Following Alvesson and Kärreman's (2000) influential essay on the modes and interpretation of organizational discourse, this article reports on a longitudinal study of naturally occurring interactions that took place before, during, and after a meeting between representatives of Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders), a well-known humanitarian organization, and representatives of local health centers in a region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This episode is used to exemplify the fruitfulness of adopting a view that incorporates two dimensions of discourse, that is, what Alvesson and Kärreman identify as its transient (autonomous) and muscular (determining) nature. The longitudinal aspect of our study allows us to show what interactants accomplish in particular settings, while illustrating a crucial aspect of the trans-local dimension of their talk. As shown in this article, a given Discourse must be embodied, materialized or even incarnated in discourses, that is, tokens of text or talk, in order for it to be reproduced, sustained and transported from one point to another, that is, to become what Latour (1987) calls an immutable mobile . A given Discourse can thus maintain its shape across time and space only if a lot of interactive work is done to assure the stability of its associations in the ordinary day-to-day activity of the people who embody it.
Alvesson, M. and Kärreman, D. (2000) `Varieties of Discourse: On the Study of Organizations through Discourse Analysis', Human Relations53: 1125—49.
2.
Atkinson, J.M. and Heritage, J. (eds) (1984) Structures of Social Action: Studies of Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
3.
Ballard, D.I. and Seibold, D.R. (2003) `Communicating and Organizing in Time: A Mesolevel Model of Organizational Temporality', Management Communication Quarterly16: 380—415.
4.
Ballard, D.I. and Seibold, D.R. (2004) `Organizational Members' Communication and Temporal Experience: Scale Development and Validation', Communication Research31: 135—72.
5.
Barrett, F.J., Thomas, G.F. and Hocevar, S.P. (1995) `The Central Role of Discourse in Large-scale Change: A Social Construction Perspective', Journal of Applied Behavioral Science31: 352—72.
6.
Bartlett, C.A. and Ghoshal, S. (1994) `Changing the Role of Top Management: Beyond Strategy to Purpose', Harvard Business Review72: 79—88.
7.
Bateson, G. (1979) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
8.
Bergson, H. (1911) Creative Evolution. London: Macmillan.
9.
Boden, D. (1994) `The Business of Talk. Organizations in Action . Cambridge: Polity Press.
10.
Callon, M. (1986) `Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: The Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay', in J. Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief, pp. 196—233. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
11.
Chia, R. (1999) `A ``Rhizomic'' Model of Organizational Change and Transformation: Perspective from a Metaphysic of Change', British Journal of Management10: 209—27.
12.
Cooren, F. (2004a) `Textual Agency: How Texts Do Things in Organizational Settings', Organization11: 373—93.
13.
Cooren, F. (2004b) `The Communicative Achievement of Collective Minding: Analysis of Board Meetings Excerpts', Management Communication Quarterly17: 517—51.
14.
Cooren, F. (2006) `The Organizational World as a Plenum of Agencies ', in F. Cooren, J.R. Taylor and E.J. Van Every (eds) Communication as Organizing: Empirical and Theoretical Explorations in the Dynamic of Text and Conversation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
15.
Cooren, F. (in press) Interacting and Organizing: Analyses of a Management Meeting . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
16.
Cooren, F. and Fairhurst, G.T. (2004) `Speech Timing and Spacing: The Phenomenon of Organizational Closure', Organization11: 793—824.
17.
Cooren, F. and Fairhurst, G.T. (in press) `Dislocation and Stabilization: How to Scale Up from Interactions to Organization', in L.L. Putnam and A.M. Nicotera (eds) The Communicative Constitution Of Organization: Centering Organizational Communication. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
18.
Deleuze, G. and Guatarri, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus. London : Athlone Press.
19.
Fairhurst, G. (1993) `The Leader—Member Exchange Patterns of Women Leaders in Industry: A Discourse Analysis', Communication Monographs60: 321—51.
20.
