Email this article Is There a "Canadian" Approach to the Study of Organizational Communication?
Abstract: Although few departments in Canada have identified organizational communication as an area for priority development, this paper argues that there is at least a virtual "Canadian approach" to the field. It outlines three factors that might serve to distinguish such an approach: (1) the influence of Harold Innis; (2) the crossroads situation of Canadian scholars, resulting in a confluence of both European and American ideas; and, inspired by an analysis by Maurice Charland of the divergent constitutional ontologies of Canada and the United States, (3) the special circumstances of the Canadian experience as a seedbed for Canadian intellectual inquiry. The paper concludes by proposing that the Canadian "way" may indeed be postmodern.
Résumé: Bien qu'il y ait peu de départements au Canada qui aient reconnu la communication organisationnelle comme domaine de recherche privilégié, cet article soutient qu'il existe-au moins à l'état virtuel-une «approche canadienne» dans ce domaine. L'article décrit trois éléments pouvant caractériser une telle approche : (1) l'influence d'Harold Innis; (2) la situation de chercheurs canadiens au carrefour de penseurs européens et américains; et, à l'exemple d'une analyse de Maurice Charland des ontologies constitutionnelles divergentes du Canada et des États-Unis, (3) les circonstances particulières de l'expérience canadienne comme source d'inspiration pour la recherche intellectuelle canadienne. L'article conclut en proposant que «l'approche canadienne» peut fort bien être postmoderne.
Introduction
While I was preparing to write this essay for the millennium issue, at Rowland Lorimer's request focusing on organizational communication studies in Canada, I happened to receive two papers on the topic, one by a French writer, one by Americans (identities unknown, since it was an article out for review). Both papers used an expression that I found odd. The article in French, a summary of American approaches to the field, ended like this: "Je ne voudrais pas terminer sans parler des travaux du Canadien Taylor et de son équipe qui sont particulièrement intéressants . . . ." Earlier in the same paper this author had written "Certaines approches constructivistes actuelles, dont les travaux, par exemple, du Canadien Taylor . . . ." Why the highlighting of "Canadien," I asked myself, especially since, in French, references to nationality are typically written in lower case? On almost the same day, this time in an article authored by Americans, I read as follows: "In this section we follow the lead of the Canadian communication theorist, James Taylor . . . ." Again, while it is always flattering to be cited, I asked myself why the writers of the article had used the term "Canadian," especially since in the discussion that follows the only reference to my writings were ones that had appeared in journals published in the United States? Was there, I began to ask myself, something about the work I have been doing that made it specifically "Canadian"-so much so that those coming from elsewhere felt it necessary to single out the provenance?
It was a notion that had never occurred to me before. I received my doctoral formation in an American program of graduate studies, and I have continued to participate in American organizations such as the International Communication Association and the National Communication Association throughout my career as an academic. I have also been deeply influenced by trends in French intellectual life, very present at the Université de Montréal. My debts to those sources are clear. On the other hand, while individual researchers at Canadian universities (Simon Fraser, Calgary, Windsor, Carleton, Ottawa, Université du Québec à Montréal, Laval, Concordia, École des Hautes Études Commerciales, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, and the TéléUniversité) have made significant contributions to the literature on organizational communication, it is nevertheless fair to observe that nothing like the critical mass which is characteristic of a developed field yet exists in Canada for the communicational study of organization-certainly not with the density and involvement that would explain my "Canadian-ness," so seemingly apparent to these foreign writers.
In this paper I am going to explore a hypothesis, that in fact there might indeed be a specifically "Canadian" way of looking at organizational communication, and that there might be a "Canadian approach" to such a field of study-even if, for the moment, this approach exists more as a virtuality than a fait accompli. I will outline three reasons for believing so. First I reconsider the work of Harold Innis, now interpreted as a theoretician of organizational communication (not the usual glossing of his influence, I think). I am going to argue that he does in fact lay the basis for a distinctive theory of the communicational basis of organization, even though I see his argument as limiting in certain key respects. I am then going to consider the geographical location of Canadian scholarship, situated halfway between Europe and America, as a source of intellectual tension and a stimulus to creativity in thinking about organizational phenomena. I will argue, with examples from the work of some of my associates, that it is by incorporating ideas of European thinkers, adapted to the preoccupations of a field developed uniquely in America, that Canadians are impelled in theoretical directions distinct from those in the current literature in the great republic to the south. In Europe there is practically no organized study of organizational communication but there is a rich heritage of sociological and historical reflections on organization; this contrasts with the American "orgcom" tradition which has roots in pragmatism, speech communication, and social psychology-influences very different from, and much less sociological than, those prevailing in Europe. My thinking follows neither path exactly, but reflects elements of both. Finally, I am going to explore an idea inspired by an unpublished paper written by Maurice Charland, who contrasts the origins of the United States and Canada, one in a Declaration of Independence and the other in a parliamentary Act passed in the British House of Commons, to explain current proclivities in the two countries. Charland examines the political and cultural differences this bifurcation of origins entails; I am going to pick up a different trail to argue that the very different experience of national life of Canadians leads them to a different vision of what organization is-one which problematizes the very concept of "organization."
It is this problematization that I see as offering the most distinctively (or potentially so) Canadian entry point to a study of organizational communication. There is, it seems to me, an unposed question that underlies much of the current thinking on the subject-a question that very much needs to be brought to our concerned attention since it has both ontological and epistemological implications: What is an organization? Canadians, it seems to me, begin from different premises than Americans when it comes to imaginating (to use Morgan's term) organization. If we are to collectively develop a "Canadian approach" then it seems to me that it is here we should be starting from.
Before I enter my discussion, I need to make an apology. Unlike some of the other papers in this issue, I warned Professor Lorimer from the beginning that I would make no attempt to survey the work that my fellow researchers have been doing across the country (Richards, Sept, Cossette, Giroux, Lafrance, Rhéaume, Demers, Laramée, and Beauchamp, among others). I simply do not feel qualified to do so. Instead, what follows is an essay, not a review: a very personal coming to terms with my own origin and heritage. Like most of my compatriots, sandwiched as we all are between the booming dollar economy to the south, the newly invigorated Euro confederation to the east, and the emerging, if unsteady, industrial colossus of Asia to the west, identity involves a balancing act, one which I, like my colleagues, have been resolving in my own way. This paper is a reflection on that life lived at the margins, and an attempt to comprehend its significance for the conduct of intellectual inquiry. If the essay seems biased, and even ego-centred, to the reader, I can only plead circumstance: I have just concluded almost 30 years of teaching at the Université de Montréal, with wonderful colleagues and students, and this is my best chance to reflect on the meaning of that experience. An anonymous reviewer commented that I was not so much describing organizational communication studies in Canada as reporting on the work of the "Montreal School." Of course that is true (except that even my report on the Montreal School is incomplete). What I am reporting on is not the state of organizational communication studies in Canada but what I perceive to be Canada in organizational communication studies-a very different kettle of fish. To this end, the only data I can advance are drawn from my own experience and that of the associates with whom I have worked. As an Anglophone who has, from the beginning, taught in a Francophone university, my experience is almost by definition idiosyncratic. What follows is representative of that singular experience; it should not be read as an attempt to generalize to others. I can only hope it may stimulate the reader to conduct their own exercise in self-reflection and, in this way, to create the basis for a more creative dialogue involving us all.
Harold Innis: Organizational theoretician?
Innis obviously never contributed to organizational communication studies (the field did not even exist at the time) and he has typically been assimilated to media studies, where his influence has been quite exhaustively documented. I am thus taking some liberties in treating him as a major source of inspiration for organizational communication theory. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. So here goes.
By way of introduction, in order to highlight Innis' particular contribution, let me first outline what I perceive to be the organizational problématique. The specific nature of large, modern organizations, public and private, is that they are, on the one hand, collections of people (often very large collections) involved in a range of diverse activities with little unity of perspective other than a degree of common fate and a shared sense of belonging to the same organization, and, on the other, actors who speak with a single voice, what Callon & Latour (1981) call "macro-actors": corporate actors whose identity is legitimated in law and whom we treat as having a mission and a personality. In French, they are in fact termed "personnes morales." The problématique of which I was speaking is this: How do heterogeneous collections of people, characterized by multiple voices expressing a diversity of points of view, become actors, characterized by a single voice, expressing a corporate point of view?
