Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
Over the past decades, organization studies (henceforth OS) have leveraged an increasing number of philosophical and sociological theories to explain the emergence, action and transformation of organizations (Putnam et al., 2009; Seidl & Whittington, 2014). In this trend, the growing focus on the
The turn to sociomateriality (Kuhn, 2024; Leonardi, 2011; Vásquez & Plourde, 2017) has exemplified and accelerated this rethinking by inviting descriptions of organizations as a mesh of artifacts, technologies, texts, and human and other-than-human agents (Cooren, 2020; Ivancic & Dooling, 2023; Orlikowski, 2007; Pascucci et al., 2021; Symon & Pritchard, 2015; see Cooren & Robichaud, 2012, for an inventory). While these openings have proven productive for some, many authors have made convincing cases that by opening up too much the definition of the organization, OS lost their ways, their objects, or their ability to dialog with practitioners or other fields of social inquiry (King et al., 2010; Lopdrup-Hjorth, 2015; Sillince, 2010). This constant reengagement with the boundaries of the organizational shows how crucial the ontological question (“what is an organization?”) is for OS.
Among the approaches that have most explicitly engaged with the question of the organization’s constitution is the “Communicative Constitution of Organization” movement, or CCO (Schoeneborn & Vásquez, 2017). For a long time, a staple characteristic of CCO scholarship has been its internal debate between entity-oriented and process-oriented conceptualizations of organizations, focusing either on “organizations” or “organizing”; between approaches studying the processual constitution of organizations, or the constitutive effects of communication within organizations (Brummans et al., 2013; Putnam & Nicotera, 2010; Schoeneborn et al., 2019).
While well known within CCO itself, this long-standing debate shows untapped relevance in that it reflects very well, in our view, the ontological tensions that have just as well characterized OS. Just as the field at large has undergone a progressive (and partial) shift towards expanding the organization’s boundaries, CCO theory has done the same. The process-leaning Montreal School is particularly representative of that shift, given its emphasis on the study of communication as the fundamental process through which organized forms, and eventually all social systems, are achieved (Cooren, 2012; Cooren & Seidl, 2020). The “low-threshold” definition of organizations (Schoeneborn et al., 2019) it has helped popularize has sparked similar critiques to those voiced within OS: conceptual fuzziness and limited practical applicability (Brummans et al., 2013), revealing a comparable divide in both OS and CCO.
Recently, the notion of organizationality has been claimed, either implicitly (Schoeneborn et al., 2019) or explicitly (Schoeneborn et al., 2022), to offer a kind of ecumenical ontology, between process and entitative views of organization. As Schoeneborn et al. (2022) indeed point out, “We argue that the notion of organizationality can serve as an umbrella term that can encompass various streams of recent organizational scholarship that are all united by an adjectivistic understanding of organization as a matter of degree” (p. 134). Our focus in this paper is to question and challenge this claim of an umbrella function for the notion of organizationality. We contend that some assumptions made by proponents of what we call
While this discussion is grounded in a debate that is mostly internal to CCO, we believe that it can be useful to all scholars across OS, as the assumptions we’re about to critique may be shared well beyond CCO and organizational communication. Our contention is that the lack of clarity surrounding these premises prevents the notion of
In this article, we therefore show why the theory of organizationality is, in our view, a renewed entitative vision of organization (which it has not recognized yet, to our knowing), and why it is
(1) It settles the ontological debate in a lower-stake situation, allowing OS scholars to somewhat sidestep the issue at a relatively low conceptual cost. Focus can therefore be returned on the structural, operational, behavioural, normative or otherwise pragmatic issues that constitute their specialized area of research.
(2) It supports a non-essentialist view of organization, conceiving of it as the historically situated construct that large segments of social science would also define it to be (Apelt et al., 2017; Cooper & Burrel, 1988; Haveman, 2022 Koschmann, 2024; see also Parsons, 1956).
