ABSTRACT
Joep P. Cornelissen The three chapters in this part of the volume all do something interesting and
ambitious; they try to develop new theoretical and methodological grounds for thinking about the organizing properties and effects of communication (which I will refer to as CCO, the communicative constitution of organization), and they push our thinking about CCO into new more sociological ways of thinking beyond its initial roots in (largely) discourse analysis and linguistics. They do this in different ways, with two of the chapters pushing us beyond the current theoretical vocabulary of CCO (Winkler & Wehmeier; Blaschke) whilst the other (Lohius & van Vuuren) operates from within the current Montréal School of CCO thinking-aiming to advance our thinking on a crucial aspect of the conversation-text dynamic. Despite their differences in focus as well as level of analysis, the three chapters
also each, in their own way, relate to the central question of CCO; that is, the question of how is an organization, including its identity, constituted in and through communication. The chapters consider this process to be more ‘naturally’ emergent, where an organization is an accomplishment, however precarious, as a result of communication, or as generally more ‘strategic’ in nature, where the authoring of a joint organizational text or the sensegiving by managers may direct and guide communication processes and their organizational outcomes.
