10.1177/0893318905280325Management Communication QuarterlyCooren / Rejoinder to McPhee, Myers, and Trethewey

Arguments for theIn-Depth Study of

OrganizationalInteractions

A Rejoinder to McPhee,Myers, and Trethewey

François CoorenUniversité de Montréal,

Montréal, Quebec, Canada

1

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article is a response to McPhee, R.D., Myers, K. K., and Trethewey, A. (this issue). On Collec-tive Mind and Conversational Analysis: Response toCooren. I would like to thank Boris H. J. M. Brummans,James R. Taylor, and Elizabeth J. Van Every for providing mewith very helpful comments on previous versions of thisrejoinder. My recognition also goes to Valérie Carayol, chairof the Groupe de Recherche en Communication des Organi-sations at the Université de Bordeaux 3–Montaigne for host-ing me while I was writing this rejoinder.

“We never leave

the terra firma of

interaction, since

it is precisely

through these

interactions that

something like an

organization can

come to exist and

act. When we

scale up, we do

not leave the

territory, we just

start to see the

same phenomenon

in a wider picture.

If we want to see

BLURB IS TOO LONG,DOESN'T FIT COLUMN.

Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. X, Month 2003 1-DOI: 10.1177/0893318905280325© 2003 Sage Publications

This is a rejoinder to McPhee, Myers, and Trethewey’s response to Cooren’s arti-cle titled, “The Communicative Achievement of Collective Minding,” publishedin Management Communication Quarterly in May, 2004. It serves to reaffirmsome of the theoretical and methodological arguments initially made in the arti-cle and illustrate the epistemic value of in-depth studies of organizational inter-actions. The author argues that conversation analysis is one of the most relevantways to address what constitutes the specificity of the organizational communi-cation field: concern for organizational interaction and discourse in general.The author also points out that this approach needs to be adapted if to account forthe sequential dimension that is so characteristic of organizational processes.

Keywords: collective mind; organizational communication; conversation analy-sis; nonhuman agency; interaction; high reliability organization

C harles Conrad kindly invited me to write a rejoinder toMcPhee, Myers, and Trethewey’s response to my Man-

agement Communication Quarterly article and I, of course, imme-diately accepted, knowing that this debate would hopefully consti-tute a nice occasion to clarify our respective positions. I would liketo thank the three respondents for taking the time to write a critiqueof my initial article because I am presumptuous enough to thinkthat perhaps it means that they are taking the work I am trying to doseriously and that the analyses and positions I propose are at leastworth a response! I also would like to point out that I especiallywelcome this kind of exchange because of its relative rarity in theorganizational communication discipline. Although the collegial-ity that reigns in our field is to be praised and maintained, I some-times feel that it also acts to the detriment of strong debate, whichtypically animates any serious field of inquiry, whether philosophi-cal, humanistic, or scientific. This rejoinder, as the title indicates,will therefore serve for me as a way to reaffirm some of my theoreti-cal and methodological arguments and illustrate the epistemicvalue of in-depth studies of organizational interactions.

Behind the critique that McPhee, Myers, and Trethewey addressto the positions and analyses I develop, I sense that there lies abroader attack on the relevance of detailed analyses of talk in inter-action to the study of organizational communication. Even thoughthe authors explicitly claim that their response does not suggest thatorganizational communication scholars should give up on Conver-sation Analysis (note, incidentally, that giving up would imply thatorganizational communication scholars had ever actually used it,which, with some exceptions, is far from being obvious!), it seems

2 Management Communication Quarterly

clear to me that their critique could be read as yet one more con-demnation of the form of myopia that conversation analysts aresupposed to suffer from when they study organizational interac-tions. “I don’t see the organization in these analyses” is the classicalreproach that organizational communication scholars typicallyaddress to conversation analysts when these latter dare to be so boldas to study interaction in organizational settings (Cooren, in pressb). Not that I would necessarily disagree with this critique, but oneof the objectives of my article was precisely to show that it is possi-ble to study the detail of organizational interaction while stillaccounting for the sequential dimension that is so characteristic oforganizational processes.

