Unplugged - Book Reviews Special Forum: Around the Communicative Constitution of Organizations perspective

Abstract

Following The Emergent Organization (2000) and The Situated Organization (2011), James R. Taylor and Elizabeth Van Every pursue their inquiry into the communicative constitution of organization in their latest book, entitled When Organization Fails: Why Authority Matters (hereafter, Why Authority Matters). As the third part of what can be thought of as a trilogy, this book extends the communicational framework developed by the authors in their previous books to study organization and organizing. This framework can be summarized by the following thesis: organization essentially consists of interconnected processes of communication; this is defined as the recursive articulation of conversations and texts. Hence, for Taylor and Van Every, organization emerges in communication as described in text – organization becomes an object toward which actors coorient their actions – and realized in conversation – organization is enacted by actors through situated interaction.