Discursivity, Relationality and Materiality in the Life of the Organisation

Communication Perspectives

Colleen E. Mills, Francois Cooren, Colleen E. Mills, Francois Cooren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780815384618
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351203852
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The field of organisational communication has been rapidly transforming in the wake of the linguistic and discursive turns that have been sweeping across the social sciences since the mid-eighties. These 'turns' have prompted organisational communication scholars to look more closely at how they think about communication and its relationship to the organisation and the process of organizing. What has emerged from these reflections is a perspective that proposes communication is not merely something that happens in organisations but is the heart of organizing and therefore actually constitutes the organisation. This perspective, which embraces several sub-threads, is now commonly referred to as the CCO (Communication as Constitutive of Organisation) perspective. This is itself evolving as scholars come to realize that organizing does not just occur at the discursive level. It is inextricably coupled to the material and relational aspects of work – the discourse mutually constitutes relationships between human and non-human bodies that combine to create what we encounter when we participate in organisational life. This book examines the way these three dimensions combine to create organisational outcomes. In doing so, it advances CCO and sociomateriality scholarship and contributes to new ways of thinking about strategy and practice. The series of empirical studies should interest the widely interdisciplinary audience that seeks to understand work, organizing and management. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Communication Research and Practice journal.

How things make things do things with words, or how to pay attention to what things have to say

Nicolas Bencherki

ABSTRACT

While organisational communication research has traditionally limited talk to human beings, a trend within the Montreal School (TMS) of the Communicational Constitution of Organizations (CCO) perspective acknowledges that ‘things do things with words’ as well, and criticises the ‘bifurcation of nature’ into two distinct realms: materiality and discourse. However, due to a preference for studying human discourse, many TMS studies still may give the impression that only human spokespeople can make objects talk. This paper uses data from an ethnographic case study to argue that CCO is well equipped to recognise that other sorts of objects may speak as well, and that they enter the realm of language through yet other objects (i.e. their ‘spokesthings’). In doing so, this paper advances an argument that will counter critiques of TMS scholarship that propose it reduces the role played by objects to their interpretation by humans.

Research in organisational communication, and in particular studies concerning talk in organisational settings (Boden, 1994; Czarniawska-Joerges & Joerges, 1988; ten Have, 1991), has for the most part considered the conversations of humans as its starting point. After all, talk regularly has been considered the privilege of human beings. For instance, in the Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) tradition of organisational communication research, two of the three ‘schools’ (Schoeneborn et al., 2014) explicitly limit agency and communication to humans. The Four Flows approach questions whether non-human agency can be meaningful, thus locating meaning within the realm of humans only (McPhee & Seibold, 1999). The Luhmannian trend of CCO, for its part, prefers to consider objects as being part of the environment of organisations, limiting the latter to meaningful human practices (Schoeneborn, 2011).

However, perspectives on (socio)materiality in organisation studies have insisted – in various ways – that materiality and, in particular, technology play a part in the constitution of organisational reality (Leonardi, 2012). For the most part, the perspectives that have been put forth recognise the role of artefacts, technologies, and devices but maintain a distinction between the social and the material domains, as if they can be separated. That is the case of affordance theory (Faraj & Azad, 2012; Fayard & Weeks, 2007), structuration theory (Orlikowski, 1992, 2007), situated action (Suchman, 1987), activity theory (Engeström, 2000; Engeström, Miettinen, & Punamäki, 1999), or distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995a, 1995b), amongst a long list of others. Putnam (2015) differentiates five different perspectives, all but one considers discourse and materiality as distinct phenomena. The exception is Orlikowski and Scott’s perspective, which borrows from Barad’s agential realism (2007). The literature, whatever its theoretical bent, continues to understand the involvement of objects and technology in action/agency/activity mostly through the spectrum of their use by human beings. Nardi (1996, p. 76), for instance, speaks of ‘One’s ability – and choice – to marshal and use resources’.

This article uses data from an ethnographic case study to argue that CCO is well equipped to move us beyond this limited view of material agency and show that, not only can the objects humans use speak, but they also enter the realm of language through yet other objects who speak for them (i.e. their ‘spokesthings’).

This paper starts by describing the Montreal School’s (TMS) CCO perspective on materiality in order to make the argument that this perspective provides the latitude to recognise that things make other things talk and, in so doing, move away from the view that things only participate in the world to the extent that we, humans, ‘interpret’ what they have to say. It then explores how things speaking for other things allow an ‘objectivity’ that is otherwise not possible, before presenting data from an ethnographic study to illustrate how this occurs in practice. It finishes by proposing a redefinition of objectivity and of the way things may gain access to language and participate in human sociality.

