The Communicative Constitution of Organizations E-Book

Robert D. McPhee

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: Foundations of Communication Theory Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 506

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Discusses interrelations or confluences among communication flows as the Four Flows Model of organizational communication

The Four Flows Model illustrates how communication makes an organization what it is, presenting in-depth information on the Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO). Written by a team of renowned experts in the field, this comprehensive resource is designed for all those involved in the study of organizations, particularly advanced students and researchers in Business, Sociology, Communication Studies, and the subdiscipline of Organizational Communication.

Organized into eleven substantial chapters, the text clearly and thoroughly explains all key aspects of Four Flows Theory (4F) and provides a theoretical grounding in its parent, Structuration Theory (ST). The book draws upon original research and evidence to demonstrate that organizations are not constituted in merely one way, but rather by four analytically different yet interconnected characteristic flows: Membership Negotiation, Self-Structuring, Activity Coordination, and Institutional Positioning. Throughout the book, the authors describe their theoretical developments through discussion of other key schools of CCO thinking, as well as important issues such as critical perspectives on organizing.

Articulating the significance of the Four Flows Theory for CCO scholarship, this innovative volume:

• Discusses interrelations or confluences among flows and explores relations of the Four Flows Model with alternate perspectives
• Emphasizes the need to ask broader questions in CCO theorizing regarding the ways socio-material things are constituted
• Lays out the context of 4F theory and identifies the key issues CCO theories should address
• Describes how conlocutions allow sensitive exploration of relations
• Introduces the concept of transtruction to Structuration Theory, explaining how communication produces and reproduces organizations

Highlighting the importance of studying organizations as novel social entities that rule the world, The Four Flows Model: The Communicative Constitution of Organizations is an excellent textbook for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses on Organizational Communication, Structuration Theory, Organizational Communication, Management, Organizational Studies, and Public Administration, as well as an invaluable reference work for researchers and practitioners in the field.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

1.1 Theoretical Grounding

1.2 Agency and Human Centrality to Human Social Systems

1.3 Materiality and Sociomateriality of Communication and Organizations

1.4 Power/Domination

2 Communication and Structuration Theory

2.1 Structuration Theory Tenets with Reference to Organizations

2.2 Structure: Rules and Resources

2.3 Systems

2.4 Agency

2.5 Duality of Structure

2.6 Modalities

2.7 Distanciation

2.8 Communication and System Structuring

3 Communicative Constitution

3.1 Structuration Theory and the Constitution of Organizing

3.2 The Structurational Hermeneutic

3.3 Conlocutions

3.4 Constitution

3.5 The Modalities—An Augmented Formulation

4 The Four Flows Model

4.1 Flow and Constitution

4.2 Flows with Agency

4.3 The Materiality of Flows

4.4 Flow as Organizational and Communicative

4.5 Ways That

Flow

Departs from

Communication

4.6 The Four Flows Model

4.7 Conclusion

5 Membership Negotiation

5.1 Moving from Outsiders to Insiders: Socialization Toward Membership

5.2 Previous Experiences and Their Relation to Membership Negotiation

5.3 Ongoing Membership Negotiation

5.4 Members’ Relationship to the Organization

5.5 Materiality

5.6 Constitutive Effects

5.7 Drawing on Membership Negotiation

5.8 Conclusion

6 Self‐Structuring

6.1 Type 1: Formal Structuring

6.2 Organizational Goals

6.3 Organizational Boundaries

6.4 Rules, Goals, and Other Formal Structuring

6.5 Emergence of Ideas of (Formal) Structuring

6.6 How Formal Structuring Constitutes Organizations

6.7 Formal Structuring and the Four Dimensions

6.8 Type 2: Information and Communication Technology

6.9 Bases of ICT

6.10 How the ICT System Constitutes the Organization

6.11 ITC and the Four Dimensions

6.12 Type 3: Culture

6.13 How Culture Constitutes Organizations

6.14 Culture and the Four Dimensions

6.15 Conclusion

7 Activity Coordination

7.1 Research on Coordination

7.2 HRO Activity Coordination

7.3 Supervisor‐Subordinate Activity Coordination and Transtruction

7.4 Materiality

7.5 Activity Coordination between Coworkers and Transtruction

7.6 Conclusion

8 Institutional Positioning

8.1 Institutions and Organizations

8.2 Positioning by Individual Agents

8.3 Four Facets of Institutional Positioning

8.4 Organizational Identity

8.5 Social System Actant

8.6 Organization to Individuals

8.7 Organization to Organizations in the Institutional System[s]

8.8 Transtructions

8.9 Corporate Social Responsibility

8.10 Crisis Communication

8.11 Conclusion

9 Confluence of the Four Flows

9.1 The Confluence of the Flows

9.2 Flows as Foundational Theoretic Constructs for Organizational Communication and CCO Analysis

9.3 Strains and Contradictions, or Contraventions, Among/Within Flows

9.4 Confluence of the Flows at Micro, Meso, and Macro Levels

9.5 Deep Structures/Currents and the Confluence of the Flows

9.6 Conclusion

10 Contributions to the Ongoing CCO Debates

10.1 Confluence with Luhmann’s Theory

10.2 Confluence with The Montreal School

11 Conclusion

11.1 Summary of Key Insights

11.2 Resources for Practical Appropriation of CCO Thought

References

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1 Transtructions.

Guide

Cover Page

Table of Contents

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Preface

Acknowledgments

Begin Reading

References

Index

WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

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Foundations of Communication Theory

Series Editor

Marshall Scott Poole (University of Illinois, Champaign‐Urbana)

The Foundations of Communication Theory series publishes innovative textbooks that summarize and integrate theory and research for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate courses. In addition to offering state‐of‐the‐art overviews in a broad array of subfields, authors are encouraged to make original contributions to advance the conversation within the discipline. Written by senior scholars and theorists, these books will provide unique insight and new perspectives on the core sub‐disciplinary fields in communication scholarship and teaching today.

