To further explore the relationships between organization and identity, in this chapter I provide an overview of the CCO perspective. In doing so I identify the ways in which understandings of organizations and organizational events as communicatively constituted can inform individual engagement in processes of organizing. From that perspective, I suggest that organizational identities which emerge as durable and persist within and beyond the organization are created and maintained in language, not actions or results (Grant, Keenoy, & Oswick, 1998). Thus, a company’s identity may be formed with rhetoric, not tangible results of management processes (Oswick, Grant, Michelson, & Wailes, 2005; Thurlow & Mills, 2009).
Although conceptualizations of organizations as communicatively constituted are gaining momentum and reach in the literature, methodological applications and frameworks of analysis to operationalize this perspective are still somewhat limited. To date, “the CCO perspective’s range of methodologies is still limited to analyzing local communication episodes, rather than studying organizations as broader networks of communication episodes” (Blaschke, Schoeneborn, & Seidl, 2012, p. 879). Tackling the broader questions of networked identities is a difficult one, and from a CCO perspective this may take one of several different approaches. Throughout this volume the term CCO will represent the phrase communication is constitutive of organizing (Putnam & Nicotera, 2009). Bisel (2010) describes the current state of CCO quite succinctly when he says, “CCO theories articulate a communicative ontology of organization. Although the specific mechanisms and processes by which communication is associated with organization are debated hotly among theorists, one premise remains constant across the tradition: Communication calls organization into being” (Bisel, 2010, p. 124).
This statement emphasizes the fact that even though the specific approaches within the CCO approach may vary (Ashcraft et al., 2009; Putnam & Nicotera, 2009), there is a common focus on the centrality of language, speech, text and discourse to collective sensemaking within organizations. As Putnam and Nicotera (2009) summarize, “CCO is first and foremost a collection of perspectives about grounding the role of communication in the ontology of an organization” (p 482). They further describe the central focus of CCO as “a body of work connected by a central question or an overall problem rather than a clear-cut answer” (Putnam & Nicotera, 2010, p. 158). Schoeneborn and Vasquez (2017) further summarize the body of work as “based on the idea that organization emerges in and is sustained and transformed by communication” (p. 367). And Koschmann (2013, p. 65) contributes to the definition of CCO, describing it as a constitutive approach which views “communication as generative of organizational realities and the fundamental process by which we know and understand the social world.”
Within the family of theories which collectively represent CCO theory, there are essentially three distinct schools of thought. However, as Schoeneborn et al. (2014, p. 305) summarize,
the strongest commonality among the three schools … is the presumed link between organization and communication. All three schools are fundamentally grounded in the assumption that the organization does not pre-date communication but emerges and perpetuates itself as a network of interlocking communication events (Blaschke et al., 2012; Taylor & Van Every, 2000) or flows (McPhee & Zaug, 2000).
Tackling the central question identified through CCO has been the focus of multiple approaches. Ideas about how organizations emerge through communicative processes are surfaced throughout the organizational identity literature over the past several decades, but the early work in CCO originates in 2000 when two of the three dominant perspectives within this tradition were presented. In that year, Taylor and Van Every published their trail-blazing book entitled, The Emergent Organization: Communication as its Site and Surface (Taylor & Van Every, 2000). In the book’s preface the authors introduce that work as “the culmination of a long quest: to explain organization in the language of an authentically communicational theory” (Taylor & Van Every, 2000, p. ix). And that same year, McPhee and Zaug published their innovative article, The Communicative Constitution of Organizations: A Framework for Explanation (McPhee & Zaug, 2000). While both of these works are recognized now as foundational to the establishment of the CCO literature, they offered different approaches to understanding how communication and organization are interconnected in their production. And ultimately, scholarship emerging from this point of origin can be broken into three distinctive schools of thought known generally as: The Montreal School, The Four Flows Approach and Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems.
