184Giordano


Paperback: 376 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press (2014)
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0198703082

Unplugged - Book Reviews Special Forum:
Around the Communicative Constitution
of Organizations perspective

François COOREN, Eero VAARA, Ann LANGLEY & 
Haridimos TSOUKAS (2014), Language and 
communication at work: Discourse, narrativity and 
organizing. Perspectives on Process Organization 
Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

reviewed by 

Yvonne GIORDANO
GREDEG (UMR 7123), Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis
yvonne.giordano@unice.fr

The unplugged  section edits some book reviews special forums dedicated to a 
topic, an author or a theoretical perspective. This second forum considers three 
important volumes gravitating around the communicative constitution of 
organizations perspective. Originated in a seminal contribution from one of our 
reviewers, Robert McPhee, who  based his work on Giddens’s structuration 
theory, this perspective experienced different avenues and forms now a “rather 
heterogeneous theoretical endeavor” (Schoeneborn et al., 2014). Montreal 
School of organizational communication constitutes one of the main pillars of this 
perspective; James R. Taylor and François Cooren recently offered some 
stimulating volumes, carving  out their own path within organizational 
communication studies. The CCO  perspective has significantly disseminated in 
the field of organizing studies and an effective conversation henceforth unfolds 
with various discursive studies. 

L’évènement fondateur du contrat social ne 
remonte pas à quelque petit matin 

préhistorique de l’humanité ; on le repasse à 
chaque conversation.

Bougnoux (1989: 254)

! The fourth work in the series Perspectives on Process Organization 
Studies is linked to the annual International Symposium on Process Organization 
Studies (June 2012). This collection is devoted to voices that claim that 
organizations have to be explored as processes in the making (Hernes, 2007 ; 
Langley & Tsoukas, 2010). François Cooren, Eero Vaara, Ann Langley, and 

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1.‘In his latest book, Cooren (2015) explains how 
we can differentiate between Discourse with a 
“D” as relatively durable, and institutionalized, 
focusing on repetition, and reproduction (textual 
modality), and discourse with a “d”, as erratic, 
grounded and local which focuses on the eventful 
character of conversation and interaction 
(conversational modality) (see, in particular, pp. 
4−10).

Haridimos Tsoukas invite us to articulate organizational process research studies 
with various theoretical discursive perspectives, using the fruitful metaphor of 
work. 

MAIN PURPOSE AND STRUCTURE OF THE VOLUME

! As mentioned  at the very beginning of the book, Language  and 
Communication at Work means many things and can be related to a large variety 
of theoretical and methodological approaches. For decades, linguistics, 
discourse1 analysis and communication studies have  gained  a respectable status 
in the organizational literature, especially since the eighties, with the  “interpretive 
turn” (Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983). Nevertheless, they were often used in a 
functionalist or restrictive  way by organizational scholars. Language and 
communication were focused on language alone as if they were in a vacuum and 
detached from other sociomaterial practices, activities, and  actions. 
Organizations, in turn, were  often metaphorically understood as containers of 
communication (Putnam, Phillips, Chapman, 1994), as “a bracketed space in 
which communication occurs” (Ashcraft, Kuhn & Cooren, 2009: 9). 
! At the same time, and since then, other scholars have maintained that 
language  and communication have to move  beyond these narrow views. Not only 
are they part of organizational life  (or work) (Borzeix & Fraenkel, 2001) but they 
are also constitutive of work (Engeström & Middleton, 1996; Lacoste, 2001) − 
and, more widely − organizing (Boden, 1994; Cooren, Taylor & Van Every, 2006; 
McPhee & Zaug, 2000; Putnam, et al., 1994; Putnam & Nicotera, 2009; Taylor, 
1993; Taylor & Van Every, 2000; Weick, 1979). Part of this book is deeply 
embedded in this last approach. The  editors add two other intricate processual 
questions: how language and  communication actually work, i.e. do things in the 
broad contexts of organizing and what role they play as part of strategic and 
institutional work in and around organizational phenomena (p. 2). Moreover, the 
main purpose is to articulate various theoretical views of language and 
communication (at work) with organizational processual perspectives, which are 
the essence of these annual series. The challenge is exciting: ‘knitting’ these 
views with organizations-in-the-making streams of research constitutes a new 
step  for cross-disciplinary studies that will illuminate the organizational process 
research agenda (Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas & Van de Ven, 2013; Tsoukas & 
Chia, 2002).
! The book consists of 13 chapters, including the introduction, which is 
written by François Cooren, Eero Vaara, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas. 
The authors come from different disciplines, thus establishing a valuable dialogue 
between them: communication, (socio)linguistics, sociology, psychology, 
organizational behavior, management and organization studies, marketing, 
strategic management. Broadening the scope of “(at) work”  to include pluralistic 
meanings opens up  various avenues for collaboration between organizational 
and communication research, as suggested by Ashcraft et al. (2009). Many of the 
chapters are  based on empirical material and employ various strategies and 
methods, such as ethnomethodology/conversation analysis (Chapter 4), 
ethnography (Chapters 3, 6, 11, and 12), narrative analysis (Chapter 10), and 
critical discourse analysis (Chapter 3). Other chapters are more conceptual and 
theoretically oriented (Chapters 2 and 5), illustrative (Chapters 7 and 8), or 
questioning of methodology (Chapters 9 and 13).
! Another interesting feature of the book is the large variety of contexts and 
settings under scrutiny: meetings (Chapters 3, 4, and 5), a large electricity 
company (Chapter 5), a mountaineering expedition (Chapter 6), the design of a 
large organization (Chapter 7), a management coaching conversation (Chapter 

