777498

Course

Perspectives on Communication, Organization, and Culture

Faculty

•   Professor Lars Thøger Christensen, CBS
•   Professor Dennis Schoeneborn, CBS
•   Professor Joep Cornelissen, VU University Amsterdam
•   Professor Dan Kärreman, CBS
•   Associate Professor Mette Zølner, CBS

Course Coordinator

Lars Thøger Christensen

Prerequisites

The course is aimed at PhD students with a background from any discipline in the social sciences. Participation does not require prior training in communication studies.

Prior to the course, participants are required to hand in a short paper of 2,000 – 2,500 words maximum (plus references), in which his or her PhD project is related to the course curriculum. The paper must include specific and explicit links to one or more texts from the course literature. In addition, participants should be prepared to briefly present their short papers in the workshop.

Only PhD students are accepted for the course. It is a precondition for receiving the course diploma that PhD students attend the entire course.

Aim

Across the social and political sciences and beyond, communication is often understood as a simple sender-receiver model, i.e. something that merely conveys, mirrors, or represents social and physical phenomena. Over the last 25 years, however, developments in several fields have demonstrated that communication takes center stage in processes of perception, sense-making, and world-construction. The “linguistic turn”, thus, has resulted in a rich body of research exploring how communicative practices constitute organizations. Studies of organizations as cultures, sites of identity formation, systems of power struggles, for example, have focused on the discursive and communicative processes through which organizing occurs and is “talked into being”. This PhD course will foreground communication and explore some of these research traditions, examining the extent to which they meet the challenge of taking communication seriously as an essential and constitutive feature of organizations and organizational cultures.

This PhD course will allow students to discuss and experiment with the applicability of a communication-centered perspective for conceptual and/or empirical inquiries into organizations and organi¬zational culture. The course will address themes and concepts like discourse, narratives, identity, power, culture, change, responsibili¬ty, actorhood, and new organizational forms. Students will learn how to analyze organization and culture from a communication-centered perspective and they will learn to consider the ontological, epistemological, and axiological implications of different communication approaches. Furthermore, the course will include an introduction to “communicative constitution of organizations” (CCO) perspective that has gained increasing attention in management and organization studies over the past years. Finally, students will be taught in the craft of writing for scholarly publication at the interdisciplinary intersections of communication, organization, and culture.

Course content

N/A

Teaching style

The teaching style will be a mixture of lectures, short presentations, and discussion sessions in which students are expected to actively participate. Each student will need to read all the short papers of the other course participants before the workshop and will be asked to act as a discussant of one short paper (these discussant roles will be assigned by the course coordinators).

Lecture plan

Time/Period June 1-4 2014	Faculty	Title/Topic
Day 1
9.00 - 12.00	Lars Thøger Christensen	Welcome and introduction: Communication Perspectives on Organizations and Cultures
13.00 - 15.30	Dennis Schoeneborn	Introduction to the “Communicative Constitution of Organizations” (CCO) Perspective
15.30 – 18.00	Lars Thøger Christensen, Dennis Schoeneborn & Dan Kärreman	Student project discussions
Day 2
9.00 - 12.00	Dan Kärreman	Organizational Discourse, Identity, and Power
13.00 - 15.30	Lars Thøger Christensen	Organizational Talk and Social Change
15.30 – 18.00	Lars Thøger Christensen, Dennis Schoeneborn & Dan Kärreman	Student project discussions (continued)
Day 3
9.00 - 12.00	Mette Zølner	Organizational Culture in Context
13.00 – 15.30	Dennis Schoeneborn	Organizational Communication, Fluidity, and Actorhood
15.30 – 18.00	Lars Thøger Christensen, Dennis Schoeneborn & Mette Zølner	Student project discussions (continued)
Day 4
9.00 - 12.00	Joep Cornelissen	Writing for Scholarly Publication at the Intersection of Communication, Organization, and Culture
13.00 - 15.30	Lars Thøger Christensen, Dennis Schoeneborn & Joep Cornelissen	Student project discussions (continued)
15.30 – 18.00	Lars Thøger Christensen & Dennis Schoeneborn	Final discussion, wrap-up & farewell

Learning objectives

•   To sharpen students’ sensitivity to important nuances between different theoretical approaches to communication, organization, and culture, including their ontological, epistemological, and axiological implications.
•   To enable students to detect and question simplistic assumptions about communication and to become familiar with more elaborate understandings that take into account the formative and constitutive role of communication for contemporary organizations and cultures.
•   To aid students in understanding organizations and cultures as ongoing communicative accomplishments, along with examining the consequences of assuming such a perspective.
•   To develop skills in crafting (incl. framing, positioning, and scoping) research that draws on insights from the field of communication studies and enable them to apply these insights to the context of organizations and cultures in an interdisciplinary way.

Exam

N/A

Other

Start date

01/06/2015

End date

04/06/2015

Level

PhD

ECTS

Language

English

Course Literature

(preliminary; an updated list will be provided after acceptance to the course)Alvesson, M. (2012). Understanding organizational culture. Thousand Oaks: Sage. [Excerpt: chapters 2-4)Alvesson, M., & Kärreman, D. (2000). Varieties of discourse: On the study of organizations through discourse analysis. Human Relations, 53(9), 1125-1149.Ashcraft, K. L., Kuhn, T. R., & Cooren, F. (2009). Constitutional amendments: ‘Materializ-ing’ organizational communication. Academy of Management Annals, 3(1), 1–64. [Excerpt: pages 1-23]Axley, S. (1984). Managerial communication in terms of the conduit metaphor. Academy of Management Review, 9(3), 428-437.Christensen, L. T., Morsing, M., & Thyssen, O. (2013). CSR as aspirational talk. Organization, 20(3), 372-393.Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9(2), 119-161.Hatch, M. J. (1993). The dynamics of organizational culture. Academy of Management Review, 18(4), 657-693.Schoeneborn, D., Blaschke, S., Cooren, F., McPhee, R. D., Seidl, D., & Taylor, J. R. (2014). The three schools of CCO thinking: Interactive dialogue and systematic comparison. Management Communication Quarterly, 28(2), 285-316.Taylor, J. R. & Van Every, E. J. (2000). The emergent organization: Communication as its site and surface. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. [Excerpt: chapters 1&2]

Fee

6,500

Minimum number of participants

Maximum number of participants

Location

Porcelænshaven 18B, room PHS0.23

Contact information

Bente S. Ramovic
Email: bsr.research@cbs.dk
Tel.: +45 3815 3138

Registration deadline

Top