335 research outputs found
The Work of Communication
The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism revolves around a two-part question: "What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalismâand how should organization studies approach them?" Changes in the texture of capitalism, heralded by social and organizational theorists alike, increasingly focus attention on communication as both vital to the conduct of work and as imperative to organizational performance. Yet most accounts of communication in organization studies fail to understand an alternate sense of the "work of communication" in the constitution of organizations, work practices, and economies. This book responds to that lack by portraying communicative practicesâas opposed to individuals, interests, technologies, structures, organizations, or institutionsâas the focal units of analysis in studies of the social and organizational problems occasioned by contemporary capitalism. Rather than suggesting that there exists a canonically "correct" route communicative analyses must follow, The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism explores the value of transcending longstanding divides between symbolic and material factors in studies of working and organizing. The recognition of dramatic shifts in technological, economic, and political forces, along with deep interconnections among the myriad of factors shaping working and organizing, sows doubts about whether organization studies is up to the vital task of addressing the social problems capitalism now creates. Kuhn, Ashcraft, and Cooren argue that novel insights into those social problems are possible if we tell different stories about working and organizing. To aid authors of those stories, they develop a set of conceptual resources that they capture under the mantle of communicative relationality. These resources allow analysts to profit from burgeoning interest in notions such as sociomateriality, posthumanism, performativity, and affect. It goes on to illustrate the benefits that investigations of work and organization can realize from communicative relationality by presenting case studies that analyze (a) the becoming of an idea, from its inception to solidification, (b) the emergence of what is taken to be the "the product" in high-tech startup entrepreneurship, and (c) the branding of work (in this case, academic writing and commercial aviation) through affective economies. Taken together, the book portrays "the work of communication" as simultaneously about how work in the "new economy" revolves around communicative practice and about how communication serves as a mode of explanation with the potential to cultivate novel stories about working and organizing. Aimed at academics, researchers, and policy makers, this bookâs goal is to make tangible the contributions of communication for thinking about contemporary social and organizational problems
Comment les textes Ă©crivent lâorganisation. Figures, ventriloquie et incarnation
Dans quelle mesure peut-on dire que les textes Ă©crivent lâorganisation ? Cet article montre dâabord quâune organisation sâincarne dans un agencement de figures, quâelles soient textuelles, humaines, architecturales ou machiniques. Le monde organisationnel est donc un monde pluriel, dont le mode dâexistence ne se rĂ©duit pas Ă sa seule actualisation communicationnelle. LâagentivitĂ© textuelle doit ĂȘtre comprise comme la mĂ©diation par laquelle ces figures Ă ontologie variable sont ventriloquisĂ©es dans lâinteraction, donnant du poids (et donc de lâautoritĂ©) Ă ce qui est mis de lâavant par les interlocuteurs humains. Si les textes Ă©crivent lâorganisation, ils lâĂ©crivent donc Ă travers toutes les figures quâils font et qui les font exister, parler et agir.To what extent can we claim that texts write organizations? This paper first shows that an organization is embodied in a set of textual, human, architectural, and technological representations. The organizational world should thus be seen as plural and not reducible to its communicational enactment. Textual agency must thus be understood as the mediation by which representations with variable ontologies are ventriloquized through interaction, lending weight (and therefore authority) to what is put forward by human interlocutors. If texts write organizations, they do so by making representations exist, speak, and act
A Particle Swarm Optimization Technique used for the Improvement of Analogue Circuit Performances
International audienceno abstrac
Introducing the Fourth Volume of âPerspectives on Process Organization Studiesâ
Abstract: Studying language and communication at work implies that we connect them to the very processes, activities, and practices that constitute organizations or organizational phenomena. We demonstrate in this chapter that language and communication at work can mean many things and that there are a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches that can be used for such analysis. Four characteristic features of such studies are highlighted: (1) interest in the communicative constitution of organization, (2) focus on discursive or communicative practices, (3) emphasis on temporal aspects and dynamics, and (4) placing language and communication in its sociomaterial context. Not all studies can focus on all these aspects, but these features are central in this nascent stream of research
