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SWG on “Organization as Communication” (2015–2020), which has created a new space for dialogue between organizational communication
and organization studies.
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Performativity researchers, who have met regularly at EGOS Colloquia.
SWG 06 will also be of relevance to organizational discourse researchers and will attract scholars who do not normally attend
EGOS, but whose work resonates with the aim of exploring the constitutive features of communication and performativity in
organizations.
The concept of performativity was originally crafted as a means of describing how communication performs reality, for instance
in speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) or in the writings of Wittgenstein (Fayard, 2017; Shotter & Tsoukas, 2011).
Communication, in this sense, is performative and consequential: it creates and accomplishes organizing. This line of inquiry
has been developed, in particular, by scholars working on the elision of communication and organization studies scholarship.
This research focuses on how communication constitutes organization (e.g., Boivin et al., 2017; Schoeneborn et al., 2019;
Taylor & Van Every, 2000).
The notion of performativity – broadly defined as the power of discursive and material practices to shape and change the world
– has also gained increasing traction in organization studies (Gond et al., 2016) and has resulted in numerous conceptual
developments (e.g., Beunza & Ferraro, 2018; Cabantous & Gond, 2011; Cabantous et al., 2016; Garud & Gehman, 2019; Harding
et al., 2017; Hultin & Mähring, 2017; Fleming & Banerjee, 2016; Marti & Gond, 2018; Muniesa, 2018; Nyberg & Wright, 2016;
Roscoe & Chillas, 2014; Simpson et al., 2017; Vásquez et al., 2018; Wickert & Schaefer, 2015). Drawing on the work of scholars
such as Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, Donald MacKenzie, Judith Butler and Karen Barad (Barad, 2003; Butler, 1993, 1997; Callon,
2007, 2010; Latour, 2005; MacKenzie & Millo, 2003; MacKenzie et al., 2007), researchers adopting a performative lens consider
that organization exists through the way in which people and things interact and communicate (Cooren, 2018).
The CPO community shares with both the CCO and performative research traditions a post-humanistic outlook on organization
that seeks to de-center analytical attention from human beings and to re-focus it towards inter-relating actions and practices
themselves (human and non-human; see Cooren & Seidl, 2019). By connecting both streams of research, the CPO community aims
at enhancing and strengthening organization theory based on a relational ontology – to explore the ongoing communicative performativity
of organizational phenomena and issues.