(3) It therefore favours a continued dialogue between OS and other social sciences by promoting a reflexive and critical stance for OS scholars towards their disciplinary object.
Although points 1 and 3 are explicitly stated by Schoeneborn et al. (2022) as strengths of the theory of organizationality, we believe that a thoroughly processual approach to organizations, focused on “organizing” instead of “organizationality” (Schoeneborn et al., 2019), shows promise in this regard too.
This paper follows a traditional dialectic structure. We first present the main tenets of the emerging
Organizationality: A Critical Review
The notion of organizationality was introduced in an article by Dobusch and Schoeneborn (2015) where they argued for three “minimum criteria” (p. 1006) that a given collective entity had to fill, to varying degrees, to be considered an organization (i.e. to possess organizationality). The rationale provided by the authors for formalizing organizationality criteria was that research focusing on organizing processes, as it broadened the range of spaces and fields where it studied such processes, could be “criticized for failing to distinguish organizations from other social collectives, such as communities, networks, or movements” (p. 1006). To cope with this alleged problem, the authors merge the Luhmannian theory of organizations (Ahrne et al., 2016, 2017) with the focus on communication advocated by members of the CCO approach to OS. This results in a theory of organizationality that distinctively defines organizations among other types of social collectives, in a Luhmannian fashion, as “decided orders” (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011), while emphasizing
More technically, the three criteria that would allow a collective to be defined as an organization are: (1) interconnected decision episodes; (2) collective actorhood, and (3) identity claims (Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015; Schoeneborn et al., 2022). The first criterion is drawn from Ahrne and Brunsson (2011), who argued that social collectives gradually become organized as they decide upon their membership, rules, hierarchy, systems of monitoring, and sanctions. The second criterion is based on a number of works in OS according to which organizations are valuable objects of scientific inquiry because, indeed, they act upon the world (King et al., 2010) and because they are able to channel multiple individual agencies into singular collective achievements (Barnard, 1938; Bencherki & Cooren, 2011). The third criterion reflects the notion that an organization needs to be recognized, i.e. that it is indeed commonly taken and represented as an entity, being, or thing, with its agenda, responsibilities, allies, and opponents. For instance, we could imagine a newspaper heading one of its articles with the following title: “ExxonMobil needs better assets in this region if it wants to increase its global outreach.” Moreover, organizations (attempt to) orchestrate these representations in a concerted manner, claiming identities through various processes (King et al., 2010).
While this theoretical model seems very appealing in order to describe the multiple communicative endeavours of an organization – especially those that help the organization create, maintain, and transform itself, called “autopoietic” (Luhmann, 2018) – it is essential to underscore that it has not been so much construed as a
We may turn to Apelt et al. (2017), who raised a similar question about Ahrne and Brunsson’s (2011, 2019) theory of partial organizations, a theory that motivated the inclusion of the “interconnected decision-making” criteria in Dobusch and Schoeneborn (2015). According to their critique, Ahrne and Brunsson’s theory falls short of setting convincing boundaries to the organization by allowing too many things to fit their definition. Defining organizations by their decidedness before opening the possibility for partly decided orders (partial organizations) to co-exist with formal organizations within the organizational realm induces, according to Apelt et al. (2017), “considerable confusion” (p. 9). A second problem they raise is how little consideration is given in the model to what lies outside of the organization: how other forms of order might be achieved without decisions and “how organizations and their decision-based processes are related to other forms of social order” (p. 9). On the grounds of these two criticisms, Apelt et al. advocate for narrowing further the definition of organizations developed by Ahrne and Brunsson (2011, 2019), through a deeper resort to Luhmann’s theory of social systems. As we’ll see below, our own take on the weaknesses of a criteria-based definition of organizations leads us in the exact opposite direction. Nonetheless, this review of Apelt et al.’s (2017) counterargument is still useful to show the kind of conceptual confusion that one might end up in when trying to draw up definitional boundaries, especially without solid empirical grounds.