Taylor and Van Emery’s (2000) book is a defining work of what has evolved as the Montreal School of organizational communication. They argue that organizations emanate from two communicative circumstances, ‘conversation’ and ‘text.’ Text is understood as a structuring principle which can include any ‘stable patterning’ or documenting of values, roles or rules which govern the organizational identity. In contrast, ‘conversation’ is seen as the shared interactions occurring in everyday situations when people come together to coordinate around specific objectives (p. 35). These interactions can be recorded or fixed in texts that contribute to the persistence and durability of the organizational identity. Text can be represented in a multitude of forms including, for example, the architecture of buildings, organizational documents, technologies and processes (Cooren & Fairhurst, 2009). Further, from this perspective, text and conversation are seen to co-constitute each other and together they form ‘a self-organizing loop’ (Taylor & Van Every, 2000). Fairhurst and Putnam (2004) highlight the potential of this self-organizing loop in terms of sites that could capture the constitutive nature of both text and conversation as social practices and as enduring systems of thought at a particular point in time.
McPhee and Zaug (2000) introduced the Four Flows approach, predicated on four communication flows: activity coordination, self-structuring, membership negotiation and institutional positioning, within their understanding of communicative organizations. Activity coordination was described as a flow that encompassed connections between work practices as produced through rhetorical and discursive power. Organizational self-structuring was concerned with structures that set boundaries around and within the organization and informed strategic direction. Membership negotiation was a flow of practices related to relationship formation, network building and inclusion, or exclusion of organizational members. And Institutional positioning focused on external as well as internal stakeholders to address the ways in which organizations position themselves relative to other organizations and society. As Bisel (2010) explains, these four flows are located
among the microlevel talk of instructions and commands (i.e., activity coordination), the macrolevel talk about how the organization should function and what image it should attempt to create (i.e., self-structuring and institutional positioning, respectively), and the mesolevel talk of culture and socialization (i.e., membership negotiation).
(Bisel, 2010, p. 126)
In Schoeneborn et al. (2014, p. 291), Robert McPhee describes the understanding of communication reflected in the Four Flows approach as a process of
symbolic transtruction, where ‘transtruction’ means the intermediation of each of four basic dimensions of action – signification, domination, legitimation and constitution (see McPhee, 1998) – by the other three dimensions. In other words, communication is the fused emergence, in symbolic interaction, of meaning – in the first instance, as we are talking about communication – power, and its bases; normative force, and socially or materially constituted systems and contexts.
McPhee continues on to emphasize the usefulness of all four dimensions as they “elaborate the complexity” (in Schoeneborn et al., 2014, p. 291) that communication involves.
This approach has been adopted by CCO scholars interested in understanding the organization as a reflection of rules and structures that are used by individuals within organizations to guide their social interactions (for example, McPhee & Iverson, 2009); Browning, Greene, Sitkin, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2009). With a strong focus on organizational and social structures, essentially the Four Flows approach is rooted in Giddens’ (1979, 1984) view of structure (Structuration Theory). McPhee and Zaug (2000) posited that organizations emerge from the four processes above which structured how individuals organized and created organizations. McPhee (Schoeneborn et al., 2014, p. 294) reaffirms that connection to Giddens’ work as he accepts Gidden’s (1984) definition of organization as “collectivities in which the reflexive regulation of the conditions of system reproduction looms large in the continuity of day-to-day practices” (p. 200). This definition differs from that of the Montreal School in terms of the focus on structure. For example, boundaries around membership would be well defined and their permeability determined and communicated.
The Four Flows approach has been critiqued for its focus on structure, as well as on the application of the flows individually (Bisel, 2010; Sillince, 2010). Perhaps the strongest critiques are around the definition of organization. However, Putnam and Nicotera (2010) in their response to questions about CCO theory assert that
For McPhee and Zaug, an organization exists in time and space as a texture of practice in which the four flows are interwoven, like hues of yarn that become inextricably intertwined and in combination constitute a new form. Treating the flows as a texture of practices envisions any one of them as a prototype rather than a necessary and sufficient condition of an organization.
(p. 4)
This description of the approach as an overall tapestry as opposed to a rigid application of process does perhaps open the door to a broader integration of aspects of this model with the other two perspectives.