This is an issue that, curiously enough, has received relatively little consideration in the mainstream organizational communication literature. Smith (1993) conducted an exhaustive review of this literature, dating back to its origins in the 1960s, and discovered that its dominant preoccupation is with communication in or within organization, a perspective that takes organization as a given and thus effectively sidesteps the question. Weick (1979, 1995) and Giddens (1976, 1979, 1984), although both in their respective ways deal with the genesis of organization in the sensemaking activities of its members, do not in the end address the problem of scaling up to produce an organizational "persona." The most explicit account of the phenomenon I know of is that of the Paris group associated with Callon and Latour (Callon, 1986; Callon & Latour, 1981; Latour, 1987, 1994), who explain the emergence of "macro-actors" as an effect of "translation," by which they mean the progressive recruitment of a variety of actants, human and non-human, in a movement where, little by little, a single view appears, with a single actor (or group of actors) to voice it-a hybrid they call an "actor-network."
Cooren & Taylor (Taylor & Cooren, 1997; Taylor & Van Every, 2000) think there is an even earlier source for the idea of translation, in Durkheim's (1915) Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim's topic in this least-cited of his books was the maintenance of social coherence in the geographically fragmented universe of Australian Aboriginal society. Durkheim's argument, in a nutshell, is that the sense of community, which is the indispensable core of continued association in co-operative activities, inevitably supposes a process by which the multiple representations that compose what he called "opinion" are subsumed under a common representation, voiced by a person who can speak with authority (he uses the word "force"), and thus give focus and purpose-and an identity-to the collectivity.
I have tried to graph this as a process (Taylor, 1999; Taylor & Van Every, 2000), illustrated in Figure 1. Consider the left-hand column, that of "Representation." This is the perspective of the organization-as-actor: how it is enabled to speak with a single voice. I am prepared to interpret the notions of "text" and "voice" broadly, as including all those signs, spoken, written, and otherwise (such as architectural or iconic), whose expression, in whatever medium, constitute the basis of identifiability of "the" organization-that to which we, since the mid-nineteenth century, accord person status for legal and administrative purposes. The right-hand column stands for the organization-as-network: a "laminated" superimposition of many organizational conversations (Boden, 1994) that I refer to, for convenience, as "the" conversation, out of which there appears that amorphous, but crucial, layered hypertext of perspectives that we still-a century after Durkheim-also refer to as "opinion." The organizational communication dynamic is thus both dialectical (representation, once voiced, must be legitimated in the organizational conversation for it to have an effective "force"; opinion is made interpretable by its transformation into a textual, and ultimately voiced, representation) and rhetorical (everything depends on a successful voicing of a community's representation of what it believes, addressed to itself and recognized as such).
Figure 1:
How Macro-actors Emerge: My Interpretation of Durkheim's View
With this in mind let us now return to Innis. Innis (1951) begins by drawing a sharp contrast between what he calls the "oral tradition" and "the vernacular," on the one hand, and "systems of writing," on the other. The distinction is not critical in and of itself but as explaining the emergence of "a special class" of those who possess "a specialized skill in writing" and thus become "monopolies" or "oligopolies" of knowledge, giving rise to "aristocracies" and "hierarchies." Because of the specialization, and the opacity of expression that it results in (technical jargon being one example), the aristocracy of knowledge finds it increasingly difficult to communicate in the vernacular ("specialized skill in writing . . . weakens contact with the vernacular") and thus alienates itself from its essential base in the community at large ("concentration on learning . . . introduces monopolistic elements in culture which are followed by rigidities and involve lack of contact with the oral tradition and the vernacular") (p. 4). Using Figure 1 as our point of departure, we would see the representation becoming increasingly complex and sophisticated, and in the process distancing itself from the conversation which is its ground.
This has two effects, according to Innis: First, the "freshness and elasticity" of the oral tradition is lost, leading to rigidity and absence of adaptability, and, second, since in the end "force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion" (Innis, 1951, p. 4, citing Hume; Latour, 1986, has made a similar point in an insightful analysis of power and its basis), the position of power which knowledge supported is undermined from within. The "equilibrium" having thus been "disturbed," the stage is set for revolution and the overthrow of power as those sidelined to the margins of society by the monopolization of the instruments of making sense marshal their forces and develop the technical means to revolt: "Written codes not only implied uniformity, justice, and a belief in laws but also an element of rigidity and necessity for revolution and drastic change" (p. 7).
Making due allowance for the background to Innis' analysis, based as it is on the study of the historical growth and collapse of empires from those of Mesopotamia and Egypt to those of Britain in the nineteenth century, I think it is still possible to read the Innis of "Minerva's Owl" as having enunciated a theory of organization, not dissimilar in its way from that of Karl Weick (1979) in his The Social Psychology of Organizing. In this interpretation of Innis, there are two ways to look at knowledge: (1) as that which is codified in symbolic form to constitute the institutional basis of the organization, including its programmed activities and system of rules and regulations (what Giddens, 1984, calls "structure"); and (2) as the sprawling, incoherent but energetic, still unorganized (as opposed to disorganized) interactive discourse of the diverse community of organizational members (what I think Giddens means by "system" since while it is "unorganized" in the global sense, it is far from "disorganized" at the level of the local working community). The "representation" column of Figure 1 constitutes knowledge that is enunciated in symbolic form; the "conversation/opinion" column constitutes a pool of knowledge that I have described as subsymbolic since it is distributed and, from the point of view of expressibility, virtual (Taylor, 1999, Taylor & Van Every, 2000)-Innis' "vernacular."
The difference between Innis and Weick is in how they perceive the dynamic working itself out. Weick, the optimist, sees the symbolic (the explicit knowledge based on previous experience and translated into established organizational procedure and understandings) as compensated for by the subsymbolic (all the tacit, practical, and normally invisible knowledges, in the plural, of any large organization, regenerated in its conversation), a resource to be called upon whenever the organization is confronted by an uncertain and incomprehensible environment. Thus, in his view, the variety present in the organizational conversation (Innis' "freshness and elasticity") is ultimately accessible, and a resource for adaptation in the face of change. Innis, the pessimist, sees an inexorable march toward increasing rigidification and ultimate revolution as what might be called the iron law of history. For Innis, symbolic and subsymbolic become irrevocably divided: mutually incompatible systems of discourse. Figure 1 then becomes a representation of the alienating influence of translation from the many to the one when knowledge is codified in writing. Knowledge is both the key to power and its Achilles heel; the very instrumentalities which supported the elaboration of the system of knowing themselves become the problem in that in their blossoming they outgrow their root system and finally die for lack of nourishment.
The difference in the perspective of the two authors can, I believe, be traced to Innis' preoccupation with media, and the almost total neglect of this topic in Weick (and most other writing in the organizational communication tradition). To read Figure 1, not taking media into account, is to turn organizational process into, to use Weick's term, a "social psychology" of organizing. We fall back on default media assumptions of interpersonal process and elementary texting (text receives, in fact, very little attention in Weick's treatment, or indeed in that of most of his management science cohort). Innis, much bolder, is constantly preoccupied by the extensions of organization, in time and over space. The result is to, first, give the formal text that is generated by sophisticated media-writing-a much more central role in organization and, second, emphasize the institutionalization of knowledge by its giving rise to a "specialized" class of professionals. What Innis is doing then, to again take Figure 1 as our point of reference, is to stretch out the cycle: to take it beyond the elementary exchanges of an Australian Aboriginal community, or even the development of a scientific consensus described by Callon & Latour (1981), to try to deal with the institutionalization of translation and the historically grounded emergence of classes of educated professionals for whom the translation, by a subtle displacement, becomes an end in and of itself. The inevitable result is an exclusion of those whose voices are no longer heard, and it is this "exclusion" (Latour, 1999) that Innis sees as laying the groundwork for an eventual retribution-a revolution in embryo.
My own understanding of this more historically grounded view is conditioned by my reading of Toulmin (1990) and Latour (1992). Toulmin believes that the authentic modernity that is evident in sixteenth-century writings, such as those of Montaigne, was distorted by the more rationalistic thought of Descartes and his contemporaries in the seventeenth century. The result was to have made analytic rationality uniquely acceptable and to have discarded the other pole of Aristotle's scheme: dialectic and rhetoric. If Figure 1 is a reasonable representation of the organizational communication cycle, then what Toulmin is describing as having happened in the seventeenth century is a short circuit: a preoccupation with the analytic rationality of representation and a downgrading of the understandings inscribed in daily work, resulting in the neglect of the larger translation process of which both are a part. Modern organization, at least in its rationalization, is thus, communicationally speaking, an aberration-a product of the imperfect modernity of Descartes, and a failure to realize the more generous promise enunciated by Montaigne.
