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Spring01 Organizational Session21

Reminder: Group project presentations were pushed back to April 16 because of the Ice Storm

Organizations and Communities

• Taylor et al, c. 4

• The basic point of this chapter:
  • Communication is how social "structures" happen
    • Organizations are social structures
    • Organizations contain social structures
    • Those structures are both systems and cultures!
• It tries to explain how communication enables
  • The establishment of management systems and other structures that are embued with power
  • The establishment of cultural markers that:
    • Legitimate such systems
    • Enable people to know how the system works (frame knowledge; normal interpretive sense-making))
  • Note that the boundaries between systems theory and cultural theory all but disappear as we go down this path

• The fundamentals
  • Communication is the fundamental means of structuration
  • This situated communication
    • Occurs within discourse communities
    • That organize themselves by forming units of delegated responsibility
  • These situated groups
    • Integrated into a network of relations that turns these groups, and the organization itself, into an actor
    • Are therefore both situated contexts where actors work and actors that work within a larger situated context
• This sounds a bit like Simon's discussion of subassemblies as the emergent solution to complexity, it should
  • We've just taken another path
  • One that proposes to show how communication makes it happen
• But as we look, lets remember that things may not be quite this simple
  • There may be other emergent mechanisms of complexity:

• Taylor et al are suggesting a modification of Giddens' structuration theory
  • Communication is the primary modality of structuration
  • Let's add "relationships" to that, but in doing lets note that:
    • Relationships are themselves a structure
    • Communication is the fundamental building block of relationships

• Key elements of communication that matter in this discussion:
  • Conversation
  • Text
  • Relationships
  • Agency
  • Practice

• Let's dive in
• An organization is a special kind of object
  • Not substantial ... a construct of imagination
  • But with substantial representations
• Organizations are represented by
  • A set of conversations
    • A contest of influence
    • A conversation of conversations
  • A set of relationships that emerge in the pattern of those conversations
    • A dance of agency
    • Of head-complement relationships in which people "act-for" others
    • An actor of actors
  • A text
    • A text of texts
    • A collection of practices
      • Frames
      • Retained

• A fractal structure which repeats at finer degrees of scale:
• A community
  • A set of conversations
  • A set of texts
  • A set of narratives

Spring03OrganizationalSession22