The third approach to CCO is referred to as Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems. Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud, and Taylor (2014) describe this perspective as an emerging approach to CCO, reflecting an understanding of the relationship between communication and organizing as a process of self-referential systems. The social systems approach draws from Luhman’s (1992, 1995) foundational work on Social Systems Theory and emphasizes the systems-level processes which engage communication in organizing. From this perspective Luhman saw communication as a critical component in the building of and functioning of social systems. As quoted in Brummans et al. (2014, p. 185), Luhman (1995) explains that
in social systems formed by communication, only communication is available as a means of decomposing elements… . A social system has no other manner of dissection; it cannot resort to chemical, neurophysiological, or mental processes (although all these exist and play a part). In other words, one cannot bypass the constitutive level of communication.
(p. 164)
In Schoeneborn et al. (2014), CCO scholar David Seidl describes Luhmann’s perspective on communication as a
purely social phenomenon. In this sense, communication has to be conceptualized as an emergent phenomenon that arises from the interaction between individuals. Extending this line of reasoning, Luhmann argues that what matters is not how a particular individual understands a communication but how a subsequent communication interprets the preceding communication it is connected to; only a communicative event can determine the particular way in which the immediately preceding communicative event is understood. For example, from a given answer, you can infer how the respective question has been understood.
(290–291)
In this sense, Luhmann (1995) suggests that communication can only be understood, or made possible, retrospectively.
In contrast to the Montreal School approach, however, Luhmann uses the term organization in a much narrower sense. As Seidl (Schoeneborn et al., 2014, p. 293) explains,
For Luhmann (2003), organizations are one of three generic types of social systems; the other two being society (i.e. the system encompassing all communication) and face to face interactions (i.e. the system encompassing communication between people who reflexively perceive each other as present. All three types of social systems are conceptualized as ‘autopoietic’ (i.e. self-reproducing) communication systems that are able to process meaning.
Although I have discussed three somewhat distinctive orientations of the CCO approach, the strong commonalities in the foundational assumptions of CCO mean that these may not necessarily be mutually exclusive ways of seeing organizations and identity. The foundational element in each of these perspectives, of course, reflects the formative nature of language and communication. And, as Putnam and Fairhurst (2015) suggest, each of these three understandings had weaknesses that could be addressed by the other two perspectives. They further advocate that theory building should cross perspectives, and encourage the potential in “using the object orientation to address relativism in the becoming approach as well as introducing materiality in the grounded-in-action view” (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2015, p. 377).
The CCO perspective adopted in this book is, for the most part, that of the Montreal School approach. Although, as suggested previously, elements of the other two schools of thought are certainly reflected in the chapters that follow. For an analysis of identity construction in social media, the Montreal School appealed to me largely for its compatibility with other discursive approaches which offered insights into this question. In his interview at the Hamburg panel discussion on CCO thinking facilitated by Dennis Schoeneborn, Montreal School scholar Francois Cooren indicated that the epistemological foundations of this stream of CCO theory are relational (Schoeneborn et al., 2014):
By relational epistemology, I mean the kind of epistemology that was put forward by pragmatist scholars such as Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey and, to a lesser extent William James. A relational or pragmatist epistemology calls into question both subjectivism and idealism, on one hand, and empiricism and materialism on the other by refusing to determine a starting point in the act of knowing, inquiring or investigating.
