Preface

This volume in the series Foundations of Communication Theory takes up an important or even crucial issue in organizational communication research, and organizational studies overall: How do organizations exist? What is involved in a human collectivity being an organization? That is, how is something-a group of people or associated set of people and material objects-Constituted as an organization? We think it is important to answer this question with special awareness of today's capitalist corporations, which stretch across the world in one way or another, governed by varied regimes of corporate laws. However, a discussion of this issue must recognize, no less governments with departments and military arms that are themselves organizations, and nonprofit organizations and organizations comprised by definite, explicit alliances and collaborations of these, like NATO or the American Federation of Labor in the United States. Many scholars have noted that organizations can possess immense, world-shaking power-indeed, the array of today's complex organizations can claim to rule the world. (We should admit that emergent forms-the older one of liberal democracy or the relatively new collectivities like the Internet-may be harbingers of new interactive arrangements with, potentially, equal or even greater power-if they are not themselves colonized by organizations.) If we use a group of people in a pick-up game of tag, or a nuclear family, or a pair of people in a conversation, as our prototype for understanding organizations, we may well be misled into emphasizing features that are inadequate to characterize the powerful organizations underlying practically all our everyday activity.

This volume puts forward our own view of organizational constitution, which, we will argue, is especially good for treating the issues mentioned above. We call it the Four Flows Model of the Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO). As we discuss later, it is surely a perspective, and might be a theory, depending on your definition of those terms. Obviously, we will be arguing that communication is what constitutes organizations-but only communication having certain features and interconnections. We will address merely in passing some equally basic and relevant issues, including those that Smith (1993), in a seminal paper for all of CCO, mentions as the questions of whether organizing, in a very broad sense, is the basic process underlying or constituting communication, and whether organizing and communicating are essentially equivalent. We address these, in passing, mainly in Chapters 3 and 4, by discussing what it means for communication to have constitutive force.

We think of our model as one among many organizational and communication theoretic positions, including many contributing to our own ideas and many more or less contrary to ours. This means that our discussion in this volume had to be multilayered and recursive, with later chapters reorienting as well as simply building on earlier ones. That being said, we propose in the remainder of this Preface to trace through the argument about CCO developed in these pages.

Our first introductory chapter sets the stage for our own argument and exposition, by recounting, in its first part, the array of fundamental positions in social and communication theory from the mid to late twentieth century, up to roughly today. These include empiricist or systems theories, critical theories, and interpretive theories. For very influential statements of this distinction, see Habermas (2015) and Burrell and Morgan (1979). Some later perspectives, perhaps even more distinct, were articulated as post-structuralism and post-modernism by authors such as Derrida (1976), Foucault (1977), Lyotard (1984), and LaTour (2007). Those revolts transformed, but also became incorporated in, the interpretive and especially the critical perspectives. This clash among perspectives led the way to the impressive synthesis achieved by the theorist to whom we owe the most gratitude, Anthony Giddens. Then, in the second half of the chapter, we identify some core issues that inspire developments from the triad of main earlier theories, concerning agency (the unique capacities of humans), materiality, and power. These also helped frame the development of structuration theory.

The second chapter articulates structuration theory, and organizational/communication research developing it, in some detail. One central structurational notion is the duality of structure: as humans interact, they draw on-use-the rules and resources of immediate context, language, and social order, while simultaneously reproducing-maintaining or transforming-those rules and resources for use in the very next act or episode, or more broadly as part of society. A second major notion is that of human agency-the sole type of agency in our perspective-for which Giddens' model elaborates the capacities agents need in order to interact meaningfully and effectively, and to produce/reproduce structural resources.

The third chapter elaborates our views of communicative constitution. Communication per se has constitutive power-it brings social realities into existence and makes them what they are. We develop several concepts to shed light on this process: Giddens' notion of distanciation-constitution as articulation of variance across time, space, and language; the structurational hermeneutic-the interplay between whole communication processes and their constituent parts; perlocution-the constitution of social realities through language, specifically in organized settings; and transtructions-the rules or relations that intertwine the meaningful, power-laden, normative, and constitutive dimensions of social interaction. These four facets of constitutive communication provide conceptual substance for our conception of communicative flow in the next chapter. We also discuss constitution of a sign or linguistic resource, and of a (human) agent, noting how those differ from constituting an organization, and discussing how all three are influenced by forces of social power and its distribution in interaction and society.

Based on these preliminaries, our fourth chapter explicates our idea of communication as flow. While flow has important differences from examples of communicative interaction, its positive analogies are strikingly useful in understanding organizational contexts. Like aquatic, electrical, or atmospheric flows, communication is dynamic: it moves temporally, but changes form and direction, and overflows preestablished channels. It is multidirectional and typically disseminates meanings and consequences. Its signs, whether written or nontextual, are material and accompany flows of other materials-people, fuel, and goods-while giving those larger flows meaning and significance. It can include currents with different speed, depth, and composition, and cross-cuts and roils itself in contradictions and paradoxes often enough that we find it appropriate to apply a flow label-contravention-to such strained social-interactive phenomena. Indeed, we find enough parallel and enlightening features and subtypes between physical and communicational flows to speak of flow as a model for communication in general. However, we end the fourth chapter with a more theoretic move, by articulating and justifying the distinction among the four flows of our 4F model, discussed in detail in the next four chapters, where richer accounts of their distinctiveness and relations can be found.

Our fifth chapter discusses our first flow: membership negotiation. Both these terms are important: Membership emphasizes that people's belonging, or connection as members, occurs as organizational agents become connected, through constitutive communication flows processes, into varying role-relational practices typically marked by varying activity expectations, hierarchic or power levels, and standard communicative ties (e.g., with bosses). Negotiation emphasizes that these connective processes-of search, actual hiring, and crossing the boundary onto the membership roster, then socialization into work roles, sharing narratives with other members to position themselves, actual work experience, and perhaps exit-are two- or multidirectional. In this communication, both members and organizational others negotiate, exercising agency based on power deriving from identity factors as well as past work and interactions. They negotiate tacit or explicitly, placidly, or turbulently to set or re-set the parameters of their role-relationships in processes through which the organization as a multi-member collectivity is constituted.

The sixth chapter concerns organizational self-structuring-a communication flow that is prototypically though not distinctly organizational-which influences members as they produce and reproduce overt or recognized resources, social-relational as well as material. Its influence typically structures the organization so that it can become a power vehicle or medium to serve the goals or interests of the collectivity-or, more narrowly, powerful members, groups, or even outsiders. Through three types of overt self-structuring flow-the formal (authoritative texts and orders), the informal (cultural patterns), and the technological (infotech...