The Montreal School

History of the school

The Montreal School, as its name suggests, is a school of thought in the field of organizational communication. It was initiated by James R. Taylor ^[1] and colleagues in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal. It origin can be traced back to the introduction in 1987 of a new doctoral program bringing together three major French-language universities in Montreal, the Université de Montréal, the Université du Québec à Montréal, and Concordia University.^[2] The Montreal School has had, and continues to have, a global resonance in Europe ^[3][4]) as well as on the American continent, where it has been applied, for example, as a critique of the theory of the firm^[5] and as an original approach to the study of clandestine organizations.^[6][7] The global audience is probably related to the nature of the questions it as set a target address and the original synthesis that operated between different epistemological and theoretical trends in anthropology, linguistics, semiotics, language philosophy, ethnomethodology, sociology, systems theory and game theory to provide foundations .

Objectives of the school

The Montreal school has started to answer questions about the ontology of the organization (what is it organized?). The pragmatics of the organization (which is the basic logic works or how the organization?) and the emergence of the organization (which operations, processes and concrete materials the organization exists and is maintained?). To answer these questions the particularity of the Montreal school have focused, including the analysis of interactions " performative " on negotiated and co-constructed or co-directed process of organisants (Cooren Robichaud and character 2011 in Grosjean and Bonneville ). This school of thought has been taken round the body direction was indicated in 1969 the pioneering work of Karl E. Weick on the communicative nature of the organization to support it and give it a decidedly more discursive turn (Weick , 2004) and materialist (Cooren and Fairhurst , 2004). School of Montreal has set a goal of theorizing and empirical research on the processes and operations by which the Communication gives embodies or represents the organization in its identity, coordination , authority , power and its common integrate and decide (Taylor, 1993 , 1995, 2000 ways, Taylor and Van Every , 1998; Taylor, Cooren, Robichaud and Giroux, 1996; Taylor and Cooren , 1997; Taylor and Van Every , 2000; Cooren and Taylor, 1997 and 1999 ; Cooren, 2000; Cooren, Taylor and Van Every, 2006; Taylor and Robichaud, 2007; Cooren, Brummans, Charrieras 2008; Cooren, Fairhurst, 2009; Taylor, 2009; Cooren 2010; Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, Clark, 2011; Cooren, 2012, Taylor 2011, Taylor and Van Every, 2011; Cooren and Robichaud, 2013; Cooren, Matte, Taylor, Vasquez, 2007). In the wake of the work and various syntheses around this important issue, researchers, and Zaug with McPhee (2000) and other significant contributors have called this line of research in the styling "Constitutive role of communication in organizations" (CCO) (Putnam, Nicotera and McPhee, 2011; Putnam, Nicotera , 2009; Taylor, Van Every, 2000; Taylor, 2011).

Perspective on organization and communication

Organizations are discursive and material formations that occur and recur in the course of conversational interactions. Communication as well as the organization that emerges is a dialectic between the conversation and the text. The conversation is the place of organizing process while the text is the interpretive framework used to define human and non-human mobilized in conversational negotiations. The organization exists in the communication itself is the intersection of its conversational dimension where identities (ie. what is the people, objects, problems and events) are negotiated and renegotiated the one hand and secondly its textual dimension that involves different to transactional priori assumptions for the various categories of public officials involved, (Taylor and Van Every, 2000; Taylor, 2011), these assumptions and tacit assumptions that have a significant impact in the conversational and transactional dynamics were called subtexts (Katambwe and Taylor, 2006). Between these two dimensions there are two processes involved: the mediation of meta-communication and a constant two-way translation between text and conversation. This translation makes the implicit support of the paralinguistics conversation, the non-verbal and other objects must textualized or is explained and set in impersonal texts invested with a greater or lesser authority. These texts more or less responsible will then be picked up and interpreted in subsequent conversations actors.

Communicative processes and constituent operations of the organization

For the Montreal school processes that operate the constitution of the organization are not messages that will help to satisfy constituent functions of an organization, as in the model of the four streams (Zaug & McPhee, 2000, 2011). Unlike the latter, here the processes that operate the interrelated constitutionality are a series of circular and different translations whose entry point is on the point of view of the researcher (Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud and Taylor, 2014 p. 177 for a schematic model). These translations are also four in number. First local conversations are kept here and there by various actors in the course of their complementary activities. These will require the creation of ideal mutual obligations or transactions to stabilize the interdependencies between the actors involved in these negotiations and each bearing views and different values. These conversations and transactions they require are then translated into a discursive formation (a group of utterances) through an increase in generality (distancing) metacommunicationnal used to represent a plurality of voices and patterns like perspective and the will of one collective actor with its own identity. The discursive formation generated by metacommunicationnal distancing is then translated to give it an author, ie. take him an authority (Katambwe and Taylor , 2006). This is done as statements of undress deictic or indexical elements, to reify and naturalize by distancing themselves and away from their local context and situated saying (distancing and decontextualization). The discursive formation that is now in authority will undergo translation. This is the time to incorporate the organization acquired this authority to enable it to be the representation of the group now consists and presence with other collective formed. It is through the mechanism of discursive agency that will invest a collective actant (to allow the possibility that an object can also be coated with this authority and then be "ventriloquist " (Cooren, 2010), as is the case idols and icons and other artifacts) the authority of its discursive formation for it to be his spokesman. The result will be that speaking on behalf of the organization is equal to speak with authority. Thus the hierarchy is created by investing in a scalar some actors the authority of the discursive formation that they can now say. Network conversations this series of translations and led to the emergence of the organization (hierarchical system of authority) in the communication organization that will be reinvested in a circular manner and engaged in subsequent conversations.

Implications for research and practice on organizing processes

The action is to organize the conversation. Communication is what gives life to the organization, the organization emerges insofar as it allows him to have an identity and realize the provisions of the actors in the various functions it attempts to satisfy. The organization is nowhere and everywhere at the same time insofar as it is the case of communication. Since communication is the intersection between text (structure) and conversation (action) and the organization emerges from this communication, we must consider it as a symbolic or discursive space made of tensions, contradictions and paradoxes that are their resolutions in the communication itself, and more specifically in metacommunication. Communication, and therefore the organization has a double symbolic and materialist basis so that designs the influence of various objects and other artifacts on the establishment and functioning of the organization. The conversation is a symbolic space that includes a variety and diversity of actants that are spoken by the actors involved and make them talk (by ventriloquism (Cooren, 2010) . In an organization the human actors and non-human speak and are spoken, their authority depends on how they articulate the emerging identity of the texts.

References

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• Cooren, F. & J.R. Taylor. (1997). Organization as an effect of mediation: Redefining the link between organization and communication. Communication Theory, 7, 219-259.
• Cooren, F., & Taylor, J. R. (1999). The procedural and rhetorical modes of the organizing dimension of communication: Discursive analysis of a Parliamentary Commission. The Communication Review, 3(1,2), 65-101.
• Cooren, F. (2000). Articulating Discursive, Mechanical and Human Agents in Organized Systems. A New Approach to Organizational Agency. Paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Organizational Discourse: World-views, Work-views and World-views, King’s College, London, UK, July 26–28, 2000.
• Cooren, F., & Fairhurst, G. T. (2004). Speech timing and spacing: The phenomenon of organizational closure. Organization, 11(6), 793-824.
• Cooren, F., Matte, F., Taylor, J. R. & Vasquez, C. (2007). International Communication Association, San Francisco, mai.
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• Cooren, F. (2010). Action and Agency in Dialogue : Passion, incarnation and ventriloquism. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Amsterdam.
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