(p. 288)
This orientation allows for deep connections with other approaches which support both critical sensemaking and organizational communication such as Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005, 2013) and Framing Theory (Entman, 1993). Perhaps most importantly for the purposes this research, The Montreal School approach also allows for the investigation of synergies between the Critical Sensemaking framework and elements of CCO as they relate to identity construction, plausibility and enactment in the creation of meaning. These synergies reflect complementary approaches, enhancing the usefulness of both frameworks for research on the diverse landscape of social media. For example, the position of the Montreal School approach in refusing to determine a starting point in the communication process is balanced by the CSM position of bracketing a sensemaking process which begins with a shock and ends with the restoration of routine or establishment of order. Although these positions may appear incompatible at first, they actually serve to highlight both the ongoing and retrospective elements of sensemaking (which transcend the brackets) and the constant flux of the social media landscape, which is ultimately an ongoing process as opposed to a distinct conversation. Of course, elements of the other two CCO approaches may also come into play here, indicating other points at which to investigate an ‘act of knowing, inquiry or investigation.’ Luhman’s Theory of Social Systems approach, for instance, firmly determines a starting point of communication, that of the observer “a human being, a social system (e.g. an organization), or even a machine – and the observations (see Seidl & Becker, 2006)” (Schoeneborn et al., 2014, p. 288). This approach is interested in the ways in which an observer may structure observations and ultimately construct reality within this process. Insights from this approach may be useful in understanding how particular sensemaking occurs from a retrospective point of view, for example.
Although there may be differences in interpretation about where sensemaking starts, both the Montreal School view of CCO and CSM are in agreement that action is central to communication. Weick (1995) clearly identifies enactment as the property which brings sensemaking into being, with action being defined quite broadly in terms of the production and enactment of text and discourse. Similarly, the Montreal School view of CCO tends to define communication in terms of enactment. As Cooren explains, “communication is, first and foremost, considered an action” (Schoeneborn et al., 2014, p. 289).
Another appealing feature of this interpretation of CCO is the view that communication involves not just humans, but other entities as well. This view is incorporated into CSM through the element of formative context, and also central to Actor Network Theory in the description of non-human actants operating within and upon networks. Cooren explains that
communication should not be considered an activity that only concerns human beings. Many other things get communicated through what people say, write or do: emotions, ideas, beliefs, values, positions, but also – and through the latter of these – situations, facts, realities and so on.
(Schoeneborn et al., 2014, p. 290)
He continues on to explain that
regarding the question of non-human agency, we see that, indeed, artifacts have a big role to play in the communicative constitution of an organization. They matter a lot. They count. They display agency to the extent that they … communicate how an organization is perceived and experienced – think of buildings, machines, and logos, for instance.
(p. 298)
This perspective is particularly useful in an investigation of communication mediated through social media networks. Although we may not be talking about buildings here, there are certainly other elements of architecture in digital structures, such as website designs, which convey meaning. Likewise, the nature of social media allows for multi-platform sharing of not just textual elements, understood here in a broad sense (written, visual, iconic, ideational, oral, etc.), but also of discourse, and to that end, discursive practices. As Cooren (2004, p. 375) reminds us, “organizational activities, are discursively structured, which means that text in all its forms (written, oral, iconic) can display a form of agency” and he concludes, these texts can make a difference. This textual agency essentially takes place as soon as a text is produced and disseminated across the network. The moment that the text takes on agency is almost instantaneous now as by clicking a button, the content producer sends that text out into an ‘uncontrolled’ environment where it may be transformed, endorsed, refuted, etc., by other members of that network and beyond. It takes on its own being, and becomes in itself an artifact of organization.
The Montreal School perspective is also useful in terms of insights into how organizational membership may be understood. This element is critical in understanding social media networks, which are sites of constant and often contentious negotiated memberships. Dobusch and Schoeneborn (2015) address this question in their work on the communicative constitution of Anonymous, a controversial online organization of ‘hacktivists’ who conceal their identities as they conduct political or other social actions of resistance. Dobusch et al. (2015) categorize this group as part of an emergent form of organization which they characterize as resembling a looser social collective. Organizations in this category would include online communities (Garud, Jain, & Tuertscher, 2008; O’Mahony & Ferraro, 2007; Puranam, Alexy, & Reitzig, 2014), hacker collectives (Coleman, 2014; Scott, 2013) and terrorist networks (Comas, Shrivastava, & Martin, 2015; Schoeneborn & Scherer, 2012; Stohl & Stohl, 2011)” (p. 1005). According to Dobusch et al. (2015), what these organizations have in common is a fluidity of membership, boundaries and identity. This high degree of fluidity is typical of many online social networks and challenges some of the long-held assumptions of organization in more traditional organizational theory. Schreyogg and Sydow, 2010 (p. 1253) point out that traditionally organizations are “simply not conceivable without reference to workable identities and boundaries.”
