1 Constitutional Amendments: “Materializing” Organizational Communication

Abstract

This essay aims to “materialize” organizational communication in three senses. First, we seek to make the field of study bearing this name more tangible for North American management scholars, such that recognition and engagement become common. To do so, we trace the development of the field’s major contribution thus far: the communication‐as‐constitutive principle, which highlights how communication generates defining realities of organizational life, such as culture, power, networks, and the structure–agency relation. Second, we argue that this promising contribution cannot easily find traction in management studies until it becomes “materialized” in another sense: that is, accountable to the materiality evident in organizational objects, sites, and bodies. By synthesizing current moves in this direction, we establish the basis for sustained exchange between management studies and the communication‐as‐constitutive model. Third, we demonstrate how these conceptual developments can “materialize” in empirical study, proposing three streams of research designed to examine communication as a central organizing process that manages the intersection of symbolic and material worlds.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Gail Fairhurst, Linda Putnam, and James Taylor for their insightful feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Thank you also to the Annals editors, Art Brief and Jim Walsh, for their excellent remarks.

Notes

1. For a notable exception, see the work of many “business discourse” scholars (e.g., Bargiela‐Chiappini, 2009), referenced again later.

2. Miller (2005), for example, identifies numerous definitions of communication debated over time (see especially Chapter 1, Table 1.1).

3. Such a claim resembles Dewey’s (1916/1944) conception of society as existing in communication.

4. For a critique, see Taylor (2009).

5. For example, while the “materialism versus idealism” frame joins OB and organizational communication scholarship in the idealist camp, one can readily imagine a lively debate between these subfields about the relative role and weight of cognition and communication.