CHAPTER 20
COMMUNICATIVE CONSTITUTION OF
ORGANIZATIONS
Outline
I. Introduction
A. Robert McPhee and other communicative constitution of organizations (CCO)
theorists insist any company is what it is because communication brings the
organization into existence.
B. They believe only communication can bind people into an organization.
C. McPhee believes that CCO theory can help us see that any organization’s chaos
has an underlying order.
II. Communication: The essence of organization
A. Employees are not a set of lifeless parts; people create an organization.
B. Communication calls organization into being.
C. According to Weick’s Information Systems Approach, organizations are like
organisms—active beings who must continually process information to survive.
D. When faced with such equivocality, Weick encouraged organizations to engage in
sensemaking— communication behavior designed to reduce ambiguity.
E. McPhee thinks communication doesn’t just reduce ambiguity—it creates the
organization itself.
F. McPhee’s answer to the big CCO question [how does communication create
organization?] is four specific forms of communication, or flows.
1. Membership negotiation
2. Self-structuring
3. Activity coordination
4. Institutional positioning
G. McPhee thinks each flow literally creates the company as members talk. These
flows aren’t something an organization does but rather what an organization is.
III. The Four Flows of CCO
A. CCO theorists believe organizations are like a river—always changing, always
active, and sometimes violent.
B. McPhee believes the communication must occur in four flows, or “circulating
systems or fields of messages.”
E. What sets the four flows apart is that they are necessary for creating the
organization itself.
IV. Membership negotiation: Joining and learning the ropes
V. Self-structuring: Figuring out who’s who in the organization
A. After the organization’s founding, self-structuring continues through the writing of
procedures manuals, memos, and sometimes a chart that specifies the
relationships among employees.
VI. Activity coordination: Getting the job done
A. McPhee believes all organizations have goals.
B. A defined purpose, such as a mission statement, separates an organization from a
crowd of people. Most important to CCO theorists, members communicate to
VII. Institutional positioning: Dealing with other people and organizations
A. Institutional positioning is communication between an organization and external
entities—other organizations and people.
B. No organization survives on its own.
VIII. Four Principles of the Four Flows
A. McPhee claims that communication constitutes organization through the four
flows of membership negotiation, self-structuring, activity coordination, and
institutional positioning.
B. It’s the intersection of the four flows, mixing and blending together, that
constitutes organization.
C. Four principles direct the four flows of communication.
2. Different flows happen in different places.
4. Different flows address different audiences.
a) Self-structuring is of little interest to those outside an organization.
b) Membership negotiation targets new members or those who may be
leaving.
c) Activity coordination addresses specific groups within an organization.
d) Institutional positioning focuses on external organizations.
IX. Diverting the flow: Crafting solutions to organizational problems.
A. Some CCO scholars are pragmatists who try to use such insights to fix
organizational problems.
B. They can begin doing this by describing the four flows in an organization.
C. It is likely that improvements to an organization must address more than just one
flow.
X. Critique: Is constitution really so simple?
1. Taylor and McPhee identify sufficient conditions (co-orientation and the
four flows, respectively) for organizing.
2. Both may be necessary conditions rather than sufficient conditions.
G. Although they may disagree on the details, CCO theorists share a broad
community of agreement.
Key Names and Terms
Robert McPhee
Organizational communication scholar from Arizona State University behind
Communicative Constitution of Organizations [CCO].
Constitution
Circulating fields of messages that constitute organizations.
Membership negotiation
Communication that regulates the extent to which a person is an organizational
member.
Self-structuring
Communication that shapes the relationships among an organization’s members.
Closure
A sense of shared understanding that emerges in back-and-forth interaction.
Activity coordination
Communication that accomplishes the organization’s work toward goals.
Institutional positioning
Communication between an organization and external entities.
Co-orientation
Communication wherein two or more people focus on a common object.
Sufficient conditions
Principal Changes
After being introduced in the 9th edition of A First Look, this chapter has been lightly
edited for clarity and readability. The content remains the same.
Kick-off Questions & Interaction Starters
• When joining a new organization or starting a new workplace, what’s the most essential
thing: learning the ropes of the organization or figuring out tasks of the job?