At the beginning of another article addressing the ontological problem, Ahrne et al. (2016) argue that OS face an increasing challenge in that the notion of organization has been receiving decreasing attention in social sciences, which jeopardizes the ability of scholars within the discipline to find a public outside their own community: “organization studies has been less successful in exporting its ideas to other fields of social science; interest in the issues addressed by organization studies is not great outside the field” (p. 93). From the 1970s onwards, they argue, much research in social sciences addressed what goes on in organizational spaces using more traditional sociological concepts. As they point out, “In essence, organizations were conceptualized not so much as local orders, but as orders representing wider social institutions” (p. 94). It is in response to this situation, the authors argue, that the concept of organization must be “resuscitated”: that is, given a clear, distinct definition so that the need for distinct concepts to explain organizations appears more explicitly.
What they call for is to draw an ontological distinction between organizations and other social collectives. Now, should an ontological claim be made on the grounds of a discipline looking for its raison d’être? While scientific validity remains a complex and contentious issue (Hacking, 2000), which should invite caution when assessing any contribution on such grounds, disciplinary self-preservation as a rationale seems quite distant, as a motive, from the usual goal of achieving relative correspondence with empirical data. If sociological concepts are demonstrated to be enough to study whatever goes on in organizations, then a distinct “science of organizations” might indeed not be required, and OS should simply be understood – with all their intricacies and contributions, mind you – as a field of application for sociological inquiry. To be fair, Ahrne et al. (2016) do attempt to provide such empirical grounding for the ontological claim by affirming, following March and Simon (1958), “that organizations influence people’s behaviour in a different way than was the case outside of the organizational context”. If that is the case, then there might indeed be a good argument for the ontological specificity of organization. Unfortunately, the authors do little to back up this claim of a “different” (in kind) influence of organizations on human behaviour.
In parallel, Dobusch and Schoeneborn (2015) import Ahrne and Brunsson’s (2011) argument to organizational communication to argue in favour of the definite usefulness of a distinctive (and therefore, we argue, exclusionary) concept of organization. As the original set of articles, theirs insist on the provision that the concept should be “fluid” enough to include a certain variety of organizational forms. Their argument therefore faces the same difficulties identified by Apelt et al. (2017): How can we support the claim that what we need is a strong notion of what organizations are (that would distinguish them radically from other social collectives), while recognizing that organizations now take so many forms? And which empirical grounds can support this search for the ontological distinctiveness of organizations, in relation to other social forms?
Our contribution to this debate – upon which is based our broader present contribution to organization theory – is in regard to the claim by Schoeneborn et al. (2019, 2022) that the theory of organizationality could be a potential third way within CCO, setting to rest some ontological debate. In our opinion, this claim is indicative of a further issue that may affect any entity-oriented definition of organization: unassessed ontological premises that would require, if critically considered, further development before the attempt is made to draw (even partially) from process-oriented approaches.
As background to their claim, Schoeneborn et al. (2019) map out CCO scholarship over what they present as three different ontological “tensions”. According to them, those tensions would characterize scholarship studying the relationship between communicative acts, on one hand, and, on the other, organized phenomena conceptualized as: (1) a “noun” (organization), or (2) a “verb” (organizing), or (3) an “adjective” (organizationality). These tensions each represent a particular brand of CCO (see Table 1), with the first two broadly corresponding to the two classic tendencies within CCO mentioned earlier, either more entity-oriented or more process-oriented (Putnam & Nicotera, 2010).
The three tensions defining CCO inquiry according to Schoeneborn et al. (2019).
In Schoeneborn et al.’s (2019) conceptualization, the first two tensions are established between two poles: communication as a process (a “verbal thing”) and either organization (a “nominal thing”) or organizing (a second “verbal thing”).