For Latour, the seventeenth century witnessed a kind of permanent saw-off that he calls the "constitution" of modernity, where all those questions having to do with Nature would become the province of the rationalistic experimental/theoretical science then being invented by Descartes and others while everything to do with Society would be left to sociology and political science. This is as if we were to construct a wall between the two columns of Figure 1, with Science on the left, and Social Studies on the right, and no commerce between them. Latour, of course, believes it never did, and never could, work out so tidily (he calls his 1992 book We Have Never Been Modern); there has been a lot of cross-border smuggling and illicit night traffic, with the result that science is, and always has been, as political as it is rational, and politics is as rational as it is political. Latour thinks it is a hybrid world-much closer to the dynamic of Figure 1 than conventional views of science and politics let on. (If he had been writing about organization, he could have made much the same observation: It too is more "hybrid" and it is often acknowledged to be.)
It is a remarkable fact that, by and large, organizational communication studies have been little concerned with media and the role of text. They are similarly, like most organizational studies (with interesting exceptions such as Chandler, Beninger, and Williamson), relatively little preoccupied with the long term. The result is that, although in the time since Innis died we have been traversing an incredible technological sea of change, totally transforming organizational media, the current literature on the topic is rather banal: half science fiction, half quick fix.
I have to confess my own deep debt to Innis. The first papers I published in what I would now think of as organizational communication were an attempt to apply Innis' media hypothesis to a case study in implementation of technology into contemporary organization. The Innis hypothesis, as enunciated in his Empire and Communications (1972), states that media that emphasize time favour decentralization and institutional hierarchy while media that emphasize space favour centralization, dehierarchization, and organization that is spatially distributed. The work we were doing, reported in Leduc's (1978) master's thesis and commented on in some of my own articles (Taylor, 1981, 1982a, 1982b, 1984, 1986a, 1986b; Taylor & Katambwe, 1988), was in collaboration with the Business Planning Group of Bell Canada who had implemented an experimental system known as NLS (for oNLine System), later renamed AUGMENT. NLS was the brainchild of a group at the Stanford Research Institute under the direction of Doug Engelbart. It was to become, 10 years later, although we could not have known it at the time, the model for the Macintosh, and then for Windows, and finally for the Internet. Its philosophy was dictated by the perception that computing is a new medium whose potential is in (1) augmenting the capabilities of creative people (2) working together in intellectual problem solving, (3) even though they are spatially separated from each other. To our way of thinking (Leduc and myself), this system met to perfection Innis' criterion for a medium that favours space over time-its "bias," to use the Innisian expression. Since the Bell BPR group was a loosely organized linking of researchers, mostly freelance, it seemed to us an ideal testbed to explore Innis' hypothesis in a contemporary context. Since we had access to all the written exchanges on NLS, we therefore did a networking study of organizational change over the period from the beginning to the end of the experiment. What emerged seemed to confirm strongly Innis' intuition: The structure of the group appeared to flatten out over time, to become less hierarchical.
The broader implications of this "finding" (if I can call it that, since to the best of my knowledge it has not been exactly replicated since) were at least suggestive: If the introduction of spatially biased media has such a direct impact on organizational structure at the microcosmic level of a collaborative working group, then surely it would be fair to speculate there might be a similar effect at the macrocosmic level of corporate structure. It was this idea that we tried to develop in the 1993 books (Taylor 1993; Taylor & Van Every, 1993). I continue to be curious about this possibility although it is a question that has preoccupied me less in recent years (although see Krikorian, Taylor, & Harms, 1998).
Although this attempt to operationalize the rather Olympian theorizing of Innis at a more mundane level of contemporary practice left an indelible mark on my thinking, in the end I found Innis frustrating because, while he announces some extraordinary generalizations, and illustrates them from his encyclopedic reading of history, the mechanism by which knowledge is translated into power remains elusive. Citing the past is a risky way to buttress a causal argument because, as any statistician knows, just because something has happened a hundred times in a row does not allow one to draw a conclusion about the hundred-and-first roll of the dice. History does not actually repeat itself: at best, to cite Mark Twain, it rhymes. The problem, I think, is that Innis reduces communication to media (and even his view of media is simplistic, as I hope to show later). There is no real theory of communication (in the singular) in his writing and so trying to reinterpret his ideas into a form appropriate to organizational research tends to end up at a dead end.
Because of this, I think, my attention began to be drawn to a different question: how to link communicational process to organizational structure (the missing link in his work). In the next section I turn to consider this phase. Here my own work was to become increasingly intertwined with that of some extraordinarily brilliant students and associates. Through them, I began to absorb a literature with which I had previously been little acquainted, originating for the most part in Europe. This is my second reason for believing there is a specifically Canadian approach to organizational communication-now that I have been socialized into a distinctly Canadian tradition of research by those I was supposed to be teaching!
Betwixt and between: Canadian research at the crossroads between Europe and America
François Cooren
Innis, to put it in functional cause-effect terms, makes organization a dependent variable-that which is to be explained-and communication the independent variable, or causative factor. The effect of this explanatory framing is to oblige us to ask ourselves what are the indicators of organizational structure we will be looking for in trying to assess the effect of media. One of these, and Innis is quite clear on this, is hierarchy. Hierarchy, to put it as simply as possible, is a lining up of relationships of agency where, at the limit, someone commands and someone else obeys. Of course, in most societies it is not quite that simple: Hierarchy may be explained by many other indices, such as who gets to speak, when, to whom, about what (and who listens), and who does what for whom, whether explicitly told to do so or not (and who benefits). So the communicational question becomes: How do you explain hierarchy as an effect of communicative interaction?
This is the challenge François Cooren addressed himself to in his dissertation (Cooren, 1995, 2000). He began with Austin's (1962) and Searle's (1969, 1979) theory of speech acts (a very definite innovation in organizational communication studies, which, incidentally, have seldom taken account of this tradition). Austin's particular contribution was to have attacked head on a prejudice common to logic, linguistics, and communication studies: language as merely the instrumentality through which knowledge is exchanged (communication as information transmission). Austin proceeded in two steps. In the first he pointed out the existence of usages of language where it is clear something is being done through speech, and indeed where speaking and/or writing is the only way of doing it: calling the batter "out" in baseball, for example, or getting married, or handing down a judgment in a court of law, or making a will, or baptizing a boat. He designated this class of expressions "performatives" (to contrast them with informative statements, which he called "constatives"). He then, in a second step, argued at some length, and with abundant examples, that the property of acting through speaking is a feature of all language use, even when it is not explicitly performative. Suppose someone says "I believe the window is open; I feel a draught." Is that just a statement of fact? It could be. It might also be a veiled request for you to get up and shut the window. How do you tell, in practice?
Searle's elaboration on Austin's ideas set out to isolate the factor in speech that makes the difference between a mere "locution" (Austin's term for the factual dimension of language) and its "illocutionary" point or force (again Austin's term for the dimension of language that conveys its quality of acting): how you divine it is or is not a request, in effect. The vital factor, Searle argued, is that an act of speech can be said to carry an illocutionary meaning to the extent that it communicates the intentionality of the speaker, thus presuming comprehension of such intentionality by the hearer. Language, in other words, communicates on two levels: On one, it makes factual assertions, more or less explicit, about a state of affairs holding in the environment of the interactors. On the other, it refers to the state of the conversation itself: the respective intentions of its participants and, lurking in the background, a structure of more permanent relationships in that, since making a request is an imposition, it speaks indirectly to the rights and obligations of the interactants with respect to each other (Labov & Fanshel, 1977). It is in this sense that communication generates hierarchy: who asserts, who agrees; who requests, who responds; who promises, who holds to account; and so on.
Cooren's objection to this formulation was not directed to the role of intentionality per se, but to Searle's tendency to psychologize the concept: to reduce communication to intersubjectivity, in effect. Cooren's demonstration takes its point of departure in a notable exchange of views between Searle and Jacques Derrida (who had, incidentally, first presented his ideas on speech act theory in a paper delivered in Montreal in 1971 at a conference of philosophers in which I participated). Derrida (1988) once again attacked what he has repeatedly criticized as an unfounded prejudice of Western philosophy: a belief in the primacy of the present (implying as it does the parasitism of writing or text on the spoken). On the contrary, he sees the textuality of language (écriture) as that which makes communication possible in the first place, and our impression of presence as derivative on it: We become present to each other, and ourselves, only reflexively through the medium of the texts we have produced.
