OTASC 9 (3) pp.

211215 Intellect Limited 2012

Journal of Organizational Transformation & Social Change Volume 9 Number 3

2012 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/jots.9.3.211_2

Editorial
Arlette Bouzon

Current perspectives in organizational and strategic communication: Corporate news and theoretical approaches in question
The current economic outlook is present in the conception of this special issue of the Journal of Organisational Transformation and Social Change, and the present delivery shows the importance of communication in the life of companies in general and more specifically of organizations. More than an activity in the extensive meaning of the term (at the crossing of the technical, the economical and the social), communication can indeed be considered as one of the founding principles of any social life: it contributes to the processes of exchanges between individuals and therefore constitutes one of the essential modes of self-realization, identitary construction and\or secondary socialization of individuals (in the meaning of Shepherd and Luckmann, 1966). It leads to a diversity of speech, sometimes caricatural, and symbolizes quite well what is at play in the different social worlds, in particular the professional ones. For

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a long time marginal, the corresponding academic research was confined to the specific field of the company (profit-seeking). It then expanded to organizations in general, namely, any social unit having a set of activities aimed at specific purposes. Within fifteen years, organizational and strategic communications have become a central object of analysis for an increasing number of researchers from varied horizons (e.g. their development within the ECREA association since 2007). Today, they mainly concern the processes of communication, and the cognitive and social phenomena connected to them, and are at the heart of numerous debates. This issue aims to be an echo of all these debates. But this research on the communication of and in organizations is not easy to carry out. Indeed, it offers the academic researcher a wide range of questions that differ depending on the studied object (a content or a process), and vary according to its finality (describing a situation, understanding a mechanism or explaining a functioning). To bring to the fore a better understanding of the phenomena to be studied, these analysis call on different sorts of knowledge, stemming in particular from sociology, management or psychology. The investigations feed on multiple methodological experiments. Through this panorama of current international scientific works on the communication of organizations, this issue suggests that the reader question the foundations of the link between communication and organization, but also the specificities of this field of research.

The communication of organizations: Fragmented academic works with constant dimensions

Whatever the question, research in communication of organizations concerns the combination of a theme (what to study?) and a purpose (why?), which forces the choice of an approach (how to proceed?) knowing that infinite compositions exist. It is, for example, necessary to respect the criteria of scientificity of any scientific work, to define the theoretical object and the field of empirical phenomena in a clear way. To prove its abstract relevancy and not be considered artificial, its study must also be confronted with the pluralistic questioning and with the debates on standards. In addition, for the corresponding research project to be fertile, it needs to demonstrate its heuristic power (possibility of producing recognized new facts), but also to produce new questions or new ways of asking old ones while resisting the quarrels of the rest of the scientific community. Finally, it needs to demonstrate a capacity for growth (the enrichment of the notions and models taken into account) without questioning the concepts, hypotheses and methods that define it. Yet the theoretical and empirical research, carried out in these places of power called organizations, faces many obstacles, moulded by uncertainty and dependent on the local contingencies. Rare are those that did not meet any difficulty during their implementation or were able to apply a pre-established plan without modifying it slightly. Moreover, the presence of the researcher in such a group of actors influences the behaviour of the observed subjects, and its continuous participation in everyday life eventually alters his own perception. The scientific world is more and more called upon to solve problems of social order, forcing it to observe an unstable object with multiple evolutions. This is why these studies on communication in and on organizations cannot refer to a unique theoretical and methodological base, as long as such

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a project should be encouraged. They still call on diverse communicational problematics and mobilize a multiplicity of paradigms, theoretical references and methods of investigation. Today, they appear to be a space of fragmented problematics reinforced by the search for explanatory pluri-dimensional models, with sometimes a background of criticism and overtaking of dominant paradigms. But let us not be pessimistic. The mosaic of the contributions published in this issue is not without coherence: strong points and fertile paths emerge. The confrontation of lived experiences with the works of researchers from different backgrounds (Spain, France, Australia, Portugal, the Netherlands) brings to light a certain number of constant dimensions, so that the field of research that emerged at the junction of questionings (on communication policies and their effects, on the processes of communication observed at the level of the work collectives, or on the analysis of the interactions at work) seems to be the place for a certain number of common problematics with foundations enriched by multiple contributions. In the end, the options the researchers in organizational communication face are not much different from those of the other disciplines of the human and social sciences. Because methods do not belong to an established science, they are procedures whose use is left to each individuals appreciation. The diversity of the approaches, without rejecting one a priori, appears to be a source of wealth and discovery in a field still far from being formalized. This is why, as coordinators of this issue, sometimes confronted by impassioned speeches, we do feel that there is room for a scientific approach and reading of the relationship and place of communication in and\or on organizations, by trying in particular to go beyond the underlying classical oppositions (external communication versus internal communication, professional communication (public relations, advertising versus interpersonal communication, media communication versus public relations). This is the reason why we decided not to restrict ourselves to a single frame of established structure, but to select an article associating a reflection on the theoretical bases with a focus on diverse forms of organizations the university, the company, a business sector such as tourism subject to deep changes. This is what any organization experiences today.