Materiality and TMS perspective

TMS flavour of CCO (Brummans, 2006) has borrowed from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) the recognition that the distinction between, on the one hand, a social world made of speaking humans, and on the other, a material and natural realm made of mute objects, does not stand (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009; Latour, 1993). Through the notions of textual agency (Brummans, 2007; Cooren, 2004, 2008) and the ‘plenum of agencies’ (Cooren, 2006), TMS researchers have acknowledged that things can do things with words (Cooren & Bencherki, 2010).

To this day, however, TMS has mostly limited its attention to cases where materiality is brought by humans into their conversations or writings. In this paper, I argue that this is an artefact of TMS’s preferred methodological approach – the analysis of interactions, and conversations in particular. The TMS approach does, however, have the theoretical and empirical apparatus to recognise that things ‘speak’ in different ways, besides being mobilised in human talk. In fact, as I will show, from a TMS perspective there are cases when things’ ability to speak on their own is crucial. For instance, we humans have delegated the job of making things talk to other things (i.e. phonation devices) like medical instruments and navigational devices.

Putnam (2015) classifies the ‘plenum of agencies’ perspective of TMS as giving privilege to the discourse side of the duality. I do not believe this is accurate, but I admit that the TMS literature has sometimes left misleading clues in that respect. For instance, Cooren and Taylor’s (1997) argument for the constitutive power of communication focuses on the interplay between talk and text, with the result that the meaning of materiality appears to be solely constructed in human communication (Brummans, Cooren, & Chaput, 2009). This confusion has also been fuelled by the choice of cases. For instance, Vásquez, Schoeneborn, and Sergi (2016) studied project proposal forms, a technical template and a presentation slide; Cooren’s (2015) example of a museum-related creative project focused on a participant’s oral presentation. These different studies discuss cases where verbal language is present, but what makes a difference in each case is the material (i.e. physical) availability of text or speech in given situations.

The apparent tension between a more conventional sense of materiality (i.e. physicality) and a more semiotic one may be traced back to contentious elements within TMS’s underlying theory of materiality, namely ANT. Indeed, while some ANT champions, such as Law (2009), embrace it as a ‘material semiotics’, the precise status of language and representation in the theory has been decried as ambiguous (c.f., Lenoir, 1994). Furthermore, some authors have called for greater acknowledgement of the non-discursive side of artefacts, in particular in the study of technology and its agency (Bardini, 2007).

In this paper, I argue that when TMS scholars denounce the ‘bifurcation of nature’ (i.e. the separation of reality of things from their representation), they are not merely bringing the ‘real’ world into the realm of talk (c.f., Cooren, 2015). They are in fact rejecting the very terms of this alleged opposition. The distinction between the two realms simply does not hold, as illustrated in Arnaud, Mills, Legrand and Maton’s (2016) study of the way texts, furniture, visual displays, and geosocial arrangements – all material that can be read – translate an organisation-wide strategy in the context of local branches and allow resistance and negotiation between the branch and the senior managers driving the change. Such cases suggest we need to go past ‘either/or’ considerations and embrace the plurality of reality (Friedberg, 2000; Latour, 2000; Raffnsøe, Gudmand-Høyer, & Thaning, 2016). I will therefore attempt to extend Cooren’s (2015) proposal that things speak by using a more conventionally ‘material’ case to show how the very process by which things are brought into talk, or given the power to talk, is itself a material process. I will use the example of run-down buildings, which are both the object and the setting of the work of a tenants’ association in a large North American city.

The argument that the process by which things are brought into talk is a material process in no way implies that humans do not play a part in the process. First of all, when things speak, they also speak to humans, who can then act (or not) on the basis of what they understand. Also, the tools through which things talk were designed by humans (e.g. engineers and designers) who embed particular scripts into them (Akrich, 1992). This is, for instance, what Groleau and Cooren (1999) describe in the account of a graphic design firm’s use of computerised tools, which implement routines and procedures that otherwise would need to be learned and remembered by the workers. These include ‘constative/performative’ (p. 138) procedures, which may include tools that pick up specific aspects of reality as relevant and propose specific programmes of action as appropriate.

My choice to focus on buildings and on the way they can tell about their condition, as opposed to managerial examples (such as the strategy case described by Arnaud et al., 2016), allows me to make my argument clearer by avoiding what some readers could view as a ‘feedback loop’ (i.e. humans reading tools that describe their own human activity). Of course, from the moment we are discussing human-made artefacts, we are, as Cooren (2015) rightly says, in the ‘middle of things’ or, to say it in another way, in a ‘chain of agency’ (Cooren, 2006) where humans and technology cannot be clearly distinguished. Even a building, in describing its own state of deterioration, is also saying something about the way its landlord or tenant have failed to care for it. The ability of speech is not limited to humans, nor do things only speak through humans, or about human activity. This is not at issue. What is less certain is the way things take part in the world they share with humans. Various typologies have been proposed for the relationship between things/technology/devices and the social/human/discursive (Leonardi, 2012; Nicolini, Mengis, & Swan, 2012; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008; Putnam, 2015). Many of them, though, suppose a distinction between a ‘technical subsystem’ and a ‘social subsystem’ (Leonardi, 2012). The problem is to re-link the two – something that would take considerable theoretical effort. A more productive approach, perhaps, may be ANT’s and TMS’s suggestion to accept that our reality, in fact, is already hybrid (Latour, 1993, 2008). Then, speech is not the a-priori prerogative of humans. Whether someone or something can speak is an empirical matter. Being objective, rather than attempting to get interpretations ‘right’, then refers to paying attention to what objects have to say.

