Workshop discussing Theory Building at the Intersections of Organizing, Communication and the Public Private Debate

The goal of the workshop is to explore ways in which organizational communication scholarship theorizes organizational and social challenges differently. Workshop participants will present working papers that highlight ways in which organizational communication theory speaks to or alters the way we understand public-private relations. Drawing on various streams of empirical data, these scholars will demonstrate how the public-private dichotomy is experienced by organizational members (on both micro and macro levels) and offer ways in which we can theorize this experience differently.

The workshop will be organized so as to encourage discussion from panelists as well as audience members with the aim of creating a special issue of the workshop papers edited by Robyn Remke (Copenhagen Business School), Tim Kuhn (University of Colorado, Boulder), and Dennis Mumby (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). Nine papers will be presented by the following participants:

• Mikkel Flyverbom, Copenhagen Business School

• Dennis Schoeneborn, University of Zurich; Patrick Haack, University of Zurich; Timothy R. Kuhn, University of Colorado at Boulder

• Donnalyn Pompper, Temple University

• Karl-Heinz Pogner, Copenhagen Business School

• Joann Keyton, North Carolina State University; Mark A. Clark, American University; Ryan S. Bisel, University of Oklahoma

• Sanne Frandsen, University of Southern Denmark; Jennifer Barttlet, Queensland University of Technology

• Birgit Abelsen, Norut Alta; Trine Kvidal, Norut Alta; Katie Sullivan, Lund University

• Erik Garrett, Duquesne University

• LaReina Hingson, Purdue University

Workshop Rationale: 

The “linguistic turn” has placed communication and discourse at the focal point of organizational theory and research. The assumption that organizations are constituted through the everyday communicative practices of their members requires that we develop robust and powerful theories regarding the relationship between communication and organization. To that end, recent calls within the organizational communication discipline to foster better engagement with actual organizational members and related stakeholders highlight the need for more nuanced and comprehensive approaches to and theorizing of organizational processes.

Moving beyond traditional definitions and metaphors for organizations that limit organizations to clearly bounded entities or containers, contemporary research instead highlights the complicated and complex organizational relationships that transcend public and private boundaries on both micro levels and macro levels. In response to the aims of the BiS Strategy and the CBS Public-Private Platform, which include “Initiating new forms of public-private conversation, facilitating the creation of novel forms of collective and individual agency, devices and techniques for the solution of pressing public problems,” this workshop intends to explore possibilities for using organizational communication perspectives to theorize the public-private conversation in new ways. This workshop will contribute to the stated goal to “open up discussions about changing public/private relations by going beyond the continual invocation of simplistic dichotomies characteristic of many contemporary debates” and examine how an organizational communication perspective contributes to our rethinking the public-private dichotomy. In turn, this rethinking will allow for more nuanced and insightful engaged research.

Lunch is included. 

Please register your attendance no later than Tuesday, 4 September to Michael Kunov (mnkk.ikl@cbs.dk). Full papers will be distributed upon registration.  

Please contact Robyn Remke (rr.ikl@cbs.dk) if you have any questions.