1
For these first two, what changes is the nature of one of the two poles in the communication–organization relation. However, the third tension (the one focusing on organizationality) situates “adjectivity” not at one of the poles of the tension like the two others, but as a bridge, a passage point between communication as a process and organization,
In Schoeneborn et al.’s (2019) graphic representation, of the three tensions, what crystallizes the difference between the first two tensions is how the pole opposite to communication is defined: either it is a thing, “organization,” or a process “organizing”. In contrast the third tension is defined by the mediating space between the two poles, where “organizationality” is found. By focusing attention on the mediating thing between the two poles instead of the way the pole of organization/organizing is defined (critically, in this third tension,
Following up on the fact that the poles of the third tension are a “verb” (communication-as-process) and a noun (organization-as-a-thing), we see how, then, the third tension appears to be not much more than an addendum to the first tension, reintroducing a “nominal” understanding of the organization through the back door. It would thus be a mistake to think that the notion of organizationality resolves the recurring tension between entitative and processual definitions of organization in CCO. The struggle to determine whether the object of CCO is either “organization”, a nominal thing, a
Schoeneborn et al. (2019) trace back the preoccupation with organizationality-as-an-adjective to some texts associated with the Montreal School (typically more concerned with
The three tensions, relabelled.
A consequence of this somewhat biased reference to processual approaches is the claim by Schoeneborn et al. (2019) that an interest in uncovering what it means for something to be an organization would somehow set the third tension apart from the first two.
Research in this stream opens up the focus of CCO scholarship beyond established forms of organization and organizing to explore other types of social phenomena, such as networks, markets, social movements, communities, and so on. A central question in this stream of research is what makes these phenomena more or less “organizational” (Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015; see also Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011; Ahrne et al., 2016; Apelt et al., 2017). (Schoeneborn et al., 2019, p. 487)
We would argue, in opposition to this claim, that CCO has been for a large part of its institutional existence preoccupied with what makes phenomena more or less organizational (see Boivin et al., 2017, for an analysis of the institutionalization of CCO). This might not have been emphasized enough in previous research, since process approaches can have a tendency to avoid clear ontological commitment. However, in the next section, we show how at least one processual approach to organization – stemming from the Montreal School and explicitly cited by Schoeneborn et al. (2019, 2022) – does have ontological commitments and that, if those commitments are made explicit, they should appear contradictory to the premises of the theory of organizationality and lead scholars to a significantly different understanding of organizations.
Our goal in the rest of this article is, in relation to the preceding points, twofold. (1) We demonstrate how processual approaches, without refuting the existence of organizations, can offer an understanding of what they are that is paradigmatically different from the theory of organizationality and potentially other intermediary perspectives. (2) We show how this alternative ontology may be useful to OS by allowing scholars interested by more pragmatic organizational concerns to move beyond the search for the essence of organization. Contrary to what Du Gay (2020) argues, we contend that more ontological openness, not less, will in the end allow OS to refocus their gaze, when needed, on (formal) organizational matters.
A Fourth Tension: The Organizationality of Communication
Taylor and Van Every’s (2011) definition of organization “as Thirdness” is well representative of a typical Montreal School approach to organizing (Cnossen, 2022). These authors use Peirce’s philosophy to reflect on the common nature of “all purposeful activity” (Taylor, 2014, p. 29). Briefly, in this peircean framework,
The point Taylor and Van Every (2011) make through this reference to Peirce is that organization is what is created when such recurrence or habit (conceived of as Thirdness) is formed, when meaning is established in any given setting. Communication is the process that allows Thirdness to be created: I
This is the groundwork for Taylor and Van Every’s (2011) theory of the organizing properties of communication (Cooren, 2000). It places Thirdness and organizationality in equivalence, as both are produced through communication. Therefore, it opens a vast field of inquiry for OS, since Thirdness is a pervasive mode of being in the world. This also means that what may happen at the level of the organization may happen at any other level wherever communication is happening. Consider the following excerpt: Now for the issue we are exploring. Since the topic of this book is organization, and since organization implies a network of relationships involving many human actors, as well as their tools, tasks, and objects of attention, the Peircian presentation of Thirdness offered above has a missing dimension: it involves only
In this excerpt, Taylor and Van Every argue for scaling up from the level of individual agents meeting and co-orienting towards each other, therefore creating Thirdness, to a sort of macro perspective where we consider networks of such meetings coalescing into “organizations”. But we may also scale back down.