To illustrate what I understand Derrida to be saying, let me cite an illustration. Michael Mills (who later completed a PhD in communication at McGill and taught at the Université de Montréal, before going on to New York University and Apple) based his master's thesis on the following experiment (Mills, 1971). He placed subjects before a television monitor on which their own image appeared. The camera recording their image was now connected not directly to the monitor but to a satellite tape recorder, placed at some distance from the one feeding the monitor. The result was a full second delay between the capturing of the image of the subject by the camera and its occurrence on the screen. The effect was fairly bizarre: Subjects waved to the camera, and then watched themselves waving back as if responding: self-greeting. They had been put into a dialogue situation with themselves.
It is this displacement in time that Derrida is calling attention to. Even in ordinary interaction, no matter how instantaneous the feedback is, there is always going to be an infinitesimal delay. We will never actually be present to others, or to ourselves. There will always be a slight "deferral"-a fractional delay (Derrida's "différance"). But if we can never be quite "present" then we are forever dependent on the text ("écriture") that conveys our presence, whether it be verbal/gestual, graphic, or, as in Mills' experiment, visual. It follows that if intentionality is the key to detecting the illocutionary point of a speech act, then intentionality must be an objective property of language, not simply an inference to the subjective state of the speaker or writer.
Notice, before we go on, the implications of this argument. Earlier in my discussion I pointed out the necessity of explaining organizational identity-the production of a corporate macro-actor. It is clear that Bell Canada or the Royal Bank or the Government of Manitoba do not have an "intention," in the subjective sense of a human attitude. How could they since they are merely legal fictions, products of someone's previous speech act, creating them? No doubt their CEO's and premiers do, but the organization as such does not have an "intention" in the sense of a psychological state. Any theory based on intersubjectivity is thus going to have difficulty explaining corporate personality, other than as a loose analogy. But an objectively grounded theory of intentionality as a property of language has no difficulty at all, since we have only have to say something like "Bell Canada has now decided to . . ." or "The Royal Bank today announced . . ." or "Manitoba is vigorously opposed to . . ." and we will have instantiated a corporate actor in our discourse and made it as "present" as Derrida thinks it ever could be, corporate or not. The organizational intention may have had a human intention behind it-that of the CEO or premier-but what explains organizational power to perform is not its chief executive's ability to act, but its own, and that is something which derives from its intention materialized in text, not the subjective state of the executive (although of course the latter may vocalize the text).
The second implication is even more radical in that it supposes that our own identity as individuals must also be established in discourse. In 1971, based on Mill's work and that of another of my students, Paul Haley (1971), we presented a paper to the International Communication Association in which we drew attention to the significance of the experiments we had been conducting, where a distance-in time or space (the latter being Haley's contribution)-is artificially created between some individual and their fedback image (Taylor, Haley, & Mills, 1971; Taylor, 1972). We claimed to have been giving concrete form in our experiments to Goffman's early writings on the presentation of self in everyday life (see Goffman, 1959). In Goffman's view, the establishment of a self-ness is far from automatic: We must project an image of ourselves to our peers in a context of interaction, and have it confirmed (or disconfirmed) there by them (a similar view is developed in Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967). The maintenance of "face" depends, Goffman writes, on the taking of a "line." "Face" is something that can be saved, lost, or given. Thus the establishment of individual identity is no more primary, or secure, than that of corporate identity; both must be interactively produced.
Having established that intentionality is a property of language, and not just a reflection of psychological state, Cooren then proceeded to consider how it should be studied, as an objective phenomenon. Here he draws on the semionarrative theory of a French structuralist, Algirdas Greimas (1987), in order to reinterpret the categorization of speech acts initially proposed by Austin (1962) and Searle (1979) and revised by Vanderveken (1990, 1991). Accepting the standard speech act position that a communicative act may be analyzed on two levels, Cooren then argues somewhat as follows.
At one level, there is a state or a change of state (an event). This is the domain of the locution. It is at this level that the object of value which will become the theme of the communicative exchange is established. Objects take on value, communicatively speaking, because of their association with some subject. The subject-object link is not only foundational, it is mutually defining: Objects have value because of being possessed or otherwise associated with some subject, or subjects, while subjects are inevitably defined in part by their involvement with objects (material or otherwise).
At the other level, the illocutionary, there is a link between the intentionality, or attitude, of an knowing/acting subject and its object. This is termed a modal object (modality being the linguistic term for the attitudinal relation of speakers to the states of affairs and events that we described as level one). What both speech act and semionarrative theory claim is that intentionality, once voiced or otherwise made concrete in some expression, may be exchanged-transferred. We can change people's minds about something, persuade them to do something, honour them, and embarrass them. It is this second level that transforms a "simple" (they never actually are simple, in practice) statement of fact, or locution, into a fullfledged act. Communication thus serves to establish a trinary relationship involving two subjects and an object, such "object" being a description of a level-one state or event (Robichaud, 1998). The nature of the link between the subjects is one of giving and taking, where the taker-the one who is affected by the act of giving-is now related to level one in a new way, either in his or her belief of the facts of the situation or in the role of agent, acting to bring about an event. I believe this is a constructive interpretation of Newcomb's (1953) concept of an "A-B-X system" (Taylor, 1999).
The link between the two levels is that of agency: Agency is both what explains events, since it motivates knowledge and action (level one) and also supposes a capability to know and to act (level two). This acting capability, in organizational contexts, must usually be gained or earned (which Greimas calls "competence" or "qualification"): Level two is about gaining competence through transfer of intentionality ("manipulation")-being "mandated," given a "mission" or task.
All this being admitted, we can then, first, classify the acts of communication according to their target: (1) establishing the truth of a state, (2) creating the conditions for the performance of some act, and (3) declaring a state of affairs to exist and by that act making it exist in fact. There are thus three modalities: epistemic (establishing truth through speech), deontic (mobilizing action through speech) and, to use Austin's expression, performative (causing something to be true by saying it, as "We find the defendant guilty on all counts!" spoken by a jury foreman). Secondly, we can classify acts according to whether the primary link with the object is the speaker or the addressee (promises versus requests, for example).
Employing the category system thus developed, Cooren then went on to analyze hearings of a parliamentary committee and was able to show how they first establish through conventional procedures their own identity (who the members are, what their titles and functions are, what their object is) and then, second, proceed to debate an issue within the well-established canons of a legitimate rhetorical contest involving two parties. Giddens (1976, 1979, 1984) has distinguished between structure (global properties of organization) and system (local properties of organization) and thinks of what he calls "duality" as the reproduction of structure in system. Cooren, it seems to me, gives a much more vivid demonstration of Giddens' principle than he was himself able to produce.
Carole Groleau
Recently, Groleau & Cooren (1999), using data from Groleau's doctoral dissertation, have proposed a further application of Cooren's system, to the representation of computerized tasks. Groleau (1995, Groleau & Taylor, 1996) similarly employed Austin's speech act theory as a theoretical scaffolding for her case studies of the implementation of new technology into contexts of work (accounting, purchasing, graphic design). She observed that the classical view of technology portrays it as an instrumentality, reserving to its human users the role of agency. Computerization, however, confuses this picture because one property of software is that it inscribes in its text the expressive modalities for the conveyance of intentionality. Whereas we commanded the tools of an earlier epoch, our new machines have now been given the discursive means to command us ("For Sales, press one; for Service, press two; etc."). Groleau's original research was a sensitive analysis of the human response of skilled workers to finding their traditional modes of work transformed by the new actor in their midst; the more recent writing of Groleau & Cooren promises to open the door to a more rigorous analysis, and may well be of benefit to system design, which is increasingly preoccupied with supporting collaborative work (Taylor, Groleau, Heaton, & Van Every, in press).