However, Dobusch et al. (2015) argue that this perspective fails to acknowledge that even highly fluid forms of organizing can ‘gain the status of organizational entities and actors,’ as in the case of Anonymous. They further point to the work of Tsoukas and Chia (2002) who call for a recognition of organizations as more than static entities but as ongoing processes of becoming. This approach fits as well with Weick’s interpretation of organizations as process driven as opposed to structurally driven. Dobusch et al. (2015) further suggest that it is the advent of new digital technologies and the social networks that they invoke, such as open source software, wikis and social media, that make these new and more loosely characterized forms of organizing possible (e.g. Puranam et al., 2014).
Dobusch et al. (2015) draw on CCO theory to illuminate their work in this area because of the central idea in this perspective that
organizations are not primarily comprised of their members or job roles but come into existence through the continuous layering of conversations and texts that become constantly interconnected and collectively evoke and stabilize the organization as an identifiable entity or actor (Taylor and Van Every, 2000, 2011; Cooren, 2010).
(p. 1012)
They in particular draw on the insights within CCO theory concerned with communication as a dynamic “process of manipulating symbols toward the creation, maintenance, destruction, and/or transformation of meanings, which are axial – not peripheral – to organizational existence and organizing phenomena” (Ashcraft et al., 2009, p. 22). From within this perspective, fluid or loosely structured organizations can be included in analysis of organizational processes. From the perspective of the Four Flows school, Dobusch et al. (2015) take the position that membership negotiation is one of the central components of organization. This negotiation can be conducted through both human and non-human actants, and essentially requires decision making around the location of authority on behalf of the organization., i.e. who has the authority to speak or act on behalf of the organization. This negotiation is typical within many social media networks, and even formal organizations operating offline struggle with the need to ‘control’ access to textual production on behalf of the organization by individual members without that level of authority.
In their conclusion, Dobusch et al. (2015) indicate that organizationality (a term they propose to refer to the degree to which a social collective meets the requirements for organization) “is a precarious accomplishment (see Cooren et al., 2011) that needs to be repeatedly reinstated through the performance of certain speech acts (e.g. identity claims) and their attribution to an overarching organizational address (see also Drepper, 2005)” (p. 1030).
That is not to suggest that fluidity in organizational form and membership is limited to social media. Koschmann (2013) further illustrates the challenges of membership negotiation in his work on Interorganizational collaborations, concluding that one of the central barriers to establishing collective identity in organization is the negotiation and organization of members with competing values and interests. In his work, however, he draws on the Montreal School approach to discuss membership in relation to authority. Using this approach he describes authority as coming from “abstraction and reification” (p. 68). He continues to describe the process of distancing an author from the textual production and thereby re-enforcing agency within the text itself, not the individual. This process is called distanciation and as it
continues and texts are further removed from their immediate circumstances, more and more ambiguity is introduced until all that remains is an abstract representation of the original interactions. On the face of it, this process of abstraction is nothing new. It is impossible to fully represent every interaction in successive conversations or texts. We live by this kind of inference (Goffman, 1959), and the capacity to generalize in this way is the source of all human communication (Zijderveld, 1970). The important contribution of the Montreal School, however, is to demonstrate that this process of abstraction through distanciation becomes a source of authority for collective action. Through distanciation, abstract representations tend to shed any trace of specific authorship. That is, the actions and intentions of particular individuals are omitted in subsequent interactions, and the resulting textual representations (abstractions) are the primary means by which we communicate with each other. It is this ‘vanishing’ (Taylor & Van Every, 2011) of authorship that gives abstractions their authority. As the contributions of specific individuals get lost in the distancing of texts, more and more agency is attributed to the textual abstraction itself. Consequently, the textual abstraction becomes reified – taken as given – in ways that convey power. Authority is now attributed to the textual abstraction itself rather than any particular individual.
