Language and Communication at Work: Discourse, Narrativity, and Organizing

With the growing influence of discursive and narrative perspectives on organizing, organizational scholars are focusing increasing attention on the constitutive role that language and communication play in organizational processes. This view conceptualizes language and communication as bringing organization into being in every instant and is therefore inherently sympathetic to a process perspective. However, our understanding of the role of language in unfolding organizational processes and as a part of organizational action is still limited. This volume brings together empirical and/or conceptual contributions from leading scholars in organization and communication to develop understanding of language and communication as constitutive of work, and also analyze how language and communication actually work to achieve influence in the context of organizations.

It aims to elucidate the role language, communication, and narrativity play as part of strategic and institutional work in and around organizational phenomena. In keeping with the preceding volumes in the Perspectives on Process Organization Studies series, this collection demonstrates why we need to start thinking processually and offers a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to studying these 'works in process' that we call organizations, companies, businesses, institutions, communities, associations, or NGOs.

Francois Cooren, Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication, Universite de Montreal, Canada,Eero Vaara, Professor of Management and Organization, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland,Ann Langley, Professor of Management, HEC Montreal,Haridimos Tsoukas, Professor of Strategic Management; Professor of Organization Studies, University of Cyprus; Warwick Business School, University of Warwick

Francois Cooren is Professor and chair of the Department of Communication at the Universite de Montreal, Canada. He is past president of the International Communication Association (ICA, 2010-2011) and the current president of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis (IADA, 2012-2014). His research interests lies in organizational communication, language and social interaction, communication theory and pragmatics. He has published seven books (both as an author and editor), close to 50 articles in international peer-reviewed journals and more than twenty book chapters.

Eero Vaara is Professor of Management and Organization at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland. He is a permanent Visiting Professor at EMLYON Business School, France, a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Lancaster University, UK, and an Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research interests focus on organizational and institutional change, strategic practices and processes, multinational corporations and globalization, management education, and methodological issues in organization and management research. He has worked especially on discursive and narrative approaches. His work has been published in leading journals and several books.

Ann Langley is professor of management at HEC Montreal and Canada research chair in strategic management in pluralistic settings. Her research focuses on strategic change, leadership, innovation and the use of management tools in complex organizations with an emphasis on processual research approaches. She has published over 50 articles and two books.


Haridimos Tsoukas is the Columbia Ship Management Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Cyprus, Cyprus and a Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK. He has published widely in several leading academic journals and was the Editor-in-Chief of Organization Studies (2003-2008). He is the editor (with Christian Knudsen) of The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory (Oxford University Press, 2003). He has also edited Organizations as Knowledge Systems, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 (with N. Mylonopoulos) and Managing the Future: Foresight in the Knowledge Economy, Blackwell, 2004 (with J. Shepherd). His book Complex Knowledge: Studies in Organizational Epistemology was published by Oxford University Press in 2005. He is also the author of the book If Aristotle were a CEO (in Greek, Kastaniotis, 2005, 2nd edition).