragd, In one sense, this community was relatively inclusive: Also, these "aliens" could well be involved in the next project. The created discourse community was new, but not exceptional. Indeed, the much-advertised "newness" of the project team discourse did not reach the sediments of the inherited discourses: Whereas new ways of inclusion were carefully constructed, the old means of exclusion were unreflectively in place.

New discourses always feed on old discourses or, as Latour put it, local interactions are always distributed. This picture was corroborated in the third study, where "the project" concerned the acquisition of one company by a company from another country. The Swedish-Danish Corporation The third case differed from the other two in that there existed a project of bridging cultural differences, which revealed only an existing discursive community.

The study Christensen, was a part of a bigger project following the acquisition of a year-old Danish company by a Swedish competitor. From the beginning, the integration of the two nationalities within the new company was an explicit goal. Seven project teams were built "across the border" to function as integrators. Top management was intent on constructing "fireproof walls" field metaphor to protect them from intrusions from outside. Team members were not supposed to talk with outsiders about their project work; eventually, the seven teams were to become "mothers" field metaphor to 50 cross-border projects in both companies.

One of the early measures consisted of hiring consultants whose role was to "educate" the employees about the differences between the Swedish and Danish cultures. However, neither set of employees thought that their cultures differed greatly. This case highlights well the difference between language communities and discourse communities. Conclusions reaching beyond organizational borders These cases have all demonstrated that discourse is an important resource in the purposeful creation of new communities.

Be they "new and desirable" as opposed to "old and undesirable" — new in the sense of coalescing around a new product or new in the sense of joining two previous communities — the creation of a "new discourse" is among the chief means of achieving the community renewal. But no new discourse smoothly replaces the previous ones. It must be translated, domesticated. In the process, what was a pure language may become a pidgin or a Creole, a parody or pastiche; it may be translated with passion or with distance and derision.

Nevertheless, the style of discourse is also a style of action, and although a change of discourse is rarely of the type desired by those who introduced the change, the changes are usually more profound than the most hard-bitten skeptics would allow. As usual, the unintended consequences tend to be more puzzling than intended ones, at least to an observer.

No discourse can be new in the sense of being created from a void; it can only be new in the sense of being constructed from material at hand. Thus, however new the new discourse, it always employs elements of old discourses. The elements that were especially visible in the two last cases were elements of "old exclusions". Although the main purpose of new discourses was new communities and therefore inclusion, they inadvertently excluded the same "outsiders" — women and strangers — as did the previous ones see also Acker, In the case of VCC, the new discursive community, although it did have predecessors and will have followers, was a temporary creation resulting from a project.

In the case of the Swedish-Danish Corporation, two formal organizations and two linguistic communities were involved. The connotations are negative: However, the same metaphor can be interpreted differently, and DiMaggio and Powell's analysis corroborates this deviant interpretation. In the first place, cages not only imprison, but also protect. In a zoo, the cages protect the visitors from the wild animals, and not less importantly, they protect animals from visitors. A cage gives safety, and so does following institutional patterns of behavior.

Second, a cage, especially if made of iron, offers support: Again, the normative justification of existing institutions gives support to those who conform to such institutions, a backing that daring entrepreneurs and other deviants decline to use. Thus, if formal organization is seen as a modern institution, it follows that it, too, can be used both ways.

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But whereas the negative sides of institutions are often discussed, the negative sides of the existence of organizations are less often under scrutiny. I try to counteract this disequilibrium later; at this point I adopt a positive connotation of seeing organizations as objects, one that has also been often neglected. Organizations An organization does not exist in the realm of the physical: It can be neither seen, or heard, touched nor smelled — directly.

Although this obvious dictum is often forgotten, even the most ardent "reifiers", when brought back to their senses, must admit that organizations are virtual objects. Virtual or not, their "nature" or kind of virtuality is constantly debated. The "mechanistic" conceptualization of organizations has been a standard target of attack, even from systems theoreticians, who favored biological systems.

But this is because organizations were mostly seen as factories rather than machines I will return to his metaphor. If, however, Perrow's suggestion that organizations should be treated as tools is taken seriously; they can be seen as machines, most closely resembling robots. An organization in such a perspective is a combination of a dispatcher Latour, and a translator — a machine that is given a legal personality Lamoreux, , thus acquiring the right to an identity, a will, and an image.

They constructed this machine, but once constructed, the machine continues to construct them Kunda, The two main parts, a dispatcher and a translator, are dependent upon one another. To be able to send objects and humans to the right places at the right time, the dispatcher must know how to contact them; the dispatcher depends on translator services. The translator is needed because there is a movement of people and objects; had they stayed at the same place, there would be no need for translation, as supposedly there was in the Tower of Babel before its fall. In such a perspective, organizations are literally instrumental: If they don't, they should be repaired or exchanged possibly dropped.

No "survival" comes into question. Consequently, they can be designed or designed worse, but they cannot be designed perfectly. My knowledge, gathered during many years of studying organizing prevents me from sharing such a belief. A structure may facilitate processes, but guarantees nothing. Only processes can control processes; that is, a regulation must be constant.