(Koschmann, 2013, p. 68)
This phenomenon of distanciation is evident across social media platforms as content (including ideas, intentions, discourse and other textual products) can be rapidly and continuously edited or adjusted to fit the needs of the current producer/consumer, the format of the given technology (image, tweet, blog, video, audio, etc.), and the discursive effects of other texts in that network.
Given that tumultuous nature of organization within social media, the Montreal School perspective on organizing and organization is a useful one to employ. Cooren in Schoeneborn et al. (2014) describes an organization as a hybrid,
it is made of various ontologies that are organized and recognized to a greater or lesser extent. Taylor and Van Every (2000) would also say that it is an interrelated network of communication processes, a position that appears, to some extent, compatible with social systems theory.
(p. 293)
This approach fits well with Weick’s own view of organization as a process of becoming, a state of organizing, which is ongoing and social in nature. At the same time, I heed Putnam and Nicotera’s (2009) suggestion that we need not limit ourselves to just one perspective within CCO, as insights from the other two schools of thought offer complementary tools of analysis and may respond to gaps in the others. For example, the Four Flows approach (McPhee & Zaug, 2000) offers a useful framework for understanding processes of member negotiation within organization which works well from a CSM perspective as a flow of organizing.
Cooren et al. (2011, p. 1159) point out that CCO provides a valuable perspective on organizational identity and “connects with recent interests in organizational identity from a discourse perspective (i.e. Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2011).” From this perspective CCO and current work on discourse and identity continue to reflect organizations as “socially constructed from networks of conversations or dialogues” (Humphreys & Brown, 2002, p. 422). Taylor and Cooren (1997) have laid the groundwork for further understandings of organizational identity as existing only as “discourse where its reality is created, and sustained” (p. 429). Subsequent work in this vein has expanded theory on the communicatively constituted nature of organizations to address ways in which individual voices may connect to broader, organizational perspectives, thus opening a path of inquiry into the relationships between individual sensemaking around organizing and the collective organization (i.e. Taylor & Cooren, 1997, Taylor & Van Every, 2000).
Although there is a growing literature in the CCO tradition which investigates the importance of technology within the paradigm (Kavada, 2015), there has not been a great deal of work done specifically in the area of social media from within the CCO tradition. Nevertheless, there has been some interest in technology within the broader organizational communication literature from a number of different perspectives. Building on the work of theorists such as Wanda Orlikowski (1992), researchers working from the CCO approach (Kavada, 2015) have begun to investigate the importance of technology within social processes, collective sensemaking and issues of power.
Digital media may represent new channels of communication, yet they are still defined by social processes embedded in conversations, texts, interactions and sensemaking. As a result, social media communication surfaces experiences and interactions that may previously have gone unspoken or undocumented within organizations. For that reason, digital media networks offer a rich site of inquiry for CCO scholars who wish to explore the processes through which organizational identities are formed and maintained through time. To that end, social media networks themselves can be theorized as communicatively constituted sites of organizing. Koschmann (2013, p. 68), drawing upon the work of the Montreal School, conceptualizes collective identities as textual phenomenon, ‘authoritative texts’ that represent an “abstract textual representation of the collective that portrays its structure and direction, showing how activities are coordinated and indicating relations of authority.” Similarly, Kuhn (2008) defines text as a ‘network of meanings’ that reflect the linguistic interactions between network members. Kuhn then explains that these texts become authoritative when they develop a ‘dominant reading.’
Although we may conceptualize organizational identities as authoritative texts, constituted through communication, theorists still struggle with questions regarding agency and power within and through these texts. Social media networks may provide insights into how communicative processes impact these specific networks, and how issues of power and agency in identity construction are reflected in these platforms. Furthermore, these networks may lack a clear picture of their members. Generally speaking, an organization establishes a somewhat fixed and visible membership base (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011) that ensures the “succession of its constitutive communication process and therefore increases the organization’s chances of perpetuation” (Blaschke et al., 2012, p. 966). In her work on communication technology, Thorhauge (2012), takes a CCO perspective to investigate the use of social media as a channel of organizational communication between professors and students in a university environment. And Boyd and Ellison (2007) concur in that social media reflect very different aspects of organizational life than more traditional forms of organizational technology, concluding that social media represent a new and different way of understanding and accessing social networks.