Published

Health Communication Theory by Teresa L. Thompson and Peter J. Schulz. Organizational Change: Creating Change Through Strategic Communication, Second Edition by Laurie K. Lewis.

Theorizing Crisis Communication, by Timothy L. Sellnow, Matthew W. Seeger.

Theorizing Crisis Communication, Second Edition by Timothy L. Sellnow and Matthew W. Seeger.

The Work and Workings of Human Communication by Robert E. Sanders.

The Communicative Constitution of Organizations: The Four Flows Model by Robert D. McPhee, Karen K. Myers, and Joel O. Iverson.

The Communicative Constitution of Organizations

The Four Flows Model

Robert D. McPhee

Arizona State University

Karen K. Myers

University of California Santa Barbara

Joel O. Iverson

University of Montana

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Preface

This volume in the series Foundations of Communication Theory takes up an important or even crucial issue in organizational communication research, and organizational studies overall: How do organizations exist? What is involved in a human collectivity being an organization? That is, how is something—a group of people or associated set of people and material objects—Constituted as an organization? We think it is important to answer this question with special awareness of today’s capitalist corporations, which stretch across the world in one way or another, governed by varied regimes of corporate laws. However, a discussion of this issue must recognize, no less governments with departments and military arms that are themselves organizations, and nonprofit organizations and organizations comprised by definite, explicit alliances and collaborations of these, like NATO or the American Federation of Labor in the United States. Many scholars have noted that organizations can possess immense, world‐shaking power—indeed, the array of today’s complex organizations can claim to rule the world. (We should admit that emergent forms—the older one of liberal democracy or the relatively new collectivities like the Internet—may be harbingers of new interactive arrangements with, potentially, equal or even greater power—if they are not themselves colonized by organizations.) If we use a group of people in a pick‐up game of tag, or a nuclear family, or a pair of people in a conversation, as our prototype for understanding organizations, we may well be misled into emphasizing features that are inadequate to characterize the powerful organizations underlying practically all our everyday activity.

This volume puts forward our own view of organizational constitution, which, we will argue, is especially good for treating the issues mentioned above. We call it the Four Flows Model of the Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO). As we discuss later, it is surely a perspective, and might be a theory, depending on your definition of those terms. Obviously, we will be arguing that communication is what constitutes organizations—but only communication having certain features and interconnections. We will address merely in passing some equally basic and relevant issues, including those that Smith (1993), in a seminal paper for all of CCO, mentions as the questions of whether organizing, in a very broad sense, is the basic process underlying or constituting communication, and whether organizing and communicating are essentially equivalent. We address these, in passing, mainly in Chapters 3 and 4, by discussing what it means for communication to have constitutive force.

We think of our model as one among many organizational and communication theoretic positions, including many contributing to our own ideas and many more or less contrary to ours. This means that our discussion in this volume had to be multilayered and recursive, with later chapters reorienting as well as simply building on earlier ones. That being said, we propose in the remainder of this Preface to trace through the argument about CCO developed in these pages.

Our first introductory chapter sets the stage for our own argument and exposition, by recounting, in its first part, the array of fundamental positions in social and communication theory from the mid to late twentieth century, up to roughly today. These include empiricist or systems theories, critical theories, and interpretive theories. For very influential statements of this distinction, see Habermas (2015) and Burrell and Morgan (1979). Some later perspectives, perhaps even more distinct, were articulated as post‐structuralism and post‐modernism by authors such as Derrida (1976), Foucault (1977), Lyotard (1984), and LaTour (2007). Those revolts transformed, but also became incorporated in, the interpretive and especially the critical perspectives. This clash among perspectives led the way to the impressive synthesis achieved by the theorist to whom we owe the most gratitude, Anthony Giddens. Then, in the second half of the chapter, we identify some core issues that inspire developments from the triad of main earlier theories, concerning agency (the unique capacities of humans), materiality, and power. These also helped frame the development of structuration theory.

The second chapter articulates structuration theory, and organizational/communication research developing it, in some detail. One central structurational notion is the duality of structure: as humans interact, they draw on—use—the rules and resources of immediate context, language, and social order, while simultaneously reproducing—maintaining or transforming—those rules and resources for use in the very next act or episode, or more broadly as part of society. A second major notion is that of human agency—the sole type of agency in our perspective—for which Giddens’ model elaborates the capacities agents need in order to interact meaningfully and effectively, and to produce/reproduce structural resources.

The third chapter elaborates our views of communicative constitution. Communication per se has constitutive power—it brings social realities into existence and makes them what they are. We develop several concepts to shed light on this process: Giddens’ notion of distanciation—constitution as articulation of variance across time, space, and language; the structurational hermeneutic—the interplay between whole communication processes and their constituent parts; perlocution—the constitution of social realities through language, specifically in organized settings; and transtructions—the rules or relations that intertwine the meaningful, power‐laden, normative, and constitutive dimensions of social interaction. These four facets of constitutive communication provide conceptual substance for our conception of communicative flow in the next chapter. We also discuss constitution of a sign or linguistic resource, and of a (human) agent, noting how those differ from constituting an organization, and discussing how all three are influenced by forces of social power and its distribution in interaction and society.

Based on these preliminaries, our fourth chapter explicates our idea of communication as flow. While flow has important differences from examples of communicative interaction, its positive analogies are strikingly useful in understanding organizational contexts. Like aquatic, electrical, or atmospheric flows, communication is dynamic: it moves temporally, but changes form and direction, and overflows preestablished channels. It is multidirectional and typically disseminates meanings and consequences. Its signs, whether written or nontextual, are material and accompany flows of other materials—people, fuel, and goods—while giving those larger flows meaning and significance. It can include currents with different speed, depth, and composition, and cross‐cuts and roils itself in contradictions and paradoxes often enough that we find it appropriate to apply a flow label—contravention—to such strained social‐interactive phenomena. Indeed, we find enough parallel and enlightening features and subtypes between physical and communicational flows to speak of flow as a model for communication in general. However, we end the fourth chapter with a more theoretic move, by articulating and justifying the distinction among the four flows of our 4F model, discussed in detail in the next four chapters, where richer accounts of their distinctiveness and relations can be found.

