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Chapter 5: Coordinated Management of Meaning
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
Chapter 5
Coordinated Management of Meaning
Chapter Outline
I. Introduction
• To understand what takes place during a conversation, Barnett Pearce and Vernon Cronen
developed Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM).
o For Pearce and Cronen, people communicate on the basis of rules.
o Rules help people not only in their communication with others but also in their
interpretation of what others are communicating to them.
o CMM helps explain how individuals co-create the meaning in a conversation.
• Coordinated Management of Meaning generally refers to how individuals establish rules
for creating and interpreting meaning and how those rules are enmeshed in a conversation
where meaning is constantly being coordinated.
o Cronen, Pearce, and Harris’s (1982) summary of CMM is informative here: “CMM
theory describes human actors as attempting to achieve coordination by managing
the ways messages take on meaning” (p. 68).
o The theory requires an understanding of the co-creation of “social worlds” that
Pearce believes exist.
o Pearce (2012) notes, “CMM does things to us; it changes in constructive ways the
way people think and relate to others” (p. 17).
II. All the World’s a Stage
• To describe life experiences, Pearce and Cronen (1980) use the metaphor “undirected
theater” (p. 120).
• Conversational flow is essentially a theater production.
o Interactants direct their own dramas, and, at times, the plots thicken without any
script.
o For many people, how they produce meaning is equivalent to their effectiveness as
communicators.
o The actors are constantly coordinating their scripts with one another.
• The theatrical metaphor was later reconsidered by Pearce (2007).
o He noted that it was somewhat incomplete as he considered the ebb and flow of
conversations and the unpredictability of dialogue.
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o Pearce and Cronen indicate that the actors who are able to read another’s script will
attain conversational coherence.
• Early discussions of CMM centered on the need to break away from the empirical tradition
that characterized much theory building at that time.
o To shape their theory, Pearce and Cronen looked to a number of different disciplines,
including philosophy (Wittgenstein), psychology (James), and education (Dewey).
III. Assumptions of Coordinated Management of Meaning
• The first assumption of CMM points to the centrality of communication.
o That is, human beings live in communication.
o CMM theorists propose a counterintuitive orientation: They believe that social
situations are created by interactions.
▪ Because individuals create their conversational reality, each interaction has the
potential to be unique.
• A second assumption of CMM is that human beings co-create a social reality.
o The belief that people in conversations co-construct their social reality is called
social constructionism.
o Pearce (2007) observes: “Rather than ‘What did you mean by that?’ the relevant
questions are ‘What are we making together?’ ‘How are we making it?’ and ‘How
can we make better social worlds?’” (pp. 30–31).
▪ These social worlds require an understanding of social reality, which refers to
a person’s beliefs about how meaning and action fit within his or her
interpersonal encounters.
• The third assumption guiding CMM relates to the manner in which people control
conversations.
o Specifically, Pearce (2012) concluded that “communication is about meaning” (p. 4)
and that meanings are constantly changing from interaction to interaction.
o Transactions depend on personal and interpersonal meaning, as distinguished many
years ago by Donald Cushman and Gordon Whiting (1972).
▪ Personal meaning is defined as the meaning achieved when a person interacts
with another and brings into the interaction his or her unique experiences.
▪ When two people agree on each other’s interpretation, they are said to achieve
interpersonal meaning.
o Personal and interpersonal meanings are achieved in conversations, frequently
without much thought.
▪ Perceptive individuals recognize that they cannot engage in specialized
personal meaning without explaining themselves to others.
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IV. The Hierarchy of Organized Meaning
• Suggesting that people organize meaning implies that they are able to determine how much
weight to give to a particular message.
o It is true that people are constantly being bombarded with stimuli and that they must
be able to organize the stimuli for communication to occur.
• CMM theorists propose six levels of meaning: content, speech acts, episodes, relationship,
life scripts, and cultural patterns.
o The higher levels help people to interpret lower-level meanings.
A. Content
• The content level specifies the first step of converting raw sensory data into some
meaning.
• The content level can be imagined as a message without a context (Pearce, Cronen, &
Conklin, 1979).
B. Speech Act
• Pearce (2007) describes speech acts as a “class of very familiar things, such as
promises, threats, insults, speculations, guesses, and compliments” (p. 105).
o Speech acts communicate the intention of the speaker and indicate how a
particular communication should be taken.
• One should be aware that two people co-create the meaning of the speech act.
o Frequently, the speech act is defined both by the sender and by the response to
what others have said or done.
• The relational history must be taken into consideration when interpreting a speech act.
o It’s important to point out that speech acts don’t always involve speech; Pearce
acknowledges the importance of nonverbal communication, too.
