Abstract
Organization studies scholars have expressed increased attraction to the line of thought associated with the moniker ‘CCO’: Communication as Constitutive of Organization (Ashcraft et al., 2009; Cooren et al., 2011; Cornelissen et al., 2015; Wright, in press). There is no couple more closely associated with this movement than James Taylor and Elizabeth Van Every, the founders of what has become known as the ‘Montréal School’ of organizational communication, the most welldeveloped line of CCO scholarship. Whether interested in CCO thinking or not, many organization studies scholars have found inspiration in Taylor and Van Every’s (1993, 2000, 2011) and Taylor et al. ’s (2001) substantial body of work because it exemplifies the very best sort of scholarship: that which both brings together and yet sees through concepts to illuminate a phenomenon in a way formerly unavailable. This book does just that in its exploration of the mutual constitution of communication, authority, and organization. And it does it remarkably well.
I suggest that there are four ‘problems of organization’ to which organization studies scholarship speaks: existence, persistence, performance, and (social) influence. This book is geared in particular to the first two issues, to first principles in our conceptions of organization—where ‘organization’ is both noun, a putative entity, and verb, in terms of ongoing organizing practice. But the book is not content to simply articulate a unique ontological stance on the equivalence of communication and organization; it is interested in developing an altogether novel explanation for authority in organizing. Taylor and Van Every’s unique approach to organization is clear throughout, perhaps best exemplified by this definition: An organization, from the perspective of the communication process, can be viewed as an imbricated assemblage of hierarchically embedded transactions, mediated by accounts and crowned by the one all important constitutive transaction that constitutes the organization as an entity, and thereby a legally recognized person who relates to all its members, whatever their rank. At that point, the organization has been authored. (p. 27)
Although this excerpt focuses on ‘the’ organization (as noun), it should be clear that Taylor and Van Every’s view places the genesis and maintenance of organization squarely in the practice of communication. It therefore also speaks to the practice of organizing (taken as a verb). And while this definition includes or references notions key to Taylor and Van Every’s argument that will have to remain outside my discussion (including imbrication, assemblages, accounts, and meta-conversations), the larger point is that communication, for Taylor and Van Every, is not a simple exchange of messages that creates or transmits meanings. Instead, communication is a complex transactional process (cf. Dewey and Bentley, 1949), a dialectic of conversations and texts that involves the transferring of an object of value between actors that simultaneously produces relations of obligation.
The definition also highlights authority as key to understanding organizing and organizations. The field has long understood authority to be key to understanding organization, but it is startling how little conceptual innovation there has been on what is clearly a central notion. Most work follows the Weber/Barnard line (see Kahn and Kram, 1994), although a growing literature interrogates authority from a psychoanalytic perspective (e.g. Catlaw, 2006; Stavrakakis, 2008). Taylor and Van Every’s extensive review of existing literature ‘found no empirical studies of authority in practice’ (p. xviii). In response, they claim that we need to develop an ‘awareness of authority as a phenomenon of communication and the importance of studying its role … in the establishment of the organization’ (p. xvi), Taylor and Van Every pursue a conception of authority sure to both challenge and inspire. To place authority in communication—and thus not as something separate from or constructed by communication—Taylor and Van Every draw on an innovative reading of theoretical resources that rarely consort with one another: Peirce’s notion of thirdness, Greimas’ narrativity, and Simmel’s notion of the triad (where they portray organizations as constellations of three-person games). Taylor and Van Every’s fresh reading of these theorists shows the importance of the presence of a text, a narrative, that becomes law-like in guiding and directing organizing activity by underwriting both local and distributed relations of obligation. That text, in other words, is authoritative, and its emergence is crucial in understanding organization.
Following the first two chapters, which lay out their theoretical base (and which helpfully include text boxes that illustrate and explain major points and concepts—suggested, as I understand, by a friendly review of an early draft), Taylor and Van Every present two detailed case studies that illustrate the claims they make about authority and organization. The first, a study of the Seven Days TV program at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), consumes three full chapters; the second, a study of the Integrated National Crime Information System (INCIS) in New Zealand, comprises four chapters. Drawing primarily on interviews and publicly available testimonies (from legislative hearings), these seven chapters provide renderings of organizational processes far more elaborate than those possible in journal articles. I will confess that, as I worked through these cases, at a few points I felt overwhelmed by the data (although the authors pepper the chapters with helpful explanations, interpretations, and questions). But there is a significant payoff for the diligent and determined reader. Taylor and Van Every are master storytellers with a knack for delivering context and insight. The narrative arcs they create and the characters they describe over those seven chapters are captivating, and the chapters’ length is essential to supply the richness and texture for the claims they are making. (Incidentally, since few researchers who conduct studies based on Taylor and Van Every’s work will have the luxury of such extended displays of data, some methodological guidance for more traditional formats would have been beneficial.) Although, at first blush, the cases’ data sources would appear to emphasize individual actors as the source of action, as the primary units of analysis, upon close inspection the depictions convey a semblance of practices unfolding over a significant span of time and space. Some scholars argue that data derived directly from practices (e.g. observations) are necessary to support constitutive claims; in this case, that requirement seems misplaced because Taylor and Van Every’s data provide a level of detail, context, and history rarely found in CCO research.