The Work of Communication
The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism revolves around a two-part question: "What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalismâand how should organization studies approach them?" Changes in the texture of capitalism, heralded by social and organizational theorists alike, increasingly focus attention on communication as both vital to the conduct of work and as imperative to organizational performance. Yet most accounts of communication in organization studies fail to understand an alternate sense of the "work of communication" in the constitution of organizations, work practices, and economies. This book responds to that lack by portraying communicative practicesâas opposed to individuals, interests, technologies, structures, organizations, or institutionsâas the focal units of analysis in studies of the social and organizational problems occasioned by contemporary capitalism. Rather than suggesting that there exists a canonically "correct" route communicative analyses must follow, The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism explores the value of transcending longstanding divides between symbolic and material factors in studies of working and organizing. The recognition of dramatic shifts in technological, economic, and political forces, along with deep interconnections among the myriad of factors shaping working and organizing, sows doubts about whether organization studies is up to the vital task of addressing the social problems capitalism now creates. Kuhn, Ashcraft, and Cooren argue that novel insights into those social problems are possible if we tell different stories about working and organizing. To aid authors of those stories, they develop a set of conceptual resources that they capture under the mantle of communicative relationality. These resources allow analysts to profit from burgeoning interest in notions such as sociomateriality, posthumanism, performativity, and affect. It goes on to illustrate the benefits that investigations of work and organization can realize from communicative relationality by presenting case studies that analyze (a) the becoming of an idea, from its inception to solidification, (b) the emergence of what is taken to be the "the product" in high-tech startup entrepreneurship, and (c) the branding of work (in this case, academic writing and commercial aviation) through affective economies. Taken together, the book portrays "the work of communication" as simultaneously about how work in the "new economy" revolves around communicative practice and about how communication serves as a mode of explanation with the potential to cultivate novel stories about working and organizing. Aimed at academics, researchers, and policy makers, this bookâs goal is to make tangible the contributions of communication for thinking about contemporary social and organizational problems
Pour une approche communicationnelle de lâindividu au travail
LâactualitĂ© qui a accompagnĂ© la conception de ce numĂ©ro 36 de la revue Communication & Organisation montre combien le travail - a fortiori lors de pĂ©riodes de tensions organisationnelles mĂ©diatisĂ©es - est susceptible dâoccuper une grande place dans la vie de lâindividu : revendications et grĂšves suite Ă des dĂ©localisations, des fermetures de sites (Molex, ContinentalâŠ) et/ou des licenciements massifs (Moulinex, Caterpillar, FreescaleâŠ), sĂ©questrations de dirigeants, destructions de lâoutil de..
Writing : A Versatile Resource in the Treatment of the Clientsâ Proposals
This chapter investigates how writing serves as a resource in decision-making at the Clubhouse and how writing activities relate to professionalsâ responses to clients. The ideology of the Clubhouse is one of interaction, and in accordance with this perspective, support workers and clients should be treated equally in decision-making processes related to the activity of the Clubhouse. However, as demonstrated in previous research, encouraging clients in mental health rehabilitation to participate actively in interaction and decision-making can be difficult. Therefore, support workers carry a substantial responsibility for promoting clientsâ participation in interactions; this responsibility is supported by how they respond to clients. The focus in this chapter is on a certain type of participation-encouraging responseâthat is, a response that promotes the documentation of vaguely expressed ideas in written documents and encourages a dialogue between support workers and Clubhouse clients around the formulations in a text-in-production.This chapter investigates how writing serves as a resource in decision-making at the Clubhouse and how writing activities relate to professionalsâ responses to clients. The ideology of the Clubhouse is one of interaction, and in accordance with this perspective, support workers and clients should be treated equally in decision-making processes related to the activity of the Clubhouse. However, as demonstrated in previous research, encouraging clients in mental health rehabilitation to participate actively in interaction and decision-making can be difficult. Therefore, support workers carry a substantial responsibility for promoting clientsâ participation in interactions; this responsibility is supported by how they respond to clients. The focus in this chapter is on a certain type of participation-encouraging responseâthat is, a response that promotes the documentation of vaguely expressed ideas in written documents and encourages a dialogue between support workers and Clubhouse clients around the formulations in a text-in-production.Peer reviewe
