Interacting and Organizing

Analyses of a Management Meeting

Francois Cooren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780805848557
• eBook ISBN: 9781136684111
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

This work provides an exceptional case study, shedding light onto the functioning of an actual corporate board of directors. It presents analysis of a series of corporate management meetings shown in the 1974 documentary film, Corporation: After Mr. Sam. The film chronicles the discussion and communication processes as a company considers how to replace its president, and it serves as a unique opportunity for analysis of real-world organizational discourse.

With an impressive list of prominent contributors, Interacting and Organizing: Analyses of a Management Meeting employs the dual perspectives of organizational communication and language and social interaction (LSI) to examine the film. It is arranged around specific topics, analyzed separately by organizational communication and LSI scholars. Editor François Cooren provides an introduction for each topic, and a comparison and synthesis conclude each part. Readers will appreciate the information presented, as it is an arena typically off-limits to outside eyes. The transcript of the film is included as an appendix to the volume.

This volume is appropriate for use in advanced courses and seminars in organizational communication, LSI, management, and organizational behavior. With its distinctive approach to studying the film's content, it will be invaluable to scholars, researchers, and graduate students in organizational communication, LSI, and management.

I

Leadership and Speakership: Which Voice Matters?

Part I addresses, in many respects, the analytical gap that has often been identified between the LSI and OC perspectives. As mentioned in the main introduction, LSI scholars tend to be accused by their OC counterparts of focusing too much on the details of interaction while neglecting the organizational context in which these interactions occur. In other words, OC scholars accuse their LSI colleagues of studying interaction and not organizations (Fairhurst & Cooren, 2004; Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004). Alternatively, OC scholars are often accused by their LSI counterparts of neglecting the details of interaction to the benefit of large-scale organizational analyses that do not really do justice to what Boden (1994) called, in the subtitle of her groundbreaking volume, “Organizations in Action.” In other words, LSI scholars accuse their OC colleagues of studying organizations and not interaction.

This tension between the two perspectives is I think best summarized by Boden (1994), whose objective precisely was to address this issue. Speaking of ethnomethodologists, as representing an LSI perspective, she wrote,

They are not interested in organizations, but in organization, which is to say that they are animated by a curiosity for the organization of experience and the “extraordinary organization of the ordinary” … Activities in organizational and work settings are, for ethnomethodologists, simply a marvelous way of unraveling the fine detail of social interaction. That organization may, indeed, be more or less hierarchically structured, resulting in more or less complexity of staffing, spatial divisions of labor, line of communication, and so forth, but how these are achieved and occasionally subverted becomes the research question. (p. 31, italics in original)

The challenge would thus consist of scaling up, as Taylor and Van Every (2000) put it, from the organization of experience to the organization per se, that is, to show that it is possible to study the organization of interactions while always keeping in mind questions related to the mode of being of organizations.

In a way, this is precisely what James R. Taylor and Daniel Robichaud do in the first chapter of this section. Since his 1993 book, titled Rethinking the Theory of Organizational Communication: How to Read an Organization, Taylor’s research agenda can be said to have been devoted to this one question: Can we identify a genuine theory of organizational communication, that is, a theory that would both enable us to scale up from communication to organization and scale down from organization to communication? This question has recently been addressed through what Taylor and Robichaud call here and elsewhere (Robichaud, Giroux, & Taylor, 2004) the phenomenon of metaconversation. Starting from the recursive property of language, they show that one of the ways to scale up from communication to organization is to show how in conversations, certain organizational members, especially managers, address other conversations, an activity that enables them to give a unified voice to their organization.

It is through this specific type of conversation that, according to Taylor and Robichaud, we can see the organization in the communication of managers (see also Taylor & Robichaud, 2004). In their daily conversations, managers set themselves up, among other things, as speaking on behalf of past and remote conversations and it is through this activity, typical of spokespersons, that a certain unity of the organization can be reaffirmed and reproduced. Managers constantly attempt to (re)define the identity of the organization by interactively searching for what Taylor and Robichaud call closure, that is, an agreement on what constitutes the organization.