The value of the case studies does not lie merely in their richness. They allow Taylor and Van Every to address an empirical and conceptual problem that has limited the explanatory reach of CCO scholarship. In much of that work, the accomplishment of order is foregrounded to the neglect of the messiness of opposition and disorder. This book offers a remedy. The three theoretical resources—Peirce, Greimas, and Simmel—all make conflict central to their thinking, and Taylor and Van Every employ this work to develop a unique focus on failure and its intersection with authority. As described in their cases, it is not that failure creates a need for an authority to intervene to rectify a problem; it is that the production of authority is inherently associated with failure. In the book’s concluding paragraph, the authors suggest that Sometimes, as we have seen, the negotiation fails. And when it does it is the organization that falters, and the consequence is a breakdown of authority and a loss of corporate coherence. Authority is built into the relationships of communication itself. It is something that must be continually reconstructed in the flow of communication: a legitimization of individual and group activities. (p. 205)
Rather than reading the coherence posited here as a sort of standard for success, I suggest that Taylor and Van Every’s view has affinities with the version of failure in the theory of performativity advocated by Judith Butler (2010). Failure, for her, is not about missing some preexisting mark or metric; it is a necessary characteristic of practice—where practice is an ongoing precarious accomplishment marked by inevitable breakdowns. Organization, thus, must be continually reaccomplished and reconstituted, as Taylor and Van Every have long held. What then becomes interesting are the problems of authority that emerge when ‘interpretations become incoherent or contradictory’ (p. 71), as in Taylor and Van Every’s description of how early problems in the INCIS case were the result of ‘the absence of an already established thirdness. INCIS was still a coming-to-be, an organizing’ (p. 144; emphasis in original). And in the CBC Seven Days case, parties battled over authority itself—‘conceptions of what it is, and how it is to be exercised’ (p. 99)—as part of a contest to author the organization and its trajectory. Taylor and Van Every narrate both cases without limiting intentions and interests to individual human actors alone.
As commentators have argued over the past decade, CCO thinking would benefit from understanding communication as a struggle over meanings that unfolds in the constitution of organizing and organizations (Cooren et al., 2011; Kuhn, 2008, 2012; Putnam, 2013). Taylor and Van Every are clearly making struggle, and the organizational tensions it produces, vital to their depiction of constitution. Research following their line might do well to investigate how the version of thirdness (or narrative, law, frame, authoritative text), understood as the ongoing result of contests over authorship, becomes deeply intertextual over time and thus has the potential for a myriad of (disordering) readings and counter-narratives (Kuhn, 2008). Such an analysis could produce insight on the limits of communicative constitution, considering how failure reinscribes versions of authority that reproduce the failures they attempt to remedy.
Researchers might also examine how to leverage the tensions evidenced in organizing to gain insight into the contradictions of capitalism. A consideration of the interests written into the authoritative thirdness might start with an acknowledgment of the forces shaping similarities across contexts (‘the boss always “wins,” in the context of the head office’: p. 24) and ask how these processes are the outcomes of more encompassing social forces, why actors recognize communicatively created contradictions as irrational yet ‘natural’, and how those contradictions produce inequalities in capital accumulation and social choice. The notion of authority in communication that Taylor and Van Every advocate could very well speak to how authority in any given site is the product of models of legitimacy and value that squeeze out competing orders, or economies, of worth (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991); alternatively, one could follow Stark (2011) to argue that authority depends on the capacity to keep competing orders of worth in play, resisting any simple resolution of contradictions. In any case, if CCO scholarship is to develop responses to the last of the aforementioned ‘problems of organization’ (social influence), connecting this compelling vision of authority in organizing with the contradictions of capitalism would seem a worthwhile endeavor.
As Tim Dun argued in a recent Organization review of another volume emanating from the Montréal School (Robichaud and Cooren, 2013), Taylor and Van Every have provided a good deal of grist for lively debate about the ontology of organization—and, crucially, why these questions matter for organizational research and practice. As should be clear by now, I see When Organization Fails as an important work, one that will not only inform that debate but will also guide research for years to come. It represents a novel contribution not only to CCO scholarship but to visions of authority, one of organization studies’ most central and enduring concepts. It articulates profoundly communicative explanations of organizational existence and persistence, its detailed case studies provide careful and compelling demonstrations of their value, and those explanations form a foundation from which to examine the struggles over meaning and social influence that are a key element of the future agenda of CCO theorizing. It is an immensely rich book; I strongly recommend it to all who seek to understand organization—as both verb and noun—more deeply.