Fairhurst, G.T. and Cooren, F. (2004) `Organizational Language in Use: Interaction Analysis, Conversation Analysis, and Speech Act Schematics', in D. Grant, C. Hardy, C. Oswick, N. Phillips and L. Putnam (eds) Handbook of Organizational Discourse, pp. 131—52. London: Sage.
21.
Fairhurst, G.T. and Putnam, L.L. (2004) `Organizations as Discursive Constructions', Communication Theory14: 5—26.
22.
Fairhurst, G.T., Jordan, J.M. and Neuwirth, K. (1997) `Why Are We Here? Managing the Meaning of an Organizational Mission Statement', Journal of Applied Communication Research25: 1—22.
23.
Feldman, M. (2000) `Organizational Routines as a Source of Continuous Change', Organization Science11: 611—29.
24.
Fletcher, J.K. (1999) Disappearing Acts. Gender, Power and Relational Practice at Work. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
25.
Foucault, M. (1978) `Politics and the Study of Discourse', Ideology and Consciousness3: 7—26.
26.
Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison . New York: Vintage Books.
27.
Fournier, V. (1998) `Stories of Development and Exploitation: Militant Voices in Enterprise Culture', Organization5: 55—80.
28.
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
29.
Garfinkel, H. (2002) Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
30.
Gee, J.P. (1999) An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. London: Routledge
31.
Giddens, A. (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. London: Macmillan.
32.
Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
33.
Gilbert, G.N. and Mulkay, M. (1980) `Contexts of Scientific Discourse: Social Accounting in Experimental Papers', in K. Knorr-Cetina , R. Krohn and R. Withley (eds) The Social Process of Investigation. Dordrecht: Reidel.
34.
Gilbert, G.N. and Mulkay, M. (1984) Opening Pandora's Box: A Sociological Analysis of Scientists' Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
35.
Goodwin, C. (2000) `Action and Embodiment within Situated Human Interaction', Journal ofPragmatics32: 1489—522.
36.
Grant, D., Hardy, C., Oswick, C., Phillips, N. and Putnam, L. (eds) (2004) Handbook of Organizational Discourse. London: Sage.
37.
Heritage, J. (1984) Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
38.
Heritage, J. (1987) `Ethnomethodology', in A. Giddens and J. Turner (eds), Social Theory Today, pp. 224—72. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
39.
James, W. (1909/1996) A Pluralistic Universe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
40.
Jefferson, G. (1984) `On Stepwise Transition from Talk about a Trouble to Inappropriately Next-positioned Matters', in J.M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (eds) Structures of Social Action: Studies of Conversation Analysis , pp. 191—222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
41.
Keenoy, T., Oswick, C. and Grant, D. (1997) `Organizational Discourses: Texts and Context' , Organization4(2): 147—57.
42.
Knights, D. (2002) `Writing Organizational Analysis into Foucault' , Organization9: 575—93.
43.
Knights, D. and Willmott, H. (1992) `Conceptualizing Leadership Processes: A Study of Senior Managers in a Financial Services Company', Journal of Management Studies29: 761—82.
44.
Latour, B. (1986) `The Powers of Association', in J. Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief. A New Sociology of Knowledge?, pp. 264—80. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
45.
Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
46.
Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
47.
Latour, B. (1999) Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
48.
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. London: Oxford University Press.
49.
Law, J. ( 1987) `Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion', in W. Bijker and T. Pinch (eds) The Social Construction of Technological Systems, pp. 111—34. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
50.
Law, J. and Singleton, V. (2003) Object Lessons. Published by the Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN, UK, available online at: [ http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Singleton-Object-Lessons.pdf].
51.
Lindlof, T.R. and Taylor, B.C. (2002) Qualitative Communication Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
52.
Lomax, H. and Casey, N. (1998) `Recording Social Life: Reflexivity and Video Methodology' , Social Research Online3(2).
53.
McDonald, S. (2005) `Studying Actions in Context: A Qualitative Shadowing Method for Organizational Research', Qualitative Research5(4): 455—73.
