Abstracts
Abstract
This interview with François Cooren, professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, discusses his best-known contribution to communication theory, his metaphor of communication as ventriloquism. According to this perspective, we all have a “capacity to make other beings say or do things while we speak, write, or, more generally, conduct ourselves” (Cooren, 2012, p. 4). More specifically, the notion of “meetings” and the contribution of ventriloquism to their studies are at the core of this interview. Initially, this interview was conducted by email in the fall of 2019 for a community of meeting researchers and meeting professionals, and then slightly edited for the present publication.
Keywords:
- interview,
- organizational communication,
- organizational meeting,
- relational ontology,
- ventriloquism
Appendices
Bibliographie
- Ashby R.W. (1956). Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall.
- Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Woman in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831.
- Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham; London: Duke University Press.
- Boivin, G., Brummans, B. H. J. M. & Barker, J. R. (2017). The Institutionalization of CCO Scholarship. Management Communication Quarterly, 31(3), 331–355.
- Cooren, F. (2004). The Communicative Achievement of Collective Minding: Analysis of Board Meeting Excerpts. Management Communication Quarterly, 17(4), 517–551.
- Cooren, F. (Ed.) (2007). Interacting and Organizing: Analyses of a Management Meeting. NYC: Routledge; Routledge Communication Series.
- Cooren, F. (2010). Action and Agency in Dialogue. Passion, incarnation and ventriloquism. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
- Cooren, F. (2012). Communication Theory at the Center: Ventriloquism and the Communicative Constitution of Reality. Journal of Communication, 62(1), 1–20.
- Cooren, F. (2015a). Organizational Discourse: Communication and Constitution. Hoboken: Wiley.
- Cooren, F. (2015b). In medias res: Communication, Existence, and Materiality. Communication Research and Practice, 1(4), 307–321.
- Cooren, F. (2016). Ethics for Dummies: Ventriloquism and Responsibility. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 24(1), 17–30.
- Cooren, F. (2017). Acting For, With, and Through. A Relational Perspective on Agency in MSF’s Organizing. In Boris H.J.M. Brummans (Ed.), The Agency of Organizing. Perspectives and Case Studies (1st ed.), 1–28. Routledge.
- Cooren, F. (2018). A Communicative Constitutive Perspective on Corporate Social Responsability: Ventriloquism, Undecidability, and Surprosability. Business & Society, 00(0)1–23.
- Craig, R.T. (1999). Communication Theory as a Field. Communication Theory, 17(2), 125–145).
- Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. NYC: MacMillan.
- Follett, M.P. (1940). Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett. NYC: Harpers Bros Publishers.
- Groutel, E., Carluer, F. and Le Vigoureux, F. (2010). Le leadership follettien : un modèle pour demain ? Management & Avenir, 26, 284-297.
- Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
- Kuhn, T., Ashcraft, K.L. and Cooren, F. (2017). The Work of Communication. Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism. Routledge.
- Latour, B. (1986). The Powers of Association. In John Law (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief. A New Sociology of Knowledge? (pp. 264–280). London, Boston & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- 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., Cooren, F., Giroux, N., & Robichaud, D. (1996). The Communicational Basis of Organization: Between the Conversation and the Text. Communication Theory, 6(1), 1–39.
- Taylor, J.R. (2015). Text and Conversation in Organizing. In Karen Tracy, Cornelia Ilie & Todd L. Sandel (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, 1–11. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons.
- Weick, K.E. (1979). The Social Psychology of Organizing. McGraw-Hill.