Course Coordinators: Lars Thøger Christensen & Dennis Schoeneborn, Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC)

NEW DATE - Course postponed from August to December 2024

Faculty

Professor Lars Thøger Christensen
Department of Management, Society and Communication, CBS

Professor Dennis Schoeneborn
Department of Management, Society and Communication, CBS

Professor Timothy R. Kuhn
University of Colorado at Boulder

Prerequisites

The course is aimed at PhD students with a background in any discipline within the social sciences or humanities. Participation does not require prior training in communication studies. Only PhD students are accepted for the course.

As part of the course registration, participants are required to hand in:

(1) a short motivational statement of about 500 words on why you are applying for the course

After being accepted to the course and two weeks prior to the course start at the latest, participants are required to hand in: 

(2) a short paper of 2,500 – 3,000 words max. (plus references) in which his/her PhD project (or one of the papers of a cumulative dissertation) is presented and explicitly related to the course curricu¬lum. The paper must include specific links to texts from the course literature (further instructions will follow in a separate email). In addition, participants should briefly present their short papers in the workshop. 

Furthermore, it is expected that participants have carefully read the re¬commend¬ed key literatures prior to the course (plus, ideally, also some of the optional readings).

It is a precondition for receiving the course diploma that PhD students hand in the required paper in advance and attend the entire course.

Aim

Across the social and political sciences and beyond, communication is often understood as a simple sender-receiver model, i.e. something that merely conveys, mirrors, or represents social and physical phenomena. Over the last 25 years, however, developments in several fields have demonstrated that communication takes center stage in processes of perception, sensemaking, and world-construction. 

The “linguistic turn”, thus, has resulted in a rich body of research exploring how communicative practices constitute organizations, indeed how organizations “emerge” in communication. Studies of organizations as voices, sites of identity formation, or systems of power struggles, for example, have focused on the discursive and communicative processes through which organizing occurs and through which organizations are “talked into existence”. This PhD course will foreground communication and explore some of these research traditions, examining the extent to which they can help us understand how organizations are constituted, maintained and changed.

Course content

The PhD course will allow students to discuss and experiment with the applicability of a communication-centered perspective for conceptual and/or empirical inquiries into organization and organizing. Students will learn how to analyze organization from a communication-centered perspective using themes and concepts such as agency/actorhood, authority, performativity, transparency, identity, narrative, polyphony, ventriloquism, and organizationality. Specifically, the course will include introduction to the communicative constitution of organization (CCO) perspective that has gained increasing attention in management and organization studies over the past years. Finally, students will be trained in the craft of writing for scholarly publication at the interdisciplinary intersections of communication and organization.

Teaching style

The teaching style is a mixture of lectures, short presentations, and discussion sessions in which students are expected to actively participate. Each student will need to read the short papers of the other course participants before the workshop and act as a discussant of one of these short papers (these discussant roles will be assigned prior to the course).

Lecture plan

The lecture plan is preliminary and subject to further adjustments. 

Monday, Dec 2 (Day 1)
13.00-13.30 - Welcome & practical matters 
Dennis Schoeneborn & Lars Thøger Christensen

13.30-15.30 - Introduction to Communication Perspectives on Organization and Organizing
Lars Thøger Christensen 

15.30 - 16.00 Coffee break 

16.00 - 18.00 Introduction to the 'Communicative Constitution of Organizations' (CCO) Perspective
Dennis Schoeneborn 

Tuesday, Dec 3 (Day 2)
9.00 - 12.00 Performativity and Talk-Action Dynamics
Lars Thøger Christensen

12.00 - 13.00 Lunch break 

13.00 - 15.00 Student project discussions
Lars Thøger Christensen, Dennis Schoeneborn & Tim Kuhn

Wednesday, Dec 4 (Day 3)
9.00 - 12.00  Collective Actorhood & Organizationality 
Dennis Schoeneborn

12.00 - 13.00 Lunch break 

13.00 - 15.00  Student project discussions
Lars Thøger Christensen, Dennis Schoeneborn & Tim Kuhn

Thursday, Dec 5 (Day 4)
9.00 - 12.00  Identity, Authority, and Narrative in/through Organizations
Tim Kuhn

12.00 - 13.00 Lunch break 

13.00 - 15.00  Student project discussions
Lars Thøger Christensen, Dennis Schoeneborn & Tim Kuhn

Friday, Dec 6 (Day 5)
9.00 - 12.00 How to Develop Theory at the Intersection of Communication and Organization (Part I)
Lars Thøger Christensen, Dennis Schoeneborn & Tim Kuhn

12.00 - 13.00 Lunch break 

13.00 - 15.00 How to Develop Theory at the Intersection of Communication and Organization (Part II/Exercises)
Lars Thøger Christensen, Dennis Schoeneborn & Tim Kuhn

15.00 - 15.30 Course Evaluation and Farewell
Lars Thøger Christensen & Dennis Schoeneborn

Learning objectives

•    To sharpen students’ sensitivity to important nuances between different theoretical approaches to communication and organization, including their ontological, epistemological, and axiological implications.
•    To enable students to detect and question simplistic assumptions about communication and its possible effects on organizations and their members. 
•    To become familiar with elaborate understandings of communication and to account for the formative and constitutive role in the contexts of organizations and wider society.
•    To aid students in understanding organization as an ongoing communicative accomplishment, along with examining the consequences of assuming such a perspective.
•    To develop skills in crafting (incl. framing, positioning, and scoping) research papers that draws on insights from the field of communication studies and enable them to apply these insights to the study of organization in an interdisciplinary way.

Exam

N/A

Course Literature

(Preliminary – a detailed reading list will be provided after acceptance to the course)

Axley, S. (1984). Managerial communication in terms of the conduit metaphor. Academy of Management Review, 9(3), 428-437. 

Christensen, L. T., Morsing, M., & Thyssen, O. (2021). Talk–action dynamics: Modalities of aspirational talk. Organization Studies, 42(3), 407-427.

Dobusch, L., & Schoeneborn, D. (2015). Fluidity, identity, and organizationality: The communicative constitution of Anonymous. Journal of Management Studies, 52(8), 1005-1035. 

Kuhn, T. (2008). A communicative theory of the firm: Developing an alternative perspective on intra-organizational power and stakeholder relationships. Organization Studies, 29(8-9), 1227-1254.

Locke K. & Golden-Biddle K. (1997). Constructing opportunities for contribution: Structuring intertextual coherence and “problematizing” in organizational studies. Academy of Management Journal, (40)5, 1023-1062.

Schoeneborn, D. & Vásquez, C. (2017). Communication as constitutive of organization. In: C. R. Scott & L. K. Lewis (Eds.). International encyclopedia of organizational communication. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. 

Taylor, J. R., & Cooren, F. (1997). What makes communication ‘organizational’? How the many voices of a collectivity become the one voice of an organization. Journal of Pragmatics, 27, 409-438.

Thyssen, O. (2005). The invisibility of the organization. Ephemera, 5(3), 519-536.

Windahl, S., Signitzer, B. & Olsen, J. T. (2009): Using communication theory – an introduction to planned communication. London: Sage. [Excerpt: chapter 2]

Note: In case we receive more registrations for the course than we have seats, CBS PhD students will have first priority. Remaining seats will be filled on a first come first serve.