It also raises another issue of profound importance. Perhaps the difference between the computer and earlier technologies is not one of kind, but of degree. Maybe it was always an illusion to believe that we "commanded" our tools. Certainly Bruno Latour (1994) believes so. Take the case of a firearm, he suggests. Members of the National Rifle Association argue that it is not guns that kill people, it is people. But is this not a somewhat simplistic assumption? If that were really so, then the murder rate would not be correlated with gun ownership. But it is. For Latour, the explanation obliges him to rethink the concept of who or what is acting: where is the agency located? He believes that it is neither in the gun in isolation nor in the person in isolation (you could not commit murder without having some weapon); the real actor (or "actant," to avoid anthropomorphizing) is a combination: man-with-gun. The essence of technology is then seen to be the embodiment in some artifact of a specific intentionality, which then becomes part of the given environment of subsequent societies, and a shaper of people's future acts as well as their instrumentality-not just a neutral "tool." This, it seems to me, is an invitation to study the computerization of our work world in a new way, one which emphasizes the role of agency (or what Cooren now calls "sub-mission": sous-mission). It is this dimension that is missing in Innis.
Daniel Robichaud
Robichaud (1998) has attacked the issue of how hierarchy emerges in interaction from a more sociological perspective. His master's thesis (Robichaud, 1991) was an analysis of the theory of Karl Weick, and his thinking also has roots in the thought of Bourdieu and Giddens (notably the latter). His work is thus what might fairly be called "structurational." He, like Cooren, draws extensively on the semionarrative theory of Greimas but he puts it to use in a different way.
How, he begins by asking, should we analyze communication? In answer he distinguishes between two dimensions that he calls "conversational" and "textual." For the term "conversation," he adds, we could substitute that of "interaction"; and for "text" we could read "sense." The dynamic of communication then involves a kind of two-way translation, out of which emerges structuration, or organization: The participants' texts are "actualized" in the form of acts, and acts are textualized to become texts. The translation process is ongoing. Texts, in this interpretation, are thus both virtual (what people know as they enter into interaction) and real (what they produce as speech or other expressive form in conversation). Every conversational exchange thus becomes a point of intersection of two or more texts (some verbalized, some not). The actualized organization can be read as a real text and yet the organizational text remains, in its virtual variety, a superimposition of many virtual texts (a hypertext) from which communication has generated one string of realized text. In large organizations there are, of course, many simultaneous conversations going on (what Boden, 1994, calls a "lamination" of conversations), so that organizational communication remains, as Weick (1979) has always insisted, "loosely coupled." Organizationally speaking, conversations are frequently intersections of conversations, and Robichaud intends to capture the implications of this overlaying in his analyses.
Every organizational conversation then becomes an issue of influence: Whose virtual text will get recognized in the real text as it takes shape in the interactive sphere? Presumably it is here that hierarchy will get produced, and reproduced.
In his methodology, Robichaud also draws on the semionarrative theory of Greimas and his school, but with a difference. The traditional basis of data for structuralist researchers such as Greimas has generally been stories or other forms of discourse illustrating narrative principles, analyzed ex post facto, as artifacts. Robichaud extends this reasoning to argue that organizational actors are continually narrativizing their own interactive experience, and it is out of this narrativization that the actual organization is produced. Like Weick, Robichaud sees it as a forever-incomplete project: always a bridesmaid, never a bride; always an organizing, never quite an "organization."
Rather than enter into the quite complex details of his analysis, I am going to select a brief illustration drawn from his dissertation. The situation is this. The mayor of a mid-sized suburb of a large city has decided at mid-term to engage as many citizens as possible in a consulting exercise, designed to ascertain their main preoccupations. To this end, he assembles a team (of which Robichaud was a member) who will plan the campaign and assist at the public hearings. Robichaud has recorded the background planning sessions and the evening public meetings and it is this corpus that he uses for his dissertation (the dissertation is thus part of a longer-term project of analysis). It is one of those sessions; several citizens have vocalized what is on their minds: salting of winter streets, a sidewalk in a state of disrepair, a hole that needs to be filled, the need for a bicycle path, response times of the police. Each of these objects links two subjects: the speaker and the city (whose spokesperson is the mayor) and, following Greimasian principles, it sets up an opposition, with the city as the opponent, at least in the discursively created narrative of the speaker. One possible strategy on the part of the mayor would presumably be to refute the claims of the speaker: show him or her to be wrong (and in fact Robichaud found one instance of this reaction on the part of a city official, not the mayor). But this would be to reinforce the opposition (as indeed the official discovered, to his dismay, since his intervention encountered a wall of hostility). The mayor is too experienced to fall into this trap. Instead what he does, without exception, is to incorporate the citizen's narrative within another where citizen and mayor now are linked as co-subjects confronting another opponent. For example, one citizen rises to complain about the exceptionally high wages paid to city employees, making it the mayor's responsibility to act to bring them into line. In his response, the mayor proceeds to paint on a different canvas, drawing on his knowledge of provincial politics, the power of the unions, and other factors even including the weather. When he has finished, the oppositional confrontation has been reframed as one pitting the city and its citizens against the union.
As Robichaud points out, this is a kind of globalization in which the present conversation is fitted into a larger conversational arena, with the effect of reidentifying the narrative roles of those involved with respect to a given object. This is how, Robichaud believes, the organization is regenerated, structurationally.
Robichaud's more recent work is now concerned with analyzing the manner in which the planners managed to frame the evening meetings to give them a certain institutionally recognizable meaning to participants. In this respect, his work now overlaps with that of Cooren in the latter's interpretation of the role of proceduralization in organization.
Loren Lerner
The influence of Greimas can again be found in Lerner's (1996) dissertation (see also Taylor & Lerner, 1996). Her analysis was based on the transcribed interactions of a group of very senior federal public servants who met on a regular basis over a three-year period to consider the implications for government of functioning in an information-driven society and economy: the Governance in the Information Society Roundtable. Each of the participants made a commitment to develop a "case study" which would illustrate some aspect of the larger question by relating it to a specific activity of government. Lerner selected the presentation of these case studies for her analysis.
Like Robichaud she is able to demonstrate the constructed character of the participants' organization. Weick has always argued that managers operate in an environment characterized by great equivocality: what he calls an "environment of puns." This is very evident in the discourse of the governmental managers for whom every feature of the world they live in is susceptible to be given multiple interpretations. Lerner points out two features of the narrativization the mandarins are clearly doing in trying to make sense of that world that help to extend Robichaud's analysis in new directions. Bruner (1991) has observed that every story can be read in two ways: as an account of some specific events in some concrete situation, and as an instance of a more abstract structure that he calls a "generic" narrative. Story-ness is thus not simple relating a sequence of interconnected events; stories must also conform to what might be called a narrative grammar, following certain principles of construction that may vary from genre to genre, and society to society, but are what gives the narrative its peculiar power-its good "form." In her dissertation, Lerner pursues this idea by asking whether, in the relatively homogeneous context of the Roundtable, the participants may not be working toward a collectively realized story, where each of their separate chronicles can be seen as an approximation of a deeper narrative reconstruction. In fact, her dissertation claims to isolate not just one, but two, such narrative structures. Her work illustrates the extraordinary extent to which organizational actors and their environments are in fact, as Weick hypothesizes, "enacted" in the sensemaking of members.
Lerner's other contribution draws on work by Labov & Fanshel (1977). The latter report their analysis of the discourse of a young anorexic patient in therapy and in particular her relation to her mother. Labov & Fanshel believe that the family is a governance relationship based on complementary rights and obligations, and that dysfunctional relations can be studied in an analysis of discourse that focuses on failures to negotiate the outcome of claims made by one member directed to another, based on a perception of rights and duties. Lerner generalizes this view of governance to argue that, for the public servants as well, frustrations that they attribute to the "information society" may always in fact be traced back to perceptions they have that some basic contract of governance has been in some way violated. Her analysis, in fact, very strongly supports this hypothesis in that the participants formulate their narratives as involving what are clearly generic actors: Government, the People, the Public, the Courts, the Press, the Prime Minister, the Private Sector. In every case they report a breakdown of some basic understanding as to what each owes the other. Again this suggests that it is in narrativization that organization is realized.
One other feature of Lerner's work would also emphasize a conclusion Robichaud comes to, that worlds of discourse enfold each other and that the identity of organizational actors has to be recalibrated to each situation as it occurs. It is in this manner that the conversations of an organization become interconnected, and the identities of participants confirmed.
