Communication as Organizing

Communication as Organizing unites multiple reflections on the role of language under a single rubric: the organizing role of communication. Stemming from Jim Taylor's earlier work, The Emergent Organization: Communication as Its Site and Surface (LEA, 2000), the volume editors present a communicational answer to the question, "what is an organization?" through contributions from an international set of scholars and researchers. The chapter authors synthesize various lines of research on constituting organizations through communication, describing their explorations of the relation between language, human practice, and the constitution of organizational forms. Each chapter develops a dimension of the central theme, showing how such concepts as agency, identity, sensemaking, narrative and account may be put to work in discursive analysis to develop effective research into organizing processes. The contributions employ concrete examples to show how the theoretical concepts can be employed to develop effective research.