The Institutionalization of CCO Scholarship: Trends from 2000 to 2015

Abstract

This article presents an empirical analysis of the communicative constitution of organization (CCO) literature to demonstrate how, and to what extent, CCO scholarship is becoming established within organizational communication studies and related fields. We assess the trajectory of CCO research from 2000 to 2015 and, via the application of a neo-institutional perspective, show that CCO scholarship is gaining legitimacy within organizational communication and is becoming increasingly recognized in fields such as management and organization studies, although it has not focused extensively on formalizing its approaches to investigating how organizations are produced in communication. Our analysis reveals key questions and challenges that future CCO scholarship should address to strengthen its institutional legitimacy and influence.

Keywords

communicative constitution of organizations neo-institutional theory habitualization objectification sedimentation Four Flows Model Montréal School Luhmannian Systems Theory

Several recent publications suggest that research on the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) is becoming increasingly established in organizational communication, management, and organization studies (see Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud, & Taylor, 2014; Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, & Clark, 2011; Cooren, Vaara, Langley, & Tsoukas, 2014; Schoeneborn et al., 2014; Schoeneborn & Vásquez, in press). Despite these suggestions, little empirical evidence demonstrates the extent to which CCO scholarship is becoming institutionalized as a legitimate area of research at the nexus of these disciplines. If CCO research is indeed becoming an area of inquiry in and of itself, then how is this institutionalization unfolding and what obstacles could obstruct this process?

We can readily find current arguments for the importance of CCO research in organizational communication. Some scholars have depicted CCO research as answering a call for organizational communication theories that scholars in the larger discipline have been making for years. In their introduction to the SAGE Handbook of Organizational Communication, Putnam and Mumby (2014) claim that the Montréal School’s approach to examining how organizations are communicatively constituted is “the primary perspective that originates wholly in our field rather that being a deri-vative of other social or organization theories” (p. 13). “The Montréal School,” the authors note, “has developed sophisticated, communication-based concepts that focus on the dynamic relationship among conversation, text, and organization. It is a catalyst for a large body research and has produced original insights about organizing and organization” (p. 13). Organizational communication studies need to develop more “homegrown” theories, they add, to strengthen the field and “develop a discipline-based lens to study organizational communication” (p. 13).

Other CCO perspectives, such as McPhee’s Four Flows Model and Luhmannian Systems Theory, contribute such alternative theories for understanding how organizations are produced in communication. This proliferation of perspectives is leading to fruitful scholarly exchanges in journals like Management Communication Quarterly (e.g., see Bisel, 2010; Schoeneborn et al., 2014), yet no empirical research has examined how these and other publications are shaping CCO scholarship and the extent to which published work is contributing to institutionalizing this area of research, both within organizational communication and beyond.

We address this issue through an extensive analysis of the CCO literature published from 2000 to 2015 (see appendix for complete bibliography). Thus, we identify key questions and challenges that future CCO scholarship should address to strengthen its legitimacy and influence in various fields. Our study builds on recent work by organizational communication scholars on institutional theory (see Cornelissen, Durand, Fiss, Lammers, & Vaara, 2015; Kuhn 2005, 2012; Lammers, 2011; Lammers & Barbour, 2006; Lammers & Garcia, 2014). Although institutional theory is often used to explain the “elaboration of rules and requirements to which [non-academic] organizations must conform if they are to receive support and legitimacy” (Scott & Meyer, 1983, p. 40, cited in Lammers & Garcia, 2014, p. 195), some scholars (notably Kuhn 2005, 2012; Pang, 2006) have shown the value of institutional theory for investigating changes or innovations within an academic discipline. For example, in his 2005 essay on the adoption of interpretative and critical paradigms in organizational communication studies and his discussion of the institutionalization of the Alta conference, Kuhn demonstrated how an institutional lens could reveal important shifts within organizational communication. Kuhn (2005) showed, more particularly, that neo-institutional theory could help provide “a narrative on the forces that shaped [the field]” and develop “a vision of the field’s future” (p. 620).

Our analysis applies Kuhn’s neo-institutional perspective to examine the institutionalization of CCO scholarship. First, we situate the development of CCO research within the historical trajectory of organizational communication studies, showing how CCO scholarship emerged from several turns in this discipline. Next, we explicate the neo-institutional framework that guided our empirical research, describe the methods we used to analyze the CCO literature, and then present the results of our study. Based on these findings, we discuss the main questions and challenges that CCO scholarship faces as it moves toward becoming a legitimate institutional “force.”

CCO Scholarship’s Emergence within Organizational Communication

As several texts have pointed out (e.g., see Brummans, 2015; Corman & Poole, 2000; Kuhn, 2005; Mumby & Stohl, 1996; Putnam & Mumby, 2014), organizational communication studies emerged and became increasingly established as a legitimate discipline within communication studies and vis-à-vis other fields through several important changes or shifts. Although “organizational communication” was not used extensively as a name until the 1960s, interest in studying organizational communication processes arose from a practical need to train speech communication specialists in the context of World War II and U.S. economic developments. Early studies therefore predominantly adopted a functionalist perspective and were conducted by scholars in disciplines like management and organization studies or psychology. The birth of the field was thus shaped by clear business and industrial interests (see Putnam, Phillips, & Chapman, 1996).

The shift toward conceptualizing organizations as constituted in communication emerged in the 1980s when interpretative and critical scholars questioned the functionalist paradigm. “Inspired by definitions of organizations rooted in social interactions and coordinated behaviors,” Putnam and Fairhurst (2015) observed,

Communication scholars gathered at the Alta conference to explore ways that language, symbols, and meanings coconstructed organizing processes (Putnam, 1983). Alta refers to several organizational communication conferences held in Alta, UT in the early 1980s that charted a gradual shift from functional or instrumental views of communication to perspectives grounded in the linguistic turn in philosophy and social sciences. Incorporating interpretive and critical theories, researchers challenged the belief that organizations were reified objects and began to develop perspectives on organizations grounded in communicative processes. (p. 376)

Hence, the “interpretative (and critical) turn” signified a shift away from a modernist conception of communication as “a variable that influenced individual and organizational performance” (Putnam et al., 1996, p. 376), and “organizational communication became defined as ‘the study of messages, information, meaning, and symbolic activity’ that constitutes organizations (Putnam & Cheney, 1985, p. 131)” (Putnam et al., 1996, p. 377, emphasis added).

The growing interest in interpretive and critical approaches, together with the linguistic turn in philosophy and other disciplines, led to increased attention in organizational communication to the role of discourse/language in the late 1990s and early 2000s (see Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004; Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001, 2015)—during this period, the same linguistic turn could be observed in management and organization studies (see Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000; Grant, Hardy, Oswick, & Putnam, 2004). Citing Taylor’s (1993) book, Rethinking the Theory of Organizational Communication, Putnam et al. (1996) observed, for example, that, from a discourse perspective, organizational communication becomes an interplay of conversation and text, where conversation “focuses on both process and structure, on collective action as joint accomplishment, on dialogue among partners, on features of the context, and on micro and macro processes” and text refers to “sets of structured events or ritualized patterns of interaction that transcend immediate conversations” (Putnam et al., 1996, p. 391).