Our fifth chapter discusses our first flow: membership negotiation. Both these terms are important: Membership emphasizes that people’s belonging, or connection as members, occurs as organizational agents become connected, through constitutive communication flows processes, into varying role‐relational practices typically marked by varying activity expectations, hierarchic or power levels, and standard communicative ties (e.g., with bosses). Negotiation emphasizes that these connective processes—of search, actual hiring, and crossing the boundary onto the membership roster, then socialization into work roles, sharing narratives with other members to position themselves, actual work experience, and perhaps exit—are two‐ or multidirectional. In this communication, both members and organizational others negotiate, exercising agency based on power deriving from identity factors as well as past work and interactions. They negotiate tacit or explicitly, placidly, or turbulently to set or re‐set the parameters of their role‐relationships in processes through which the organization as a multi‐member collectivity is constituted.

The sixth chapter concerns organizational self‐structuring—a communication flow that is prototypically though not distinctly organizational—which influences members as they produce and reproduce overt or recognized resources, social‐relational as well as material. Its influence typically structures the organization so that it can become a power vehicle or medium to serve the goals or interests of the collectivity—or, more narrowly, powerful members, groups, or even outsiders. Through three types of overt self‐structuring flow—the formal (authoritative texts and orders), the informal (cultural patterns), and the technological (infotech networks)—other communication gets constituted in its direction, its sanctioned use of an official or cultural vocabulary, and its legitimacy as it proceeds in the other flows. Now, a member may, for example, find that covertly cooperating to disobey an order, or consulting an illegitimate advice‐giver, or using a friend’s log‐in, all “work” in their role activities. However, those interactions are still (deviant) self‐structuring, probably reducing the organization’s internal control, reliability, and effectiveness—or, perhaps, yielding greater overall success!

The seventh chapter analyzed our third flow, activity coordination, which constitutes the activities of organizational members so that they mutually adapt and combine to serve goals legitimated in the organization. It accomplishes both on‐the‐spot informal adjustments among members as well as on‐the‐spot—usually routine, sometimes inventive, and even sometimes deviating—application of structural mandates to divide up labor and communicate only in sanctioned ways. It constitutes the organization as the flow in which organizational work gets collectively performed, thus practically connecting members (Flow 1) and outsiders (Flow 4), as well as putting into practice the self‐structuring influences of Flow 2.

The eighth chapter elaborates on our fourth flow, institutional positioning. Engaged in this flow organizational members and collectivities constitute the organization through activities and interaction that cross (and thus constitute) organizational boundaries, engage and influence members and activities of other organizations and collectivities, and thus produce an organizational identity. Thus, corporate social responsibility efforts (as well, unfortunately, as environmental pollution) rest on organized members’ communication and coordinated activities outside the structurated boundaries of a formally recognized organization. Efforts like social responsibility position the organization, through its members’ responsible acts, in relation to (communicatively‐constituted) institutions such as an industry, a sector such as education, an organized alliance such as the NBA, or even an organization so embedded and far‐reaching as Meta or PBS. In this fourth flow, it is especially clear how the boundary‐constituting force of each other flow, focused on in the earlier chapters, has impact on, and is even part of, Flow 4.

With the fifth through eighth chapters, we have set forth both the inner logic and the constitutive vitality of each communication flow in organizations, conceptualizing organizational constitution in a suitably variable and well‐rounded way. Our final three chapters address some unavoidable issues facing a perspective like the Four Flows Model. First is the issue of confluence—the fact that a single interaction can be part of more than one flow, or even part of a single flow in more than one way. Indeed, that is commonly or even necessarily the case. Each chapter discusses this phenomenon in passing, but here, we focus on several key issues. One is the distinctive value of our model, compared to the numerous other category schemes for organizational communication. Another is the issue of strains and contradictions within and across communication episodes, a fact we seek to reconceptualize with the term contraventions. A structural preference for clear, consistent, productive communication can be found in many if not most other positions, we have striven to expose and essentially include the many instances where organizational communication is roiled. A third is the fact that complex organizations are comprised of systems within systems of flows, so we discuss the varied ways the flows work at varied hierarchical levels. Fourth is the issue of deep structures—the fact that communication flows, or enacts contextual change, at varied levels. Societal features such as identity politics, work life and the contraventions it exhibits, global inequities of wealth, prestige, and power—these change more, even much more slowly than interaction or jobs. Yet slow‐changing deep currents and shallow rapids can at times, roiled by volcanoes or global warming, depart from our expectations.

Our tenth chapter concerns parallels and likely disputes between our perspective and others, and focuses on the two most fully developed alternative models or perspectives. With regard to the first major alternate, the Luhmannian School, we try to convey our great respect for their work on the importance and variegation of social systemic closure, while forging our own sense of social system boundaries produced and reproduced in the flows. With regard to the other main alternative, the Montreal School, we hope we have articulated our equally great respect for the insights they have generated into the nature of agency in communication, while ourselves still advocating a baseline notion of agency as the powers and constitutive force of interaction by humans.

Our final chapter gives a final summary of the main points for which we have argued, followed by a number of suggestions of ways practitioners can employ our general perspective or specific insights in everyday life and work. Our belief is that readers and researchers will find special utility in our approach to CCO.

Acknowledgments

We are naturally grateful to the past generations of scholars in social and communication theory who have done vital work forging intellectual foundations for understanding the communicative constitution of organizations and elaborating superb insights that have inspired us. In particular, we must mention our primary forebear Anthony Giddens, but also Talcott Parsons and Karl Weick in general social theory, and Stanley Deetz, James Taylor, Francois Cooren, and Linda Putnam in organizational communication studies specifically. We owe a special debt of thanks to Scott Poole for encouraging, facilitating publication, and providing valuable suggestions that helped give this volume its final shape.

