ABSTRACT
Andreas Georg Scherer and Andreas Rasche Organization scholars have long acknowledged the practical significance of com-
munication in the management process (Barnard, 1938; Davis, 1968; Simon, 1947). Recent literature considers communication as a cornerstone of organizational analysis and elaborates on its theoretical implications (Jablin, Putnam, Roberts, & Porter, 1987; May & Mumby, 2005). This links back to the linguistic turn in the social sciences (Rorty, 1992), being captured by discussions in neighboring disciplines such as sociology, communication studies, or media studies (Jablin & Putnam, 2001; Jablin et al., 1987), or by developments in more fundamental fields such as philosophy (Rorty, 1992), philosophy of language (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), and linguistic philosophy (Peirce, 1992, 1998). In the course of this development, a new subfield of communication studies has been established: organizational communication, which builds upon the knowledge base of communication theory and organization studies. Organizational communication has matured in past years, as can be seen by the various handbooks, scholarly associations, and specialized journals dedicated to this topic area (Jablin & Putnam, 2001; Jablin et al., 1987; Redding, 1985). One recent theoretical perspective on organizational communication has gained
particular prominence: Communication Constitutes Organization (CCO), that is, the idea that organizations primarily maintain their existence through the use of language and texts (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009; Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, & Clark, 2011; Putnam & Nicotera, 2009). This perspective abandons a mechanistic model of communication in which fixed meanings are transferred in a one-to-one fashion, and in which interpretations are neglected as an issue of special concern (Schoeneborn et al., 2014). Instead, CCO scholars tend to adopt a pragmatist and/or social constructivist epistemology, in which communication is considered a continuous process of sensemaking (and source of change). The CCO perspective suggests that by analyzing communication processes, we learn more about the essence of organizations and organizing than by simply treating organizations as a collection of individual members bound together by contractual agreements and hierarchical relationships. The analysis of processes of sensemaking, interpretation, and meaning negotiation that take place in and around organizations (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005) can help us acquire new insight into how and why organizations come into existence, how and why they behave in a certain way, and how and why they eventually change over time. In the meantime, the CCO perspective has become increasingly acknowledged in
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organization studies, and has been applied to various forms of organizations (business, governmental or non-governmental) or organizational phenomena (for overviews, see Cooren et al., 2011; Putnam & Nicotera, 2009). Given that the CCO perspective has until recently been promoted primarily by
scholars from Canada (Cooren, Taylor, & van Every, 2006; Robichaud, Giroux, & Taylor, 2004; Taylor & van Every, 2000) and the United States (Ashcraft et al., 2009; Kuhn, 2008; Kuhn & Ashcraft, 2003), it comes as no surprise that the potential contributions of contemporary German philosophy and social science approaches to this distinct organizational communication perspective have not yet been explored in depth, even though many of the German perspectives put an emphasis on the role of communication in social relations (e. g., Apel, 1980; Habermas, 1984, 1987; Luhmann, 1982)(for exceptions, see Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud, & Taylor, 2014; Christensen, Morsing, & Thyssen, 2013; Cooren, 2012; Schoeneborn, 2011).