What kinds of organizations for today?

For several years now, organizations, particularly companies, have been confronted with a context of globalization; national and international competition (potentially culturally violent in the case of privatizations and the deinstitutionalizations); globalization of the business sectors; increasing financial requirements; and recurring financial and economic crises. This entails the need to think all these phenomena in a collective way. Running a race for productivity, these organizations adapt their structures and forms: extension and productive decentralization, structuring through networks, outsourcing, subcontracting, etc. The transformations resulting from the relation of employment (flexibility, employability, precariousness, etc.), the weakening of the working collectives, the new modes of management (competition, autonomization and responsibilization, evaluation, etc.), the increase of work intensity (with the cult of urgency), of communication strategies, as well as the emergence of new organizational types (by project), the proliferation of ICTs (creating among others effects of electronic leash or of cognitive overload),

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etc. This situation makes employees more isolated, but paradoxically more dependent. Yet, seen from an interpretativist perspective, the corresponding processes of communication whether mediatized or interpersonal, financed or spontaneous are established and also constituent of the organizations themselves. They can be approached through a communicational problematics or one where communication would play a central role. Today international research is the object of numerous empirical works. They concern the content or modalities of the acts of communication or try to understand the role of communication in working situations. They deal with the discursive construction of the context and/or the situation at work, work being then defined as a situated action, a communicational activity in itself. This issue is a good example of all that. Perhaps this is the reason why our call for papers, widely publicized, aroused such interest: more than fifteen contributors submitted an abstract. The six final communications were selected first based on their content, and then based on an anonymously peer-reviewed text assessed for expertise. This issue gathers contributions that illustrate research carried out in different directions, with plural objects, frames of analysis or steps of research. By taking as their guiding principle communication confronted with todays complex world, the authors, some through field studies, questioned the importance and\or the role of communication in the transformations of the organization. The concepts of identity and culture, of politics and strategic effects, are considered in fine as controversial categories of analysis.

A presentation according to two axes

Stemming from a confrontation between international researchers from Australia, Spain, France and the Netherlands around debates, reflections, methods and methodologies, the selected contributions present as a result very different points of view, mainly because of their relationships to empirical work, theoretical foundations or various itineraries of researchers. They nevertheless reflect the extensive knowledge a researcher in organizational communication has to master. Therefore, to present the complexity of the existing phenomena, we chose to organize the selected texts according to two axes. The first one illustrates the various existing theoretical reflections by confronting them with local concerns. In this perspective, practices, situations, processes and plans of communication are studied to bring to the fore their importance or status. In the organizational sphere, communication is multiple, diverse and fundamentally complex. It is part of the everyday life of organizations defined as semi-autonomous sets of relations whose origins are found in human interactions. The reality of these dynamic and interactive organizational systems is therefore co-built by the actors themselves. In order to contextualize, at least partially, the previously mentioned phenomena, the second axis analyses the devices at work, in order to understand communication at work, the question of the how taking over that of the why. This axis presents some of the devices at work in modern organizations by studying several levels (micro but also meta) that transcend organizations (team projects, best practices, etc.). Finally, organizational communication appears to be a complex process in which the meaning of the messages is more a construction in culturally marked situations that depend on the progress of the process, in time and

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space. Structured and structuring, it is no longer limited to its instrumental perspective, where the cognitive work of the actor is underestimated. It brings to light the performance of the individuals in a situation. Therefore, organization and communication participate in their mutual construction. They are emergent realities that form an inseparable couple, and can be understood only through an interdisciplinary approach.

To conclude
One of the ambitions of this special issue of the OTSC is to offer the reader, whether informed or not, a representation of all the significant recent debates on organizational communication. The various contributions demonstrate the complexity of the phenomena at work in organizations. Each author has tried in his or her own way, to underline the springs of collective action and the existing relations between the actors (internal and external) in a given organization. In doing so, they have developed explanatory models that, sometimes by being inspired from other disciplines, show themselves as strongly dependent on their own culture, and participate in the conceptual renewal of the discipline. They appear to participate in a more general questioning on collective intelligence and communication, an intelligence that today still remains an enigma even if it has led to a plurality of models and has already mobilized many researchers from various disciplines. Arlette Bouzon has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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