Bob is monstrously indebted to Joel and Karen for their cooperation over years and decades working out the four‐flows position and its articulation in this book, for their patience and good judgment, as well as to the first student who worked with him on it, Pam Zaug. He is beholden in very many ways to Scott, along with Dave Seibold, for their collaborative work with him, over the decades, formulating the structuration‐theoretic study of communication, as well as the wave of other colleagues who have built on, or formulated rivals to, that work. He wants to acknowledge appreciation to many other colleagues and students at the University of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee, and Arizona State University, and to several other specific individuals for support that contributed in inexplicable ways to this project. But he has been blessed above all by the encouragement, patience, and love of his wife Dale Kalika and of his son Karl.

Karen feels especially fortunate to have taken classes from and been an advisee of Bob during her doctoral program at Arizona State University. The classes he taught introduced her to structuration theory and the communicative constitution of organizations, both of which have shaped her research and the research of many of her own students and advisees. This book was an opportunity to honor and promote the enormously significant contributions that Bob’s theorizing and writings have brought to the discipline, and to collaborate as well with an admired former ASU peer, Joel. Most especially, she is appreciative of her dear husband, Dave Seibold, who was supportive, and mostly patient, through the many years or work on this book.

Joel is grateful to Bob as a mentor, advisor, and colleague. His classes covering communication theory, organizational communication, and structuration provided rigor as well as humor while delivering a rich appreciation for academic work. This book is one way to extend our theorizing and continue the conversation regarding CCO theorizing with the community of scholars who engage in such work. He also thanks those who encouraged him to pursue theory such as his good friend, Pam Zaug, and many colleagues, including Karen. He especially appreciates the support and encouragement from his wife, Karen Iverson, and son, Ckhai Iverson.

1Introduction

“The Communicative Constitution of Organizations” (CCO) has, since about 2000, been a focal point for considerable work by Communication, Organizational, and Social Theory scholars (Basque et al., 2022). From the beginning, several major theories have guided research and been the subject of much theoretical discussion. Schoeneborn et al. (2014) identified three of these, but some other alternative theories do exist, including—Weick’s organizing theory and Kuhn’s (2008) theorizing on materiality and communicative theory of the firm. One of these, “Four Flows” (4F) theory, is the focus of this book.

The 4F referred to are flows of communication; specifically, for any single organization, there are four “flows” of communication that constitute that organization—that make it what it is, an organization. There are four flows for organizations as well known as, for example, Apple Computers or Google or “the Mafia.” At one extreme of size, we could point to the United States Federal Government, while at the other extreme, one would find social entities on the borderline of being organizations at all—maybe a local Thursday Night Book Club.

There are two important purposes for this book. One is to be a fundamental resource for work in disciplines that study organizations, like the subdiscipline of Organizational Communication, or Business or Sociology. We want to say, “This is how to conceive of and study organizations, or at least one way to do it.” The second is to correct a common tendency in CCO theorizing, or at least advocate for a different flavor in that work, away from the question, “How do sociomaterial things, like an Apple Watch or the WWW, get constituted?” In a somewhat alternative direction, we emphasize that a major—we want to say the major—reason for studying organizations is that on the whole, they are social entities of a novel kind that rule the world. Companies like Google can span the world, own a major share of world resources, and reconstitute major institutions such as capitalism. The United States Government can set out to “spread democracy”—to fundamentally alter the contents of “politics.” It is this kind of prototypical organization that we want to focus scholarly attention on (though, in varied ways, the focus is obviously already there). We urge CCO scholars to ask, “How are organizations communicatively constituted, such that they can (though obviously don’t always) wield such power?”

Answering that question is the goal of 4F theorizing and concretely of our book. In the chapters to follow, we will articulate the grounding of our work in structuration theory (ST), explain what a flow means, explain what the four flows are, and articulate their significance for CCO scholarship. In the remainder of this chapter, we lay out the context of our theory and the key issues CCO theories like ours should address.

1.1 Theoretical Grounding

Neither 4F theory, nor its parent ST developed in a vacuum. To explain the 4F vision specifically, we need to lay out some larger contexts and histories within which it lies. The obvious context is Organizational Communication, itself a subdiscipline within larger intellectual contexts, especially Communication or Communication Studies, which are in turn inside a major category Social Theory, including allied disciplines such as anthropology and sociology.

Long ago, works in social theory gave birth to another important subdiscipline, organization studies, recognizing bureaucratic communication as an important feature of nascent forms of economic corporation as well as in long‐established organizations such as governmental departments or the Catholic Church. Students of organizational communication, inspired by or coming from these disciplines, study not just one but many sorts of communication processes and phenomena that are relevant to organizations and organizing, drawing on ideas and methods from many scholars and conceptual schemes. Rather than try to organize on our own the welter we have today, we can employ an old, simplified, deceptively clear overarching distinction displaying the main currents of social/communication theory that ground the work of organizational communication scholars.

Organizational communication ideas themselves developed from three specific constellations of ideas, each with ancient ancestry and stultifying mutations. First is a set of conceptions of general systems, theories that actually elaborate ideas from hundreds of years Before Common Era (BCE). But modern ideas about systems developed, in novel insights and prominence, in the mid‐twentieth century, as scholars and engineers tried to build on the analogy comparing complex machines, including military artillery, automobiles, electronic devices, and simple computers, to the human body. One key analogy they advocated involved the sources generating coordinated motion among system parts: in machines and electronics, coordination is achieved through electrical current flow and microwaves, while in the human body, the nervous system coordinates physiological processes. In this view, every person or group has their own role in the system and vaster ecology of systems, and action governed by the role is valid, right, because it sustains the whole.

All sorts of systems seem, to many systems scholars, to generate system needs and values, which can in themselves explain and validate member activities and organization attributes. Thus, a systems theorist would say that a company has a public relations department or a CEO describes company plans in an interview because the company needs good relations with publics, such as stockholders—it finds good PR to be necessary for its existence. (Contrariwise, 4F theory, to foreshadow our argument, will reject the idea that the organization is a giant agent tending to its needs. Instead, we will contend that the necessity of PR or any other function is the result of communication among individual agents that necessitates—communication that makes, e.g., PR seem necessary to powerful agents—that perhaps points out problems caused by inadequate PR, or advocates copying PR practices in other, successful firms—in arguments and decision processes that may or may not succeed in inculcating PR for the company, perhaps even leaving that company’s constitution weaker.)

