TY - JOUR

T1 - Speaking about vision, talking in the name of so much more

T2 - A methodological framework for ventriloquial analyses in organization studies

AU - Nathues, Ellen

AU - van Vuuren, Mark

AU - Cooren, François

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2020.

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - Organizations have long been treated as stable and fixed entities, defined by concrete buildings, catchy names, and strategic goals neatly written on paper. The Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) school proposes an alternative, practice-grounded conceptualization for studying organizations as emerging in communicative (inter)actions. In so doing, CCO invites organizational scholars to trace back organizational phenomena to how they are communicated into existence. The concept of ventriloquism can help us explain the communicative constitutive view as it depicts how various elements of a situation are communicated into being and make a difference in interaction. However, ventriloquism lacks a proper methodological outline. Taking employee conversations about visions—a classic constituent of organizations—as our venue, we created a four-step framework for ventriloquial analyses and explored how visions are talked into existence. In this paper, we introduce and illustrate our analytical framework, showing how to identify, order, and present ventriloquial effects. We thus provide organizational (communication) scholars with a new methodological tool that facilitates the systematic inquiry into organizing and the organized from a communicative constitutive perspective.

AB - Organizations have long been treated as stable and fixed entities, defined by concrete buildings, catchy names, and strategic goals neatly written on paper. The Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) school proposes an alternative, practice-grounded conceptualization for studying organizations as emerging in communicative (inter)actions. In so doing, CCO invites organizational scholars to trace back organizational phenomena to how they are communicated into existence. The concept of ventriloquism can help us explain the communicative constitutive view as it depicts how various elements of a situation are communicated into being and make a difference in interaction. However, ventriloquism lacks a proper methodological outline. Taking employee conversations about visions—a classic constituent of organizations—as our venue, we created a four-step framework for ventriloquial analyses and explored how visions are talked into existence. In this paper, we introduce and illustrate our analytical framework, showing how to identify, order, and present ventriloquial effects. We thus provide organizational (communication) scholars with a new methodological tool that facilitates the systematic inquiry into organizing and the organized from a communicative constitutive perspective.

KW - Communicative constitution of organizations (CCO)

KW - Montreal school

KW - ventriloquism

KW - vision

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85114097267&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/30e62423-5fb2-332c-a507-0583a2189a85/

U2 - 10.1177/0170840620934063

DO - 10.1177/0170840620934063

M3 - Journal articles

AN - SCOPUS:85114097267

VL - 42

SP - 1457

EP - 1476

JO - Organization Studies

JF - Organization Studies

SN - 0170-8406

IS - 9

ER -