PDW 05: Writing Publications at the Nexus between Communicative Constitution and Performativity – CANCELLED

Convenors:
David Hollis
Sheffield University Management School, United Kingdom
Ellen Nathues
University of Twente, Netherlands

Call for Applications



Facilitators:

Laure Cabantous, Bayes Business School, United Kingdom
Boukje Cnossen, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany
François Cooren, Université de Montréal, Canada
Penny Dick, Sheffield University Management School, United Kingdom
Jean-Pascal Gond, Bayes Business School, United Kingdom
Dennis Schoeneborn, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Consuelo Vásquez, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada



Purpose

This PDW offers the opportunity for early career scholars and PhD students who are interested in the Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO: e.g., Ashcraft et al., 2009; Cooren et al., 2011; Schoeneborn et al., 2019) and performativity perspectives (e.g., Cabantous et al., 2018; Gond et al., 2016) to hone and improve their conceptualization, writing, and publishing skills and to develop their research ideas with extensive feedback from leading scholars in the field.
 
The PDW is held as part of the EGOS Standing Working Group (SWG) 06 on “Communication, Performativity, and Organization” which aims to organize PDWs across the four years that it is running (2022–2025). The general purpose of these PDWs is to provide a forum for exchange, learning, and community-building. We seek to begin this series of PDWs with a workshop that:

  • covers ‘hints and tips’ of conceptualizing, writing, and publishing in the nexus between communicative, performative, and allied studies (e.g., demystifying CCO jargon, using nouns when writing from a processual perspective, targeting journals for submission, good reviewing practice, etc.); and

  • offers participants the opportunity to receive rich, developmental feedback from experienced facilitators.

 
CCO and performativity perspectives have gained increasing traction in organization studies in the last few years and have advanced our knowledge of organizational processes and phenomena in substantial ways. Two core contributions include the ideas of organizations being continually in-flux through simultaneous processes of organizing and disorganizing (e.g., Vásquez et al., 2016), and of decentered agency beyond human interactants (e.g., Cnossen & Bencherki, 2019; Nathues et al., 2021). Instead of focusing on organizations or humans as discrete entities, CCO and performativity studies focus on the configurations and webs of relations through which organization and organizing manifest, evaporate, transform, etc., from one moment to the next. Blending these two perspectives can help us to direct further attention to these webs of relations and to more fully grasp their consequentiality for how organizational processes and phenomena emerge and unfold. SWG 06 aims to explore these types of issues.
 
This PDW seeks to specifically address challenges and/or considerations encountered by (in)experienced academics writing publications at the nexus between communicative constitution and performativity. These include how “we” perform performativity (e.g., Gond et al., 2016) in our writing or present ‘a dizzying array of concepts’ (Conrad & Sollitto, 2017, p. 1123) that can be rather abstract (e.g., Kuhn, 2008) but, nevertheless, axial for conveying CCO’s bold and arguably ‘amorphous’ (Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud, & Taylor, 2014, p. 187) onto-epistemological assumptions. There is also a danger that labels like performativity and CCO can lead to conceptual and analytical silos, and the associated risk of limited cross-fertilization and generative exchange of ideas (see Hollis et al., 2021). Therefore, the inaugural 2022 PDW offers an opportune locale for aspiring and early-career academics to enter into conversations with more experienced colleagues in the hope that their developing publications can blend and contribute to several academic “camps”.
 

Format

The PDW consists of two main parts:

  • Part 1 ‘hints and tips’ involves a panel discussion between Dennis Schoeneborn and Laure Cabantous around publishing in the areas of CCO and performativity, which is guided by questions that participants submit alongside their application. In this way, the panel discussion can take the form of a dialogue that is led by participants’ questions, rather than the monological format that is often associated with a keynote address. Part 1 will be moderated by David Hollis and Ellen Nathues.

  • Part 2 involves roundtable discussions on participants’ working papers. There will be seven roundtables in total, with each table consisting of approximately three participants and one confirmed facilitator who has experience in the areas of CCO and/or performativity. Each participant will receive feedback from their facilitator and the other two participants. A good practice guide to reviewing will be issued in advance.

 

Application

We invite working papers (conceptual or empirical) that draw on CCO theorizing and/or a performativity perspective to study organizing processes and phenomena. We also welcome papers that do not (yet) explicitly engage with these perspectives but whose authors wish to explore how they could re-think their work from constitutive and performative lenses. We particularly encourage applications from doctoral students and scholars in the early stages of their career, but also welcome submissions from more senior academics.
 
