784759

Professor Lars Thøger Christensen, Copenhagen Business School

Professor Dennis Schoeneborn, Copenhagen Business School

Professor Joep Cornelissen, VU University Amsterdam

Professor Dan Kärreman, Copenhagen Business School

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. Only PhD students are accepted for the course.

Prior to the course, participants are required to hand in a short paper of 2,500 – 3,000 words maximum (plus references), in which his or her PhD project is explicitly related to the course curricu¬lum. The paper must include specific 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. Furthermore, it is expected that participants have at least read the re¬commend-ed key literatures prior to the course (plus, ideally, also some of the optional readings).

It is a precondition for receiving the course diploma that PhD students hand in the required paper in advance and attend the entire course.

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 existence”. 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.

The 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. 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.

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).

MONDAY, MAY 23

9.00 – 9.45 Lars Thøger Christensen & Dennis Schoeneborn: Welcome & Introductory Round

10.00 – 12.00 Lars Thøger Christensen Introduction: Communication Perspectives on Organization and Culture

Key readings
Axley, S. (1984). Managerial communication in terms of the conduit metaphor. Academy of Management Review, 9(3), 428-437.

Windahl, S., Signitzer, B. & Olsen, J. T. (2009): Using communication theory – an introduction to planned communication. London: Sage. [Excerpt: chapter 2]

Optional readings
Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9(2), 119-161.

12.00 – 13.00 Lunch Break
 
13.00 – 15.00 Dennis Schoeneborn: Introduction to the “Communicative Con-stitution of Organizations” (CCO) Perspective

Key readings
Brummans, B., Cooren, F., Robichaud, D., & Taylor, J. R. (2014). Approaches in research on the communicative constitution of organizations. In L. L. Putnam & D. Mumby (Eds.), Sage handbook of organizational communication (pp. 173-194). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Optional readings
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]

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]

15.00 – 15.30 Coffee Break 

15.30 – 18.00 Lars Thøger Christensen & Dennis Schoeneborn: Student project discussions

TUESDAY, MAY 24

9.00 – 12.00 Lars Thøger Christensen: Combining CCO and Neighboring Theories: The Case of Aspirational Talk

Key readings
Christensen, L. T., Morsing, M., & Thyssen, O. (2013). CSR as aspirational talk.Organization, 20, 372-393.

Optional readings
Brunsson, N. (2003). Organized hypocrisy. In: Czarnaiwska, B. & Sevón, G. (Eds). The Northern lights: Organization theory in Scandinavia (pp. 201-222). Copenhagen: Copen-hagen Business School Press.

Luhmann, N. (1990) Essays on Self-Reference. New York: Columbia University Press.

12.00 – 13.00 Lunch Break
 
13.00 – 15.00 Dennis Schoeneborn: CCO and Empirical Analyses: The Case of the Anonymous 

Key readings
Dobusch, L., & Schoeneborn, D. (2015). Fluidity, identity, and organizationality: The communicative constitution of Anonymous. Forthcoming in Journal of Management Studies.

Optional readings
Bencherki, N. & Cooren, F. (2011). Having to be: the possessive constitution of organization. Human Relations, 64, 1579-1607.

Schoeneborn, D. & Scherer, A. G. (2012). Clandestine organizations, al Qaeda, and the para¬dox of (in)visibility: A response to Stohl and Stohl. Organization Studies, 33, 963-971.

15.30 – 18.00 Lars Thøger Christensen & Dennis Schoeneborn: Student project discussions

WEDNESDAY, MAY 25

9.00 – 12.00 Dan Kärreman: Organizational Culture in Context

Key readings
Alvesson, M., Kärreman, D. & Ybema, S. Studying culture in organizations: Not taking for granted the taken-for-granted.

Optional readings
Alvesson, M. (2012). Understanding organizational culture. Thousand Oaks: Sage. [Excerpt: chapters 2-4)
Hatch, M. J. (1993). The dynamics of organizational culture. Academy of Management Review, 18(4), 657-693.

12.00 – 13.00 Lunch Break
 
13.00 – 15.00 Dan Kärreman: Organizational Discourse, Identity,
and Power

Key readings
Alvesson, M., & Kärreman, D. (2011). Decolonializing discourse: Critical reflections on organizational discourse analysis. Human Relations, 64(9), 1121-1146.

Thornborrow, T., & Brown, A. D. (2009). ‘Being regimented': Aspiration, discipline and identity work in the British parachute regiment. Organization Studies, 30(4), 355-376.

Optional readings
Alvesson, M., & Kärreman, D. (2000). Varieties of discourse: On the study of organizations through discourse analysis. Human Relations, 53(9), 1125-1149.

Maguire, S., & Hardy, C. (2006). The emergence of new global institutions: A discursive perspective. Organization Studies, 27(1), 7-29.

15.00 – 15.30 Coffee Break 

15.30 – 18.00 Lars Thøger Christensen & Dennis Schoeneborn: Student  project discussions

19.00 – 22.00 PhD Course Dinner (location to be announced) 

THURSDAY, MAY 26

9.00 – 12.00 Joep Cornelissen: Writing for Scholarly Publication at the Inter¬section of Communication, Organization, and Culture

Key readings
Cornelissen, J. P. & Durand, R. (2014). Moving forward: Developing theoretical contributions in management studies. Journal of Management Studies, 51, 995–1022

Optional readings
Alvesson, M. & Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating research questions through problematization. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 247-271.

Colquitt, J. A., & Zapata, C. P. (2007). Trends in theory building and theory testing: A five-decade study of Academy of Management Journal. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 1281-1303.

Locke K. & Golden-Biddle K. (1997). Constructing opportunities for contribution: Structuring intertextual coherence and “problematizing” in organizational studies. Academy of Management Journal, (40)5, 1023-1062.

12.00 – 13.00 Lunch Break
 
13.00 – 15.00 Lars Thøger Christensen, Dennis Schoeneborn & Joep Cornelissen: Student  project discussions

15.00 – 15.30 Coffee Break 

15.30 – 17.00 Lars Thøger Christensen & Dennis Schoeneborn: Wrap-up & Farewell

• 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

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Copenhagen Business School
Porcelænshaven 18 B
DK-2000 Frederiksberg
Room: S.023

Contact PhD Support
Katja Høeg Tingleff
kht.research@cbs.dk
Tel.: +45 38 15 28 39