Veranstaltungsprogramm der VHB Jahrestagung

The current proliferation of misleading and deceptive communication in public discourse, often referred to as post-truth communication (PTC), presents a pressing challenge to democratic societies today. While PTC thrives on disrupting established organizations such as political parties, academic institutions, legacy media, and firms, in doing so it also brings forth its own forms of counter-organization. To date, however, the organizational dynamics at the heart of PTC have received only scant attention in organization theory. We shed new light on these dynamics by drawing on a perspective that considers communication as constitutive of organization (CCO), advancing this perspective with Michel Serres’ notion of the “parasite”. We develop a model of parasitic dis/organization highlighting how PTC maintains its own organizational properties by disorganizing established organization. More specifically, we show how PTC accomplishes communicative interconnectivity, identity and actorhood by parasitizing these same properties in established organization through escalating disruption of decision-making, identity simulation, and coordinated authority exploitation. Our study adds to organization theory in two main ways. First, we offer an integrative explanation of how PTC perpetuates its organizational existence by parasitizing established organization. Second, we extend communication-centered understandings of organization by unpacking the dependency relations between established and partial organization. Our study also yields practical implications for how established organizations can respond to and avoid the polarizing effects of PTC by embracing rather than seeking to suppress their inherent parasitic properties.

Although cross-boundary collaboration happens increasingly in online environments, existing research falls short in examining the role of modern communication technologies in enabling and constraining these collaborations. To address this gap, we draw on a 14-month online ethnography of a project team using video-conferencing software to collaborate across functional and hierarchical boundaries. Surprisingly we find that the observed team ended up in a situation in which the ability to speak was bound to the hierarchical position and the different units would not talk with each other at all during the meetings. Our findings indicate that the way the team used the video-conferencing software gave rise to two communicative practices we call structuring and silencing. Whereas actors in a hierarchically higher position engaged in structuring behavior to give voice to speakers, topics, or sequences in the conversation, actors lower in the company’s hierarchy were hindered from speaking up by their silencing behavior. The two practices follow an escalating dynamic over time, eventually reinforcing the hierarchical boundaries within the team. Moreover, the practices reinforced the existing functional boundaries, by imposing a structure upon the communication that mimicked the company’s functional structure. By shedding light on the unexpected and detrimental effects of communication technology, our study contributes to research on cross-boundary collaboration, especially in technology-mediated settings.