School of Montreal

The Montreal school and his perspective on communication and organization.

History of the school

School of Montreal, as its name suggests, is a school of thought in the field of communication research organization or organizational communication. It was initiated by James R. Taylor ^[1] ^[2] and colleagues in the Department of communication at the University of Montreal. It dates from the introduction in 1987 of a new doctoral program bringing together three major French universities in the metropolis of Montreal (Brumans, Cooren, Robichaud and Taylor, 2014). This approach has had and continues to have a global resonance in Europe (see Communication and Organization, 1996^[3]^[4]) on the American continent (Symposium JR Taylor ICA HEC) where it is now, for example, used in research on theory of the firm (Kuhn, 2008) and clandestine organizations (Stohl and Stohl , 2011). The global audience is probably related to the nature of the questions it as set a target address and the original synthesis that operated between different epistemological and theoretical trends in anthropology, linguistics, semiotics, language philosophy, ethnomethodology, sociology, systems theory and game theory to provide foundations .

Objectives of the school

The Montreal school has started to answer questions about the ontology of the organization (what is it organized?). The pragmatics of the organization (which is the basic logic works or how the organization?) and the emergence of the organization (which operations, processes and concrete materials the organization exists and is maintained?). To answer these questions the particularity of the Montreal school have focused, including the analysis of interactions " performative " on negotiated and co-constructed or co-directed process of organisants (Cooren Robichaud and character 2011 in Grosjean and Bonneville ). This school of thought has been taken round the body direction was indicated in 1969 the pioneering work of Karl E. Weick on the communicative nature of the organization to support it and give it a decidedly more discursive turn (Weick , 2004) and materialist (Cooren and Fairhurst , 2004). School of Montreal has set a goal of theorizing and empirical research on the processes and operations by which the Communication gives embodies or represents the organization in its identity, coordination , authority , power and its common integrate and decide (Taylor, 1993 , 1995, 2000 ways, Taylor and Van Every , 1998; Taylor, Cooren, Robichaud and Giroux, 1996; Taylor and Cooren , 1997; Taylor and Van Every , 2000; Cooren and Taylor, 1997 and 1999 ; Cooren, 2000; Cooren, Taylor and Van Every, 2006; Taylor and Robichaud, 2007; Cooren, Brummans, Charrieras 2008; Cooren, Fairhurst, 2009; Taylor, 2009; Cooren 2010; Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, Clark, 2011; Cooren, 2012, Taylor 2011, Taylor and Van Every, 2011; Cooren and Robichaud, 2013; Cooren, Matte, Taylor, Vasquez, 2007). In the wake of the work and various syntheses around this important issue, researchers, and Zaug with McPhee (2000) and other significant contributors have called this line of research in the styling "Constitutive role of communication in organizations" (CCO) (Putnam, Nicotera and McPhee, 2011; Putnam, Nicotera , 2009; Taylor, Van Every, 2000; Taylor, 2011).

Perspective on organization and communication

Organizations are discursive and material formations that occur and recur in the course of conversational interactions. Communication as well as the organization that emerges is a dialectic between the conversation and the text. The conversation is the place of organizing process while the text is the interpretive framework used to define human and non-human mobilized in conversational negotiations. The organization exists in the communication itself is the intersection of its conversational dimension where identities (ie. what is the people, objects, problems and events) are negotiated and renegotiated the one hand and secondly its textual dimension that involves different to transactional priori assumptions for the various categories of public officials involved, (Taylor and Van Every, 2000; Taylor, 2011), these assumptions and tacit assumptions that have a significant impact in the conversational and transactional dynamics were called subtexts (Katambwe and Taylor, 2006). Between these two dimensions there are two processes involved: the mediation of meta-communication and a constant two-way translation between text and conversation. This translation makes the implicit support of the paralinguistics conversation, the non-verbal and other objects must textualized or is explained and set in impersonal texts invested with a greater or lesser authority. These texts more or less responsible will then be picked up and interpreted in subsequent conversations actors.