Systems theorists quickly ventured further, to argue that larger social units—relationships, groups, nations, and also in the mix, organizations—were also systems that could be studied using that analogy. Human communication in general could be construed as a series of signals/messages with measurable impact and often important feedback. Such interactive signals typically traced out a network of message interchange that integrated the overall system and helped it operate, just like the electronic signals that initiate and even power auto engines. (Such systems can, of course, also go haywire.) Just as for nonhuman systems, maintaining system performance is an overriding value, but social systems also involve cultures; cultures feature their own religious and moral value systems; all these values are system elements, functioning above all else to unify but stratify the systems. It is important to remember that, today and into the past and future, the metaphor of system, and of message flows integrating and coordinating it, is an enduring resource of communication, and especially organizational communication theory.

In a predictable dialectical swing, another group of scholars, today called critical theorists, argued that social systems theories, in their deepest notions, reflect and reinforce the worldview of currently empowered people, groups, or classes. System models insinuate that the current power distribution is simply there or unavoidable or optimally adjusted. Critical theorists instead argue that every element of social existence has an inner logic of development that generates external relations essentially opposing it, a contradiction that transforms their very essence. Thus, excellent and fulfilling work today conflicts with a simple fact: people work under conditions imposed by corporate powers that benefit from excellent work but still downplay the factor of workers’ excellence to maximize profit. Some excellent employees can win promotion to higher‐level work managing or “facilitating” others, subject to orders from above. Most of those “others,” even ones equal in performance excellence, stay at unfulfilling lower‐salary levels, to make the whole unit most profitable. A similar global process derogates some workers worldwide to be underpaid, constricted, stunted, deluded, and often have miserable roles, lives, and relationships. This occurs because work is monetarized, allowing its value to be controlled and expropriated to increase profits far beyond the return for management coordination and capital risk that is objectively their due. They also argued that monetarization leads to supposedly fair markets, but employees negotiating work and for organizational financial support can be manipulated using monopoly power, maximizing the inequality of distribution and control of work.

Critical theories today have evolved far past the Marxist economic‐class focus and an emphasis on the multivariant consequences of economic inequity—the multiple, intersecting dimensions of injustice and bias (toward differences in race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and occasionally class or age) where violence and disgusting suppression efforts evince deep structural roots. Critical theory has been distinguished first by its strong emphasis on the workings and varieties of social power phenomena such as intermember relations, formations like social–practical knowledge, representation, and privilege/disadvantage, which then unclearly exhibit (or sometimes hide) biased and deeply rooted institutional/macrosociosystemic forces. The focus on power, and domination of individuals such as workers leads tendentially to a focus on the limits of human agency, with people as puppets at the mercy of power‐bearing cultural and organizational forces. The second truly distinguishing feature of critical theory has been its fundamental value commitments. Critical scholars argue that all social/communication theory, like all human endeavors, is guided and lured by value judgments about features of today’s situation and possibilities of change. However, research committed to the value of analyzing what is, whether the social system today or people’s interpretive frames, inevitably slides toward acceptance of what should not be, and neglects reflective inquiry about the causes of absolutely foundational systemic bias.

We can best describe a third traditional variety of theory by noting its opposition to the first two variants. Interpretive social science opposes systems theory because of the willingness of the latter to invent variables based on outside theories or quick glances at the processes being examined. And they oppose critical theory’s imposition of crucial concepts like class, ideology, and even Western notions of power. Interpretive theorists were inspired by philosophic schools, including idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, and pragmatism, along with some ideas and methods from anthropology, rhetorical studies, and literary criticism. They argue that meaning and significance do not derive in any simple way from the natural objects and processes we observe, nor from the definitions and syntax of languages we are taught. Rather, we develop, in collaboration with our conversational partners, a sense of language and event meanings that is grounded in context and the practices engaging us with the world, other people, and ourselves.

For interpretive scholars, organizations (and all social phenomena and processes) are communicative in their essence. It is no surprise that several interpretive concepts have been prominent on organizational communication research. The most well known of these is organizational culture. Several decades ago, the idea that organizations have unique cultures, including stories and keywords, was fresh, but soon was transformed by findings that organizations are in every way cultural themselves, with cultural elements that are vague, localized in distinct milieux, and internally conflicting with one another. A second prominent conception is organizing (and a correlate term sensemaking)—not the noun organization, but the verb. The parent of this conception, Weick (1979), argued that organization is a meaning‐generating process starting from any initiating event or act (often by a manager), blossoming in a plethora of equivocal meanings. One or a few of these are selected to retrospectively interpret the initial act and give sense to inform/organize the consequent stream of acts/processes, and the relational forms characteristic of organizations. The sensemaking process thus inescapably generates a negotiated order (Clarke, 2021; Strauss et al., 1963), adjusting and intertwining the action and meaning threads of parties to the organizing. The focus of this school on meaning‐making and its variability leads to a tendency to study communication processes in quite fine detail without seeking to generalize patterns that are discovered.

The three idea‐clusters, systems, critical, and interpretive, have intertwined, clashed, and metamorphosed for decades or centuries, but remain easily detectible in organizational communication research and organize some of the intellectual clashes in organizational studies as well. In particular, the interpretive cluster of theorizing and research seems increasingly to recognize the power‐ladenness and inescapable biases in the language, rhetorical figures and topoi, and communicative practices—biases articulated by critical as well as rhetorical scholars. Contrariwise, critical scholars have become evermore articulate about the amazing variations of the meaning of fundamental concepts like work and the individual worker (Mumby, 2019), but perhaps without fully critiquing the impacts of their own critiques or insights that might come from systems concepts.

