ABSTRACT
Swaran Sandhu Since the 1990s, institutional thinking has become a success story in social and
political sciences, history, and economics. Institutional theory is now one of the most prominent research streams in organization studies and management science, in particular. Recently, institutional scholars have rediscovered the communicative roots of their discipline (Cornelissen, Durand, Fiss, Lammers, & Vaara, 2015; Gray, Purdy, & Ansari, 2015; Ocasio, Lowenstein, & Nigam, 2015). In contrast, communication scholars utilize institutional frameworks for the analysis of communication processes (e. g., Frandsen & Johansen, 2013). They have jumped on the institutional bandwagon after a slight delay but are recognizing its “tremendous promise” for communications studies (Lammers & Garcia, 2014, p. 195). However, both perspectives tend to adhere to their established world views. They either treat communication as an outcome or manifestation of institutional processes, or they generalize communication as all encompassing. In this chapter, I argue that the idea of a communicative constitution of orga-
nizations (CCO, Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009; Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, & Clark, 2011) lends itself particularly well to bridging the gap between communication research and organization studies. While the CCO perspective is an umbrella for several schools of thought (for overviews, see Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud, & Taylor, 2014; Schoeneborn et al., 2014), their common premise is the rejection of the so called transmission model or conduit metaphor of communication (Axley, 1984). Instead, CCO scholars view communication as the basic building block of all action and organization (Taylor & van Every, 2000). This chapter first provides a short overview of institutional theory, particularly its communicative origins and variants, which servers as a basis for a later discussion of the potential links to the CCO perspective.
