ABSTRACT
This book develops a thesis, that communication is the essential “modality,” to use Giddens’ (1984) term, for the constitution of organization and, more generally, of society. By modality, Giddens means that which explains how those properties of a society that give it continuity over expanses of time and across many geographically dispersed situations come to be manifested in day-to-day human interaction. It is how social structures inform social systems (to again use his terminology) and, vice versa, how organization can be both local (systemic) and global (structured), bounded by constraints of space and time and yet also transcending them.