Discourse, then, came to be seen as the constitutive force of organizations, and organizations were increasingly seen as “discursive constructions” (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004). Critiquing Smith’s (1993) root metaphors of organizational communication, Fairhurst and Putnam’s (2004) well-known article proposed three orientations for examining the discourse–organization relationship (see also Putnam & Fairhurst, 2015). From an object orientation, an organization is considered to be an entity that contains discourse; that is, researchers treat “the organization as a preformed object” (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004, p. 10). Scholars adopting a becoming orientation distance themselves from this container metaphor, because they see discourse as existing prior to an organization and claim that discourse produces “it.” Finally, scholars adopting a grounded-in-action orientation see “the organization” as being “anchored in what Giddens (1979, 1984) refers to as the dureé or the continuous flow of discursive conduct” and thus “[treat] action and structure as mutually constitutive” (p. 16).

According to Fairhurst and Putnam (2004), the Montréal School and McPhee’s Four Flows Model are grounded-in-action approaches. More specifically, “James Taylor and his colleagues,” the authors noted in an earlier article (see Fairhurst & Putnam, 1999), “draw from four . . . approaches to language analysis: conversation analysis, semiotics, pragmatics through the study of speech acts, and formal linguistics” (p. 8). From the Montréal School’s perspective, communication is no longer contained in an organization or something that produces it; instead, “the organization can be found in the maneuverings and interpretations of its many conversations” (p. 9). Montréal School scholars still align themselves with the grounded-in-action orientation, yet their current work draws “from the interplay across the three [orientations], particularly in accounting for how an organization develops materially and socially through metatexts and multiple communities of practice” (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2015, p. 378). Initially, Fairhurst and Putnam (2004) classified McPhee and Zaug’s (2000, 2009) Four Flows Model as a grounded-in-action orientation as well. According to McPhee, Poole, and Iverson (2014), however, the model has “the potential to transfigure all three orientations” (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2015, p. 379).

This brief historical overview reveals how CCO research emerged through various turns that influenced organizational communication studies and that paralleled shifts in disciplines such as management and organization studies. What this overview does not show is to what extent CCO scholarship is gaining traction as a legitimate area of inquiry within and across these fields. To examine this question, we draw on Kuhn’s (2005) appropriation of neo-institutional theory.

Investigating CCO Scholarship’s Institutionalization

The Latin root of the word “institution,” as Lammers and Barbour (2006) pointed out, refers to “something set up or established” (p. 358). It is in this sense that Kuhn (2005) first mobilized the term to analyze how the Alta conference became an “institutionalized component” (p. 619) of the organizational communication discipline. Kuhn appropriated Tolbert and Zucker’s (1996) multistage model to explore this conference’s role in establishing the interpretative and critical turns within organizational communication. “[A]lthough the purpose of Kuhn’s essay was not to define an institution,” Lammers and Barbour noted, “his aim, like other communication scholars who have used the term, was to describe something that had become permanent” (p. 363). “Once established,” Kuhn (2005) wrote, “institutions control action by enforcing upon actors norms of appropriate practice through molding extrinsic incentives and leading self-conceptions to be labeled more or less valid.” “By these means,” he added, “the rules of legitimacy become internalized” (pp. 619-620).

Following Kuhn’s lead, we use Tolbert and Zucker’s model to study the institutionalization of CCO scholarship. According to Tolbert and Zucker, institutionalization begins when an innovation, broadly defined, is introduced to a field of practice (a set of individuals, group, organization, or discipline), which starts a period of habitualization. For Kuhn (2005), this phase refers to “generation of patterned approaches to problem solving (i.e., research) and the formalization and codification of such arrangements” (p. 620). At this stage, the innovation is adopted by a comparatively small group of actors who are connected to each other. The Alta conferences, Kuhn (2005) argued, were “the crystallization . . . of an epistemological innovation” (p. 620) in organizational communication studies. During the habitualization stage, Kuhn suggested, “[a relatively small] group of interpretive and critical scholars discussed the uniqueness of their perspectives and addressed the challenges of disciplinary acceptance of their work” (p. 620).

During the objectification phase, a “degree of social consensus emerges about the value of the innovation based on the results of others’ uses and on the efforts of champions who advance convincing theoretical arguments” (Kuhn, 2005, p. 621). Thus, a search for legitimacy drives the institutiona-lization of the innovation and is led by “articulate spokespersons” (p. 621) who advocate the innovation and play a significant role in shaping its identity within a larger field. With regard to Alta, Kuhn stated,

Work on . . . culture and identification showed that there was a great deal of insight to be produced through this new interpretivism. At the same time, a nascent critical theory movement enabled analysis and critique of organizational configurations and processes while also inveighing against the interpretive silence on issues of power. [Hence,] lessons learned from the Alta-inspired transition enabled the field to mature and to develop a legitimate identity of its own. (pp. 621-622)

Finally, the innovation spreads across the field and persists over time during the sedimentation phase. According to Kuhn,

[A]s the story of Alta and its impacts [was] taught to new generations of graduate students as a social given (Berger & Luckmann, 1967) and as its antifunctionalist model of communication continue[d] to take hold in textbooks, the fact of multiple perspectives and of the validity of interpretive and critical views [became] increasingly engrained in the field’s consciousness. (p. 622)

During this final phase, interest groups also usually begin to position themselves for or against the institutionalization of the innovation.

Building on Kuhn’s work, we investigate the social processes by which CCO scholarship, as an innovative way of studying organizations, is beco-ming habitualized, objectified, and sedimented within and across different fields. In neo-institutional theory, Kuhn (2012) claimed, “a recognition that explaining institutions’ reproduction and change requires an attention to local practices has recently led scholars to incorporate factors associated with cognition, rhetoric, and discourse” (p. 545; see also Lammers, 2011; Loewenstein, Ocasio, & Jones, 2012; Phillips & Oswick, 2012; Sillince & Barker, 2012). Here, we examine how published discourse (published texts) provides empirical markers of the aforementioned stages of institutionalization.