While it must be acknowledged that, at this higher level that is organization, many new products of communication can be observed (the installation of a transcontinental pipeline, a stock exchange crash, a new ice cream flavour being added to the menu of all locations of a global fast food chain),
This is also aligned with Bencherki and Iliadis’s (2021) recent call to better develop what it means to consider “communicating and organizing as a single process” (p. 1). These authors argue that this CCO axiom hasn’t been fully realized yet, as research adhering explicitly to it has mostly focused on only one side (organization) of what is, by definition, a reciprocal relationship of identity. Noting that
As they show, Simondon’s (1995) cybernetic philosophy provides a useful framework to do so. Without delving here into the complexity of Simondon’s thought, it is worth mentioning that one of the key points Bencherki and Iliadis (2021) take away from it is the ubiquity of organizational phenomena. In very succinct fashion: when any two entities are significatively co-present (present to each other; in each other’s perceptual realm), information exchange happens and
Taylor and Van Every (2000, 2011) may not frequently cite Simondon’s (1995) intricate cybernetics, but their theorizing of (organizational) communication does understand in a very similar way the parallels that exist between the individuation (as a generative process) of so-called non-collective entities and the individuation of organizations. “As any dictionary will confirm, organization is merely a synonym for organizing, and as such it is a feature of all kinds of human activity, from getting supper ready to waging international war” (Taylor, 2011, p. 1276). It is in this regard that we take their theory to invite us to open the CCO approach to study the organizationality of any social facts (that is, their communicative constitution).
This conception of the intrinsic relationship between communication and organization is, however, not represented in Schoeneborn et al.’s (2019) article. What would most closely resemble it in their conceptualization, the verb–verb tension, is represented as a one-way relation of determination: communication as a process
If one holds to the need to set a strict definition of what organizations are, the constitution of organizations as specific types of social systems
Boivin and Brummans (2022), Chaput (2021), Cnossen (2022), Leybold and Nadegger (2020), and Smith (2022), among many others, all point to an interest for CCO scholars in a more intrinsic, ontogenetic organizationality that appears
These examples are, to us, cases of a fourth “tension” (Schoeneborn et al., 2019). The first and third approaches are, as we saw, linked by their focus on an entity. The third tension differs from the first one in that it opens up ontological assumptions by focusing not just on organizations per se but on similar entities that could be more or less organizational. A similar type of relation could be theorized between the second tension and our purported fourth. The latter would open – or flatten – the ontological assumptions of the second, while maintaining, like its predecessor, a strong focus on the processual nature of organizing. The first tension studies
In this regard, we read Latour (2018) to be promoting an approach quite close to the fourth tension when he lists “organization” (or what he calls “[ORG]”) as one of the fifteen, non-exhaustive, “modes of existence” he describes. In his work, [ORG] would be characterized by the amalgamation of “scripts” into courses of action (p. 391). As he said: “The adverb ‘organizationally’ leads to the verb ‘organize,’ which leads to the noun ‘organization’ – and, in particular, to the ones called ‘market organizations’” (p. 401).
Adding a fourth tension.
Schoeneborn et al. (2019) assert that “the verb–adjective tension has its roots in early CCO scholarship” (p. 409), citing Taylor and Cooren (1997) who asked, “what makes communication organizational?” in support of their claim. We believe that, in this, they tend to confuse asking what makes communication organizational with what makes organizations organizational. The former is the one that properly reflects Taylor’s work and many of the scholars he inspired, offering a social ontology foundation which, if acknowledged and developed, could indeed provide OS a way to connect with other social sciences. The relative disappearance of the formal/modern/capitalist organizations and the questions it raises are much less significant for organizational communication scholars since forms of organizing are fluid and pervasive and, therefore, can be found and studied in many other types of collective (human and non-human) arrangements.