To apply for this PDW, please submit – via the EGOS website – by April 30, 2022 a single document (.docx or .pdf file) that includes:

  • On the first page: a short letter of application containing name, affiliation, contact details, career stage, nature of submission (i.e., article or book chapter, but not a thesis chapter), target outlet for the submission, and a question that they would like the panel to discuss in the ‘hints and tips’ part of the workshop.

  • Subsequent pages should include a working article or book chapter of between 7,000 and 10,000 words (including text, references, figures, tables).
     


References


  • Ashcraft, K.L., Kuhn, T.R., & Cooren, F. (2009): “Constitutional amendments: ‘Materializing’ organizational communication.” The Academy of Management Annals, 3, 1–64.
  • Basque, J., Bencherki, N., & Kuhn, T. (forthcoming): The Routledge Handbook of the Communicative Constitution of Organizations. New York: Routledge.
  • Brummans, B.H.J.M., Cooren, F., Robichaud, D., & Taylor, J.R. (2014): “Approaches to the Communicative Constitution of Organizations.” In: L.L. Putnam & D.K. Mumby (eds.): The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Communication: Advances in Theory, Research and Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 173–194.
  • Cabantous, L., Gond, J.-P., & Wright, A. (2018): “The performativity of strategy: Taking stock and moving ahead.” Long Range Planning, 51, 407–416.
  • Cnossen, B., & Bencherki, N. (2019): “The role of space in the emergence and endurance of organizing: How independent workers and material assemblages constitute organizations.” Human Relations, 72, 1057–1080.
  • Conrad, C., & Sollitto, M. (2017): “History of Organizational Communication.” In: C.R. Scott & L. Lewis (eds.) The International Encyclopedia of Organizational Communication. Oxford: Wiley, 1106–1136.
  • Cooren, F., Kuhn, T., Cornelissen, J.P., & Clark, T. (2011): “Communication, organizing and organization: An overview and introduction to the Special Issue.” Organization Studies, 32, 1149–1170.
  • Gond, J.-P., Cabantous, L., Harding, N., & Learmonth, M. (2016): “What do we mean by performativity in organizational and management theory? The uses and abuses of performativity.” International Journal of Management Reviews, 18, 440–463.
  • Hollis, D., Wright, A., Smolović Jones, O., & Smolović Jones, S. (2021): “From ‘Pretty’ to ‘Pretty Powerful’: The Communicatively Constituted Power of Facial Beauty’s Performativity.” Organization Studies, 42, 1885–1907.
  • Kuhn, T. (2008): “A communicative theory of the firm: Developing an alternative perspective on intraorganizational power and stakeholder relationships.” Organization Studies, 29, 1227–1254.
  • Nathues, E., van Vuuren, M., & Cooren, F. (2021): “Speaking about vision, talking in the name of so much more: A methodological framework for ventriloquial analyses in organization studies.” Organization Studies, 42, 1457–1476.
  • Schoeneborn, D., Kuhn, T.R., & Kärreman, D. (2019): “The communicative constitution of organization, organizing, and organizationality.” Organization Studies, 40, 475–496.
  • Vásquez, C., Schoeneborn, D., & Sergi, V. (2016): “Summoning the spirits: Organizational texts and the (dis)ordering properties of communication.” Human Relations, 69, 629–659.
  •  

David Hollis is a Lecturer in Organisation Studies at Sheffield University Management School, United Kingdom, where he is also a member of the Organization Studies research cluster. His research largely revolves around how communication constitutes organizational realities, investigating classic notions such as power, authority, and aesthetics. David’s most recent publications are in ‘Organization Studies’ and De Gruyter “Mouton’s Handbook of Management Communication”.
Ellen Nathues is a fourth-year PhD candidate at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. Her research interests focus on organizational communication, relationality, and team interaction processes, particularly in pluralistic, polyphonic, and temporary contexts such as interorganizational collaboration. Ellen is also interested in methodological work. Her dissertation develops a communicative constitutive (ventriloquial) analytical framework that is subsequently applied to study interorganizational collaboration processes across and around differences and boundaries. Her work has been published in ‘Organization Studies’ and ‘Strategic Organization’.