Methods

Data Collection

To investigate how, and to what extent, CCO scholarship is becoming institutionalized, we analyzed books, book chapters, and journal articles that mobilize concepts or theories from one or more of the CCO schools of thought (Montréal School, Four Flows Model, and Luhmannian Systems Theory) and that were published between 2000 and 2015. We created our corpus by conducting systematic keyword searches in the Université de Montréal’s databases. Conference papers were excluded due to the difficulty of collecting these papers in a systematic way and because these papers do not undergo the same review process as manuscripts submitted for publication. As the term “communicative constitution of organizations” first appeared in McPhee and Zaug’s (2000; see also McPhee & Zaug, 2009, p. 21) article, we used the year 2000 as the starting point of our analysis. Taylor and Van Every’s (2000) influential book, The Emergent Organization, was also published in this year. Work published before 2000 that could be regarded as the theoretical foundation of CCO scholarship (especially Taylor’s work prior to 2000) was thus excluded. Moreover, we concentrated on publications that explicitly focus on the constitutive character of communication in bringing forth social collectivities and rely on the “constitutive” vocabulary that has come to characterize CCO scholarship. Because what exactly constitutes CCO research is still being debated, we excluded publications of scholars who did not explicitly use this constitutive vocabulary in their published work. We subsequently asked four CCO experts associated with each of the three schools (i.e., François Cooren and Consuelo Vásquez—Montréal School; Joel Iverson—Four Flows Model; and Dennis Schoeneborn—Luhmannian Systems Theory) to review our corpus and suggest additional references.

Although CCO research is published in various languages, the number of texts published in French, German, and Spanish is limited compared with the English CCO literature. Many of these publications appear in journals with low impact factors (or no impact factor at all) and are rarely cited in the main peer-reviewed journals that publish CCO research. For these reasons, we limited our analysis to English-language publications, which did include English-language publications by scholars from French-, German-, and Spanish-speaking countries who have been making significant contributions to CCO research’s emergence and institutionalization (e.g., see Schoeneborn & Sandhu, 2013).

Data Analysis

Using the above selection criteria and expert suggestions, we identified 206 publications (see appendix). We analyzed each publication based on 11 ca-tegories in an Excel spreadsheet and computed simple frequency counts. Together, these categories reveal specific aspects of (Kuhn’s appropriation of) Tolbert and Zucker’s institutionalization model and provide a portrait of CCO scholarship’s trajectory from 2000 to 2015.

Specifically, we regarded the number of published empirical studies and the degree to which authors specified their research methods as empirical markers of CCO scholarship’s habitualization phase. Examining these aspects allowed us to determine the extent to which CCO scholarship is developing “patterned approaches to problem solving” (Kuhn, 2005, p. 620) and forma-lizing these approaches. This part of our analysis also provided insight into the main problems or questions that appear to drive CCO scholarship.

Next, we analyzed the increase of CCO publications since 2000, the contributions of CCO champions, the proliferation of CCO theories and concepts to study different topics, and scholars’ positioning within one of the three CCO schools, to gain insight into Tolbert and Zucker’s objectification phase. Hence, we regarded these aspects as empirical markers of CCO scholarship’s increased popularity and of champions’ efforts to position CCO scholarship as an area of inquiry with “a legitimate identity of its own” (Kuhn, 2005, pp. 621-622).

To examine the sedimentation stage, we investigated authors’ institutional affiliations and their main academic disciplinary homes (organizational communication, management, organization studies, etc.), because these aspects reveal how CCO scholarship is becoming more established within organizational communication and beyond. That is, we regarded the expansion of CCO scholarship to academic institutions outside of North America and to fields beyond organizational communication as markers of sedimentation, because such developments show that scholars from different parts of the world and from various disciplines are adopting this approach to doing organizational research. Their appropriation of CCO scholarship thus contributes to establishing this area of inquiry. We also analyzed peer-reviewed journals in which CCO research is published and their impact factors to provide insight into this stage, presuming that publishing in reputable journals with a high impact factor is a sign that CCO scholarship is becoming increasingly valued.

Results

Signs of Habitualization

Increase in empirical publications

Depending on the source consulted, the origins of CCO scholarship can arguably be traced to Taylor’s (1988) book, L’Organisation n’Est qu’un Tissu de Communication [The Organization Is but a Web of Communication]. While Taylor had argued that organizations are communicative phenomena for many years prior to 1988, this book marks the seed of this emerging area of inquiry. The specific framing that communication constitutes organizations first appeared, however, in McPhee and Zaug’s 2000 article, “The Communicative Constitution of Organizations.” Between then and 2015, 206 articles and book chapters were published, including McPhee and Zaug’s seminal text.

Examining the number of theoretical and empirical texts published in this period shows an increase in empirical publications over time—of the 206 publications assessed, 135 were theoretical, three were literature reviews, and 68 were empirical studies. Our analysis indicates that theoretical publications played a more significant role in constituting CCO scholarship than empirical ones before 2006. Since 2006, empirical work has been growing in popularity (63 of the 68 empirical texts or 92.6% of them were published in or after 2006). This finding suggests that from 2000 until 2005, CCO scholarship was still “under construction” as an area of inquiry. During this period, CCO research was a “novelty” at the start of its institutionalization within organizational communication and little known outside this field. Hence, during these years, CCO “pioneers” like Cooren, McPhee, Taylor, and Van Every put effort into developing and clarifying their theories and concepts. These pioneers were driven by the lack of organizational communication theories that explained what an organization is and how it emerges. In turn, they sought to address problems related to, respectively, the privileging of human agency in organizing processes (Cooren), the inattention to the different types of communication through which organizations are constituted (McPhee), and the absence of theory to explicate the properties of communication through which organizations emerge in interaction (Taylor and Van Every).

Other scholars began to explore and apply these CCO theories and concepts to diverse empirical contexts as CCO scholarship became known within organizational communication. This heightened interest in operationalizing the work of early CCO pioneers suggests that CCO scholarship became increasingly formalized. To date, scholars nevertheless continue to debate ontological questions about what constitutes CCO scholarship and what gives this area of research its own legitimate identity within organizational communication (e.g., see Bisel, 2010; Brummans et al., 2014; Schoeneborn et al., 2014) as well as management and organization studies (e.g., see Cooren et al., 2011). Moreover, we noted a lack of methodological explicitness and clarity, which may hinder the development of patterned approaches to the aforementioned problems that lie at the heart of CCO scholarship.

Lack of methodological explicitness and clarity

Our analysis indicates that 59 of the 68 (86.8%) empirical publications used what we could call a “naturalistic or (quasi-)ethnographic approach” to data collection, involving participant and/or non-participant observation, shadowing, semi-structured interviews, and/or the collection of archives/texts (sometimes a combination of these methods). Some publications were fairly straightforward in explicating their data collection methods, but many were imprecise or even vague. For example, some authors only stated that the data were collected through ethnographic methods. Others mentioned the type of data they collected without describing the process that guided their methodological choices. Only two publications relied on quantitative data collection methods such as surveys.

In terms of data analysis, most of the empirical publications (37 or 54.4%) used a combination of conversation, discourse, and/or interaction analysis. The distinction between these approaches was not always clear, however, and terms such as “conversation analysis,” “discourse analysis,” and “interaction analysis” were often used interchangeably or synonymously. Moreover, many authors did not specify their type of analysis at all. A smaller number of publications (21 or 30.9%) relied on other qualitative methods such as thematic analysis or narrative analysis, and the use of quantitative analyses remains very rare.