As illustrated in other analyses (Boden, 1994; Cooren & Fairhurst,2004; Cooren, Fox, Robichaud, & Talih, 2005; Fairhurst & Cooren,2004; Taylor & Cooren, in press; Taylor & Van Every, 2000), con-versation analysis actually appears to be well equipped to take sucha dimension into account if we elect this approach as one of the ana-lytical tools at our disposal to address questions that are relevant toorganizational communication scholars. It is true that well-estab-lished conversation analysts such as Drew and Heritage (1992),Pomerantz (1988), Sacks (1992), Schegloff (1991), and many oth-ers, do not really care about organizational processes (what they areinterested in is the “machinery of everyday conversation,” aspointed out by Holstein and Gubruim [2000]). But this does notmean that their research agenda needs to be ours. Not to sound tooclichéd, allow me to say it in French, “ne jetez pas le bébé avec l’eaudu bain!” [Do not throw the baby out with the water!] This poorbaby, known as “conversation analysis,” will never have a chance togrow up if we keep throwing it out whenever some of us, howeverclumsily, attempt to raise it as a concern.

After all, in organizational communication, there is the word“communication,” which, at least for me, means that the specificityof our mode of inquiry (vis-à-vis other related fields such as organi-zational studies or organizational psychology) is to be found in thedetailed study of this processual object. Whether our objective iscritical or analytical, conversation analysis is, I think, one of theanalytical tools available to study organizational communicationas it happens. This means, concretely speaking, that we, as ana-lysts, focus on what organizational members are doing when inter-

Cooren / Rejoinder to McPhee, Myers, and Trethewey 3

acting with each other and how they do what they do (i.e., how theypackage their actions, what or whom they invoke in their interac-tion, how they position themselves and others during the conversa-tion (Pomerantz & Fehr, 1997). As shown elsewhere (Cooren,2000, 2004a, in press a; Cooren & Fairhurst, in press; Fairhurst &Cooren, 2004), this approach can be equally well extended to non-human agency, which means that this activity of description canalso account for how machines, documents, architectural elements,signs, and so forth, contribute to organizational processes—an ana-lytical extension which, precisely, allows us to scale up frominteraction to organization (Taylor & Van Every, 2000).

In other words, conversation analysis should be considered nomore than a method and an epistemic viewpoint that enjoins us topay attention to the detail of organizational interaction, whethersuch interactions involve managers speaking to each other during aface-to-face meeting as in the sequence I analyzed in the articlecriticized by McPhee, Myers, et al.; a building manager interactingwith his corporate tenants (Cooren, in press; Cooren et al., 2005);or a group of police officers striving to recover one of their col-leagues who has just been shot (Cooren & Fairhurst, 2004;Fairhurst & Cooren, 2004). It is, in all these cases, a way to analyzehow people get organized, in the double sense of the expression—that is, how they are organized by other actors (humans ornonhumans) as much as how they organize themselves. This is cer-tainly not the only way to investigate organizational communica-tion (not an attempt on my part to co-opt the field!), but I contendthat conversation analysis is nonetheless one of the most relevantways to address what for me constitutes the specificity of our field:our concern for organizational interaction and discourse in general.

But let me now go back to the very point of my rejoinder, whichafter all is to provide a response to the response. First, I would liketo remind the readers that the point of my article was not in any wayan attempt to show or prove that the organization I was studying (adrug rehabilitation program) was a high reliability organization(HRO). Having spent a considerable time collaborating with andinterviewing several of the managers and employees, I can assureyou that, to a certain extent, this program actually is, if there is sucha term, a low reliability organization. This is unfortunately so, butwe have to realize that such kinds of rehabilitation program are

4 Management Communication Quarterly

often far from being a priority of local, state, and federal govern-ments in the United States, which means that they are poorlyfinanced and usually have to struggle to make ends meet, as far asefficiency and reliability are concerned. It is, in many respects, afantastic program, and I greatly respect and admire what the man-agers and employees are trying to do, but it is also a program that,like many others, is suffering from poor organization and lacks ofmeans.