Public relations and communication scholars also face a number of challenges when attempting to assess the dynamics of social media from both a theoretical and a practice perspective. Previous understandings of how organizing and identity are constituted in terms of communicative processes are changing within the new media environment. What may have previously been experienced as face-to-face communication between organizational members has moved into a Web-based digital format. One of the defining characteristics of social media is, however, that there exists now a durable record of this communicative interaction. The function of the network is to produce text-based communication, or in the case of YouTube or Flickr, for example, video or photographic texts. From an organizational perspective, agency in this network can be problematic as the human and non-human actants circulate through the network, text in particular moving away from its author and in to relationships with other texts, other authors and ideas that may or not reflect the mission or vision of the organization collectively.
The importance of text as a physical artifact, or ‘stable’ form of communication has been outlined by Cooren (2004) in his discussion of the implications of textual agency within organizations. These texts (digital in the case of social media, or physical in the sense of memos, letters, documents and contracts) participate, along with other elements of organization, to produce text which serve to define and structure the organization. Cooren points out that by ‘remaining’ these texts establish conversations in fixed points of time. The question of timeframe within both CCO theory and the CSM framework is interesting. Although sensemaking may be bracketed between a trigger (or shock) and the restoration of routine, the process itself is retrospective. Likewise, social media technologies are very difficult to pin down in terms of locating a particular idea at a point in time. The question of temporal location within organizing is one that continues to challenge scholars in both CSM and CCO. Nevertheless, how or whenever, the texts emerge, they also document sensemaking processes, identifying contributions to the textual conversation unfolding. These documents are also disseminated beyond just those individuals engaged in the interaction, but made available to any member of the network and possibly beyond.
There is little doubt that social media networks may offer effective communicative processes to enable organizing around the constitution of shared identity (Kahn & Kellner, 2004). However, participation in identity construction online can also present challenges to authenticity. As a recent perspective on social media for change suggests,
Facebook, in particular, can increase participation in social movements – if you call a single click of the mouse participation. More than a million people have joined a Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition, but few among them have taken any additional action to help those in Sudan.
(Wilson Quarterly, 2011)
From a CCO perspective, networks as sites of organizing represent the social media experience as more than just a change of context in terms of communication and relationships. It may ultimately be an extension of self in that, as Turkle (1995) asserts, these media are not just changing our lives, the way we work and communicate – but they are profoundly changing ourselves, our identities and challenging our authenticity. Turkle’s Alone Together suggests that technologically mediated communication, like that conducted through social media networks, separates people from the processing of their emotions, and presents confusing identities (Turkle, 2011). This tension between identity construction as an individual, and collective identity construction through a process of organizing, is highlighted in the social media environment. As organizational membership is negotiated, questions of who we are and how things are done here reflect rapid changes in both the organization and the agency surrounding both human and non-human elements in that network.
The CCO perspective can provide valuable insights into processes of identity construction within this digital context; however, CCO theory alone does not give us the complete picture. Bisel (2010, p. 129) points to the need to expand the work of CCO theory further, so as to acknowledge that communication is a necessary condition for the constitution of organizing, “but it is not sufficient to ensure organizing will be called into being.” This call for further work leads us to reflect again on the question posed in Chapter 1, why do some organizational identities persist and become durable, and others do not? What is the communicative condition under which organizations move into becoming, and identities emerge as plausible to prospective or newly enrolled organizational members? In order to unpack this question further, I will discuss the potential of the CSM (Critical Sensemaking) framework as a compatible and complementary frame of analysis through which to investigate the multi-faceted relationships between organizing and communication in the following chapter. By drawing connections between these two frameworks, I will set the foundation for further investigation of processes of social media organizing as illustrated in the case studies to follow.