Without the explication of clear data collection and analysis methods (in methods articles, chapters, or even complete books), graduate students and faculty must themselves determine how to operationalize the plethora of theories and concepts various CCO scholars have proposed (see next subsection). Developing robust CCO methods or even full-fledged methodologies and applying them consistently therefore seems key to CCO scholarship’s institutionalization, because this methodological detail will enable students and faculty to grasp how organizational phenomena can be systematically observed and analyzed from different constitutive perspectives. Such forma-lization should not suppress the diversity of methods that CCO scholars are mobilizing, which may be one of CCO scholarship’s strengths; it should rather focus on clarifying the application of methods and on the synergies that may result from combining them.

Signs of Objectification

Increase in CCO publications

More than half of the 206 publications in our corpus (145/70.4%) appeared between 2009 and 2015. We can only speculate about what contributed to this rising interest in CCO research during this period. Putnam and Nicotera’s (2009) book, Building Theories of Organization, may be partly responsible for the expansion of CCO scholarship. What should also not be overlooked is the influence of Bisel’s (2010) Management Communication Quarterly forum on CCO scholarship to which several respected organizational communication scholars and scholars from other fields (Sewell, Sillince, and Reed) contributed, although some were rather critical of CCO research. Furthermore, the papers presented during the 2008 “What Is an Organization?” conference in honor of James Taylor and subsequently published in Robichaud and Cooren’s (2013) edited book, Organization and Organizing, should be taken into account. This book also included contributions by a number of well-known scholars (e.g., Czarniawska, Latour, McPhee, Nicotera, Putnam, Taylor, and Tsoukas) as well as graduate students. Finally, recent reviews and discussions of CCO scholarship (i.e., Brummans et al., 2014; Cooren et al., 2011; Schoeneborn et al., 2014) may have played a key role in “objectifying” this area of inquiry.

Increase in publications by champions

Cooren and Taylor published, alone or with coauthors, 75 of the 206 CCO publications (36.4%), showing their considerable influence on CCO scholarship—at least if measured by the sheer quantity of their work.¹ These authors have also published in a variety of journals in (organizational) communication studies, linguistics/discourse studies, management, and organization studies. Moreover, they have collaborated with scholars from many different fields. Cooren and Taylor may thus be regarded as “champions who advance convincing theoretical arguments” (Kuhn, 2005, p. 621) because their efforts contribute significantly to establishing CCO scholarship as a legitimate area of inquiry within organizational communication and beyond.

Proliferation of theories, concepts, and topics

Leading CCO scholars, each associated with one of the aforementioned schools (Montréal School, Four Flows Model, and Luhmannian Systems Theory), have proposed an impressive number of theories and concepts. For example, those associated with McPhee’s Four Flows Model explore the concepts of organizational self-structuring, membership negotiation, activity coordination, and institutional positioning, which are grounded in Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory (15 publications). Drawing on Latour’s (2005) actor–network theory, Weick’s (1979) theory of organizing, and Greimas’s (1989) narratology, scholars associated with the Montréal School investigate concepts such as agency (31 publications), conversation/text (25 publications), ventriloquism (13 publications), presentification (six publications), and co-orientation (five publications). Drawing on Luhmann’s (1995) writings, Luhmannians focus on systems (three publications), often in combination with concepts such as autopoiesis, communicative episodes, decision making, and operational closure. These concepts have, in turn, been used to investigate a number of different topics, such as accounting (Fauré, Brummans, Giroux, & Taylor, 2010; Varey, 2006), authority (Benoit-Barné, & Cooren, 2009), collective mind (Cooren, 2004, 2006; Mcphee, Myers, & Trethewey, 2006), conflict (Güney, 2006), interorganizational collaboration (Arnaud, & Mills, 2012; Koschmann, 2013), mindful organizing (Brummans, Hwang, & Cheong, 2013), organizational identity (Cornelissen, Christensen, & Kinuthia, 2012; Piette, 2013), organizational learning (Bisel, Messersmith, & Kelley, 2012; Browning, Sitkin, Sutcliffe, Obstfeld, & Greene, 2000; Matte & Cooren, 2015), spacing and timing (Cooren & Fairhurst, 2004; Cooren, Fox, Robichaud, & Talih, 2005; Vásquez, & Cooren, 2013), strategy (Fauré, & Rouleau, 2011), and tensions (Cooren, Matte, Benoit-Barné, & Brummans, 2013; Koschmann, 2010).

This rather large breadth of topics shows that CCO theories and concepts are widely applicable, yet each of these subjects has only been investigated in a few empirical studies—frequently just one empirical CCO study. To gain more legitimacy as an area of inquiry, more concerted, systematic CCO research is needed. Such rigor and systematization will also help clarify what each of the CCO schools is “bringing to the table” in terms of studying these topics, as well as their (in)commensurabilties. Consequently, students and fa-culty will better understand the (dis)advantages of adopting a specific approach to studying the communicative constitution of organizations (or of combining approaches). Currently, these (dis)advantages may not always be clear, which may partly explain why relatively few scholars position themselves explicitly within one of the three schools (or within a combination of schools).

Absence of explicit positioning within CCO schools

Although the existence of the CCO schools can be taken as a sign of CCO scholarship’s objectification, our analysis reveals that scholars aligned themselves with a school in only 48 of the 206 publications (23.3%). That is, authors infrequently made statements such as, “In this article, we adopt a Montréal School approach to . . . .” Those who did position themselves primarily identified with the Montréal School (29 publications, compared with 13 publications by scholars who identified with McPhee’s Four Flows Model; and six publications by scholars who identified with Luhmannian Systems Theory). This suggests that elucidating the unique contributions of each school may help advance CCO scholarship’s objectification because it will strengthen the “pillars” (Schoeneborn et al., 2014, p. 310) that constitute this area of inquiry and give it “a legitimate identity of its own” (Kuhn, 2005, pp. 621-622). Further clarifying these contributions may also stimulate the development of new schools of thought that emerge as extensions and adaptations of the three existing schools. Some argue, for example, that the work of CCO scholars affiliated with the University of Colorado Boulder should be regarded as a school of thought itself, one that blends various aspects of the other schools yet also adds its own critical perspective.

Signs of Sedimentation

Diversity of authors’ institutional affiliations outside North America

The emergence of CCO scholarship has often been associated with North American institutions. Examining whether scholars outside North America have begun to take interest in this research provides one indicator of how this scholarship has started to “sediment” within organizational communication and spread to other disciplines. Our analysis reveals that, to date, scholars affiliated with North American institutions publish most CCO research (151 texts or 73.3% of our corpus). Between 2010 and 2015, however, CCO scholarship expanded to continental Europe and the United Kingdom—first authors affiliated with universities in continental Europe published 48 texts since 2000; 42 of these (87.5%) appeared between 2010 and 2015. In France, for example, authors have only recently begun to take an active interest in publishing CCO research: Seven (English) articles and/or book chapters were published by scholars who work in French institutions between 2010 and 2015. This French interest may partly be explained by the Montréal School’s influence, because its affiliated scholars publish in English as well as French and much of their work “interlinks American pragmatism with ‘European pragmatism’ by appropriating texts from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that centralize the consequentiality of action in a world of interactivity” (Brummans, 2006, p. 203). Scholars in Australia and New Zealand have also begun to take inte-rest in CCO scholarship (we found six publications in total). Moreover, we only found one English-language publication by a scholar affiliated with an Asian institution and no English-language publications by scholars affiliated with institutions in other parts of the world.