Lorna Heaton
Heaton's (1997) dissertation draws on different sources from those I have been alluding to above and yet it makes many of the same points. Hers is an observational report, using a qualitative methodology, on the factors that determine the design of computer-based technologies meant to support collaborative work in two remarkably different environments, Scandinavia and Japan. Her theoretical point of departure is the literature of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, a field principally identified with several British researchers and the group at the École des Mines in Paris, including Callon and Latour. It is an area of research that has grown rapidly over the past generation, that concentrates on the manner in which scientific "facts" are constructed, taking account of both material and social factors. Heaton's study innovates in exploring the construction of a computer-based technology, in two contexts sufficiently distinct from each other to permit her to try to isolate the effect of institutional and national culture on the design process. She discovers that the two very different contexts do, in fact, produce contrasting technologies that seem to reflect national differences: a concern for social participation in Scandinavia resulting in a very down-to-earth approach to technology development versus a preoccupation with high-end engineering married to a sensitivity to interpersonal dynamics in Japan.
Her conclusion borrows a concept from Pickering (1995), who in turn had borrowed it from Foucault: that of surface of emergence. According to Pickering, scientific inquiry is a kind of "dance of agency" in which the scientist acts and nature responds. What makes it possible for the respective agencies to interact at all is that they meet on a common "surface." The surface, physically speaking, is provided by what has already been going on, so that scientific inquiry is always highly contingent: What is now discovered depends on where the scientist started from. Heaton shows the relevance of this principle for technology development: In both contexts, current work is explained in good part by previous work-a kind of cumulative logic-with the result that, while both Scandinavia and Japan are producing software solutions to how to support collaborative work, the systems they generate bear little resemblance to each other.
Heaton then adds one dimension to Pickering's "dance of agency": the professional surface. Here she comes close to Robichaud, who similarly sees a triadic relationship of two subjects linked by a common object as fundamental. As Heaton observes, the scientist or technologist is related to their object of investigation within the context of an ongoing dialogue with other scientists or technologists. That interaction also assumes a surface of emergence, through, for example, publication and conferences. She then makes a persuasive analysis of the very central role this surface plays in the design process. She concludes by observing that there may indeed be other "surfaces of emergence" (such as those involving the eventual users of the technology), suggesting that such surfaces might best be thought of as an "interference pattern."
Martine Harvey
Harvey's (1998) dissertation reports on the implementation of a new technology into two contrasting environments, making it in some respects a mirror image of Heaton's study, now from the point of view of use rather than design. Both are hydroelectric companies. One is Canadian, one American, one public, one private, one very large, one quite modest. The technology in question is a computer-assisted device to allow meter readers to record their observations on their daily rounds. It has an additional feature, which motivated Harvey's study: Since it records activities of the meter readers on a minute-by-minute basis, it also furnishes a managerial instrument of surveillance and control.
In practice, although the equipment was basically identical, it turned out to be two different technologies, so different were the uses it was put to in the two environments. In the American company, where the supervisor was hands-on, control was tight and frequently invasive. In the Canadian company, where union opposition was powerful, the surveillance facility was not employed in day-to-day operations. Records of employee performance went instead to a central planning committee. Paradoxically, however, the stress level was apparently higher in the low-surveillance environment than in the high-surveillance American case-an apparent contradiction of the hypothesis, well documented in the literature, that surveillance generates negative reactions. The mediating factor seemed to be social coherence: The American team was smaller, accustomed to helping each other out in the completion of routes, and used to the authoritarian style of their ex-army supervisor. The Canadian company was more bureaucratic in leadership style (by the book, with preferential treatment for veterans), less egalitarian, and in contrast to the American company, discouraged inter-reader contacts on the job. In explaining her findings, Harvey then uses Giddens' principle to argue that it is routine that reduces stress.
Her Giddensian analysis also tends to support Cooren's argument for treating action according to its objective effects. In the Canadian firm, as opposed to the American, the recorded data on worker performance had little immediate effect on their daily life but, channeled through the planning committee, could be expected to have less predictable and probably more drastic long-term effects (as has subsequently turned out to be the case). Thus, in evaluating organizational action it is essential to recall that any act may have multiple, and invisible, targets. This suggests a principle that Cooren investigates: Rather than think of illocutionary force as what is added to the locution, it is preferable to see it as what is subtracted from perlocutionary effect (Austin's term for speech acts that have succeeded in producing an effect, as in "I convinced her").
Geoff Gurd
Gurd's (1994; Taylor, Gurd, & Bardini, 1997) study also addresses the phenomenon of the introduction of a new technology into an established environment of work, in this case a major urban hospital. The technology in question is CareFile, a software product designed to facilitate the work of physicians in their offices, including diagnostics and the preparation of referral-related reports. The software seemed to have an especially good chance of succeeding, since it had been designed by a doctor in the hospital and vetted by the directorial committee. Nevertheless it proved to be a fiasco, used to any great extent by only one doctor, its designer! Gurd's dissertation is an observational report on the several contexts into which the technology was implemented, and a careful analysis of the factors that explain its failure to be integrated into practice. His analysis would support a conclusion now becoming more generally accepted, that, as Sachs (1995) puts it, there are two contrasting epistemologies of organizational work. One is what she calls organizational/explicit and images the organization as an interrelated structure of functions. The other she calls activity-oriented/tacit and it emphasizes the practical, largely local and unvoiced performances of people in dealing with the contingencies of daily life, solving problems as they arise, using intuition as well as training to do so. In Gurd's analysis, the CareFile technology made the basic error of underestimating the importance of this latter situated knowledge and, by overformalizing medical practice, alienated potential users.
Gurd's work suggests a general principle that Groleau and I have since been exploring (Taylor, Groleau, Heaton, & Van Every, in press), namely, that if the basic organizational relationship is the linking of two subjects via an object to produce an A-B-X system, then many of the problems of computerization can be traced back to incompatible A and B perspectives. Computerization can be conceptualized as an act in which an A (management, systems design) imposes an X (a computer-based technology mix) on a B (a user community). When A takes an organizational/explicit view of B's work, and B's work is in fact better described as activity-oriented/tacit, then there is a mismatch, frequently leading to disappointing outcomes (Taylor, Gurd, & Bardini, 1997).
Anne-Marie Tardif
Tardif's (1996) study is also set in a hospital but she studies the implementation of a program of Quality Circles as it affects four different nursing supervisors. She, too, looks at the implementation process through the lens of speech act theory in that she sees the managerial initiative as an injunction to behave in a certain way. Her analysis then complements this perspective with the Batesonian idea of statements with paradoxical effects as developed in Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson (1967). And, indeed, she finds a range of responses to the managerial initiative, from enthusiastic adoption to total indifference, but her analysis demonstrates quite clearly the existence of paradoxicality as a barrier to organizational change imposed from above.
Other studies
There is not enough space here to report on all the work that has been done in organizational communication by my associates. It falls under two categories: completed studies and those still in progress. Of those that have been completed, I might single out those of Martine Frechette (1988), who studied technological change among keyboard punch operators; Sandra Verreault (1990), who studied the personal price paid by those subjected to paradoxical injunctions (occupational burnout); Françoise Bélanger (1990), who studied the implementation of technology in a network of franchised pharmacies; Margot Hovey (1991), who studied the implementation of technology from the opposing perspective, that of a design team whose system proves to be ill-adapted to the actual context; Nathalie Dyke (1991), who studied the contrasting discourses of regional and head office managers who were handling corporate giving; Hélène Akzam (1991), who studied the not-very-successful introduction of a new 9-1-1 technology into the police force of a major city; Manon Jourdennais (1992), who studied organizational change at the working level in the Canada Post Office; Marie-Josée Khalil (1996), who studied the implementation of a computerized network in the federal Ministry of Justice; Joël Bélanger (1996), who studied the implementation of a program of autonomous work groups in a small factory; and Pascale Ropert (1996), who studied the fall-out of a program of reform of an international agency located in Switzerland.
Among the work still in progress is that of Hélène Giroux, who is analyzing the rise and fall of Total Quality as a managerial fad, using as her theoretical starting point the theory of translation as developed by Bruno Latour; Jo Mulamba Katambwe, who is analyzing the discourse of the senior management group around Sam Steinberg shortly before his retirement in order to understand the role of leadership; and Alain Saumier, who is engaged in an analysis of the conversational dynamics of Cégep committees with responsibility for the implementation of a new program in the social sciences.