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2. James R. Taylor is considered as the founding 
father of the Montréal School of Organizational 
Communication, at the origin of the constitutive 
view that we briefly sum up hereafter.

8), the famous 2005 Stanford  Commencement Speech given by Steve Jobs 
(Chapter 10), the resuscitation bay of an emergency department (Chapter 11), 
three regional health authorities (Chapter 12), and the research process itself 
(Chapter 13) .
! The editors suggest that one  should read the volume through four ‘lenses,’ 
and reflect on the methodological questions and challenges they open up.
! The four lenses are as follows:
− the constitutive role and power of communication; 
− the discursive and communicative practices that form a constitutive part of the 
daily life of organizations;
− the emphasis on temporal (and  spatial) construction and reconstruction in 
discursive practices;
− the connection of discursive practices with other social and material ones. 

THROUGH THE BOOK: AN OVERVIEW OF THE FOUR LENSES

 These four lenses are unequally present through the  book but all in all, the 
different chapters illustrate how they can help  us to theorize how “discursive 
work” matters for processual research studies.

Communication as constitutive of organization (CCO)
To a greater or lesser extent, the  entire book may be read as a defense of a 
‘strong’ view of communication which flows through some scholars as a way of 
theorizing communication as well as organizations. As mentioned above, the first 
restrictive/functionalist perspectives maintained that communication was “located 
within a reified, materialistic organizational structure” (Putnam, et al., 1994: 375). 
According to  us, after the first “révolution de palais”  (Taylor, 2003: 3) of the 
interpretive turn (Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983) mentioned earlier, the  second 
one happened when James Taylor’s (1993)2 “conversation/text theory” gave rise 
to more radical views of communication, subsequently embedded in what 
scholars labelled “Communication as Constitutive of Organization” (CCO) 
(McPhee & Zaug, 2000; Putnam & Nicotera, 2009). 
! To put it briefly, this perspective will develop  the idea of the organizing 
properties of communication, the term “constitutive” being referred  to and 
interpreted in various ways, and not necessary familiar to all organizational and 
management scholars. Taking the ‘stronger’ version, communication cannot be 
reduced  to what people say and write even if interactions are  taken up  in 
subsequent encounters: they are not sufficient to constitute an organization 
(Cooren, 2015; Cooren & Fairhurst, 2009). The argument goes beyond 
interactional patterns as building blocks of the  organization (Boden, 1994). 
Incorporating Latour’s work (1996, 2005), the CCO  turn focuses “on how and 
what people do things locally, but […] extend[s] this action-oriented approach to 
[…] non-human actors, which can have textual forms [statuses, rules, protocols] 
or not [spatial arrangements, uniforms, furniture]” (Cooren & Fairhurst, 2009: 124 
and 137). CCO  scholars do not focus solely on human interactions and 
sensemaking activities; they extend the  concept of communication to what non-
humans do. Thus, this turn has to  be understood, not as a refinement of other 
theories, but as a radical shift: “discourse (or communication in general) 
constitutes the very means by which organizational forms […] are brought into 
being” […]. Discourse consists of a series of acts that transforms the world, as 
minimal and iterative as these transformations may be” (Cooren, 2015: 12 and 
59, author’s emphasis). The introduction and part of the present volume are 

