This article advocates a program of standard instrumentation in organization studies to improve the way knowledge is managed in the discipline. The construct ‘knowledge management’ is discussed, and the role of this construct in the theory of the firm is briefly reviewed. Then two problems of knowledge management in organization studies are identified—construct de-objectification and the difficulty of cumulating knowledge across empirical studies. The role of instrumentation in natural science is described, and it is argued that standard instrumentation in natural science helps moderate the problems of construct de-objectification and barriers to cross-study accumulation of knowledge. The possibility of implementing a program of standard instrumentation in organization studies is then discussed. It is maintained that standardized instrumentation for measuring organization studies constructs would help alleviate the knowledge management problems just mentioned. Advantages and disadvantages of the standard instrumentation program are reviewed, and the conclusion emphasizes the potential contribution of the program.
The current downsizing literature has neglected the cognitions and behaviors of layoff agents. In this article, layoff agents are defined as employees who assist in the implementation of layoffs in their employing organizations. The article develops a theoretical framework that focuses on the cognitions and perceptions of those individuals. This framework suggests that layoff agents have the potential to experience cognitive dissonance as a result of their layoff agency activities, and under some conditions they will seek to reduce that dissonance by altering their perceptions of organizational downsizing. The framework specifies variables that moderate the relationship between layoff agency and cognitive dissonance and also variables that moderate the relationship between layoff agency—induced cognitive dissonance and agent perceptions of organizational downsizing. The moderating effects of these variables are captured in a set of propositions suitable for testing in future empirical research on the psychology of layoff agents.
In a recent article published in this journal, Stohl and Stohl (2011) examine the phenomenon of clandestine organizations from a communication-centered perspective. The authors draw primarily on the work of the ‘Montreal School’ of organizational communication, which stresses the constitutive role of communication for organizations. In this response, we argue that the Stohls’ paper does not make full use of the paradigmatic turn that the Montreal School offers to organization studies. In our view, the authors overemphasize the role of communication among organizational members in the constitution of organizations. In contrast, we argue that organizations can also be ‘talked into existence’ by the communicative acts of third parties (e.g., the media), a view that is consistent with the Montreal School’s work. Moreover, drawing on the Stohls’ central example of the terrorist organization al Qaeda, we suggest that the attribute ‘clandestine’ does not capture the essence of that organization because it is characterized by extreme invisibility of its governance structures and by extreme visibility of its terrorist activities. We believe it is the reversion of the relation between invisibility and visibility that differentiates al Qaeda from legitimate organizations such as private businesses and ensures its perpetuation against all odds.
Over the last decades, the idea that communication constitutes organizations (CCO) has been gaining considerable momentum in organization studies. The CCO perspective provides new insights into key organizational issues, such as the relation between stability and change, between micro-level and macro-level phenomena, or between emergence and control. However, despite various theoretical advancements, the CCO perspective’s range of methodologies is still limited to analyzing local communication episodes, rather than studying organizations as broader networks of communication episodes. In this paper, we present a new methodological approach to the study of the relation between organization and communication, based on network analysis. Following a discussion of existing network approaches, we incorporate the fundamental assumptions of the CCO perspective into a methodology that places communication at the center of network analysis by turning the prevalent network perspective inside out, so that the vertices of the network represent communication episodes and the edges represent individuals. We illustrate our methodology with an empirical case study, in which we examine the structures and dynamics of an actual organization as a network of communication episodes.