Diversity of authors’ disciplinary homes

Authors’ disciplinary homes also provide insight into CCO scholarship’s proliferation within organizational communication and other fields. Currently, CCO research remains more popular in the field of organizational communication (98 publications) than in any other discipline, supporting the claim that CCO scholarship has created an important niche within this discipline. Management and organization scho-lars, however, show increasing interest in CCO-related topics and questions (39 publications by first authors affiliated with business schools appeared between 2006 and 2015), and two CCO publications were authored by scho-lars in sociology.

The increased popularity of CCO research beyond organizational communication can partly be explained by the number of communication scho-lars who are now affiliated with business schools such as Copenhagen Business School (e.g., Blaschke, Christensen, and Schoeneborn) or Rotterdam School of Management (e.g., Cornelissen). Furthermore, articles and chapters written by well-known management and organization scholars and sociologists in Cooren et al.’s (2011) special issue of Organization Studies on “Communication, Organizing and Organization,” or in edited books like Robichaud and Cooren’s (2013) Organization and Organizing, contribute to cementing CCO scholarship as a more or less distinct area of inquiry within the aforementioned disciplines.

Increase in peer-reviewed publications

Publication of CCO research in reputable peer-reviewed journals is another indicator of the extent to which CCO scholarship is becoming established. In total, 71 of the 206 CCO texts in our corpus were books or book chapters, leaving 135 academic articles. Most of these articles appeared in peer-reviewed journals with a significant impact factor, ranging from 9.741 to 0.331 (note, all impact factors reported are from 2016). The journals with the highest impact factors were The Academy of Management Annals (9.741) and Academy of Management Review (7.288). Only 15 papers (11.1%) were published in journals with no clear impact factor reported on their official website, such as Journal of Communication Management or Canadian Journal of Communication.

Some journals play a particularly important role in establishing CCO scholarship as an area of inquiry. Of the 135 journal articles, 42 were pu-blished in Management Communication Quarterly (impact factor: 1.865, re-presenting 31.1% of CCO journal articles and 20.4% of the entire corpus). Interestingly, 34 of these articles (81%) appeared in or after 2009, again suggesting that CCO scholarship started to “take off” around this time. Journals outside of organizational communication, such as Organization Studies (impact factor: 2.798), have also played a significant role in CCO scholarship’s gradual establishment (12 publications appeared here; 10 between 2011 and 2015). In fact, three other outlets with high impact factors in ma-nagement and organization studies have contributed to the proliferation of CCO scholarship, even though only a few articles appeared in these journals: Human Relations published five articles (impact factor: 2.619), Academy of Management Review (impact factor: 7.288) published three articles, and The Academy of Management Annals (impact factor: 9.741) two articles. These results indicate that CCO research is gaining more traction, and thus legitimacy and influence, in other disciplines. The fact that CCO scholars are also publishing edited books with reputable academic publishers such as Oxford University Press and Routledge provides additional support for this claim.

Discussion

We examined CCO scholarship’s institutionalization process based on an analysis of its textualized, published academic discourse. Our research shows that CCO research is gaining legitimacy and is becoming more established as an area of inquiry with its own identity. We further argued that insufficient focus on formalization combined with the proliferation of theories, concepts, and topics, as well as the lack of clarity regarding each CCO school’s unique contributions, may hinder this institutionalization process. Interestingly, Tolbert and Zucker (1996) claimed that their multistage institutionalization model represents a “set of sequential processes” (p. 181, emphasis added); that is, habitualization (formalization) and objectification should form the bases or conditions for sedimentation. Our study suggests, in contrast, that an innovative way of studying organizations can gain traction and institutional coherence even if the first two conditions have not been fully met. Our research nonetheless also reveals several important issues that could diminish CCO scholarship’s legitimacy and slow down its establishment in the upco-ming years. It is important to address these issues to secure CCO scholarship’s “persistence over time” (Kuhn, 2005, p. 622), both within and beyond the organizational communication discipline.

First, as we noted, CCO pioneers were driven by the search for theories that could explain how organizations are constituted in communication—similar to Dewey’s (1916) quest to explain the constitution of society in communicative terms. Our analysis suggests, however, that CCO scholarship’s institutionalization could stagnate if scholars privilege theoretical over empirical publications and, more importantly, if scholars continue to provide insufficient descriptions of their data collection and analysis me-thods, because such lack of methodological transparency will likely inhibit the ability of graduate students and faculty to appropriate CCO theories concepts in their own work. Ironically, CCO researchers are often the first to point out and even critique this theoretical focus. Bisel (2010, p. 126) claimed, for example, that Taylor and Van Every’s (2000) work consists of “a dizzying number of linguistic, interpretive, and critical theories to argue that communication is the location and manifestation of organization,” while Kuhn (2008) stated that the Montréal School’s work, more generally, consists of concepts that “are both rather abstract and are presented in a vocabulary unfamiliar to many” (p. 1232). Bisel suggested, furthermore, that, from the Montréal School’s point of view, “McPhee and Zaug’s [Four Flows] model of CCO is too broad”—from McPhee’s perspective, on the contrary, the Montréal School’s approach “is too narrow to account for communication’s multifaceted relationship to organization” (p. 126). Hence, it is important for CCO scholars to celebrate the diversity of their theoretical and methodological approaches, because this is one of CCO scholarship’s strengths and defining features, yet it is also important to better explicate and clarify these differences for those who are new to or less familiar with CCO research, so they can build on, extend, question, and innovate existing approaches.