ST was created by Anthony Giddens to transform the analysis of relations among these titanic intellectual conceptions. Giddens argued, as we shall see in detail in the next few chapters, that all action by individuals, and all institutional forms such as democracy and capitalism, answer the inquiries of all three groups of scholars because they involve three dimensions of social being, that we label meaning, power, and norms. Giddens argued that these dimensions have different importance, or loadings, for any act, communicative process, or social unit. As explained in Chapter 3, we emphasize the specific interweavings of these dimensions, called transtructions. This idea allows sensitive exploration of relations, for instance, between meanings/ interpretive schemes and power imbalances, just mentioned in broad strokes. We find it vital to add to the triad of dimensions by elucidating a fourth, independent dimension of social action and social orders, called constitution. This will let us reconceive the relation of communication to organizations. It grounds our theory of CCO. The 4F are flows of communication (broadly construed, as we shall explain later) with varying constitutive significance, inevitably tangled by transtructions with the meaning, power, and value phenomena dividing past intellectual traditions. We cannot explore this issue in any depth in this first, introductory chapter, but even the discussion so far indicates how deeply 4F theory analyzes the communicative constitution of organizational phenomena.

1.1.1 Key Issues

The theorizing of the four flows approach has not emerged independently from other perspectives, but rather is developing as part of the dialogue about CCO and larger issues for organizational scholars. Specifically, we explain our theoretical developments through conversations regarding the other key schools of CCO thinking as well as important issues such as critical perspectives regarding organizing. Three of the key but inextricably overlapping issues that we address in this volume are the issues of:

Agency, and

human centrality to human social systems

Materiality

and

sociomateriality of communication and organizations

Power/domination in all its forms, as emphasized especially by the critical approaches to understanding organizations

We contend that ST, the 4F theory, and its underlying processes of conlocutions and transtructions (in subsequent text and in later chapters) offer a useful approach to advance the conversation regarding all of these issues, especially as they need to be part of any valid CCO thinking. We also contend that conlocutions and transtructions within the four flows provide a means to empower critical theorizing and explore issues of power, structure, and material history. While more details of these processes emerge through the book, a general description of the 4F position on each is useful.

1.2 Agency and Human Centrality to Human Social Systems

While agency has had many definitions across disciplines and approaches since the 1960s (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998), for us, agency is grounded in the capacity of involvement via social practices to not only make a difference, but also have the capacity to consider those differences as meaningful and value‐relevant. While some approaches to agency in CCO theorizing remain grounded in explanations of firms through agency theory (Barnard, 1938; Coase, 1937 among others) working to explain the relationships of principals typically owners, to agents, or employees who act as agents of the principal (for a more complete explanation, see Brummans, 2018). We consider the acting for approach fundamentally tied to concepts of ownership and authority that do not work well with critical approaches seeking to decenter ownership nor with collectives that do not have clear ownership, such as nonprofit organizations and voluntary associations (Frumkin, 2002).

In informal discourse, the notion of agency rightly means the capacity to communicate or act so as to have an effect. Scholars discussing agency often argue that agents, deserving of full normal agency, instead are empowered only with partial agency, a complex notion that involves ideas reflecting some challenges constraining or slanting agency. These include material, social, and personal conditions. We provide a more detailed discussion in Chapter 2.

To mention cardinal concrete cases, people concerned about the environmental crisis or various dimensions or social injustice will recognize, with chagrin, the variety and impact of these limitations on agency that plague their own work as well as the others they seek to help. Communication—itself an action that is plagued by challenges—is still key in embodying, and dialectically in overcoming, these challenges, and thus in invigorating and transforming agency. In each case, analysis of such obstacles must be based on the model of the individual agent, to avoid muddling its relevance to people striving to act, and to avoid analysis at the level of social units (e.g., organizations) that are, inescapably, comprised of agents facing varied arrays of agency challenges in the organizational context. In addition, speaking of more or less agency is blatantly oversimplified when, as soon as one type of challenge to agency is overcome, another takes its place. All of the challenges are appropriate concerns of critical scholars, who have indeed devoted a good deal of study to them.

Twentieth‐century social and communication theorists had somewhat different concerns about agency: whether unintended behaviors (unconscious, or issuing from distorted consciousness or an unintended result of an intended act) was truly action, by a valid agent. ST, as Giddens (1976a, 1976b, 1979, 1984) argues for it, responds to these challenges with a bedrock account of agency as based on “three overarching concepts: the power to make a difference by appropriating structural resources (the capacity to act otherwise), knowledgeability, and reflexive monitoring, which includes rationalization of action” (Iverson et al., 2018, p. 44; emphasis in original). We elucidate this core conception in later chapters.

We distinguish our definition of agency from the actor–network notion of actants, which bunches together humans and groups with material objects, environmental system components, psychological phenomena such as attitudes, and other nonhuman entities. ST’s conception reveals the error of lumping everything together under the ontological label of actants, especially if theorists must, in the next breath, declare as Cooren (in Schoeneborn et al., 2014, pp. 299–300) does,

… the human actor is an obligatory passage point in everything I have been talking about so far. If a logo communicates something in the name of an organization, it is not only because its designers might have meant it that way (sometimes, they can miss the point) but also because someone is able to make it say something when he or she sees it. …The organizational world is…a world where humans play a key role, to the extent that they are the ones who mobilize or “ventriloquize” texts, values, and facts in their discourse. (We must note that he goes on to state: “…humans are not only ventriloquists, in that they make, for instance, policies say something in specific circumstances but also ventriloquized [by other actants], in that these policies lead them to say specific things and not other things. There is no absolute starting point….)

The materiality facet of this issue is explained later, but the key to agency is that it is grounded in human practices and the capacity of humans to articulate and change what are fundamentally human social systems. This approach focuses on the meanings of actions and the ability to process the meaningfulness of organizations from a communication perspective. That said, we argue that agency in relationship to organizing answers the question, “Is it an organization if humans are removed from the equation?” From a communication perspective, we would contend the answer is a resounding no. While systems certainly function in nature, in outer space, we contend that organizations are constituted from communication processes that fundamentally require human interaction as part of the process.

