ABSTRACT
Gabriele Fassauer Scholars of organizations increasingly consider communication as constitutive of
organizations (CCO Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009; Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, & Clark, 2011; Putnam & Nicotera, 2009). The central assumption of this approach is to understand organizations as “ongoing and precarious accomplishments realized, experienced, and identified primarily-if not exclusively-in communication processes” (Cooren et al., 2011, p. 1150). Instead of treating them as containers or “objective, reified entities” in which communication occurs (Putnam, Nicotera, & McPhee, 2009, p. 7), organizations are seen as “ongoing products of meaning-making practices” which are generated out of the circumstances of situated interaction (Cooren et al., 2011, p. 1154). Accordingly, communication is seen as the “producer and carrier of organizational reality” (Kuhn, 2012, p. 548) or “the means by which organizations are established, composed, designed, and sustained” (Cooren et al., 2011, p. 1154).
