Secret Agencies: The Communicative Constitution of a Clandestine Organization

Abstract

This special issue challenges scholars to consider the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of viewing organizations as ‘constituted in and through human communication.’ Interrogating the work of one of the most influential approaches to the study of the constitutive nature of organizing, the oeuvre of James Taylor and his colleagues or what has become known as the Montreal School, we identify an implicit assumption of organizational transparency. We suggest that unpacking ‘the transparency principle’ helps build a richer framework that builds upon the foundations of the Montreal School, facilitates empirical inquiry, and highlights several aspects of the social context which are typically taken for granted within organizational studies. Expanding Taylor et al.’s orientation to clandestine organizations, we address the question posed by the editors in the call for papers: ‘How does a communication-as-constitutive of organization’s perspective shape understandings of the organization’s embeddedness in social contexts?’ Clandestine organizations embody secret agency and intriguing possibilities for understanding the ways in which social actors communicatively constitute organizations. The metaconversations of clandestine organizing take place in a complex socio-political historical context, and exploration of these metaconversations not only furthers our understanding of illicit and clandestine systems but also provides new insights into the communicative constitution of contemporary organizations in general.