Communicative processes and constituent operations of the organization

For the Montreal school processes that operate the constitution of the organization are not messages that will help to satisfy constituent functions of an organization, as in the model of the four streams (Zaug & McPhee, 2000, 2011). Unlike the latter, here the processes that operate the interrelated constitutionality are a series of circular and different translations whose entry point is on the point of view of the researcher (Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud and Taylor, 2014 p.177 for a schematic model). These translations are also four in number. First local conversations are kept here and there by various actors in the course of their complementary activities. These will require the creation of ideal mutual obligations or transactions to stabilize the interdependencies between the actors involved in these negotiations and each bearing views and different values. These conversations and transactions they require are then translated into a discursive formation (a group of utterances) through an increase in generality (distancing) metacommunicationnal used to represent a plurality of voices and patterns like perspective and the will of one collective actor with its own identity. The discursive formation generated by metacommunicationnal distancing is then translated to give it an author, ie. take him an authority (Katambwe and Taylor , 2006). This is done as statements of undress deictic or indexical elements, to reify and naturalize by distancing themselves and away from their local context and situated saying (distancing and decontextualization). The discursive formation that is now in authority will undergo translation. This is the time to incorporate the organization acquired this authority to enable it to be the representation of the group now consists and presence with other collective formed. It is through the mechanism of discursive agency that will invest a collective actant (to allow the possibility that an object can also be coated with this authority and then be "ventriloquist " (Cooren, 2010), as is the case idols and icons and other artifacts) the authority of its discursive formation for it to be his spokesman. The result will be that speaking on behalf of the organization is equal to speak with authority. Thus the hierarchy is created by investing in a scalar some actors the authority of the discursive formation that they can now say. Network conversations this series of translations and led to the emergence of the organization (hierarchical system of authority) in the communication organization that will be reinvested in a circular manner and engaged in subsequent conversations.

Implications for research and practice on organizing processes

The action is to organize the conversation. Communication is what gives life to the organization, the organization emerges insofar as it allows him to have an identity and realize the provisions of the actors in the various functions it attempts to satisfy. The organization is nowhere and everywhere at the same time insofar as it is the case of communication. Since communication is the intersection between text (structure) and conversation (action) and the organization emerges from this communication, we must consider it as a symbolic or discursive space made of tensions, contradictions and paradoxes that are their resolutions in the communication itself, and more specifically in metacommunication. Communication, and therefore the organization has a double symbolic and materialist basis so that designs the influence of various objects and other artifacts on the establishment and functioning of the organization. The conversation is a symbolic space that includes a variety and diversity of actants that are spoken by the actors involved and make them talk (by ventriloquism (Cooren, 2010) . In an organization the human actors and non-human speak and are spoken, their authority depends on how they articulate the emerging identity of the texts.