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clearly constitutive-oriented: “It is through communication that we get organized 
and act collectively”  (p. 10). Four chapters can be clearly included in the (radical) 
CCO approach.
! Honoring the founder of this constitutive  turn, the core of the volume opens 
up  with Chapter 2, written by James Taylor himself, inspired by the reading and 
re-examination of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. He discusses the emergence and 
construction of the organization as an entity with the identity of a person who then 
is repeatedly reconstructed in the conversations and texts generated by their 
members. Through this process − Impersonating the Organization − these 
members can thereby establish their own authority (Taylor & Van Every, 2014) as 
its agents, translators, and representatives. By reversing Austin’s (1962) concept 
of “speech act”, Chapter 5 focuses on “action discursivity”: if words do things, 
acts speak also. Why ? Because acts involved in collective activity – considered 
as a dialogical discourse – are also signs which point to socially built meanings, 
across time and space, that is to say instituted and stabilized areas of meanings. 
Clearly embedded in the constitutive  view, Chapter 7 analyzes the design of a 
large organization as a communicative constitution of space. We  can remember 
that, by expanding our conception of language and communication, not only 
words but also spatial arrangements, habits, practices, furniture, artifacts, 
principles, and values, do also communicate. This chapter illustrates how a 
strong version of communication can reframe the topic of design activity 
associated with organizational space. Using “a sociomaterially−informed CCO 
view” (p. 163), the authors aim to extend it to design, linking the interactional with 
the material space of design’s enactment: “[t]o  design […] is to do sociomaterial 
work, and that work can be  illuminated by CCO-based visions of relational 
agency, authoritative texts, and spaces”  (p. 167). Spatial arrangements tell us 
something  about what or who is made present or absent in and through them. 
Chapter 11 refers to the same approach and will be discussed later.

Practices of language use
 More than 20 years ago, in her provocative work, Boden (1994: 8), 
claimed that the business of talk is “not just fleeting details of the moment”. As 
part of the daily life of organizations, discursive practices may be observed as 
micro-interactions per se, focusing on a very local level. They can also be 
explored as (re)producing, confirming features, procedures, and routines, and 
transforming the social or organizational life by the way. “[Organizations] are 
constituted moment to moment, interaction to interaction, day to day – across the 
durée of institutional time”  (ibidem). Many chapters are inspired by this work, 
adding or articulating other theoretical traditions such as critical discourse 
analysis or rhetoric. 
! In Chapter 8, micro-practices of management coaching are carefully 
analyzed through a conversation with a middle  manager, a specific form of talk-
at-work. The authors differentiate between Discursive  views (historically forms of 
ideas) and discursive practices (locally/contextually produced achievements). 
They wonder which discourses the  speakers draw upon within their narrations, 
and how they enact them through discursive  practices (p. 179). The analysis of 
four episodes of a conversation shows how a set of predefined managerial 
discourses tend to be actively (re-)enacted by the coach. At the same  time, “the 
coach tunes in to the manager’s discourse in a supposedly sympathetic way by 
highlighting, mirroring, and commenting on the emotionally laden aspects of the 
narration” (p. 190) while enrolling him in her favored interpretations. The analysis 
“leads to the assumption that management coaching attempts to indirectly shape 
employees’ behavior by controlling the intimate constructions of their selves” (p. 
191). Chapter 10 explores how myths are created and sustained. Drawing on 
different literatures, the chapter provides a three-part framework based on 
narrative analysis and the literature about myths, in order to analyze the famous 

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2005 Stanford  Commencement Speech given by Steve Jobs. “The speech can 
be  seen as narrative-at-work as it reveals rhetorical processes at play when 
constructing and reconstructing organizational myths” (p. 8). Myth-making is 
analyzed as a process in which myths of heroic business leaders are 
communicatively created, maintained, reproduced, and institutionalized through 
time and spaces. 
! Chapters 3 and 4 echo a recurrent theme in critical studies: language and 
communication are not power and control-free (Fairclough, 2005; Mumby, 1988). 
These scholars aim at denouncing forms of control, inequality, and oppression 
that language use contributes to producing, reproducing, and also altering. 
Meetings are central loci of these processes: in Chapter 3, Ruth Wodak shows 
how language is demanding work in a meeting of European Union decision-
makers, in particular when analyzing the micro-level discursive dynamics 
involved (p. 6). From an ethnomethodology-driven perspective, Chapter 4 
analyzes a strategy meeting through the first-order practices of its members. It 
focuses on how people use category-bound reasoning procedures through which 
“they make their own organization”. Talk actively brings into being organizational 
attributes, as people  use accounts of power(-talk) and politics(-talk) during social 
interactions to make sense  in meetings. The authors show that studying 
language-in-use in naturally occurring interactions is a fruitful contribution to 
grasping how accounts by members “not only describe the world, but […] reveal 
its constitution” (p. 75). While critical studies treat power and  politics primarily as 
external ‘forces,’ operating ‘outside’ talk, and constraining/shaping social action, 
here, power and politics are analyzed as unstable outcomes of a never-ending 
sensemaking process that members accomplish themselves.

