Bertrand Fauré, François Cooren and Frédérik Matte
The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature on accounting’s performativity by developing a ventriloquial perspective that directs the attention to the reciprocity…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature on accounting’s performativity by developing a ventriloquial perspective that directs the attention to the reciprocity between the accounting signs and the accountants: they both do things by making each other speak. This oscillation explains where accounting number’s authority, materiality and resistance come from.
Design/methodology/approach
In order to show the relevance of this approach, the authors examine various ways numbers manage to speak or do things in the context of video-recorded conversations taken from fieldwork completed with Médecins sans frontières (also known as Doctors without Borders) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Findings
The analyses show how this ventriloquial perspective can inform the way the authors interpret what happens: when numbers do not say the same thing; when numbers are competing with other figures; and when numbers backfire on their own promoters.
Research limitations/implications
Even if some of the numbers studied are sometimes far from accounting per se, it shows how the absence or presence of accounting can make a difference.
Practical implications
The authors then discuss the implications of this research for accounting social innovation through accounting inscriptions.
Social implications
This perspective helps to understand that numbers can give great power, but that everything cannot be told with numbers. This is why making numbers speak is a great talent.
Originality/value
This refreshing perspective on accounting could be extended to other fields such as auditing and auditing.
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Marie Reumont, François Cooren and Claudia Déméné
Communicating a clear, precise, interpretable and unambiguous visual message usually relies on a cross-disciplinary team of professionals. Their complementary visions can uncover…
Abstract
Purpose
Communicating a clear, precise, interpretable and unambiguous visual message usually relies on a cross-disciplinary team of professionals. Their complementary visions can uncover which information matter and how it could be visually displayed to inform, sensitize and encourage people to act toward sustainability. While design studies generally claim that this team has to come to a shared vision, the authors question this assumption, which seems to contradict the benefits of cross-disciplinarity. The purpose of this study is to reveal how simple visual representations displayed in a PowerPoint actively participate in the expression of various and sometimes divergent visions. Recognizing the agency of visuals also leads this study to propose the notion of (un)shared professional vision, which shows that the richness of visual representations can only reveal itself through the capacity of professional visions to maintain their differences while confronting each other.
Design/methodology/approach
Over a 20-month ethnography, this study documented its own cross-disciplinary reflective design process, which aimed to design collectively an experimental environmental label, focusing on interactions occurring between professionals and visuals displayed on five key PowerPoint slides.
Findings
This study first demonstrates how, in practice, a cross-disciplinary reflective design conversation with visuals concretely unfolds through boundary-objects. This study shows how these visuals manage to ex-press themselves through the multiple visions represented in the discussions, revealing their complexity. Second, this study introduces the notion of (un)shared professional vision which underlines that unsharing a vision nurtures the team’s collective capacity to express the complexity of a design situation, while sharing a vision is also necessary to confront these respective expressions to allow the professional uncovering of what should be visually communicated.
Originality/value
The Communication as Constitutive of Organization lens the authors chose to understand the reflective design conversation illustrates that, even though each collaborator’s vision was “(un)shared,” their many voices expand the understanding of the situation and lead them to develop an unexpected and creative environmental information ecosystem that can positively transform society through visuals.
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The digital and material traceability of our interactions in organizations are nowadays the subject of very advanced analyses through tools known as social media analytics (SMA)…
Abstract
The digital and material traceability of our interactions in organizations are nowadays the subject of very advanced analyses through tools known as social media analytics (SMA). As thinking (infrastructure), SMA tools constitute objects to think of our digitally mediated interactions with. It produces a substratum (a new meaning) that would not exist otherwise, and enacts different types of reasoning that hypothetically influence community managers’ or members’ sensemaking of digitally mediated interactions. This chapter proposes to look behind the curtain of charts and graphs, in order to highlight the performativity of the interactions between the different machines and the traces of our digitally mediated interactions. Drawing on a detailed analysis of the fabric of SMA, this chapter highlights the explanatory power of a communication perspective on types of reasoning enacted by thinking infrastructures. First, considering the SMA tool as an editorial enunciation allows us to see it as a process implying several beings (e.g. machines, humans and logs) that are not without consequences. Second, we show that these beings have different modalities of interactions with each other, and that these modalities of interactions influence the materiality of the digital traces of past interactions. Third, throughout the process, we demonstrate the fragility and variability of their materiality. Finally, faced with the rise of a technological deterministic discourse, which tends to portray the exploitation of our digital traces as an objective way of representing the collaborative practices that make up the organization, our research aims, on the contrary, to demonstrate their relativity.
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Sebastian Knebel, Mario D. Schultz and Peter Seele
This paper aims to outline how destructive communication exemplified by ransomware cyberattacks destroys the process of organization, causes a “state of exception,” and thus…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to outline how destructive communication exemplified by ransomware cyberattacks destroys the process of organization, causes a “state of exception,” and thus constitutes organization. The authors build on Agamben's state of exception and translate it into communicative constitution of organization (CCO) theory.
Design/methodology/approach
A significant increase of cyberattacks have impacted organizations in recent times and laid organizations under siege. This conceptual research builds on illustrative cases chosen by positive deviance case selection (PDCS) of ransomware attacks.
Findings
CCO theory focuses mainly on ordering characteristics of communication. The authors aim to complement this view with a perspective on destructive communication that destroys the process of organization. Based on illustrative cases, the authors conceptualize a process model of destructive CCO.