References

Brummans, B., Cooren, F., Robichaud, D. & Taylor, J. R. (2014). The Communicative Constitution of Organizations: Schools of Thought, Approaches, and Future Research. L.L. Putnam & D. K. Mumby, eds., Handbook of Organizational Communication, III (pp. 173-194). Thousand Oaks, Ca. & London: Sage.
Cooren, F. & J.R. Taylor. (1997). Organization as an effect of mediation: Redefining the link between organization and communication. Communication Theory, 7, 219-259.
Cooren, F., & Taylor, J. R. (1999). The procedural and rhetorical modes of the organizing dimension of communication: Discursive analysis of a Parliamentary Commission. The Communication Review, 3(1,2), 65-101.
Cooren, F. (2000). Articulating Discursive, Mechanical and Human Agents in Organized Systems. A New Approach to Organizational Agency. Paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Organizational Discourse: World-views, Work-views and World-views, King’s College, London, UK, July 26-28, 2000.
Cooren, F., & Fairhurst, G. T. (2004). Speech timing and spacing: The phenomenon of organizational closure. Organization, 11(6), 793-824.
Cooren, F., Matte, F., Taylor, J. R. & Vasquez, C. (2007). International Communication Association, San Francisco, mai.
Cooren, F., & Fairhurst, G. T. (2009). Dislocation and Stabilization: How to Scale Up from Interactions to Organization. In L. L. Putnam & A. M. Nicotera (Eds.), The Communicative Constitution Of Organization: Centering Organizational Communication (pp. 117-152). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Cooren, F. (2010). Action and Agency in Dialogue : Passion, incarnation and ventriloquism. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Amsterdam.
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Cooren, F. (2010). The Contribution of Speech Act Theory to the Analysis of Conversation: How Pre-sequences Work. In P. J. Schulz (Ed.) Communication Theory (Vol. 2). London: Sage. (Originally published in K. Fitch & R. E. Sanders (Eds.), Handbook of Language and Social Interaction (pp. 21-40), Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.)
Cooren, F., Brummans, B. H. J., Charrieras, D. (2008). The Coproduction of Organizational Presence: The Case of Médecins sans Frontières in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Human Relations 61(10): 1339-1370.
Cooren, F., Kuhn, T., Cornelissen, J., & Clark, T. (2011). Communication, organizing and organization : An overview and introduction to the special issue. Organization Studies, 32(9), 1149-1170.
Cooren, F. (2012). Communication theory at the center : Ventriloquism and the Communicative Constitution of Reality. Journal of Communication, 62(1), 1-20.
Katambwe, J. M. & Taylor, J. R. (2006). Modes of organizational integration. In F. Cooren, J. R. Taylor & E.J. Van Every (Eds.) Communication as organizing: Empirical explorations of the dynamic of text and conversation. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 55-77.
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Robichaud, D., & Cooren, F. (Eds) (2013). Organization and organizing: Materiality,agency and discourse. New York: Routledge.
Stohl, C., & Stohl, M. (2011). Secret agencies: The communicative constitution of a clandestine organization. Organization Studies, 2011 : 32.
Taylor, J.R. (1993). Rethinking the theory of organizational communication: How to read an organization. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Taylor, J.R. (1995). Shifting from a heteronomous to an autonomous worldview of organizational communication: Communication theory on the cusp. Communication Theory, 5(1), 1-35.
Taylor, J. R., Cooren, F., Giroux, H. & Robichaud, D. (1996). Are organization and communication equivalent? Collected papers of the conference and seminar on Organizational Communication and Change: Challenges in the Next Century, sponsored by the Communication Research Center, Department of Speech Communication, Southwest Texas State University, Austin TX, February 11-13, 1996. (8)1-(8)18.
Taylor, J. R.& Cooren, F. (1997). What makes communication "organizational"? How the many voices of the organization become the one voice of an organization. Journal of Pragmatics. 27, 409-438.
Taylor, J. R. (2000). A common ground, common grounds - or footbridges? In S. R. Corman & M. S. Poole, eds., Finding the common ground (pp. 190-199). New York: Guildford publications.
Taylor, J. R. & E.J. Van Every (2000). The emergent organization: Communication as its site and surface. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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Taylor, J. R., & Robichaud, D. (2007). Management as meta-conversation: The search for closure. In F. Cooren & L. Putnam, eds., Interacting and organizing: Analyses of a board meeting (pp. 5-30), Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Taylor, J. R. (2009). Co-orientation theory. In S. W. Littlejohn & K. A. Foss, eds., Encyclopedia of Communication Theory, Vol. 1, (pp. 203-4). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Taylor, J. R. (2009). The communicative construction of community. In A. Sannino, H. Daniels & K. Gutierrrez, eds., Learning and expanding with activity theory (pp. 228-239). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, J. R. (2009). Organizing from the bottom up: Reflections on the constitution of organization in communication. In A. Nicotera, L. Putnam. &, R. McPhee, eds., Building theories of organization: The constitutive role of communication (pp. 153-186). New York: Routledge.
Taylor, J. R. (2011). Communication is not neutral: The phenomenon of “worldview” and its implications. In C. Candlin & S. Sarangi, eds., Handbook of applied linguistics: Communication in the professions, Vol. 3 (pp. 107-118). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Taylor, J. R. & Van Every, E.J. (2011). The situated organization: Studies in the pragmatics of communication. New York/London: Routledge. 271 pp.
Van Every, E. J. & Taylor, J. R. (1998). Modeling the organization as a system of communication activity: A dialogue about the language/action perspective. Management Communication Quarterly, 12 (1), 127-146.
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References

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