Adaptive hybrid optimization strategy for calibration and parameter estimation of physical models
A new adaptive hybrid optimization strategy, entitled squads, is proposed for
complex inverse analysis of computationally intensive physical models. The new
strategy is designed to be computationally efficient and robust in
identification of the global optimum (e.g. maximum or minimum value of an
objective function). It integrates a global Adaptive Particle Swarm
Optimization (APSO) strategy with a local Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) optimization
strategy using adaptive rules based on runtime performance. The global strategy
optimizes the location of a set of solutions (particles) in the parameter
space. The LM strategy is applied only to a subset of the particles at
different stages of the optimization based on the adaptive rules. After the LM
adjustment of the subset of particle positions, the updated particles are
returned to the APSO strategy. The advantages of coupling APSO and LM in the
manner implemented in squads is demonstrated by comparisons of squads
performance against Levenberg-Marquardt (LM), Particle Swarm Optimization
(PSO), Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO; the TRIBES strategy), and an
existing hybrid optimization strategy (hPSO). All the strategies are tested on
2D, 5D and 10D Rosenbrock and Griewank polynomial test functions and a
synthetic hydrogeologic application to identify the source of a contaminant
plume in an aquifer. Tests are performed using a series of runs with random
initial guesses for the estimated (function/model) parameters. Squads is
observed to have the best performance when both robustness and efficiency are
taken into consideration than the other strategies for all test functions and
the hydrogeologic application
Creating the collective: social media, the Occupy Movement and its constitution as a collective actor
This paper examines the process through which Occupy activists came to constitute themselves as a collective actor and the role of social media in this process. The theoretical framework combines Melucci's (1996) theory of collective identity with insights from the field of organizational communication and particularly from the âCCOâ strand â short for âCommunication is Constitutive of Organizingâ. This allows us to conceptualize collective identity as an open-ended and dynamic process that is constructed in conversations and codified in texts. Based on interviews with Occupy activists in New York, London and other cities, I then discuss the communication processes through which the movement was drawing the boundaries with its environment, creating codes and foundational documents, as well as speaking in a collective voice. The findings show that social media tended to blur the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the movement in a way that suited its values of inclusiveness and direct participation. Social media users could also follow remotely the meetings of the general assembly where the foundational documents were ratified, but their voices were not included in the process. The presence of the movement on social media also led to conflicts and negotiations around Occupy's collective voice as constructed on these platforms. Thus, viewing the movement as a phenomenon emerging in communication allows us an insight into the efforts of Occupy activists to create a collective that was both inclusive of the 99% and a distinctive actor with its own identity
Is complexity leadership theory complex enough? A critical appraisal, some modifications and suggestions for further research
Scholars are increasingly seeking to develop theories that explain the underlying processes whereby leadership is enacted. This shifts attention away from the actions of âheroicâ individuals and towards the social contexts in which people with greater or lesser power influence each other. A number of researchers have embraced complexity theory, with its emphasis on non-linearity and unpredictability. However, some complexity scholars still depict the theory and practice of leadership in relatively non-complex terms. They continue to assume that leaders can exercise rational, extensive and purposeful influence on other actors to a greater extent than is possible. In effect, they offer a theory of complex organizations led by non-complex leaders who establish themselves by relatively non-complex means. This testifies to the enduring power of âheroicâ images of leader agency. Without greater care, the terminology offered by complexity leadership theory could become little more than a new mask for old theories that legitimize imbalanced power relationships in the workplace. This paper explores how these problems are evident in complexity leadership theory, suggests that communication and process perspectives help to overcome them, and outlines an agenda for further research on these issues
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