Communicating as timing and spacing
! This third lens is less present throughout the book. This is surprising, 
because the very purpose of the series is directly linked to time/timing, which is at 
the heart of all processes (Langley et al., 2013). If other chapters include time/
timing, only two  (Chapters 6 and 11) tackle “a key question related  to the 
processual paradigm, i.e. how language and communication allow us to  enact 
specific times and spaces in which we can then navigate”  (p. 11). These two 
chapters echo in part the Special Issue of Organization (November 2004), where 
Cooren and  Fairhurst (2004: 794-795), by means of a detailed schematic 
analysis of organizational interactions, showed  “how interactions contribute – and 
sometimes fail to contribute – to the fabrication of spatio-temporal closures which 
define the structures of organizing  processes”. This early study opened up  new 
ways of analyzing coordination processes, particularly in high-reliability 
organizing  (ibid.: 805). In doing so, they have given flesh to the concept of 
“double interact”  in Weick’s (1979) research, which has greatly inspired 
organization and communication theories (Putnam & Nicotera, 2009).
! Mengis and Hohmann (Chapter 11) focus on the  work of collaborators in 
the resuscitation bay of an emergency department. Based on a focused 
ethnography, they study how multiple professional groups have to coordinate in 
order to stabilize and diagnose  a critically ill patient when the task at hand 
evolves and develops in unexpected directions (p. 261). Three temporal practices 
are identified: fabricating the present, re-performing the past in the present, and 
expanding the future present. Recent past and imminent future are 
conversationally and materially drawn into the present. Coordinating involves 
temporal work, so time is not understood as a contextual ‘given’ background 
within which coordination practices are  embedded: it is an outcome of 
communicative activity. Time is neither in the  analytical background nor an 
objective reality but the “active –  both conversational and material –  drawing 
together […] of the temporally distributed attempts of coordinating work” (p. 263). 

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In keeping with the CCO  approach, the study also highlights “how materiality and 
its close entanglement with conversational practices come into play” (p. 286).
! Located in a more ‘exotic’ place – a mountaineering expedition in South 
Patagonia – Chapter 6 is inspired by Cooren and  Fairhurst’s (2004) frame 
mentioned above. It shows how, in this specific project-based organization, “time, 
space and calculation are not only discursively and conversationally constructed: 
they are also constitutive of the  expedition in and  of itself” (p. 139). Coping with 
non-human entities − the raging ocean and the stormy weather ‘spoke’ very 
loudly − insufficient information gathering and unexpected disruptions, the initial 
project (crossing the Darwin Cordillera for the first time in history) turned into a 
modest few “firsts” in a limited area around Mount Shipton/Darwin. “The crow’s 
flight” as a context-specific chronotope (Bakhtin) was used as a flexible unit of 
time- and space-communicative  calculation during the expedition and afterward, 
in a subsequent movie and conferences. It allowed  the climbers to  make sense of 
unexpected situations when sensemaking was a daily puzzle, so  that they could 
frame and reframe spatiotemporal objectives as well as the project itself through 
time and space. 