1.3 Materiality and Sociomateriality of Communication and Organizations

In short: The novel terms materiality and sociomateriality actually evoke ideas from systems communication science of the 1960s or before, of mathematically‐analyzable information and communication as patterned matter‐energy (Berlo, 1960; Shannon & Weaver, 1949). These were developed as alternatives to various schools of mainstream sociological and psychological theories of organizational, and indeed of all communication. The emphasis on these terms, especially sociomateriality, derives from the observation that mainstream theories often overlook the things relevant to communication, preferring to elaborate on the personality characteristics, attitudes, linguistic and interactive patterns, and relational types manifest in communication. Orlikowski, the originating scholar of the important theory‐complex surrounding sociomateriality argues that we should not separate the material and the social as different essences, but instead should study contingent sociomaterial constitutive intertwinings of agencies. Our grounding in ST—one of the communication‐theoretic wellsprings from which some sociomateriality scholars, including Orlikowski, LaTour, Cooren, and Kuhn draw leads us to several responses.

For one thing, we are not forced to use the label material agency because we have a long‐lived and rich conceptual scheme available, organized around the term causation. It is commonplace, for instance, to say that using the instrument hammer causes a nail to pierce boards and cause them to stay in place, not that the hammer or nail has agency that leads to such effects. We need not ignore the causal powers of material phenomena like viruses, hurricanes, steering wheels, computers, or paintbrushes, nor the statistical‐interactive impacts of genes and environment on personality, when we abstain from calling them agents; nor do we have to downplay or oversimplify their significance in our explanations of organizational phenomena. Many sociomateriality theorists advocate a well‐defined sort of theory termed practice theory—but in fact, ST already is one! It is a sophisticated one, able to contain the dual ideas of strong human agency and decentering of agency in favor of practice (as we explain in later chapters).

We do seek, in concert with the theorists of sociomateriality, to avoid divisions of sociomaterial entities that reduce everything into humans vs. everything else. Noteworthy is that sociomaterial has embedded in it such a division, connoting the special status they often must give to human‐interactive phenomena. That same observation runs through much of the sociomateriality literature: for instance, one of its central concepts, affordance, primordially means feature allowing manipulation or access by humans. A cardinal example involving affordance is a tool, manipulated to accomplish some further task, and about which humans can have tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1966).

We think that a finer segmentation is preferable, into, say, simple objects vs. tools (with affordances) vs. self‐reproducing entities like genes or viruses vs. automata like thermostats vs. informated entities (Zuboff, 1988) like computers, vs. insensate living beings (that cannot feel pain or frustration—arguably plants) vs. sensate beings vs. their specific subcategory humans, vs. social relations/collectivities including organizations, vs. more englobing conditions like modernity (Giddens, 1990) or weather/climate. Systems theorists strive to articulate lists like this, detailing levels of complexity entities can attain. However, for our money, the crucial list of social‐material concepts is implicitly enunciated in standard ST. ST conceives agents with powers like reflexive self‐understanding, rationalization, and discursive penetration, all of which enable them to engage in practices (explicated in later chapters). Then the crucial distinctions for theory focus on agents vs. practice vs. resources for action vs. constraints on action vs. contexts of action vs. conditions circumscribing action (McPhee & Iverson, 2009). Preserving the unique status of empowered human agents affirms the importance of ideas like meaning‐in‐context, value, significance, identity, and voice, for explanations of organizational (or any) communication (which thus is not equivalent to a causal chain of material signals or nonhuman agents).

However, we must add one final caveat about how ST relates to materiality/sociomateriality scholarship. Theory and research inspired by the interwoven‐practice notion of materiality tend to underemphasize the historical‐materialist insights of critical theory, especially the idea (Bleich, 2013) that language, and communication in practice, are both unequally available, unequally mastered, and in general help to create the whole range of obstacle to agency detailed just earlier. For instance, studies of affordances—mediating support for using—ICT generally ignore the fact that, for most of humanity, adequate ICT—and adequate living conditions of many sorts—are unaffordable—a fact that should roil the discourse of materialist social and communication scholars, as it does the insights of interpretive/deconstructive scholars.

1.4 Power/Domination

As well displayed in the accounts just earlier, critical scholarship has found fertile ground in the webs of ideas centered on the terms agency and materiality. Our overviews of those ideas, based in ST, already showed how structuration and 4F ideas might have unique value for critical, and all, organizational research. But our third key issue—power/domination—has a special affinity for that work. Like a city, an organization has “storage capacity (involving) time‐space distanciation and the generation of power,… It is a special kind of container, a crucible for the generation of power” (Giddens, 1981, p. 95, 96) and 4F theory articulates the fact that power flows through organizations in more than one way.

To introduce the discussion elaborated in later chapters, Giddens’ ideas regarding power are crucially tied to one of his most core ideas—resources, or structural resources. Structural resources, in his formulation, are comprised of two analytically separate and apparently distinct, subcategories, all of which are focal in critical theory. One is allocative resources—forms of transformative capacity—power to make a difference—generating command over objects, goods, or material phenomena. The other is authoritative resources—transformative capacities “generating command over persons and actors” (Giddens, 1984, p. 33). However, blatantly obviously, an allocative resource such as a meal from a famous chef often requires mediation by supportive personnel (subordinate chefs, waiters, etc.) via the agent’s authoritative capacity. Equally obviously, those supportive personnel draw upon material resources like cookware and chopped onions. So to discuss: “command over…material phenomena” we must discuss not just raw supplies plus tools or other instrumental media, but the command over supportive personnel involved. Contrariwise, command over persons and actors is dicier. Take, for example, a manager of a work department. This authoritative‐resource holder has to work, with variable success, to:

induce the commitment of new, as well as old, subordinates and co‐managers, plus even improve the quality of their efforts, plus induce persons of higher authority to provide support.

maintain an acceptable and workable degree of goal clarity and system integrity (an impression of what their department does, of how they do it, of whether they do they do it right and legally, of how their department fits in, and of whether it achieves some level of good outcomes for everyone involved—but especially the bosses).

achieve locally adapted, departmentally coordinated, and successful communicative and other work (not just an impression, but actually collaborate to deliver the goods).

balance their identity (i.e., relatedness to their legitimate work organization) with their and their subordinates’ attention to outside contributions and challenges.