Because texts are vital to the institutionalization of CCO scholarship, effort should be made to publish CCO textbooks. As Palmer, Simmons, and Hall (2013) showed, textbooks are important institutional artifacts and play a key role in the constitution of an area of inquiry. Such books will not only bolster CCO scholarship and prevent it from simply being a fashionable topic or fad; they will also force scholars to elucidate their ideas and communicate them in ways that newcomers to CCO research can readily grasp. Writing textbooks will confront scholars with questions such as the following: What are CCO methodologies? And what methods can we use to investigate CCO topics empirically? Addressing these questions, this study shows, is important for CCO scholarship’s persistence and growth. Furthermore, textbooks will facilitate the application of CCO scholarship in organizational practice. This point is supported by Kuhn and Schoeneborn’s (2015) recent article on “The Pedagogy of CCO.” “[A]s a theoretical endeavor,” the authors note, CCO research may

benefit from the fact that most of our students will eventually enter the practice side of organizational communication in various kinds of job roles and functions . . . Hence, making students aware of the fundamental and formative role of communication for organizations . . . will most likely help create a new generation of organizational communication practitioners who are especially sensitized to the inherent complexities of communication in organizational contexts and who will be able to question a simple transmission model of communication and its application in practical settings. (Kuhn & Schoeneborn, 2015, pp. 299-300)

Additional empirical research is needed to track CCO scholarship’s institutionalization in more depth. Our study analyzed published texts to provide a basis for this research. Using Taylor and Van Every’s (2000) well-known conversation–text dialectic, future studies could investigate how conversational dynamics play into this institutionalization as well. This research could be naturalistic or ethnographic in nature (à la Latour and Woolgar’s [1979] Laboratory Life or Knorr Cetina’s [1999] Epistemic Cultures) and would need to include other kinds of data, collected by interviewing (Spradley, 1979) leading and up-and-coming CCO scholars and observing (Spradley, 1980) or even shadowing (Vásquez, Brummans, & Groleau, 2012) CCO researchers at conferences as well as during their daily work life (as Dick and Ziering Kofman did in their 2002 documentary, Derrida).

Academic exchanges and papers presented during the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) Standing Work Group 16: Organization as Communication conferences play a crucial role in advancing CCO research’s cross-disciplinary proliferation and would provide excellent sources of data for this kind of research. These conferences can be seen as field-configuring events (Hardy & Maguire, 2010)—“temporary social organizations . . . in which people from diverse organizations and with diverse purposes assemble periodically, or on a one-time basis” (Lampel & Meyer, 2008, p. 1026, cited in Hardy & Maguire, 2010, p. 1366). Such professional gatherings are vital to an area of inquiry’s habitualization, objectification, and sedimentation because they are forums in which scholars from different disciplines can “become aware of their common concerns, join together, share information, coordinate their actions, shape or subvert agendas, and mutually influence field structuration” (Anand & Jones, 2008, p. 1037) by publicizing and discussing their academic work. Moreover, these events’ “temporal and spatial compression (Garud, 2008) provides formal and informal opportunities for face-to-face social interaction, allowing actors to share information, establish patterns of domination, and create mutual awareness of a common enterprise” (Hardy & Maguire, 2010, p. 1366).

It will be useful, then, to investigate CCO scholarship as if it were an “exotic tribe,” not so much as an exercise in navel-gazing but to encourage reflexivity as Bourdieu imagined it (see Brummans, 2015; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Practicing Bourdieu’s reflexivity reveals how social actors and fields, whether academic or non-academic (e.g., politics, arts, law, or medicine), are mutually constitutive and exist in a relationship of ontological complicity (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Such reflexivity could reveal how students and faculty constitute a relationship of ontological complicity with the budding area of CCO scholarship in the ongoing flux of conversation and text (Taylor & Van Every, 2000), how this complicity shapes and positions this area vis-à-vis other academic fields as well as professional ones (see also Kuhn & Schoeneborn, 2015), and how students and faculty themselves are shaped and positioned in the process. Because actors tend to “construct around themselves an environment that constrains their ability to change further in later years” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 149, cited in Kuhn, 2005, p. 623), this increased collective “self”-awareness could help prevent CCO scholarship’s institutionalization “from becoming dysfunctional” (Kuhn, 2005, p. 623). That is, by encouraging a “unified diversity” (Eisenberg, 1984) that not only welcomes new approaches but also ensures that such approaches are sufficiently formalized so others can understand and appropriate them, CCO research can solidify its “place at the interdisciplinary table” (Kuhn, 2005, p. 625), increase its social relevance, and gain strength as an institutional force.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We kindly thank François Cooren, Chantal Benoit-Barné, Joel Iverson, Thomas Martine, Frédérik Matte, Kirstie McAllum, Andréanne Morin, Linda Putnam, Daniel Robichaud, Dennis Schoeneborn, James Taylor, and Consuelo Vásquez for their invaluable help and guidance.

Authors’ Note

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2015 meeting of the European Group for Organizational Studies in Athens, Greece.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Geneviève Boivin is a doctoral candidate in the Département de Communication at the Université de Montréal in Canada. Her research interests include the communicative constitution of organizations, institutional theory, and intercultural communication.

Boris H. J. M. Brummans (PhD, Texas A&M University, 2004) is an associate professor in the Département de Communication at the Université de Montréal in Canada. His research interests include agency, ethnography, mindful organizing, and the communicative constitution of organizations.

James R. Barker (PhD, University of Colorado Boulder, 1993) is professor and Herbert S. Lamb chair of business education in the Rowe School of Business at Dalhousie University in Canada. He is a former editor-in-chief of Management Communication Quarterly and presently is the lead researcher for SafetyNET-Rx, a Canadian-based pharmacy safety research team.

References

Alvesson

Kärreman

(2000). Varieties of discourse: On the study of organizations through discourse analysis. Human Relations, 53, 1125-1149. doi:10.1177/0018726700539002

Anand

Jones

B. C.

(2008). Tournament rituals, category dynamics, and field configuration: The case of the Booker prize. Journal of Management Studies, 45, 1036-1060. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6486.2008.00782.x

Arnaud

Mills

C. E.

(2012). Understanding interorganizational agency: A communication perspective. Group & Organization Management, 37, 452-485. doi:1059601112451125.

Benoit-Barné

Cooren

(2009). The accomplishment of authority through presentification: How authority is distributed among and negotiated by organizational members. Management Communication Quarterly, 23, 5-31. doi:10.1177/0893318909335414

Berger

P. L.

Luckmann

(1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York, NY: Anchor.

Bisel

R. S.

(2010). A communicative ontology of organization? A description, history, and critique of CCO theories for organization science. Management Communication Quarterly, 24, 124-131. doi:10.1177/0893318909351582

Bisel

R. S.

Messersmith

A. S.

Kelley

K. M.

(2012). Supervisor-subordinate communication: Hierarchical mum effect meets organizational learning. Journal of Business Communication, 49, 128-147. doi:10.1177/0021943612436972

Bourdieu

Wacquant

L. J. D.

(1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Browning

L. D.

Sitkin

S. B.

Sutcliffe

K. M.

Obstfeld

Greene

(2000). Keep ‘em flying: The constitutive dynamics of an organizational change in the US Air Force. Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronique de Communication, 10. Retrieved from http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/010/1/01012.html

10.

Brummans

B. H. J. M

. (2006). The Montréal School and the question of agency. In Cooren

Taylor

J. R.

Van Every

E. J.

(Eds.), Communication as organizing: Empirical and theoretical explorations in the dynamic of text and conversation (pp. 197-211). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

11.

Brummans

B. H. J. M

. (2015). “Turning the lens on ourselves”: Bourdieu’s reflexivity in practice. In Tatli

Özbilgin

Karatas-Özkan

(Eds.), Bourdieu, organisation and management (pp. 70-94). New York, NY: Routledge.

