Dis/organization as Communication: Exploring the Disordering, Disruptive and Chaotic Properties of Communication

This book accounts for the transformation of organizations in a post-bureaucratic era by bringing a communicational lens to the ontological discussion on organization/disorganization, offering a conceptual and methodological toolbox for studying dis/organization as communication. Increasingly, scholars acknowledge that communication is constitutive of organization; because meaning is always indeterminate, communication also (and simultaneously) generates disorganization. The book synthesizes the major theoretical trends and empirical studies in communication that engage with dis/organization. Drawing on dialectics, relational ontologies, critical theory, systems theory, and affect thinking, the first part of the book offers communicational explanations of how dis/organization unfolds. The second part of the book grounds this theoretical reflection, providing empirical studies that mobilize diverse methodological and analytical frameworks (e.g., ethnography, situational, interactional and genre analysis) for studying the practices of dis/organization. Overall, the book exposes organizations (and organizing processes) as significantly messier, irrational (or a-rational), and paradoxical than scholars of organization typically think. It also offers readers the conceptual and methodological tools to understand these complex processes as communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars in organizational communication or management and organization studies, together with senior undergraduate and graduate students studying organizational communication, organizational discourse, discourse analysis (including rhetoric, semiotics, pragmatism, narratology) and courses in management studies. It will also be richly rewarding for organizational consultants, managers and executives.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part I Communicational Explanations of Dis/Organization 1 Constituting Order and Disorder: Embracing Tensions and Contradictions Linda L. Putnam 2 Communication as Dis/Organization: How to Analyze Tensions from a Relational Perspective François Cooren and Pascale Caïdor 3 The Queen Bee Outlives Her Own Children: A Luhmannian Perspective on Project-Based Organizations (PBOs) Michael Grothe-Hammer and Dennis Schoeneborn 4 Rethinking Order and Disorder: Accounting for Disequilibrium in Knotted Systems of Paradoxical Tensions Gail T. Fairhurst and Mathew L. Sheep 5 Feeling Things, Making Waste: Hoarding and the Dis/Organization of Affect Karen Lee Ashcraft 6 Communication Constitutes Capital: Branding and the Politics of Neoliberal Dis/Organization Dennis K. Mumby Part II Methodological Toolbox for Studying Dis/Organization 7 Dis/Ordering: The Use of Information and Communication Technologies by Human Rights Civil Society Organizations Oana Brindusa Albu 8 Disorganizing Through Texts: The Case of A.K. Rice’s Account of Socio-technical Systems Theory Anindita Banerjee and Brian Bloomfield 9 The Paradox of Digital Civic Participation: A Disorganization Approach Amanda J. Porter and Michele H. Jackson 10 Organizing from Disorder: Internet Memes as Subversive Style Peter Winkler and Jens Seiffert -Brockmann 11 Extreme Context as Figures of Normalcy and Emergency: Reorganizing a Large-Scale Vaccine Campaign in the DR Congo Frédérik Matte