Yes, these needs (overlapping, admittedly, the list of challenges to agency given in chapter two) intentionally correspond roughly to our 4F. But they, equally, reveal how agency is fundamentally linked to the critical‐theoretic concepts that occupy the heart of ST, such as the power dialectic practice‐based vs. merely utilitarian agency, and the discourse of self‐identity, explained in later chapters.

Those basic issues will reappear throughout the book. But we now turn to explicate the central theory referenced in the discussion earlier—ST.

2Communication and Structuration Theory

For decades, organizational researchers have treated organizations as relatively stable containers in which activity occurs (Kaufman, 1971; Negandhi, 1973). Most research framed by this perspective on organizations (for‐profit, nonprofit, not‐for‐profit, etc.) were macro in nature and assumed an existing organization with most distinctions between organizations attributed to size or number of people involved (Hawes, 1973). From this view, activity occurred within the boundaries of the organization and communication as a focus was limited to predictable patterns in which members sent and received messages to one another (Haas & Drabeck, 1973). Little consideration was given to how the organization influenced and was influenced by changes in membership or society beyond responding to market changes. All perspectives “assume the independent existence of an organized organization within which other activities occur” (Hawes, 1973, p. 499). This container‐like view simplified research and theorizing by limiting the focus to messages in bounded times and location, and gave little consideration to questions about human agency—how people, behaviors, and events associated with the social entity play out.

Weick (1979) offered an alternative view that slowly changed the way many scholars theorize and investigate organizations. He argued that organizations are not things or settings in which people perform activities. Instead, he proposed that organizations are organizing processes that establish, maintain, and dissolve social entities. To theorize and research organizations is to examine those processes which, by nature, are not static, but ever‐evolving. However, like others, his writings reified the idea that these organizing processes occur within the boundaries of a given locale. Further, while communication is assumed in the organizing process, initially, communication was not an investigative focus of sense‐making research.

In the 1970s, sociologist Anthony Giddens introduced a meta‐theory, structuration theory (ST), to explain the development and sustainability of social entities in society. In contrast to previous theorizing, ST accounts for social structures and also elaborates on the role of human actions (agency) in enacting social systems. Further, ST provides a means to explore the processes that connect human actions to structures as mutually influencing each other. Most importantly for the central focus of this book, ST provides an array of concepts to help answer the question: What are organizations? How are they created, modified, sustained, and dissolved?

2.1 Structuration Theory Tenets with Reference to Organizations

Sociologist Anthony Giddens is credited for developing ST, joining other scholars at the time who sought to explain human behavior in society through various practice theories. Years before, Berger and Luckmann (1967) argued for theories that would explain the reciprocal influence of society on individuals and individuals on society. They joined Popper (1962), who also argued that “all social phenomena, and especially the functioning of social institutions, should be understood as resulting from the decisions etc. of human individuals” (p. 98). In response, practice theories emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as scholars such as Bourdieu, Bhaskar, Foucault, and Giddens looked for ways to better explain relationships between material, knowledge, agency, and action.

Practice theories attempt to explain daily activities that form structures to influence everyday life beyond the popular rationalist theories that were widely used at the time. Practice theories define “practice or praxis” as “the whole of human action” and “practices” as a routinized type of behavior involving physical and mental activities, material understandings, skills, emotion, and knowledge (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 249). Structures become an important element because humans rely on structures in practice and their individual actions frequently have more enduring and broad implications in the production of praxis (practices that reproduce the regularities in systems; Bourdieu (1977)).

Based on the writings of these and many other scholars, Giddens proposed ST, which not only explicates individual behaviors, but very effectively explains the relationship between human agency and structures. Giddens articulates the production, reproduction, and transformation of systems and structures and allows for the examination of these phenomena at micro, meso, and macro levels. We briefly review key elements of ST, which is the basis of our model of the communicative constitution of organizations.

2.2 Structure: Rules and Resources

Even though they are generated by human action, structures can be described as external to action and understood as the foundation of civilized society constraining and directing behavior. All human activity is based on structures, which are themselves intertwined in social life into a larger fabric that can be referred to as structure. In fact, a primary fact about structure is that it is dual, both enacted or produced as it is drawn on to guide and constitute activity, and reproduced through activity. Thus, we do, for example, chess by following its rules; thereby, we maintain it as “the game of chess,” though we can transform it by shifting into a variant like instructive chess (where a teacher discusses alternate moves and their disadvantages, allowing moves to be taken back, etc.), or one of the innumerable variants of chess (Wikipedia, List_of_chess_variants), or even creating our own variant. We discuss these ideas more in the section “Duality of Structure.”

Giddens’ idea of structure refers to phenomena at two distinct levels of generality, as we already indicated. One is the level of macro‐scale institutions, such as the world economy, the system of nation‐states, or a broadly used language. Structures at this level involve resources such as the inequality of wealth or the different vocabularies, belonging to specific languages, for expressing one group’s ideas versus another’s. Structural resources, as general as this, are relevant to people’s lives mainly by corresponding to the rules and resources for common social interaction. We also will discuss the relation of macro to micro structures more in the section “Duality of Structure.”

Second, structures at the level of social interaction can be described in two overlapping ways through rules and resources. First, they include rules, both formal and informal, that guide individuals to not engage in some behaviors, thereby restricting their activities. At the same time, they also guide them about what they should do and how to do it. Some rules permeate society such as rules to avoid killing or stealing, while others are contextual such as giving two weeks’ notice before quitting a job, though that rule may be disappearing or have less power with quiet quitting (Johnson, 2023