12.

Brummans

B. H. J. M.

Cooren

Robichaud

Taylor

J. R.

(2014). Approaches to the communicative constitution of organizations. In Putnam

L. L.

Mumby

D. K.

(Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational communication (3rd ed., pp. 173-194). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.

13.

Brummans

B. H. J. M.

Hwang

J. M.

Cheong

P. H.

(2013). Mindful authoring through invocation: Leaders’ constitution of a spiritual organization. Management Communication Quarterly, 27, 346-372. doi:10.1177/0893318913479176

14.

Cooren

(2004). The communicative achievement of collective minding: Analysis of board meeting excerpts. Management Communication Quarterly, 17, 517-551. doi:10.1177/0893318903262242

15.

Cooren

(2006). Arguments for the in-depth study of organizational interactions: A rejoinder to McPhee, Myers, and Trethewey. Management Communication Quarterly, 19, 327-340. doi:10.1177/0893318905280325

16.

Cooren

Fairhurst

G. T

. (2004). Speech timing and spacing: The phenomenon of organizational closure. Organization, 11, 793-824. doi:10.1177/1350508404047252

17.

Cooren

Fox

Robichaud

Talih

(2005). Arguments for a plurified view of the social world: Spacing and timing as hybrid achievements. Time & Society, 14, 265-282. doi:10.1177/0961463X05055138

18.

Cooren

Kuhn

Cornelissen

J. P.

Clark

(2011). Communication, organizing and organization: An overview and introduction to the special issue. Organization Studies, 32, 1149-1170. doi:10.1177/0170840611410836

19.

Cooren

Matte

Benoit-Barné

Brummans

B. H. J. M

. (2013). Communication as ventriloquism: A grounded-in-action approach to the study of organizational tensions. Communication Monographs, 80, 255-277. doi:10.1080/03637751.2013.788255

20.

Cooren

Vaara

Langley

Tsoukas

(2014). Language and communication at work: Discourse, narrativity, and organizing. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

21.

Corman

S. R.

Poole

M. S.

(Eds.). (2000). Perspectives on organizational communication: Finding common ground. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

22.

Cornelissen

Christensen

L. T.

Kinuthia

(2012). Corporate brands and identity: Developing stronger theory and a call for shifting the debate. European Journal of Marketing, 46, 1093-1102. doi:10.1108/03090561211230214

23.

Cornelissen

J. P.

Durand

Fiss

P. C.

Lammers

J. C.

Vaara

(2015). Putting communication front and center in institutional theory and analysis. Academy of Management Review, 40, 10-27. doi:10.5465/amr.2014.0381

24.

Dewey

(1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York, NY: The Free Press.

25.

Dick

(Director), & Ziering Kofman

(Director and Producer). (2002). Derrida [Documentary]. New York, NY: Zeitgeist Films.

26.

DiMaggio

P. J.

Powell

W. W.

(1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48, 147-160. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2095101

27.

Eisenberg

E. M.

(1984). Ambiguity as strategy in organizational communication. Communication Monographs, 51, 227-242. doi:10.1080/03637758409390197

28.

Fairhurst

G. T.

Putnam

L. L.

(1999). Reflections on the organization-communication equivalency question: The contributions of James Taylor and his colleagues. The Communication Review, 3, 1-19. doi:10.1080/10714429909368572

29.

Fairhurst

G. T.

Putnam

L. L.

(2004). Organizations as discursive constructions. Communication Theory, 14, 5-26. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2004.tb00301.x

30.

Fauré

Brummans

B. H. J. M.

Giroux

Taylor

J. R.

(2010). The calculation of business, or the business of calculation? Accounting as organizing through everyday communication. Human Relations, 63, 1249-1273. doi:10.1177/0018726709355658

31.

Fauré

Rouleau

(2011). The strategic competence of accountants and middle managers in budget making. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 36, 167-182. doi:10.1016/j.aos.2011.04.001

32.

Garud

(2008). Conferences as venues for the configuration of emerging organizational fields: The case of cochlear implants. Journal of Management Studies, 45, 1061-1088. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6486.2008.00783.x

33.

Giddens

(1979). Central problems in social theory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

34.

Giddens

(1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

35.

Grant

Hardy

Oswick

Putnam

L. L.

(2004). The SAGE handbook of organizational discourse. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

36.

Greimas

A. J.

(1989). On meaning ( Perron

Collins

, Trans.). New Literary History, 20, 539-550. doi:10.2307/469352

37.

Güney

(2006). Making sense of a conflict as the (missing) link between collaborating actors. In Cooren

Taylor

J. R.

Van Every

E. J.

(Eds.), Communication as organizing: Empirical and theoretical explorations in the dynamic of text and conversation (pp. 19-35). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

38.

Hardy

Maguire

(2010). Discourse, field-configuring events, and change in organizations and institutional fields: Narratives of DDT and the Stockholm Convention. Academy of Management Journal, 53, 1365-1392. doi:10.5465/AMJ.2010.57318384

39.

Knorr Cetina

. (1999). Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

40.

Koschmann

M. A.

(2010). Communication as a distinct mode of explanation makes a difference. Communication Monographs, 77, 431-434. doi:10.1080/03637751.2010.523593

41.

Koschmann

M. A.

(2013). The communicative constitution of collective identity in interorganizational collaboration. Management Communication Quarterly, 27, 61-89. doi:10.1177/0893318912449314

42.

Kuhn

(2005). The institutionalization of Alta in organizational communication studies. Management Communication Quarterly, 18, 595-603. doi:10.1177/0893318904273851

43.

Kuhn

(2008). A communicative theory of the firm: Developing an alternative perspective on intra-organizational power and stakeholder relationships. Organization Studies, 29, 1227-1254. doi:10.1177/0170840608094778

44.

Kuhn

(2012). Negotiating the micro-macro divide: Thought leadership from organizational communication for theorizing organization. Management Communication Quarterly, 26, 543-584. doi:10.1177/0893318912462004

45.

Kuhn

Schoeneborn

(2015). The pedagogy of CCO. Management Communication Quarterly, 29, 295-301. doi:10.1177/0893318915571348

46.

Lammers

J. C.

(2011). How institutions communicate: Institutional messages, institutional logics, and organizational communication. Management Communication Quarterly, 25, 154-182.

47.

Lammers

J. C.

Barbour

J. B.

(2006). An institutional theory of organizational communication. Communication Theory, 16, 356-377. doi:10.1177/0893318910389280

48.

Lammers

J. C.

Garcia

M. A.

(2014). Institutional theory. In Putnam

L. L.

Mumby

D. K.

(Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational communication (3rd ed., pp. 195-216). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.

49.

Lampel

Meyer

A. D.

(2008). Field-configuring events as structuring mechanisms: How conferences, ceremonies, and trade shows constitute new technologies, industries, and markets. Journal of Management Studies, 45, 1025-1035. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6486.2008.00787.x

50.