C. Episodes
• To interpret speech acts, Pearce and Cronen (1980) discuss episodes, or communication
routines that have definable beginnings, middles, and endings.
o In a sense, episodes describe contexts in which people act.
• Irene Stein (2012) states that episodes can be small, such as discernible parts of a
conversation, or large, such as the entire discussion between people.
o At this level, people begin to see the influence of context on meaning.
• Pearce (2007) states that episodes are sequences of speech acts that are “linked together
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as a story” (p. 132).
o Individuals in a communication exchange may differ in how they punctuate an
episode.
o Punctuation pertains to the process of identifying when an episode begins or
ends.
• Episodes show how interactions are organized into a meaningful pattern.
o Pearce and Conklin (1979) clearly note that “coherent conversation requires some
degree of coordinated punctuation” (p. 78).
o Different punctuation, however, may elicit different impressions of the episode,
thereby creating “inside” and “outside” perspectives of the same episode.
D. Relationship
• The fourth level of meaning is the relationship, whereby two people recognize their
potential and limitations as relational partners.
o In addition to partnerships between and among friends, spouses, and family
members, Pearce also believes that relationships can include “larger, less personal
relationships such as corporations, cities, religions, and tennis clubs” (p. 200).
• Relationships are like contracts, which set guidelines and often prescribe behavior.
o In addition, relationships suggest a future.
• The relationship level suggests relational boundaries in that parameters are established
for attitudes and behavior.
o Pearce and Cronen (1980) use the term enmeshment to describe the extent to
which people identify themselves as part of the relational system.
• A relationship may prove invaluable as two people discuss issues that are especially
challenging.
E. Life Scripts
• Clusters of past and present episodes are defined as life scripts.
o People should think of life scripts as autobiographies that communicate with their
sense of self.
• People are who they are because of the life scripts in which they have engaged.
o And how they view themselves over their lifetime affects how they communicate
with others.
• Life scripts include those episodes that two people construct together.
F. Cultural Patterns
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• Cultural patterns, or archetypes, can be described as “very broad images of world
order and [a person’s] relationship to that order” (Cronen and Pearce, 1981, p. 21).
o That is, an individual’s relationship to the larger culture is relevant when
interpreting meaning.
• Speech acts, episode relationships, and life scripts are all understood within the cultural
level.
o For instance, Myron Lustig and Jolene Koester (2015) point out that the U.S.
culture puts a premium on individualism, or the notion that the interests of an
individual are put before the interests of the group.
o Other cultures (such as Colombia, Peru, and Taiwan) emphasize collectivism, or
the notion that the interests of the group are put before the interests of the
individual.
• The levels of meaning espoused by Pearce and Cronen are critical to consider when
conversing with another.
o The theorists contend that their purpose is to model the way people process
information, not to establish a true ordering.
o Individuals vary in their past and present interactions.
▪ Therefore, some people will have highly complex hierarchies and others will
have simplified hierarchies.
V. Charmed and Strange Loops
• The hierarchy of meaning suggests that some lower levels can reflect back and affect the
meaning of higher levels.
o Pearce and Cronen (1980) have termed this process of reflexivity a loop.
• When loops are consistent throughout the hierarchy, Pearce and Cronen identify them as a
charmed loop.
o Charmed loops occur when one part of the hierarchy confirms or supports another
level.
• At times, some episodes are inconsistent with levels higher up in the hierarchy.
o Pearce and Cronen have called this a strange loop.
o Strange loops usually align with intrapersonal communication in that individuals
engage in a sort of internal dialogue about their self-destructive behaviors.
VI. The Coordination of Meaning: Making Sense of the Sequence
• Coordination exists when two people try to make sense out of the sequencing of messages
in their conversation.
• Three outcomes are possible when two people converse (Philipsen, 1995):
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o They achieve coordination
o They do not achieve coordination
o They achieve some degree of coordination
• Gerry Philipsen reminds that social reality is not perfectly coordinated, so the most likely
outcome is partially achieved coordination.
VII. Influences on the Coordination Process
• Coordination requires that individuals be concerned with a higher moral order (Pearce,
1989).
o Many CMM theorists, like Pearce, explain morality as honor, dignity, and character.
o Each person brings various moral orders into a conversation to create and complete
an episode.
▪ Pearce contends that people simultaneously perform various roles, such as
sister, mother, lover, student, employee, friend, and citizen.
• In addition to morality, coordination can be influenced by the resources available to an
individual.
o When CMM theorists discuss resources, they refer to “the stories, images, symbols,
and institutions that persons use to make their world meaningful” (Pearce, 1989, p.
23).
