Communication

Page 40. Chapter 2 Heterogeneity in Knowledge and Knowing A Social Practice Perspective Timothy Kuhn and Amanda J. Porter Research on organizational knowledge is dominated by a set of assump-tions that should give communication scholars pause. ...

Our interest in this chapter is to explore the intersection between social constructionism and the study of ICTs in the workplace.  We begin by identifying a set of assumptions that underlie a constructionist perspective and indicate some ways in which these assumptions appear in studies of the workplace.  Fundamental to constructionism is the active effort to privilege neither social nor technical factors in constructing accounts of technology design, development, implementation, or use.  In the next section we reflect on the impact constructionism has had on studies of the workplace. We observe that within these studies, scholars employ constructionism for different purposes.  The first is to provide a framework for understanding ICTs in the workplace and the second is to provide guidance for designing and implementing ICTs in organizations.  Our interest here is an assessment of the extent to which constructionist views are successful in each of these.  Our argument will be that social constructionist views have in principle developed an understanding that privileges neither technology nor the workplace, but that their use in design and implementation have tended to tilt so as to privilege either the technology or the workplace.  Using the terminology of Argyris and Schon (1978), this tilt may be seen in a contrast between the espoused theory of social constructionism (its theoretical understanding) and its theory-in-practice (its actual employment in research and in organizations).  We conclude the chapter with some reflections on how scholars might address the this tendency to tilt, and maintain a constructionist perspective in practical contexts.

At the center of the undeniably contentious debates about climate change lies the question of authority: Which voices will be heard and, thus, who will influence policy, activism, and scientific inquiry. Following high-profile errors found in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the Dutch Parliament sought to achieve ‘balance’ in these debates by bringing together climate scientists and skeptics for a set of online discussions. Using both communication and dialectical theorizing, we explore the organizing of authority around climate change in the Netherlands. We locate dialectical tensions and discursive positions of diverse actors in the debate, examining the communication practices by which actors sought to resolve tensions as part of three authoritative moves: bridging, (de)coupling, and resisting. The combination of these authoritative moves failed to engage with—and therefore could not resolve—the sources of the underlying dialectical tensions. We build on these insights to suggest contributions to the climate change debate and theory on authority in organization studies.