In the end, our contention is that organizationality, counterintuitively, is a property of communication, that transfers into organizations, and that speaking of things as “organizational” is a form of (potentially useful) metonymic expression: we’re attributing characteristics of the process to the result of that process. Again, this may be quite acceptable, as it can be argued that the “result” of a process
Simply claiming we can move up and down from single interactions to organizations without any ontological cut might appear counterintuitive, but we do not see empirical evidence to support making such a cut. As Latour (2018) points out, There is aggregation; there is no break in level. There is mini-transcendence [of interactions scaling up to enormous effects]; there is no maxi-transcendence [of a higher structural level to interactions]. There is piling up; there is no transmutation. There is one level; there are not two. (p. 402)
What we’re representing here is a deeply communicational understanding of the phenomenon called “organization”. The bundling of certain entities to designate those social actors that are so important to contemporary life (formal or semi-formal collective organizations) is only secondary to the initial recognition that communicating always implies a form of organizing, as basic as it might be.
Whether these theoretical objects that are traditional organizations are sufficiently specific in their form of organizing to form the crux of a scientific
There is no doubt to us that many scholars have convincingly described and theorized aspects that might be characteristic of a considerable proportion of what we call organizations. That, of course, gives some weight to the claim that organizations are proper objects of study. However, the simple observation that these mostly boil down to questions of degrees: degree of intensity, frequency, layering, streamlining, or autoreferentiality of their activities (See Sillince, 2010, for example), shows that the boundary is at best, fragile, and at worst, unidentifiable – no ontological cut. To “make our ideas clear”, as Peirce (1998, CP 5.388) put it, we need to set the ontological background of our investigations on clear ground, and if there’s little solid ground to be found, then that is the ground on which we must nonetheless explicitly lay our arguments. For this reason, the theory of organizationality might be counterproductive: in seeking to define organizations, it may inadvertently obscure the fragility of their very distinction from other social entities.
How does the Organizationality of Communication Define new Research Agendas?
While many OS scholars do believe in the ontological distinctiveness of organizations as social systems – a defendable position, of course – no consensus has been reached on this yet, especially in social sciences outside organization and management studies.
3
A serious critique of the notion of organization
While this possibility might not be particularly appealing to every organization scholar – and is certainly not put forth here as a potentially universal stance – we contend that its mere existence and theoretical grounding carry significant insight for anyone interested in studying organizations. First, being able to study organizing without organizations shows the fragility of ontological claims in general in OS. If we can account for organizational processes without erecting strict boundaries to the ontological domain of “the organizational”, it may appear that those boundaries will not survive Ockham’s razor: their analytic optionality should encourage us to consider proceeding without them. Second, conceptualizing organizationality as an adverb – a modifier of communication – and organizations as only
A short comment on Blaschke’s (2017) attempt to address the micro–macro gap in multi-level organization theory can illustrate more concretely the shift in framing that our approach implies and the complications it avoids. A recurring question in organization theory is how we can account for the passage from individual-level behaviour (including communication acts) to structure-level organizational phenomena (Kuhn, 2012). Blaschke suggests that quantitative tools to measure intertextuality and filiation between communicational events may offer a better way to bridge the gap between these two levels without privileging either – a flaw he identifies in another method typical of CCO research: conversation analysis, by definition focusing on the minute details of organizational life.