Furthermore, even the best designed rules may not function in practice. This defect can be counteracted by flexibility dropping one's toosl, to use Weick, 's metaphor , but also by an unprejudiced observation of spontaneous practices, with a goal of stabilizing and making permanent those that seem promising. In other words, design must be seen as a never-ending process.

Her basic claim was that an artifact's "reciprocation" the ways in which it can be used always exceeds the designer's projection. How is this possible? Well, for one thing, the context of use is always richer than the context of design; or, put differently, the contexts of use are many, the context of design only one. Here, among other things, lies the strength of open source, as it combines the stances of the designer and the user — as does, at least in principle, participatory design.

But one can also say that the uses tend to surprise the designers because designers project more than they intend. They project ideas inculcated in them by the institutional order of which they — and the users — are a part. It is therefore safe to conclude that designers cannot control the arc of projection because they say more than they know the institutional order speaks through their work ; and that designers cannot control the arc of reciprocation because they cannot foresee the contexts of use.

Objects of many uses: Indeed, what more typical artifacts than computers, and what better examples for the thesis that the arc of reciprocation is always wider than the arc of projection. Here is a tentative list of the uses of computers at workplace: Although formal organizations try to domesticate their computers sometimes even binding them by chains , they will always remain beyond total control.

How organizations hamper organizing All organizations are drags. In this section, I list and discuss several negative aspects of relatively conventional and expected uses of organizations. The first problem has been well illustrated by the Golem legend. The threatened Jews of Prague built a golem to defend themselves; the clay monster fulfilled its purpose, but then turned against its creators.

Sometimes this is literally so, as Gideon Kunda showed in his study of Tech, where the engineers created an "organizational culture" that turned hostile towards them. A less drastic but perhaps more common situation occurs when the creators of a tool do not wish to relinquish it, even when the original purpose is no longer relevant. I once interviewed the General Director of the Swedish Agency for the Protection of Environment who told me that his goal was to make the Agency superfluous. I was rendered speechless, so unusual was this utterance.

In contrast, there are a great many examples of temporary organizations being kept alive by their creators at virtually any price see e. The biological system theory helps to justify such behavior speaking of the survival instinct. Thus means become goals, tools become objects of cult, and survival replaces service.

It is also taken for granted that organizations have borders, although, as March and Simon said in their original text, an attempt to establish with any exactness how these borders lie can be complicated. Borders must exist, however, or it will not be certain what an "organization" is or what its "environment" is. This assumption, however, hides a phenomenon known in peace studies: Furthermore, the constant redrawing of borders in mergers and acquisitions should make the organization theorists stop and reflect.

Indeed, boundary-setting is becoming a distinct area of interest, but even so, like in the volume edited by Paulsen and Hernes , it is Managing Boundaries in Organizations: This persistent focus on "inside" and "outside" can be explained, in my view, by the fact that behind all mechanical and organic metaphors hides one that is most persistent if often implicit: Either the focus on structural aspects evokes this image, or a historical image of a factory directed the focus of research that way.

One could argue that the metaphor of a building, even more than that of a cage, has a strong positive connotation — that of a shelter. Do organizations not provide shelter, in the sense of employment? Alas, not all of them do. Anthony Sampson, who portrayed "the fall of the company man" through periods of downsizing and layoffs, quoted Neil Millward, a UK ex-civil servant, as saying "Employees in Britain, unlike those in virtually every other European country, just do not have the mechanisms to bring their influence to bear" Sampson, , p.

For this, quite another kind of organization is needed — that of the original meaning, a trade union, or a professional association. In the previous discussion, all the problems caused by taking the existence of formal organizations for granted are possibly hampering the work of researchers. Does it matter at all to the practitioners? In a recent collection of studies of organizing caused by situations of threat and risk Czarniawska et al. In most cases, however, this strategy misfires, and proves to be inferior to a spontaneous construction of an action net following the idea of what needs to be done.

Thus, changing the focus of organization theory from organizations to organizing may not only refresh the theory, but also be of use to practitioners. Putnam, University of California-Santa Barbara The fields of organizational communication and organizational studies have changed dramatically in the past several decades.

The growth of postmodern thinking, extensive work on discourse approaches, and theory development on the links between communication and collective action typify some of the changes during this period. Clearly, James Taylor has made an indelible imprint in shaping the terrain and contours of this landscape. Fifteen years later, we refer to this work as the Montreal School, a unified yet differentiated group of scholars who pursue a related theoretical perspective. The Montreal School has produced five books and numerous articles and chapters with rich and complex theory development, multiple constitutive views of organizations, and empirical research rooted that illustrates this perspective.

It does so through adopting a lens rooted in dialectics to examine theory building in the text-conversation approach to what an organization is. Thus, this chapter has two functions—1 to tease out choices that Taylor et al. This paper begins with a discussion of a metaphor for organizing known as dialectics or the management of tensions among opposites. It then provides a brief overview of some key tenets in the Montreal School.

The bulk of this talk focuses on teasing out how dialectics serves as a source of theory building in this approach and how it can aid in pinpointing areas for future development. In doing so, it demonstrates in a reflexive way how dialectics infuses theory building and how the text-conversation perspective infuses dialectical notions of organization.

Only a few studies in the Montreal School focus directly on the management of dialectical tensions in understanding what an organization is.