The objectivity of ‘spokesthings’

The ethnographic field study that I analyse in this paper was chosen because of its concern with the issue of ‘objectivity’. For the workers of the tenants’ association, objectivity is instrumental and determines their ability to convince city official and courts to take measures to solve the housing problems that they document. While the workers understand objectivity in the prosaic sense of ‘fact-based’ and different from personal judgement, it is interesting to note that this objectivity is achieved exactly by relying on objects.

In other words, objectivity consists of recognising the fact that we share our sociability with things (I use the term ‘objectivity’ for convenience, even though, of course, if we reject the socio-material duality, it makes little sense). The social and material participate in the constitution of so many links between our ideas, judgements, etc., and the reality that we, humans, claim to be representing (Latour, 1988, 1996; Martine, Cooren, & Bartels, 2015). Objectivity can therefore be said to be achieved when we, humans, can present ourselves as merely reporting what things are saying by themselves. The issue of objectivity, then, is figuring out ‘how things do things with words’ (Cooren & Bencherki, 2010), but also how things can speak through yet other things that translate their ‘objective’ language into a verbal language that we, humans, can make sense of and that suggests a particular course of action for us to take. In fact, because I believe we humans need objects to speak without our direct help if we hope to ever achieve ‘objectivity’, I would like to argue for a somewhat radical perspective on the participation of things to the social – a perspective that recognises things ability to ‘talk’. Far from being esoteric, I propose that this ability rests on the many tools that we humans have devised to make such forms of talk possible – tools that I refer to as phonation devices (Latour, 2004; Taylor & Van Every, 2000) and that act as ‘spokesthings’ for other non-humans. I prefer the word spokesthings rather than ‘spokesartefacts’ or ‘spokesobjects’ (Vásquez & Cooren, 2011), to acknowledge the fertility of the word ‘things’, which etymologically points to the idea of deliberation and meeting (Latour, 2005a). Things, interestingly, always already include talk. Beings, whether human or not, are in fact heterogeneous to begin with (Latour, 1993), and therefore any analytical language that researchers use to distinguish between them is necessarily provisional.

Indeed, the so-called ‘material world’ (Hardy & Thomas, 2015) – an expression I actually reject, given that it precisely amounts to alluding to another world (the world of discourse and communication) that would be, in comparison, immaterial, which is not the case – regularly tells us about itself using verbal language but research so far has failed to acknowledge that form of participation. Yet, as will be made obvious by the case in this paper, without those tools that allow non-human things to talk, a large portion of what goes on in and around organisations can remain unaccounted for. After all, as French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1893) recognised over a century ago, things are societies too (see also Cooren, 2010).

Recognising that things make things talk allows moving away from a perspective where things would only participate in the world to the extent that we, humans, ‘interpret’ what they have to say. In fact, we have built those phonation devices, and regularly use them, exactly to avoid being accused of ‘merely’ interpreting what things have to say. Paradoxically, it is because we want unmediated access to the world that we add more mediators that help us gain such access (Latour, 2005b). Cooren and Matte’s (2010) discussion of a measuring stick used by Doctors Without Borders workers to decide who, among African children, may get help from a nutrition centre, may be read as such an attempt from physicians to downplay their own interpretation of the kids’ health situation, and to let the ‘talking’ be made by the stick.

This kind of argument will not appear new to those who are interested in the history of sciences or in sociotechnical controversies, in particular from a science, technology, and society (STS) perspective. Daston and Galison (1992), for instance, suggested that our current scientific obsession with objectivity has grown as we have developed technical means to ‘visualise’ data and to make facts speak for themselves. Borck (2008), for his part, has shown how the field of neurosciences has evolved along attempts to visualise the brain through various devices. Historical efforts at photographing ghosts may also be seen as technologically mediated attempts to bring otherwise invisible reality into our social world (Gunning, 2008). More broadly, the way technology has allowe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 How things make things do things with words, or how to pay attention to what things have to say
• 2 A communicative approach to sociomateriality: the agentic role of technology at the operational level
• 3 Modes of design tools: sociomaterial dynamics of a horticultural project
• 4 The materiality of discourse: relational positioning in a fresh water controversy
• 5 A spatial grammar of organising: studying the communicative constitution of organisational spaces
• 6 Making mundane work visible on social media: a CCO investigation of working out loud on Twitter
• 7 A communication perspective on organisational stakeholder relationships: discursivity, relationality, and materiality
• Index