54.
McPhee, R.D. (2004) `Text, Agency, and Organization in the Light of Structuration Theory', Organization11(3): 355—71.
55.
Merton, R.K. (1968) Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press.
56.
Mintzberg, H. (1970) `Structured Observation as Method to Study Managerial Work', Journal of Management Studies7(1): 87—104.
57.
Murphy, A.G. (1998) `Hidden Transcripts of Flight Attendant Resistance ', Management Communication Quarterly11(4): 499—535.
58.
Orlikowski, W.J. (1996) `Improvising Organizational Transformation over Time: A Situated Change Perspective', Information Systems Research7: 63—92.
59.
Orr, J. ( 1996) Talking about Machines. Ithaca, NY : ILR Press.
60.
Oswick, C., Keenoy, T. and Grant, D. (2000) `Discourse, Organizations and Organizing: Concepts, Objects and Subjects', Human Relations52(9): 1115—24.
61.
Pickering, A. (1995) The Mangle of Practice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
62.
Pomerantz, A. (1990) `Chautauqua: On the Validity and Generalizability of Conversational Analysis Methods', Communication Monographs57: 231—5.
63.
Pomerantz, A. and Denvir, P. (in press) Enacting the Institutional Role of Chairperson in Upper-management Meetings: The Interactional Realization of Provisional Authority', in F. Cooren (ed.) Interacting and Organizing: Analyses of a Management Meeting. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
64.
Pomerantz, A. and Fehr, B.J. (1997) `Conversation Analysis: An Approach to the Study of Social Action as Sense Making Practices', in T.A. Van Dijk (ed.) Discourse as Social Interaction, pp. 64—91. London: Sage.
65.
Popper, K. (1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchington & Co.
66.
Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology. London: Sage.
67.
Putnam, L.L. and Fairhurst, G.T. (2001) `Discourse Analysis in Organizations: Issues and Concerns', in F.M. Jablin and L.L. Putnam (eds) The New Handbook of Organizational Communication, pp. 78—136. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
68.
Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation. Oxford : Blackwell.
69.
Sachs, P. (1993) `Shadows in the Soup: Conceptions of Work and Nature of Evidence', Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of HumanCognition15: 125—32.
70.
Serres, M. (1982) Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.
71.
Suchman, L. (1987) Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
72.
Suchman, L. (2000) `Organizing Alignment: A Case of Bridge-building' , Organization7: 311—27.
73.
Suchman, L. and Trigg, R.H. (1992) `Understanding Practice: Video as a Medium for Reflection and Design', in J. Greenbaum and M. Kyng (eds) Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems, pp. 65—90. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
74.
Taylor, J.R. and Van Every, E.J. (2000) The Emergent Organization. Communication as Site and Surface. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
75.
Tracy, S. (2000) `Becoming a Character for Commerce', Management Communication Quarterly14(1): 90—128.
76.
Tsoukas, H. and Chia, R. (2002) `On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change', Organization Science13: 567—82.
77.
Van Dijk, T.A. (1997) `The Study of Discourse', in T.A. van Dijk (ed.) Discourse Studies: A Multidiscilpinary Introduction. Volume 1: Discourse as Structure and Process, pp. 1—34. London: Sage.
78.
Weick, K. and Quinn, R. (1999) `Organizational Change and Development', Annual Review ofPsychology50: 361—86.
79.
Weick, K. and Roberts, K.H. (1993)`Collective Mindin Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks', Administrative Science Quarterly38: 357—81.
80.
Wetherell, M. (1998) `Positioning and Interpretative Repertoires: Conversation Analysis and Post-structuralism in Dialogue', Discourse & Society9: 387—412.
81.
Wheatley, M.J. (1992) Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organizations from an Orderly Universe. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
82.
Whitehead, A.N. (1929) Process and Reality. New York : Macmillan.
83.
Widdicombe, S. and Wooffitt, R. (1995) The Language of Youth Subculture. Brighton: Harvester.
84.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