Tracking how texts circulate, refer or encompass one another, he argues, can help us move up and down the interaction–organization scale more fluidly and capture the “dislocal” nature of the organization, i.e. the fact that organizations are constituted by communicational acts disjointed spatially and temporally (Cooren & Fairhurst, 2008; Putnam & Nicotera, 2010). While it may seem problematic to say that trivial interactions about the need to order more staples, to repair the coffee machine, or to call back a client can eventually scale up to a whole, proper organization, representing the multiplicity and interconnectedness of such events, especially through the capacity of quantitative methods to process large datasets, may indeed provide a more appropriate and convincing account of this scaling-up phenomenon. In this regard, we thoroughly appreciate Blaschke’s (2017) call for recourse to more methodical representations of the actual networks of communicational events that make up organizations.
However, what is especially interesting for the argument we’re making here is how Blaschke (2017) holds on to a conception of the organization as an entity, and as such is confronted with the need to arbitrarily trace boundaries around the organizational phenomena that he claims to study using network analysis. Otherwise, where would the network stop? Indeed, this systematic tracking of intertextuality (interreferences, common topics. . .) would surely result in an extension of any network we might attempt to draw around an organization to an almost infinite range. The team discussion in the café’s staff room about the latest trends from social media draws in tropes, tones, and figures from way outside of any reasonable boundaries of the organization. Yet these very elements may in turn affect the organization’s culture in, for example, the colleagues’ representation of their craft (Bell et al., 2021).
How telling, then, that the organizational phenomenon Blaschke chooses to study through network analysis is the stranded community presented in the TV show
Without denying that multiple boundaries do typically regulate and structure organizations in various ways, we would argue that their evolving, aggregative nature makes them not essentially different, if not in terms of quantity and intensity, from boundaries of other collectives. Two conversationalists might just as well performatively establish material, cognitive, and social boundaries (Hernes, 2004) around their activity. For example, they may turn their bodies towards each other to create the best acoustic conditions for the conversation to happen between them and only between them; they may keep from looking at other people around in order not invite them into the conversation; and they may talk about things and ideas that they might be the only two in the room to share references about.
Certain collectives might have more numerous and lasting ways of maintaining those boundaries (Cooren & Fairhurst, 2008), but that does not mean that they’re not produced essentially in the same way: communicatively. The FedEx driver’s habit of stopping on her route at drug store X for a French vanilla coffee, because she likes it there, is not any less organizational than the same habit if it is Roger’s, as he’s helping his friends move. Both habits may impact the future unfolding of action, regardless of one happening in the context of a corporation and not the other. From our point of view, these two habits, these two acts that make sense in their larger context, can both be organizing.
We have already touched upon several practical corollaries, for research, of this fourth approach to organizational phenomena but, for the sake of clarity, let us review them briefly:
- Ontology: In an approach focused on the fourth tension, organizations do not have to be distinguished prior to analysis. Organizationality is found where meaning – that is, Thirdness (Taylor & Van Every, 2011) – is produced. The distinction made, for example, by Ahrne and Brunsson (2011) between organizations, institutions, and networks is not relevant a priori in this fourth paradigm. Certainly, some entities can be characterized by one aspect or another of their functioning, and therefore categories can be established: a “group of friends” will tend to use one linguistic register to communicate with each other, the structure of a “formal organization” will invite bureaucratization, and so on. That said, no clear criteria seem to be sufficient, so far, to establish a priori ontological differences between organizations and other collectives.
- Epistemology: The “radical constructivism” of the Luhmannian framework underlying the theory of organizationality has been contrasted with the specific realist stance we adopt here, inspired by the Montreal School (Schoeneborn et al., 2014), and both entail quite different roles for theory in the formation of knowledge. Of course, to argue definitely in favour of either onto-epistemological stance would be preposterous, but it is nonetheless essential to recognize that these two are quite distant from each other. The processual approach of the Montreal School allows it to maintain an ontological agnosticism (Bencherki, 2018), which leaves open the horizon of possible theoretical developments to be gained from empirical research: the sensible world remains full of surprises. When we take some of the Luhmannian contributions at their word, the opposite happens: this openness does not seem to be totally possible. In this radically constructivist approach to organizations, the meaning of organizationality must be partially and arbitrarily fixed for the Luhmannian researcher to be able to draw
- Methodology: Finally, addressing “organizationality-as-an-adverb” means focusing on “process data”, with its own set of challenges and indications (Langley, 1999). Such data may be interaction transcripts, narrativized accounts of organizational processes, genealogical analysis of organizational topics, or figures, as well as many, many others. Without pretence at establishing any sort of “list” of recommended methods of data collection, we would simply invite any processually inclined OS scholar to consider how their data reflect the intrinsic temporal nature of the organizational phenomena they’re studying.