Latour

(2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

51.

Latour

Woolgar

(1979). Laboratory life: The social construction of scientific facts. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE.

52.

Loewenstein

Ocasio

Jones

(2012). Vocabularies and vocabulary structure: A new approach linking categories, practices, and institutions. The Academy of Management Annals, 6, 41-86. doi:10.1080/19416520.2012.660763

53.

Luhmann

(1995). Social systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

54.

Matte

Cooren

(2015). Learning as dialogue: An “on-the-go” approach to dealing with organizational tensions. In Filliettaz

Billett

(Eds.), Francophone perspectives of learning through work (pp. 169-187). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

55.

Mcphee

R. D.

Myers

K. K.

Trethewey

(2006). On collective mind and conversational analysis: Response to Cooren. Management Communication Quarterly, 19, 311-326. doi:10.1177/0893318905280324

56.

McPhee

R. D.

Poole

M. S.

Iverson

(2014). Structuration theory. In Putnam

L. L.

Mumby

D. K.

(Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational communication: Advances in theory, research, and methods (3rd ed., pp. 75-100). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.

57.

McPhee

R. D.

Zaug

(2000). The communicative constitution of organizations: A framework for explanation. The Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronique de Communication, 10. Retrieved from http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/010/1/01017.html

58.

McPhee

R. D.

Zaug

(2009). The communicative constitution of organizations: A framework for explanation. In Putnam

L. L.

Nicotera

A. M.

(Eds.), Building theories of organization: The constitutive role of communication (pp. 21-48). New York, NY: Routledge.

59.

Mumby

D. K.

Stohl

(1996). Disciplining organizational communication studies. Management Communication Quarterly, 10, 50-72. doi:10.1177/0893318996010001004

60.

Palmer

Simmons

Hall

(2013). Textbook (non-)adoption motives, legitimizing strategies and academic field configuration. Studies in Higher Education, 38, 485-505. doi:10.1080/03075079.2011.583983

61.

Pang

(2006). The institutionalization of “Chinese” cinema as an academic discipline. Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 1, 55-61. doi:10.1386/jcc.1.1.55_7

62.

Phillips

Oswick

(2012). Organizational discourse: Domains, debates, and directions. The Academy of Management Annals, 6, 435-481. doi:10.1080/19416520.2012.681558

63.

Piette

(2013). Restructuring identity through sectorial narratives. In Robichaud

Cooren

(Eds.), Organization and organizing: Materiality, agency, and discourse (pp. 150-170). New York, NY: Routledge.

64.

Putnam

L. L.

(1983). Organizational communication: Toward a research agenda. In Putnam

L. L.

Pacanowsky

M. E.

(Eds.), Communication and organizations: An interpretive approach (pp. 31-54). Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE.

65.

Putnam

L. L.

Cheney

(1985). Organizational communication: Historical developments and future directions. In Benson

(Ed.), Speech communication in the 20th century (pp. 130-156). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

66.

Putnam

L. L.

Fairhurst

G. T.

(2001). Discourse analysis in organizations: Issues and concerns. In Jablin

F. M.

Putnam

L. L.

(Eds.), The new handbook of organizational communication: Advances in theory, research, and methods (pp. 78-136). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

67.

Putnam

L. L.

Fairhurst

G. T.

(2015). Revisiting “organizations as discursive constructions”: 10 years later. Communication Theory, 25, 375-392. doi:10.1111/comt.12074

68.

Putnam

L. L.

Mumby

D. K.

(2014). Introduction: Advancing theory and research in organizational communication. In Putnam

L. L.

Mumby

D. K.

(Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational communication (3rd ed., pp. 1-25). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.

69.

Putnam

L. L.

Nicotera

A. M.

(Eds.). (2009). Building theories of organization: The constitutive role of communication. New York, NY: Routledge.

70.

Putnam

L. L.

Phillips

Chapman

(1996). Metaphors of communication and organization. In Clegg

S. R.

Hardy

Nord

W. R.

(Eds.), Handbook of organization studies (pp. 375-408). London, UK: SAGE.

71.

Robichaud

Cooren

(Eds.). (2013). Organization and organizing: Materiality, agency, and discourse. New York, NY: Routledge.

72.

Schoeneborn

Blaschke

Cooren

McPhee

R. D.

Seidl

Taylor

J. R.

(2014). The three schools of CCO thinking: Interactive dialogue and systematic comparison. Management Communication Quarterly, 28, 285-316. doi:10.1177/0893318914527000

73.

Schoeneborn

Sandhu

(2013). When birds of different feather flock together: The emerging debate on “organization as communication” in the German-speaking countries. Management Communication Quarterly, 27, 303-313. doi:10.1177/0893318912470079

74.

Schoeneborn

Vásquez

(in press). Communication as constitutive of organization. In Scott

C. R.

Lewis

L. K.

(Eds.), The international encyclopedia of organizational communication. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell.

75.

Scott

W. R.

Meyer

J. W.

(1983). The organization of societal sectors: Propositions and early evidence. In Meyer

J. W.

Scott

W. R.

(Eds.), Organizational environments: Ritual and rationality (pp. 129-153). Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE.

76.

Sillince

J. A.

Barker

J. R.

(2012). A tropological theory of institutionalization. Organization Studies, 33, 7-38. doi:10.1177/0170840611425735

77.

Smith

R. C.

(1993, May). Images of organizational communication: Root-metaphors of the organization-communication relation. Paper presented at the annual conference of the International Communication Association, Washington, DC.

78.

Spradley

J. P.

(1979). The ethnographic interview. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

79.

Spradley

J. P.

(1980). Participant observation. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

80.

Taylor

J. R.

(1988). Une organisation n’est q’un tissu de communication: Essais théoriques [The organization is but a web of communication]. Montréal, QC: Université de Montréal.

81.

Taylor

J. R.

(1993). Rethinking the theory of organizational communication: How to read an organization. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

82.

Taylor

J. R.

Van Every

E. J.

(2000). The emergent organization: Communication as its site and surface. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

83.

Tolbert

P. S.

Zucker

L. G.

(1996). The institutionalization of institutional theory. In Clegg

S. R.

Hardy

Nord

W. R.

(Eds.), Handbook of organization studies (pp. 175-190). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

84.

Varey

(2006). Accounts in interactions: Implications of accounting practices for managing. In Cooren

Taylor

J. R.

Van Every

E. J.

(Eds.), Communication as organizing: Empirical and theoretical explorations in the dynamic of text and conversation (pp. 181-196). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

85.

Vásquez

Brummans

B. H. J. M.

Groleau

(2012). Notes from the field on organizational shadowing as framing. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, 7, 144-165. doi:10.1108/17465641211253075

86.

Vásquez

Cooren

(2013). Spacing practices: The communicative configuration of organizing through space-times. Communication Theory, 23, 25-47. doi:10.1111/comt.12003

87.

Weick

K. E.

(1979). The social psychology of organizing (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.35 MB