• When resources in a conversation vary from one person to another, coordination may be
challenged.
• Coordinating conversations is critical to communication.
VIII. Rules and Unwanted Repetitive Patterns
• One way individuals manage and coordinate is through the use of rules.
o For CMM theorists, rules provide people opportunities to choose between
alternatives.
o Once rules are established in a dialogue, interactants will have a sufficiently common
symbolic framework for communication (Cushman and Whiting, 1972).
o CMM theorists argue that rule usage in a conversation is more than an ability to use a
rule.
o Interactants must understand the social reality and then incorporate rules as they
decide how to act in a given situation.
• Rules are necessarily linked to time, place, relationship, self-concept, episode, culture, and
other elements in a context (Murray, 2012).
o Rules are always dependent on context and that context is a multifaceted
environment.
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• Two types of rules exist in CMM: constitutive and regulative.
o Constitutive rules refer to how behavior should be interpreted within a given
context.
o Regulative rules refer to some sequence of action that an individual undertakes, and
they communicate what happens next in a conversation.
• Cronen, Pearce, and Linda Snavely (1979) identified unwanted repetitive patterns
(URPs)—sequential and recurring interpersonal conflictual episodes that are considered
unwanted by the individuals in the conflict.
o The researchers explained that URPs arise because two people with particular rules
systems follow a structure that obligates them to perform specific behaviors,
regardless of their consequences.
• People continue to engage in URPs for the following reasons:
o They may see no other option.
o They may be comfortable with the recurring conflict.
o They may unwittingly fall into this pattern, almost instinctively and by default.
o They may simply be too exhausted to work toward conflict resolution.
IX. Integration, Critique, and Closing
• The Coordinated Management of Meaning is one of the few theories to place
communication explicitly as a cornerstone in its foundation.
• Among the criteria for evaluating the theory, four seem especially relevant for discussion:
scope, parsimony, utility, and heurism.
A. Scope
• Some communication scholars (e.g., Brenders, 1987) suggest that the theory is too
abstract and that imprecise definitions exist.
o Yet CMM theorists contend that such criticisms do not take into account the
evolution of the theory and its refinement over the years (Barge and Pearce,
2004).
B. Parsimony
• The scope may be broad, but people should not think that the theory has not undergone
tests of parsimony.
o However, illustrating difficult concepts with a visual and succinct way of looking
at conversations (vis-à-vis the hierarchy of meaning), for instance, has resulted in
making CMM a model that is efficient and available to theoretical consumers.
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C. Utility
• The practicality of looking at how people achieve meaning, their potential recurring
conflicts, and the influence of the self on the communication process is admirable.
o CMM is one of the few communication theories that has been identified by both
theorists and CMM scholars as a “practical theory” (Creede et al., 2012).
D. Heurism
• CMM is a very heuristic theory, spanning a number of different content areas, including
examining international adoption (Leinaweaver, 2012), spirituality (K. Pearce, 2012),
student-professor relationships (Murray, 2014), refugee communities such as the
Congolese (Hughes and Bisimwa, 2016), electronic chat rooms (Moore and Mattson-
Lauters, 2009), and mentoring relationships (Parke, 2011).
Classroom Activities
1. Creating Constitutive and Regulative Rules
Objective: To encourage students to apply the notion of rules to their interactions
Materials: None
Directions:
1. Divide students into small groups, and have them choose a communication situation
(e.g., classroom communication, communication between romantic partners, or
communication between a doctor and patient).
2. Have the groups create five constitutive and five regulative rules associated with the
situation.
3. Allow time for groups to share their rules with the class.
4. Discussion questions may include the following:
• To which level of the meaning hierarchy do the constitutive rules pertain?
• How did you create meaning before writing the rules?
• How do the regulative rules provide guidelines for behavior?
• How is communication viewed in the rules?
2. The Meanings of Dialogue
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Chapter 5: Coordinated Management of Meaning
Objective: To have students apply the hierarchy of meaning to dialogue in a movie or play
Materials: Copies of scenes from a movie or play
Directions:
1. Divide students into small discussion groups, and assign one scene to each group.
3. Have each group turn in a written analysis of the scene.
3. Identifying the Influence of Coordination
Objective: To have students apply the concepts of morality and availability of resources to
an important relationship
Materials: None
Directions:
1. Have students choose a significant relationship to analyze.
2. Have them analyze the relationship using concepts from CMM, including morality
and availability of resources.
3. Ask the following discussion questions:
• What roles and responsibilities do you have in the relationship? What roles and
responsibilities does your relational partner have?
• Do you share resources with the other person?
• What types of moral dilemmas have you experienced in the relationship?