I have deliberately limited myself to reporting only the work of people with whom I have been closely associated. I have done so in order to illustrate my principal thesis, that, in fact, a distinctly Canadian approach is detectable. From personal experience I know that the work I have been citing is distinctively different from the mainstream currents of organizational communication research as it is reported in the conferences of the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association, or the Academy of Management and published in the principal American journals-so different, in fact, that reviewers sometimes comment on the strangeness of the approach in their analyses. That difference is explained in large part by the influence of European thinking that is found in the Canadian studies: references to translation theory, the sociology of scientific knowledge, activity theory, structuration theory, and speech act theory-theories that figure considerably less, if at all, in American research. The result is an attention to language and discourse, and a commitment to naturalistic studies using qualitative methods, that is singular within the larger field of organizational communication studies.
To what extent are these characteristics typical of Canadian work as a whole? I cannot give an answer for research conducted in English-language universities, since my knowledge of it is so incomplete. It does seem to be generally true for French-language researchers that the European influence is more strongly felt than in the United States. So what emerges from my analysis is obviously not a report on the Canadian approach to the field, but a Canadian approach, in the singular. If there is something specifically "Canadian" about this body of work, in contrast with other tendencies in the field, this amalgamization of European and American influences has to be part of the story. In the final section of the paper I will consider a possible further explanation for the specificity of the Canadian approach.
The specificity of the Canadian experience
Maurice Charland presented a tightly reasoned paper to the 1998 convention of the National Communication Association which, in my opinion, deserves to be read by every student of organizational communication. Taking Derrida's analysis of the American Declaration of Independence as his jumping off point, Charland compares the constitutional origins of Canada with those of the United States. Derrida's deconstruction of the American Declaration was rooted in speech act theory. For him, the Declaration is a performative act of signature in which a non-existent people makes itself existent by declaring itself to be so through the intermediary of representatives whose authority to speak, and to sign, is vested in them at the moment of their signing. In Derrida's words: "The signature invents the signer" (1986, p. 10). It is an act of self-constitution, what Charland calls "a metaphysical `coup de force"' (p. 1). By contrast, the Canadian constitution, culminating in the British North America Act, is a system of deferrals: a petition addressed to the imperial government in London, which in turn derives its authority from Parliament, which in turn is subject to the law. There is, as Charland puts it, "no spontaneous assertion of right, no appeal to the Supreme Judge, and no metaphysical tautology. There is the Law" (p. 2). There is no sovereign performative. It is a constitution that begins "by submitting to an authority that is other" (p. 4).
Charland concludes by positing two figures of justification for constitution: justification from substance to command versus from command to substance. The first he thinks of as "theological" in that it merges "what must be" with "what is." The constitutional prescriptions are both doctrinal, and ontological, a rock-hard foundation grounded in "natural right." In contrast, "the movement from command to substance in constitution begins with a wish"; it "promises to constitute an object of a desire" (p. 9). Being is conditional in a way that in the first justification it is not: ultimately defeasible since the constitution never asserts that its authority is vested directly, under God's supreme authority, in the people (and indeed even their existence is treated as desirable rather than foundational). Instead, this kind of constitution emphasizes due process, prudence, and practical judgement (Aristotle's phronesis). The ontology is different.
Why is Charland's analysis of such relevance to students of organization? First, because it does address the ontological question. Smith (1993) argues cogently that the mainstream literature on organizational communication has tended to take the existence of organization as a given, thus implicitly granting credence to the ontological substance to command justification described by Charland ("reifying" organization, as Smith puts it). But we have no way, as Morgan (1986) shrewdly observed, to understand organization other than through the construction of an image: It is not directly observable, nor measurable. It is here that Charland's interpretation has its cutting edge. If Canadians "imagine" their own society and nation in a way that is radically different from Americans (in spite of their other multiple similarities of tradition and way of life), then it would not be surprising if they viewed organization through a different lens as well-if they, in effect, endowed it with less theological fervour than their neighbours.
It has been asserted more than once that the ideas of even the greatest of thinkers cannot be safely abstracted from the social, political, and economic context in which they lived. Toulmin (1990), for example, attributes the tenor of seventeenth-century thought (Descartes, Leibniz, and so forth) to the destructive internecine conflicts of the Thirty Years War and the desire for certainty it stimulated. Gellner (1998) traces the position of Wittgenstein back to the latter's experience of the Habsburg empire of Austro-Hungary in which he grew up. I. F. Stone (1989) is even prepared to see in the texts of Plato (and before him Socrates) an ideology of incipient fascism, rooted in the conflicts of the Athens of their day. I think it is therefore reasonable to postulate a Canadian approach to the study of organization. Any careful comparison of the postwar politics of Canada and the United States would find, I think, an ontological tentativeness in the Canadian experience that is absent in the American, in spite of its many divisions: a difficulty in correlating country (geographical extension) with state (administrative apparatus) with nation (a people with somewhat homogeneous characteristics). (Indeed it seems to me the sovereignist movement in Quebec arises out of the rationalist impulse to make that correlation more perfect.) But in this sense I think Canada is a forerunner, not a laggard. EuroAmerican history over the past four centuries or so has been an ongoing campaign to complete the correlation, often by outright suppression of national differences (as in Britain and France) or aggression (as in the Prussian "unification" of the German principalities in the nineteenth century). But in the spatially extended "empires" empowered by contemporary media, the pursuit of "unification"-the perfect correlation of country, state, and nation-is a will-o'-the-wisp. We have indeed entered the postmodern era, and there, it seems to me, the "Canadian approach" of organizational communication might indeed be the way of the next century-and indeed the third millennium! Will the twenty-first century, to update Sir Wilfrid, be Canada's? The third millennium? Why not?
So what is an "organization" anyway?
Underlying this essay on identity there is a view on the ontology of organization. It is a word that we all use almost carelessly, as if its reference were unmistakable. Yet the question begs to be posed: What is an organization?
Organizations come in multiple guises: public/private, immense/tiny, for profit/not for profit, secular/religious, transient/continuing, face-to-face/mediated, and so on. The diversity is so great that it is hard to imagine any single conceptual system that would effectively get at their common essence. And in any case the word itself, "organization," is an abstraction-what is termed in linguistics a nominalization. Nominalizations, as Hodge & Kress (1993) note, disguise process (and the participants whom it engages) and blur our perception of events and their time of occurrence. Nominalizations collapse, these authors point out, complex relations into single entities. They recreate frameworks of activity in such a way as to instantiate a revision in our understanding of how the world works. An organization is thus fundamentally a construction enabled by a particular property of language. There is, therefore, no single reality, no independent entity, that corresponds to an organization but, rather, an abstract object that has as many possible points of reference as there are people to imaginate it. The organization is forever being recreated in the ongoing conversations of people.
By the same token, this essay has not been an objective review (I do not believe any such thing exists) of organizational communication studies in Canada, but a reconstruction of what organizational communication studies has meant for me, as one of its recreators in this country. To the extent that it has resonances with others' experiences, then I hope it will have played a useful role in stimulating discussion on a topic that has had too little attention in Canada. But that is for others to judge. If organization is always a becoming-an "organizing," to use Weick's term-then its outcome is forever problematical. Effective dialogue is a horse that can perhaps be led to water but cannot be made to drink until the need is felt.
Or is that just Canadian thinking?
References
Akzam, Hélène. (1991). Implantation technologique et adaptation organisationnelle: Le rôle du quotidien. Unpublished master's thesis, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bélanger, Françoise. (1990). L'informatisation d'un réseau de franchises: une étude pré-implantation. Unpublished master's thesis, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Bélanger, Joël. (1996). Le fonctionnement quotidien d'un groupe autonome de travail: la négotiation de règles dans la conversation. Unpublished master's thesis, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Boden, D. (1994). The business of talk; Organizations in action. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bruner, J. (1991, Autumn). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 1-21.
Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge? (pp. 196-229). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Callon, M., & Latour, B. (1981). Unscrewing the big Leviathan: How actors macro-structure reality and how sociologists help them to do so. In A. V. Cicourel & K. Knorr-Cetina (Eds.), Advances in social theory and methodology: Towards an integration of micro- and macro-sociologies (pp. 277-303). Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Charland, M. (1998, June). The rhetoric of the people in non-sovereign democracies: The constitutions of British North America. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, New York.
Cooren, François. (1995). Proposition d'une grille d'analyse des actes de langage pour l'étude de la construction et du changement de la réalité organisationnelle. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Cooren, François. (2000). The structuring property of communication: A socio-semiotic approach. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Derrida, Jacques. (1986). Declarations of independence. New Political Science, 15, 7-15.