So one could ask, why borrow the concept of collective mindfrom an article by Weick and Roberts’s (1993), whose primaryobjective was to account for the criteria that are supposed to makean HRO what it is? Simply because I realized, by listening carefullyto the management meetings I attended, that some of the featuresthat Weick and Roberts identified as constitutive of collective mindcould in fact be identified in the way people were interacting duringtheir exchanges. Note also that for me, and this is a key point in myargument, a collective mind is not something that necessarily needsto be heedful. McPhee, Myers, et al. claim, on the contrary, that myunderstanding of this concept constitutes a misinterpretation ofHutchins (1995) and Weick and Roberts, because for them, “dis-tributed heed . . . = collective mind” (PE: PLS INSERT PAGENUMBER). For clarity of discussion, I am going to reproducebelow an excerpt from the Weick and Roberts’ article that I quotedin my article on collective minding:

When interrelating breaks down, individuals represent others in thesystem in less detail, contributions are shaped less by anticipatedresponses, and the boundaries of the envisaged system are drawnmore narrowly, with the result that subordination becomes mean-ingless. Attention is focused on the local situation rather than thejoint situation. People may still act heedfully, but not with respect toothers. Interrelating becomes careless. (p. 371)

What Weick and Roberts are telling us here is that representation,contribution, and subordination can sometimes become heedless,which means that the collective mind then becomes less intelligent.Indeed, if the concept of mind (whether individual or collective)has any value or meaning, it seems to me that we should not haveany problem saying that a mind is more or less heedful or heedless.If there are such things as degrees of intelligence, it follows that

Cooren / Rejoinder to McPhee, Myers, and Trethewey 5

there should also be more or less developed forms of collectiveintelligence. In this connection, Asch (1952), in his definition ofgroup performance, which is the model Weick and Roberts (1993)use as one of their starting points to identify the phenomenon ofcollective mind, does not hesitate to speak about variation of heedas one of four defining properties of performance.

Although I do not have a lot of space to develop this point, myposition (which seems to me quite commonsensical) actually paral-lels one of the main contributions of Derrida’s (1988, 1992a,1992b, 1994) thought; that is, that people (most scholars and phi-losophers included) always tend to start their reflection from theidealized forms of a phenomenon (such as speech acts or decisionmaking) instead of working on the whole extension and intensionof the corresponding concept. The concept of mind is a very goodexample: When we use this term, especially in ordinary language,we tend to idealize the corresponding phenomenon. For instance,we could say, “what a mind!” to describe a very intelligent person,which means that we have the tendency to use the term to mean theidealized form. As noted by Taylor and Van Every (2000) and manylinguists before them, the language we use is composed of markedterms, in which idealized archetypes are supposed to represent orincarnate all the other elements of a particular class. Derrida’sapproach consists of questioning our natural tendency to merelythink in terms of idealized phenomena to do justice to the truemeaning and extension of the corresponding concept. This ulti-mately leads us to circumscribe, as much as we can, the nature andfunctioning of a given phenomenon.

This is implicitly what I was doing in this article, because I con-tend that it is as interesting (or maybe even more interesting) tostudy limitations of intelligence as it is to study instances of greatintelligence (individual or collective). This does not mean that weshould not study heedful collective mind (i.e., HROs). It simplymeans that if the concept of collective mind is to make sense opera-tionally (through the features of representation, contribution, andsubordination), then it is also interesting to study how these fea-tures can be recognized in interactional phenomena as mundaneand banal as the meetings I was observing. If, as Weick and Roberts(1993) note, mind is indeed “disposition to heed” (p. 361) and ifone can recognize such a disposition through the activity of repre-

6 Management Communication Quarterly

senting, contributing, and subordinating, I do not see why one can-not study situations in which such activities can be revealed even if,I readily concede, I had no way of knowing, just by studying thedata I had at my disposal in this article, if these operations wereaccomplished heedfully or heedlessly. This is why I recognize, fol-lowing McPhee, Myers, et al., that I am not indeed speaking aboutmistakes in my article, precisely because I had no way to answersuch question. However, I do not think that this limitation of mystudy, explicitly acknowledged at the end of the article, calls itsrelevance into question.

My point, therefore, is that a collective mind, like an individualmind, can be more or less intelligent and that if we cannot evaluatethis intelligence, it does not necessarily mean that there is nothinginteresting to be said about the phenomenon. As I noted in my intro-duction, Weick and Roberts’s (1993) study, as well as Hutchins’s(1995) and many others, as interesting and groundbreaking as theyare, do not focus on the detail of organizational interaction, whichof course means that they cannot show us how representation, con-tribution, and subordination actually take place in naturally occur-ring interactions that have been recorded. It is my hope that the con-tribution of my article is to reveal how these occur, even in asmundane a case and, at first glance, as uneventful as the manage-ment meeting I was studying. Furthermore, my hope is that thisarticle can further other research agendas that might reveal howthese activities are, in some cases, heedless and how, in other cases,they are heedful. For that to happen, as mentioned in my conclu-sion, we need more longitudinal studies that track sequences ofaction while recording them. This, incidentally, is something I amplanning to do in a research project that was recently funded by theSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, inwhich I will shadow and videorecord logisticians working for ahumanitarian organization during several days.

