This paper provides an overview of previous work that has explored the processes and mechanisms by which communication constitutes organizing (as ongoing efforts at coordination and control of activity and knowledge) and organizations (as collective actors that are ‘talked’ into existence). We highlight differences between existing theories and analyses grounded in communication-as-constitutive (CCO) perspectives and describe six overarching premises for such perspectives; in so doing, we sharpen and bound the explanatory power of CCO perspectives for organization studies more generally. Building on these premises, we develop an agenda for further research, call for greater cross-fertilization between the communication and organization literatures, and illustrate ways in which communication-informed analyses have complemented and strengthened theories of the firm, organizational identity, sensemaking, and strategy as practice.

What happens when people communicate or dialogue with each other? This is the daunting question that this book proposes to address by starting from a controversial hypothesis: What if human interactants were not the only ones to be considered, paraphrasing Austin (1962), as “doing things with words”? That is, what if other “things” could also be granted the status of agents in a dialogical situation? Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, incarnation, and ventriloquism proposes to explore this unique hypothesis by mobilizing metaphorically the notion of ventriloquism. According to this ventriloqual perspective, interactions are never purely local, but dislocal, that is, they constantly mobilize figures (collectives, principles, values, emotions, etc.) that incarnate themselves in people’s discussions. This highly original book, which develops the analytical, practical and ethical dimensions of such a theoretical positioning, may be of interest to communication scholars, linguists, sociologists, conversation analysts, management and organizational scholars, as well as philosophers interested in language, action and ethics. This book won the prestigious NCA LSI 'Old Chestnut' Award 2019!

What is an organization? What are the building blocks that ultimately constitute this social form, so pervasive in our daily life? Like Augustine facing the problem of time, we all know what an organization is, but we seem unable to explain it. This book brings an original answer by mobilizing concepts traditionally reserved to linguistics, analytical philosophy, and semiotics. Based on Algirdas Julien Greimas’ semio-narrative model of action and Jacques Derrida’s concept of écriture, a reconceptualization of speech act theory is proposed in which communication is treated as an act of delegation where human and nonhuman agents are mobilized (texts, machines, employees, architectural elements, managers, etc.). Perfectly congruent with the last development of the sociology of translation developed by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, this perspective illustrates the organizing property of communication through a process called ‘interactoriality’. Jacques Lacan used to say that the unconscious is structured like a language. This book shows that a social organization is structured like a narrative.

Although we have to welcome the renewed interest in socio-materiality in organization studies, I claim that we are yet to understand what taking matter seriously really means. The mistake we especially need to stop making consists of automatically associating matter to something that can be touched or seen, that is, something tangible or visible, an association that irremediably leads us to recreate a dissociation between the world of human affairs and the so-called material world. To address this issue, I mobilize a communication-centered perspective to elaborate that (1) materiality is a property of all (organizational) phenomena and that (2) studying these phenomena implies a focus on processes of materialization, that is, ways by which various beings come to appear and make themselves present throughout space and time. In the paper I conceptualize the contours of these materialization processes and discuss the implications of this perspective on materiality for organizational theory and research.