Communication and Theatre 4/514

Issues in Organizational Communication

Emergent Organizing

What is a laminated discourse?

If communication is bi-dimensional, what are the dimensions?

• Sensemaking

• Criticism

One of the most important things you can learn to appreciate is that it is almost always both/and instead of either/or. What does this mean?

What is the difference between a lived world and an interpreted world?

How about the difference between conversation (site) and text (surface)?

Resources available =

• History

• Language

Constraints =

• Rules of interaction (to belong)

• Rules of language (to participate)

Narrativization = the sanctioned communication as to what the organization is.

Narrative (talk about organizing) =

• Represents organizational reality

• Instantiates organizational reality

How might we self organize?

Conversation = the total of languaging. What does that mean?

All informal and formal communication is available for interpretation.

What is a spectrum of communication?

What is text?

What we formalize from our conversation.

People enter conversation with:

• Real (lived experience; real)

• Symbolic (the used language)

Thus, through experience and language we co-construct organizing.

To converse we need to:

• Talk understandably

• Follow conversational rules

In sum, communication is:

• Contextual

• Situated

• Occasional

• Grounded

• Iterative

• Cumulative

What is the difference between a vehicle and a destination?

What is the difference between a reason for an occurrence and a cause of it?

• Know

• Should

• Would

• Could

A large amount of additional freight (meaning) is carried in a sentence.

Our conversations involve both action (pragmatic) and intention (cognitive).

Stories are contests of meaning, succeeding or failing, in the context of opposition.

So, we have stories and anti-stories; protagonists and antagonists.

local situation

individual texts

assemble texts

community text

The point of all of this is to conceptualize the emergence of a self organizing community

authentizing, voicing,

publication

conversation

thoughtco-creation, convergence

End of Emergent Organizing Session