Practical implications
The authors expand thoughts about a digital “corporate immune system” to question current offensive cybersecurity strategies of deterrence and promote resilience approaches instead.
Originality/value
Informed by destructive communication of cyberattacks, this theory advancement supports arguments to include notions of disorder into CCO theory. Furthermore, the paper explains where disruptions like cyberattacks may trigger sensemaking and change to preserve stability. Finally, a novel definition of ‘destructive CCO’ is provided: Destructive Communication Constitutes Organization by disrupting and destroying its site and surface while triggering sensemaking and becoming part of sensemaking itself.
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Joanne Jojczyk, Francois Lambotte and Christel Christophe
This article explores the interpretive process of ethnographic research within the framework of Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO) approaches. Specifically, it…
Abstract
Purpose
This article explores the interpretive process of ethnographic research within the framework of Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO) approaches. Specifically, it examines the role of Ricoeur’s triple mimesis as a hermeneutic tool in making sense of the extensive data gathered during a three-year ethnographic study of a cultural event, “Le Grand Huit,” part of the Mons 2015 European Capital of Culture initiative.
Design/methodology/approach
The research employs a filmed ethnographic methodology to capture the participatory processes of the “Le Grand Huit” project. The study is guided by CCO principles, focusing on communication events as the central unit of analysis. The interpretive framework of Ricoeur’s triple mimesis is utilized to navigate and textualize the complex data collected, including fieldnotes, interviews and video footage.
Findings
The study demonstrates how the process of textualizing ethnographic data through Ricoeur’s triple mimesis – prefiguration, configuration and refiguration – unpacks the interpretative process of CCO ethnographers. The narrative construction not only aids in data interpretation but also establishes the authority of the ethnographic account by making the researcher’s biases and preunderstandings explicit.
Originality/value
This article contributes to CCO scholarship by providing a methodological tool that integrates hermeneutic phenomenology into ethnographic research. It addresses the often-criticized vagueness of ethnographic methods and emphasizes the importance of reflexivity in legitimizing scientific knowledge. The application of Ricoeur’s triple mimesis offers a novel approach to understanding the constitutive role of communication in organizing processes.
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Francois Duhamel and Alexander Niess
This article addresses the role of communication processes in the formulation and implementation of strategic planning. It seeks to delineate a structured approach to define the…
Abstract
Purpose
This article addresses the role of communication processes in the formulation and implementation of strategic planning. It seeks to delineate a structured approach to define the contents of strategic conversations among internal stakeholders, to achieve actionable outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper employs a theoretical approach, derived from Talcott Parsons’ AGIL framework, to conceptualize the contents of strategic conversations in a systematic way. Several examples are proposed to illustrate this framework.
Findings
Conversations among internal stakeholders in organizations, to be deemed strategic, should be orientated towards the formulation and implementation of priorities, procedures, prospective sensemaking and value patterns, as well as the media of interaction connecting them.
Originality/value
This paper offers original insights for practitioners and scholars aiming to comprehend strategic value in communication processes, thanks to Parson’s theoretical views, which have been seldom used in the strategic management literature. Our framework has the originality to offer a more comprehensive and systematic view of the topics making conversations strategic in organizations.
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Francois van Schalkwyk and Nico Cloete
Relations in university settings are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, class, and gender. In South Africa, transformation imperatives…
Abstract
Relations in university settings are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, class, and gender. In South Africa, transformation imperatives have radically changed the complexion of the country’s university campuses but have also entrenched political imperatives in its universities. As a consequence, the university is a highly politicised space. This is not new. What is new is a communication environment characterised by real-time, global networked digital communication and the uptake of digital media platforms (including social media platforms). We explore the effects of politicisation and new modes of communication using the case of a controversial article published in a South Africa journal and the ensuing polemic. Drawing on both institutional theory and Castells’ description of the network society, we conceptualise collegiality along two dimensions: horizontal collegial relations which exist for the purpose of knowledge creation and transfer which, in turn, depends on self-governance according to a taken-for-granted code of conduct; and vertical collegiality which describes collegial relations between academic staff and university management, and which is necessary for the governance of the university as a complex organisation. We conclude that the highly personal nature of communication that is propelled by digital communication has a direct impact on collegial relations within the university. The motivations of both university academic staff and management, as well as the public, extend beyond stimulating collective debate in the service of knowledge production to serving individual and/or ideological agendas as the communication of science becomes politicised. While issues pertaining to collegiality in South Africa may at first glance appear to be unique to the country, we believe that in a globally transforming academy, the South African case may offer novel insights and useful lessons for other highly politicised university systems.
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Umair Riaz, Muhammad Al Mahameed, Lisa Gentemann and Theresa Dunne
This study aims to explore how organisations use institutional language in Green Bond reports to explain and justify their activities using language that describes and reflects…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore how organisations use institutional language in Green Bond reports to explain and justify their activities using language that describes and reflects narratives while simultaneously constructing and shaping ideology. The paper mobilises Wodak and Meyer’s critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine reports and related documentation relating to Green Bonds issued in France.
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses three legitimating discourses: technocratic, environmental and social and business performance to develop a linguistic perspective that permits contributions to existing knowledge in the area.
Findings
The analysis attempts to identify the discursive strategies used to legitimise Green Bond issuance via claims linked to environmental management improvements and business activities’ social impact.
Originality/value
The study contributes to the critical literature on organisational legitimation and responsibility, investigations of Green Bond narratives and an understanding of broader environmental reporting in the financial sector.