Suggestions for Discussion
Communication environments
A foundational idea to CCO is organizations exist within an environment. While we often
think about the environment as a physical component, McPhee’s theory invites us to consider
the information environment as well. This is a more socially constructed environment, and, in
keeping with Pearce and Cronen (ch. 6), we are co-creators of that environment and we are
Uncertainty vs. Equivocality
As CCO owes a large debt to Weick’s Information System Theory (available in the theory
archive at www.afirstlook.com), I find my students are better able to tackle McPhee’s ideas if
they have a bit firmer footing in Weick’s ideas. One of the core ideas is the different types of
unclear messages that organizations and its members might face. Try to draw a clear
distinction between uncertainty messages, or those where a lack of information hinders
knowledge, and equivocal messages that are information-heavy such that too many
interpretations are possible. When faced with uncertainty, we need more, missing pieces to
figure out the puzzle. We need more information. Take for example the plight of a new
employee at the Acme Corporation who hasn’t been told the dress policies or if the company
By clarifying this idea, you might get a clearer idea why McPhee’s approach is about
both—filling in the blanks and choosing a template for clarity. Looking back on the approach to
Uncertainty Reduction (chpt 9) can make for a healthy comparison. A hard-core empiricist,
Berger suggests that human possess an inherent driven to to reduce the unknown so we can
make our world more predictable; we don’t have a lot of choice (if any) in whether we possess
that drive or not. People don’t like what they do not know, Berger would tell you. By contrast,
uncertainty plays a more dynamic role in McPhee’s interpretive-based theory. Members of
organizations make choices. Those choices occur at different junctions in the organization and
for different members. In doing so, they create the reality they live in—they organize. Rather
Information management
McPhee’s theory centers on the ways that organizations create themselves. Akin to the
actions of individuals described by Berger (ch. 8) and Walther (ch. 10), organizations are
concerned with gathering and processing information in order to reduce uncertainty and
equivocality. But, rather than take a precise scientific approach, McPhee is amorphous and
focuses on the act of organizing rather than the structure. Bearing the watermark of Weick’s
interpretive tendencies, McPhee’s theory seeks to provide insight and new understanding. If,
like Weick, he favors less rigidity and more fluidity, do we really understand the nature of what
it means to be an organization any better?
Once again, you can use this opportunity to connect a few dots. Like McPhee’s
attempts to hold both the known and the unknown as inherently valuable, Baxter’s Relational
Missing the critical edge
In anticipation of the next chapter (Deetz’ Critical Theory of Organizations), you might
start a discussion of power. McPhee is silent on this issue. He offers few comments about
how power might be manifested in the organization. Is this problematic? Given that
organizations can both empower and oppress their members, is McPhee’s silence notable?
When does membership negotiation become territorialism with existing members claiming
their turf and therefore putting the new guy in his place? As any student knows, when the
teacher asks these kinds of closed-ended questions, the answer is pretty obvious. It seems a
glaring hole in the theory to assume that the structuring of organizations looks out for every
member; it may be naïve to even think the communication flows are neutral. I encourage you
Sample Application Log
Jane
I was selected to be a manager of a soccer team at my school. If it wasn’t hard enough to be a
non-athlete amongst very talented athletes, I was also the only girl as it was the men’s soccer
team. In the beginning, I think my biggest challenge was not figuring out what I needed to do
(after all, I’ve played soccer and I’ve managed other teams so I knew the tasks), but how would
I fit in on this team. They had a particular ethos that’s unlike other teams I’ve been around.
seem to talk about it a lot and made fewer assumptions. On a campus where soccer isn’t one
of the banner sports, the team tried hard to position themselves as different from the other
athletes on campus. But, I really saw this organizing come to a head during games. Each
member has to stand on the sidelines—no one is allowed to sit or disengage. Whatever
Exercises and Activities
What is an organization?
Before we can delve into the heart of the theory, it seems to me that students need to
reboot a bit of their basic conceptions of organizations. Towards this end, I will ask students to
categorize organizations they know. As you might imagine, generally the categories fall along
business lines—what the company makes or does, what branch of service they provide, or type
of outcome is produced. A gentle prod can bring students around a bit; that is what the
company or organization does but is that the same as what it is? What makes it an
organization? Is it an organizational hierarchy? Is it membership in an organizing body (such as
the Better Business Bureau)? What is an organization and then can we divide them by the
The Double Loop
Another concept from Weick that you might want to engage with your students is the
double interact. He argued that organizations, which in part must be flexible, can become
ineffective not because of what they have done but because they have failed to act at all.
