Special Issues – Call for Papers

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'New Directions in
Organizational Communication Research'

Timothy Clark, Durham University, UK
François Cooren, University of Montréal, Canada
Joep Cornelissen, Leeds University, UK
Timothy Kuhn, University of Colorado, USA

Rationale

Across disciplines, scholars of organizations increasingly assert that organizations are constituted in and through human communication. There are several versions of this view, but the general claim is that if communication is constitutive of organization, communication is not simply one of many factors involved in organizing; rather, it is the means by which organizations are established, composed, designed, and sustained. Although the forms assumed by 'communication' in this literature are varied (e.g., speech acts, turns, discourse, rhetorical tropes, texts, narratives), the central contribution of a 'communication- as-constitutive' perspective is that it enables a rethinking of ontological and epistemological positions on organization that can open up avenues for novel theoretical and empirical research. Yet the proliferation of communication-based accounts has coincided with conceptual and methodological debates regarding the 'proper' way of doing organizational communication research, both within and across scholarly communities. The wide array of approaches to understanding the communicative constitution of organization has led to conceptual confusion, challenges in traversing disciplinary boundaries, and to difficulties in using communication-based resources in ways that advance management and organization theory.

The Guest Editors of this Special Issue believe that much is to be gained by a serious reflection on what scholars mean when they argue that communication constitutes organizations. A detailed interrogation of communication-based visions of organising – in terms of assessing the current state of theorising, methodology and empirical research – is essential if we are to identify novel, imaginative and methodologically well-founded contributions to the field of organization theory as a whole. Therefore, the goals of this Special Issue are to (a) build conceptual foundations, frameworks and methods that will facilitate empirical inquiry from diverse perspectives, (b) encourage scholars to examine organizational communication through novel theoretical lenses, including approaches critical of conventional thinking, and (c) to articulate the implications of a communication-as-constitutive-of-organization perspective for issues of interest to organization studies scholars generally. We will invite theoretical, methodological and empirical papers to this end and encourage contributions from different disciplinary perspectives, including sociology, linguistics, rhetoric, pragmatics, discourse, literary criticism, critical research and communication studies.

The following is a list of indicative, but not exhaustive, issues on which we invite papers:

• How does a communication-based perspective add to our understanding of managerial and organizational subjects such as leadership, knowledge, innovation, technology, management fashions, personal/organisational identity, control and resistance, sensemaking, organising processes, strategising, governance, and distributed cognition?
   
• How does a communication-as-constitutive of organization perspective shape understandings of the organization's embeddedness in social contexts? In what ways do conceptions of the organization-society relationship that foreground communication offer alternative courses for research and practice on issues such as stakeholder relationships, institutionalisation processes and interorganisational collaborations?
   
• What sorts of individual and collective ethical commitments emerge when communication processes are placed centre stage? How do communicative conceptions of ethics shape our understanding of organizational practices and members' responsibilities?
   
• What progress has been made with language and communication-based scholarship and research within organization theory? What epistemological, conceptual and methodological advances has this kind of work brought?
   
• What specific theoretical and methodological perspectives (e.g. linguistic analysis of texts, conversation analysis, metaphor analysis) have been adopted within communication-based scholarship? And, what theoretical and methodological possibilities are still open to be considered for scholarship and research
   
• What are the prospects and future directions for communication-based scholarship and research within organization theory? What alternative 'futures' are there; and what 'challenges' does this work face in terms of rigor and relevance within organization theory?

Submissions

To be considered for publication, papers must be electronically received by 31 October 2008.

Please submit papers as e-mail attachments (Microsoft Word files only) to the Editor-in-Chief (OSeditor@alba.edu.gr), indicating in the e-mail the title of the Special Issue.

Please prepare manuscripts according to the guidelines shown at www.egosnet.org/journal/editorial_procedures.shtml.

All papers will receive a double-blind review following OS' normal review process and criteria. Up to seven papers will be accepted for publication in the Special Issue.

The Special Issue is scheduled for publication in July 2010. Any papers accepted for publication but not included in the Special Issue due to space constrains will be published later in a regular issue.

For further information please contact the Guest Editors for this Special Issue, Timothy Clark (timothy.clark@durham.ac.uk), François Cooren (f.cooren@umontreal.ca), Joep Cornelissen (j.cornelissen@leeds.ac.uk), or Timothy Kuhn (tim.kuhn@colorado.edu).