ABSTRACT
Linda L. Putnam In looking to the future of organizational communication, scholars have repeatedly
emphasized the importance of internationalization, both in the focus on global research and in developing international perspectives on theory development (Stohl & Ganesh, 2014). Special forums in Management Communication Quarterly have offered specific historical and theoretical direction based on the development of organizational communication in Brazil (Putnam & Casali, 2009), France (Cooren & Grosjean, 2010), and the German-speaking countries (Schoeneborn & Wehmeier, 2013). This volume pushes this agenda a major step forward through linking the idea of a communicative constitution of organization (CCO) developed mostly in North America with strands of CCO thinking drawn from distinct European traditions, particularly the work of Habermas (1984, 1987), Honneth (1996), Günther (1979), and Luhmann (1992, 1995). What makes this contribution special is the way in which the authors of these
chapters engages in a dialogue with tenets of the Montréal School of Organizational Communication (Cooren, 2000; Cooren, Taylor, & van Every, 2006; Taylor & van Every, 2014, 2000, 2011) and with key assumptions of the four-flows model based on structuration theory (McPhee & Iverson, 2009; McPhee & Zaug, 2000, 2009). Each chapter sets up an alternative perspective and then engages in a comparison-contrast with other schools of CCO thinking. In this way the volume integrates with CCO traditions, serves as a heuristic function to engender new ideas (Kuhn, this volume), challenges set ways of understanding the communicative constitution of organization, and introduces new concepts into the literature. In effect, this book offers a rich tapestry of ideas for organizational communication scholars in general and for CCO scholars in particular. As this volume illustrates, scholars who study the communication constitution of
organization differ in their perspectives and traditions, but they are united in the goal to account for the constitutive role of communication in producing and reproducing organization. As such, they focus on “the forming, composing, and making of” an organization as well as the form and properties of organization (Putnam, Nicotera, & McPhee, 2009, p. 4). The chapters in this volume embrace a CCO lens that anchors an organization in the continuous flow of communication, thus treating communication and organization as mutually constitutive. As Cornelissen (this volume) highlights, this volume pushes CCO in a more sociological way that centers on texts and systems than on discourse analysis, linguistics, and flows of communication. These chapters
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also situate the foundation of CCO on the spatial and temporal linkages among linguistic patterns, social ties, rules, texts, and intertexts (Blaschke, this volume; Geiger & Schröder, this volume; Van Vuuren & Lohuis, this volume).