Action then is the precondition to sensemaking. Act first, think second. Or, in Weick’s terms:
Act, Respond, Adjust. Once we’ve done something, we can evaluate if it worked and make the
necessary adjustments. Ask your students how they have seen this loop in action or times
when they’ve seen the opposite. When does making a decision, even if perhaps imperfect,
If you have ever been through one of these long, drawn out affairs, you will recognize the
challenge Weick says organizations face when they are unwilling to act until all the “I”s are
dotted; nothing happens.
Feature film examples
Two animated film might work as illustrations for CCO. In Monsters University (2013),
Mike and Sully join the misfit fraternity Oozma Kappa (OK). They go through membership
negotiation and self-structuring through their initiation and early days in the group, and activity
coordination and institutional positioning through the games. As seen in the film, sometimes
the flows are an on-going process of becoming an organization member. Another example is
Inside Out (2015). The film centers on eleven-year old Riley and the personified versions of
(Vince Vaughn), form a fraternity open to anyone. The scene where the friends establish the
group and each person’s role in it is worth some class time as is the scene where they must
strategize how to defeat their adversary, the college’s dean (played by Jeremy Piven). Often a
favorite with students, the scenes from Old School nicely illustrate how communication can
define an organization and as conditions change, it becomes even more vital.
An episode from The Big Bang Theory’s second season, “The Work Song Nanocluster,”
Further Resources
Theoretical considerations
Heather E. Canary, Maria Blevins, and Shireen S. Ghorbani, “Organizational Policy
Communication Research: Challenges, Discoveries, and Future
Directions,” Communication Reports, Vol. 28, 2015, pp. 48-64.
François Cooren, Frédérik Matte, Chantal Benoit-Barné, and Boris H. J. M. Brummans,
Matthew A. Koschmann, Matthew G. Isbell, M. G., and Matthew L. Sanders, (2015).
“Connecting Nonprofit and Communication Scholarship: A Review of Key Issues and a
Meta-Theoretical Framework for Future Research,” Review of Communication, Vol. 15,
2015, pp. 200-220.
Timothy Kuhn, “Negotiating the Micro-Macro Divide: Thought Leadership from Organizational
Communication for Theorizing Organization,” Management Communication
Quarterly, Vol. 26, 2012, pp. 543-584.
Applied examples of CCO
Oana Brindusa Albu and Michael Etter, “Hypertextuality and Social Media: A Study of the
Constitutive and Paradoxical Implications of Organizational Twitter Use,” Management
Communication Quarterly, Vol. 30, 2016, pp. 5-31.
Kathryn Aten and Gail Fann Thomas, “Crowdsourcing Strategizing: Communication Technology
Affordances and the Communicative Constitution of Organizational
Strategy,” International Journal of Business Communication, Vol. 53, pp. 148-180.
Pauline Hope Cheong, Jennie M. Hwang, and Boris H. J. M. Brummans, “Transnational
Immanence: The Autopoietic Co-Constitution of a Chinese Spiritual Organization
Through Mediated Communication,” Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 17,
2014, pp. 7-25.
Karl Weick and the Information Systems Approach to Organizations
Copyright © 2018 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the
prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Stephen Cummings and Duncan Angwin, “Stratography: The Art of Conceptualizing and
Communicating Strategy,” Business Horizons, Vol. 54, 2011, pp. 435-446.
David M. Kopp, Irena Nikolovska, Katie P. Desiderio, and Jeffrey T. Guterman, “‘Relaaax, I
Remember the Recession in the Early 1980s …’: Organizational Storytelling as a Crisis
Management Tool,” Human Resource Development Quarterly, Vol. 22, pp. 373-385.
Stephen A. Leybourne, “Improvisation as a Way of Dealing with Ambiguity and Complexity,”
Graziadio Business Report, 2010, Vol. 13, pp. 1-7.
Sally Maitlis and Scott Sonenshein, “Sensemaking in Crisis and Change: Inspiration and
Insights from Weick (1988),” Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 47, 2010, pp. 551-
580.
Karl E. Weick, “Reflections on Enacted Sensemaking in the Bhopal Disaster,” Journal of
Management Studies, Vol. 47, pp. 537-550.
Discussion of Organization Communication theory more generally
Jonny Holmström and Duane Truex, “Dropping Your Tools: Exploring When and How Theories
Can Serve as Blinders in IS Research,” Communications of the Association for
Information Systems, Vol. 28, 2011, pp. 283-294.