THE COMMUNICATIVE CONSTITUTION OF ORGANIZATIONS

This book explores new developments in the Four Flows Model of organizational communication, including the confluences among the flows and the roles of power, meaning, and norms in the constitution of organizations.

A burgeoning area of communication and organizational scholarship, the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO), explores the idea that organizations don't just use communication; rather, they are enacted by communication processes. 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 the Four Flows Model and provides a theoretical grounding in its parent, Structuration Theory. The book demonstrates that organizations are not constituted through a singular process, but rather by four analytically different yet interconnected characteristic flows: Membership Negotiation, Self-Structuring, Activity Coordination, and Institutional Positioning. It extends theorizing on hermeneutics and conlocutions and introduces a new concept-transtructions-to explicate the process by which constitution occurs in organizations. Throughout the book, the authors describe their theoretical developments through discussion of example organizations, other key schools of CCO thinking, as well as other stances such as critical perspectives on organizing.

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