Because Anita Pomerantz and Paul Denvir’s chapter 2 remains, in many respects, very faithful to the LSI tradition—and more precisely to its conversation analytic branch, a branch of which Pomerantz certainly is one of the most renowned representatives (see especially, Pomerantz, 1984, 1988; Pomerantz & Fehr, 1997; Sanders, Fitch, & Pomerantz, 2000)—it constitutes, in several ways, a very nice point of comparison with Taylor and Robichaud’s contribution. In their chapter, Pomerantz and Denvir analyze what they identify as the phenomenon of role enactment during organizational meetings, and more precisely how one of the participants, Harry Suffrin, enacted his function of chairperson throughout the management meetings. Through the detailed analysis of his performances, Pomerantz and Denvir are, in particular, able to show what sort of premises seem to guide this chairperson’s activities and how these premises were directly or indirectly the object of active negotiations by the participants.

Although the question of organizational closure is not problematized per se by Pomerantz and Denvir, we can note that it is at least implicit in their analyses, to the extent that the negotiation about what it means to be a chairman presupposes a search for closure regarding this question. What constitutes the role of chairman appears to be negotiated through participants who explicitly or implicitly set themselves up as speaking on behalf of what should be the proper role enactment of a chairman. Beyond the quality of their very fine and detailed analyses, Pomerantz and Denvir thus invite us to look for other types of metaconversation in which organizational members explicitly or implicitly problematize, negotiate, and, in many respects, realize or incarnate the rights and responsibilities mobilized in their ongoing discussion. In keeping with Boden’s (1994) point, the organization can be said to be relatively absent from their analysis, but their conversational analytic approach, coupled with Taylor and Robichaud’s chapter, illustrates how fruitful a dialogue between OC and LSI scholars can and could be if these respective viewpoints are taken seriously.

If there is one OC scholar person who can be said to have engaged in such a dialogue in her past and ongoing work, it is precisely Gail Fairhurst (1993; Fairhurst & Cooren, 2004; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004; Fairhurst & Sarr, 1996; Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001), whose contribution (chap. 3) closes this part. In her response, Fairhurst proposes to address and compare the two previous chapters in order to renew the reflection on leadership. Although the focus of mainstream research in this domain tends to be mostly restricted to the individual and psychological characteristics of leaders, Fairhurst shows in what respects Taylor and Robichaud’s as well as Pomerantz and Denvir’s constructivist approaches could participate in liberating leadership studies.

Instead of essentializing good or bad leaders’ characteristics, these two chapters help us see, according to Fairhurst, what good or bad leadership in action looks like. In other words, she convincingly shows to what extent the detailed analysis of managerial interaction, as realized in these two chapters, could liberate leadership study by problematizing this phenomenon as an interactive organizing process. Even if some limitations are recognized—in particular, the absence of reflection on the participants’ general dispositions vis-à-vis leadership, an absence mostly due to methodological constraints—Fairhurst argues persuasively here and elsewhere (Fairhurst, in press) for more constructive approaches that study leadership as it occurs in interaction.

References

Boden, D. (1994). The business of talk. Organizations in action. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

Fairhurst, G. T. (1993). The leader–member exchange patterns of women leaders in industry: A discourse analysis. Communication Monographs, 60, 321–351.

Fairhurst, G. T. (in press). Discursive approaches to leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Fairhurst, G. T., & Cooren, F. (2004). Organizational language in use: Interaction analysis, conversation analysis, and speech act schematics. In D. Grant, C. Hardy, C. Oswick, N. Phillips, & L. Putnam (Eds.), Handbook of organizational discourse (pp. 131–152). London: Sage.

Fairhurst, G. T., & Putnam, L. L. (2004). Organizations as discursive constructions. Communication Theory, 14(1), 5–26.

Fairhurst, G. T., & Sarr, R. A. (1996). The art of framing. Managing the language of leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Pomerantz,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• I Leadership and Speakership Which Voice Matters?
• II Organizing and Emotional Display Contradictions and Paradoxes
• III Strategies of Decision Making Competencies and Coherences
• IV Can We Study Interactions in Documentaries? Ways of Talking, Closure, and Data
• Appendix A Transcript of the Management Meeting*
• Appendix B Transcribing Conventions1
• Appendix C A Brief History of Steinberg Limited
• Author Index
• Subject Index