Organizations as Networks of Communication Episodes: Turning the Network Perspective Inside Out

Over the last decades, the idea that communication constitutes organizations (CCO) has been gaining considerable momentum in organization studies. The CCO perspective provides new insights into key organizational issues, such as the relation between stability and change, between micro-level and macr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Organization studies Vol. 33; no. 7; pp. 879 - 906
Main Authors: Blaschke, Steffen, Schoeneborn, Dennis, Seidl, David
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.07.2012
Sage
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects:
Bibliometrie
Case studies
Communication
Communication constitutes organizations (CCO)
Communication networks
Information dissemination
Interne Kommunikation
Management
Methodological approaches
Methodology
Network analysis
Organisationstheorie
Organization theory
Organizational analysis
Organizational change
Research methodology
Social network analysis
Soziales Netzwerk
Studies
Canada
Montreal Quebec Canada
organizational communication
network analysis
communication constitutes organizations (CCO)
organization theory
Montreal School
ISSN:0170-8406, 1741-3044
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Over the last decades, the idea that communication constitutes organizations (CCO) has been gaining considerable momentum in organization studies. The CCO perspective provides new insights into key organizational issues, such as the relation between stability and change, between micro-level and macro-level phenomena, or between emergence and control. However, despite various theoretical advancements, the CCO perspective’s range of methodologies is still limited to analyzing local communication episodes, rather than studying organizations as broader networks of communication episodes. In this paper, we present a new methodological approach to the study of the relation between organization and communication, based on network analysis. Following a discussion of existing network approaches, we incorporate the fundamental assumptions of the CCO perspective into a methodology that places communication at the center of network analysis by turning the prevalent network perspective inside out, so that the vertices of the network represent communication episodes and the edges represent individuals. We illustrate our methodology with an empirical case study, in which we examine the structures and dynamics of an actual organization as a network of communication episodes.
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ISSN:0170-8406
1741-3044
DOI:10.1177/0170840612443459