While, in our view, communication can always be said to be organizational, it may be so only to a minimal degree, with the scope and duration of its organizationality depending on certain parameters. Examples of such caveats are given in Taylor (1995), where he points out that there needs to be more than the simple
Once acknowledging that organizationality is to be found within the realm of the communicational, what must be emphatically underscored is that, for research operating in the adverbial tension, it becomes somewhat insignificant to determine which communicational events are “organizational” and which are not. Clearly, if we claim that organizing occurs through the aggregation and interrelation of meaningful communicational events, and if we define meaningful communication as any interaction making a difference somewhere in virtue of a principle, system or habit giving it meaning, then the sheer amount of communicational events potentially involved in some form of organizing becomes simply elusive (a point further discussed in Schoeneborn et al., 2014).
Rather, the adverbial approach – as we see it already active in the works of many colleagues – focuses on
The task at hand becomes one of describing the types and details of the transfer or creation of organizationality, from one process to another, as information spreads and relations are made (Kuhn, 2021). Conversely, this understanding of meaning as stemming from
To say that all of the organizational phenomena used in this article as examples are analogous because they emerged from communication is only the beginning of the story. Perhaps there are patterns. Perhaps organizationality/communicationality can be stronger or weaker (maybe in the manner of an illocutionary force; Searle, 1969), depending on how many of the five criteria identified by Ahrne and Brunsson (2011) are fulfilled by the network where it happens: Who and what participates? Are those participants in a hierarchical relation? Is their participation regulated, controlled or monitored? Again, for us, the use of the notion of organizationality might be less about asking if entities are indeed organizational or not, and more about trying to uncover when and how they participate or are affected by an emergent Thirdness.
Even single persons are organized by the communicational events that give them “texts” to refer to (Taylor et al., 1996), “allies” to associate with (Cooren, 2010), and “matters of concern” to focus on (Vásquez et al., 2018). Finding such patterns through the careful examination of the processes that constitute organized phenomena is one way to formulate sophisticated insights for improving organizational practices (see Fox & Brummans, 2019, for an example with interprofessional collaboration in a healthcare setting). And then, in a broader, philosophy-of-science scope, the adverbial tension shows incredible promise for what Bencherki and Iliadis (2021) call “a renewed philosophy of communication” (p. 2) “where communicating and organizing are truly a single process” (p. 17).
As bodies and minds come across various asperities, or (hard) facts in their phenomenal world (Secondness, would say Peirce), they assimilate (Stiegler, 2021), name, rank, normalize, and value these various segments of their experience. They organize, individually
Conclusion
Maybe organizational communication scholars were onto something quite important when they started seriously researching, almost sixty years ago, the link between these peculiar things named “organizations” and “communication” (Tompkins, 1967). Maybe this was a hint of a grander organizing property of communication (Cooren, 2000). In this article, we’ve made the case that the notion of organizationality has potential for a broad range of research questions and interests
Koschmann (2024) recently emphasized the importance of ontological clarity, stating: As new ideas are developed and refined there is some latitude for conceptual slippage and imprecision as the details are worked out. But eventually we get to a point where that fuzziness and vagueness is less tolerable and defensible, that enough scholarship has been done to show that various camps are relatively incompatible, and it is time to make tough decisions about where to reside and work. (p. 296)
We believe that
Footnotes
ORCID iDs