Placing language and communication in their sociomaterial context
! We can interpret such a title in at least two ways:
− A ‘loose’ one, considering that materiality is the background and language and 
communication the figure. Such a meaning is another way of going  back to the 
container metaphor or of bringing human-centered interactions and meaning 
making into the center of the picture. If communication never takes place in a 
vacuum, materiality is the ground upon which communication stands up;
− A second way, more disruptive, is first related to the work of Bruno Latour 
(1996, 2005) and then re-appropriated by the CCO  turn, and also by other 
scholars who argue for bringing materiality back in (Carlile, Nicolini, Langley & 
Tsoukas, 2013/2014). Both consider that “who or what communicates can 
certainly be individuals, but also architectural elements, artifacts, and  even 
principles, ideas or values”  (Cooren, 2015: 9). Saying that communication never 
takes place in a vacuum suggests that we must examine the interrelationships of 
communication and other social and material practices. Language and 
communication are not only ‘beside’ a material world; they are entangled 
(Gherardi, 2012; Jones, 2013/2014) in a world  which ‘speaks’ also because non-
human entities do things. This is not just to say that the CCO  turn is 
sociomaterially sensitive, but also that agency results from a hybridization of 
humans and non-humans. Reconceptualizing communication in this way 
“acknowledges the interactions between entities of variable ontologies”  (Cooren 
& Fairhurst, 2009: 139), and not only human beings.
! Chapter 11 (discussed above) shows how “organizational actors coordinate 
their distributed activities by mobilizing  a textual world  of understandings and a 
sociomaterial world  of practical concerns in conversations” (authors’ emphasis) 
(p. 264). In the same  vein, Chapter 7 shows that assemblages of heterogeneous 
elements (interests, persons, technologies) produce agency, realized through 
interactive events. Using a practice lens (Nicolini, 2012), Chapter 12 shows how 
moral judgment making is enacted, “in situ, by individuals through their dialogical 
interactions with co-present others, as well as with non-present or ‘imagined’ 
others, and material artifacts at hand” (p. 299). The framework emphasizes that 
such an accomplishment is not only a local achievement; it takes into account the 
wider group  of non-present actors and other authoritative resources as “fairness”, 
as a higher-order principle which transcends the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of the 
contingent local interactions. 

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Reflecting on our challenges for a constitutive view of organiz-ing
 Two chapters notably respond to  this invitation. Chapter 9 brings the 
reader from the present state of storytelling research to “the cutting  edge of 
process theory in storytelling” (p. 197). David Boje  and  Rohny Saylors explore 
“‘quantum storytelling’ as a new kind of ontological perspective that helps to 
better understand processual aspects of organizational narrativity” (p. 8). Chapter 
13 brings an interesting methodological perspective by challenging conventional 
research as well as conceptions of researcher’s reflexivity. Drawing on Lévinas’s 
work, the authors contend for “an ethical openness to the  other [i.e. professional 
participants] and an exposure to the teaching  of the other –  a vulnerability of the 
self [i.e. the  researcher]” (p. 327). This provocative perspective locates reflexivity 
in inter-subjective (conversational) experiencing  and not only in the researcher 
“as a peculiar kind of self-controlling, knowledge-generating, reflexive 
voyeur” (p.  326). By doing so, the power and perils of this position they name 
“Other-vulnerability”, leave the researcher (and the research process) in an open 
– but uncomfortable position. He moves from the frozen “said” to a knowing-with 
standpoint − the “saying”  − while sacrificing his self-security of knowing-about (p. 
331). Thus, such a position calls for a humbling and a subordination of the 
researcher as an ‘expert’ vis-à-vis his conversational partners as other experts 
too. 

GOING FURTHER ?

! By emphasizing  the role that discursive  perspectives (in general) play in 
unfolding organizational processes, the volume encourages scholars to go  on 
with language  and communication as a part of but also as constitutive of them. If 
some chapters resolutely challenge  existing traditions, others apply them to 
specific organizational contexts and processes at various levels of analysis. The 
whole  book – dedicated to process organization studies − intends to show that 
we have to depart from a narrow view of communication per se: if matter matters, 
language  and communication also matter, be they in the  details of local 
interactions or in more ‘macro’ unfolding processes. Communication not only 
brings organizations alive in bounded episodes, but also  transforms them through 
time and space.
! In their highly stimulating survey, Ashcraft et al. (2009: 2) invited 
“management and communication scholars to a common conversation”, stressing 
that fruitful interdisciplinary collaborations could be engaged. We could add that 
many of the practice-based scholars share many views with the language  and 
communication literature  (e.g. Gherardi, 2012; Nicolini, 2012), and more 
specifically on the subject of organizational materiality. The same closeness 
appears when reading the previous volume in this series, How Matter Matters. 
Objects, Artifacts and Materiality in Organization Studies3 (Carlile et al., 
2013/2014). Readers interested in the CCO  approach will find many chapters 
which seem to be very close  to it, in particular those  written by John Shotter and 
Mathew Jones. These convergences about ontological and epistemological 
foundations could pave the way for developing promising collaborative research 
avenues – perhaps in a future symposium?

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3. The Symposium took place in June 2011.