Derrida, Jacques. (1988). Limited inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Durkheim, E. (1915). Elementary forms of religious life: A study in religious sociology (J. W. Swain, Trans.). New York: Macmillan.
Dyke, Nathalie. (1991). Le langage organisationnel décomposé: étude de la tension communicationnelle entre centre et périphérie. Unpublished master's thesis, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Frechette, Martine. (1988). L'informatisation du travail en saisie de données: enjeux humains. Unpublished master's thesis, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Gellner, E. (1998). Language and solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habspurg dilemma. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Giddens, A. (1976). New rules of sociological method. London: Hutchison.
Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in social analysis. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge: Polity.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday Anchor.
Greimas, A. (1987). On meaning: Selected writings in semiotic theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Groleau, C. (1995). An examination of the computerized information flow contributing to the mobility of tasks in three newly computerized firms. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Concordia University, Montreal, QC.
Groleau, C., & Cooren, F. (1999). A socio-semiotic approach to computerization: Bridging the gap between ethnographers and systems analysts. The Communication Review, 3(1-2), 125-164.
Groleau, C., & Taylor, J. R. (1996). Toward a subject-oriented worldview of information. Canadian Journal of Communication, 21(2), 243-265.
Gurd, Geoffrey. (1994). Computerization as the intersection of two logics: A hospital case study. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Haley, Paul T. (1971). Personal distance in television interaction: Is a closeup close? Unpublished master's thesis, University of Pennsylvania.
Harvey, M. (1998). Analyse comparative de deux (2) groupes de releveurs de compteurs (québécois et américain) soumis à la surveillance sur un territoire balisé. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Heaton, L. (1997). Culture in design: The case of computer supported cooperative work. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Hodge, Robert, & Kress, Gunther. (1993). Language as ideology (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Hovey, Margot. (1991). Designing for the wrong organization: A case history of the development of a software package for a client organization. Unpublished master's thesis, Concordia University, Montreal, QC.
Innis, H. A. (1951). The bias of communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Innis, H. A. (1972). Empire and communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (Originally published in 1950)
Jourdennais, Manon. (1992). Changements organisationnels et reconstruction de marges de manoeuvre à la Société canadienne des postes. Unpublished master's thesis, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Khalil, Marie-Josée. (1996). Informatisation du travail: étude qualitative au Ministère de la Justice. Unpublished master's thesis, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Krikorian, D., Taylor, J. R., & Harms, C. (1998). Knotting by netting: Thread emergence in electronic newsgroups. Paper presented at the annual conference of the National Communication Association, New York.
Labov, W., & Fanshel, D. (1977). Therapeutic discourse: Psychotherapy as conversation. New York: Academic Press.
Latour, B. (1986). The powers of association. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge? (pp. 264-280). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (1992). We have never been modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (1994). On technical mediation-philosophy, sociology, genealogy. Common Knowledge, 3(2), 29-64.
Latour, B. (1999). Politiques de la nature. Paris: La Découverte.
Leduc, Nicole. (1978). La communication mediatisée par ordinateur: Une nouvelle définition du dialogue groupal? Unpublished master's thesis, Université de Montréal, Montreal. QC.
Lerner, Loren. (1996). Metaphors of governance: An analysis of discourse themes and patterns. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Mills, Michael. (1971). Televised visual delay-exploring a new form of self-confrontation. Unpublished master's thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
Morgan, Gareth. (1986). Images of organization. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Newcomb, T. (1953). An approach to the study of communicative acts. Psychological Review, 60, 393-404.
Pickering, A. (1995). The mangle of practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Robichaud, Daniel. (1991). Une analyse du concept d'enaction.Unpublished master's thesis, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Robichaud, Daniel. (1998). Au delà de l'action et de la structure: Traduction, réseaux d'actants et narrativité dans un processus de discussion publique. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Ropert, Pascale. (1996). Le changement plannifié dans une organisation à caractère international. Unpublished master's thesis, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Sachs, P. (1995). Transforming work: Collaboration, learning and design. Communications of the ACM, 38(9), 36-44.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts. London & New York: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1979). Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, R. C. (1993). Images of organizational communication: Root-metaphors of the organization-communication relation. Paper presented at the International Communication Association annual conference, Washington, DC.
Stone, I. F. (1989). The trial of Socrates. New York: Anchor.
Tardif, Anne-Marie. (1996). Le déploiment de la double contrainte en milieu organisationnel: une application à partir du projet d'implantation de la gestion intégrale de la qualité comme nouveau modèle de gestion dans un centre hospitalier de la région montréalaise. Unpublished master's thesis, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Taylor, J. R. (1972). L'image de soi et d'autrui dans la télévision interactive. Paper presented to the Canadian Psychological Association annual conference, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC.
Taylor, J. R. (1981). Vues nouvelles sur le bureau de demain à partir des théories d'hier/The office of the future: Weber and Innis revisited. Search/Enquête, 8(3). 4-13. (Also published in 1983 in B. D. Singer [Ed.], Communications in Canadian society [pp. 83-90]. Don Mills, ON: Addison-Wesley)
Taylor, J. R. (1982a). Computer-aided message systems: An organizational perspective. In N. Naffah (Ed.), Office information systems (pp. 631-651). Paris & Amsterdam: North Holland.
Taylor, J. R. (1982b). Updating and extending the Innis hypothesis in the microelectric age. In L. Neice, L. Snider, & E. Zureik (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Microelectronics: Information Technology and Canadian Society. Kingston, ON: Queen's University.
Taylor, J. R. (1984, April). 1984: le spectre et la réalité organisationnelle. Sociologie et sociétés, 16(1), 91-102.
Taylor, J. R. (1986a). La crise informatique: fin d'un rêve ou aube d'une ère nouvelle/The computerization crisis: End of a dream or threshold of opportunity? Proceedings of the Symposium on the Repercussions of the Computerization of the Workplace [November 3-5] (pp. 29-85). Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy/Institut de recherches politiques.
Taylor, J. R. (1986b). New communication technologies and the emergence of distributed organization. In L. Thayer (Ed.), Communication<-->Organization: Emerging perspectives I (pp. 231-273). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Taylor, J. R. (1993). Rethinking the theory of organizational communication: How to read an organization. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Taylor, J. R. (1999). Toward a theory of imbrication. Paper submitted to the Semiotics Commission of the National Communication Association.
Taylor, J. R., & Cooren, F. (1997). What makes communication "organizational"? How the many voices of the organization become the one voice of an organization. Journal of Pragmatics, 27, 409-438.
Taylor, J. R., Groleau, C., Heaton, L., & Van Every, E. J. (In press). The computerization of work: Organization, communication and change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Taylor, J. R., Gurd, G., & Bardini, T. (1997). The worldviews of cooperative work. In G. Bowker, L. Gasser, S. L. Star, & W. Turner (Eds.), Social science research, technical systems and cooperative work (pp. 379-413). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Taylor, J. R., Haley, P., & Mills, M. (1971). Mediated interaction through television-with self and other. Paper presented to the International Communication Association annual conference, Phoenix, AZ, April 22-24.
Taylor, J. R., & Katambwe, J. (1988). Are new technologies really reshaping our organizations? Computer Communications, 11(5), 245-252.
Taylor, J. R., & Lerner, L. (1996). Making sense of sensemaking: How managers construct their organization through their talk. Studies in Culture, Organizations and Societies, 2, 257-286.
Taylor, J. R., & Van Every, E. J. (1993). The vulnerable fortress: Bureaucratic organization and management in the information age. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (Winner of the "Best Book" award, organizational communication division of the Speech Communication Association, New Orleans, November 1994)
Taylor, J. R., & Van Every, E. J. (2000). The emergent organization: Communication as its site and surface. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Toulmin, S. (1990). Cosmopolis: The hidden agenda of modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Vanderveken, D. (1990, 1991). Meaning and speech acts (2 vol.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Verreault, Sandra. (1990). L'épuisement professionel: une perspective communicationnelle. Unpublished master's thesis, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC.
Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J. H., & Jackson, D. (1967). Pragmatics of human communication: A study of interactional patterns, pathologies, and paradoxes. New York: W. W. Norton.
Weick, K. (1979). The social psychology of organizing (rev. ed.). New York: Random House.
Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