At this point, I would like to pinpoint several passages in theresponse, which I think misrepresent and even distort my position.For instance, I do not think anybody can find passages in my articlein which I could be construed as saying that “conversational repre-sentation is the necessary locus of mind,” or that “RCS [representa-tion, contribution, subordination] are sufficient to enact collectiveminding” (McPhee, Myers, et al., PE: PLS INSERT PAGE

Cooren / Rejoinder to McPhee, Myers, and Trethewey 7

NUMBER, my emphasis). I challenge anybody to find such asser-tions in the article, because I was certainly not attempting to showthat representation, contribution, and subordination (RCS) are theonly way through which collective mind can emerge. Incidentally,McPhee, Myers, et al. recognize that, “Cooren nowhere explicitlystates that conversational RCS are necessary for collective mind-ing” (PE: PLS INSERT PAGE NUMBER), but they then writethat “[their] concern . . . is that, by emphasizing the conversationaloperation of representation, contribution, and subordination in actsof external reference, Cooren is focusing our attention on a system,a set of relations, that ignores much of what past theory seeks tounderstand as collective mind.” (PE: PLS INSERT PAGENUMBER).

Collective mind is a concept constructed by Weick and Roberts(1993) from Ryle’s (1949) reflection on mind and Asch’s (1952)model of group performance. Asch himself does not reduce groupperformance to RCS. RCS, as a whole, merely constitutes one ofthe four defining properties of what, in his view, is supposed to con-stitute group performance. I acknowledge this operationalizationin my article and my analyses consist of identifying not only RCSbut also such defining properties as “envisaging a social system ofjoint actions” (second defining property, according to Asch) as wellas the variation of heed (heedful versus heedless), which consti-tutes the fourth defining property (and which incidentally confirmsmy point regarding the possibility of having variation of heed incollective minding). I cannot therefore be accused of neglectingpast theory because my attempt, in fact, consists of finding in con-versational patterns what Weick and others have identified withoutactually dwelling on the detail.

Because the goal of McPhee, Myers, et al.’s essay “is to arguethat Cooren’s analysis generates neither necessary nor sufficientconditions for high reliability organization, or for organization atall” (p. 2), I can reassure them that I completely agree with them onthis point. It was neither my intention to do so, nor do I think thatany trace of such an attempt in this article can be found. My goalwas not to define such conditions. Instead, in the introduction, Iidentify three objectives, which are to (a) “demonstrate that it ispossible to pinpoint board meeting excerpts in which collectivemind can be said to be achieved online” (Cooren, 2004b, p. 519),

8 Management Communication Quarterly

(b) “illustrate to what extent the phenomenon of collective intelli-gence can and should be cultivated not only in high-reliability orga-nizations but also in any kind of organizations” (p. 519), and (c)“show how ‘scaling up’ occurs during the board meeting interac-tions that, by definition, can only be locally achieved” (p. 519).

The basic idea of my article was thus to show, as the first sen-tence reads, “to what extent [we] can . . . say that managers engagedin decision-making processes enact patterns of behaviors display-ing a form of collective intelligence” (Cooren, 2004b, p. 518), not atrace of HRO in this sentence or in the three objectives cited above.What I was also trying to do, as implied in my third objective, wasshow how it is possible to identify translocal phenomena in a localinteraction, which for me is a way to scale up from interaction toorganization. Note also that I never speak of “higher-level systemsuch as an organization” (McPhee, Myers, et al., PE: PLSINSERT PAGE NUMBER). This is a vocabulary that I wouldnever use because I do not know what it means to speak of organiza-tion as a higher-level system. Such usage would imply the recre-ation of a dualism or duality that I personally reject. Organizationsare incarnated in many different things: management meetings,logos, architectural elements, bylaws, stock certificates, ledgers,board of directors, minutes, organizational charts, buildings,annual reports, CEO, vice presidents, commercials, public rela-tions, workers, treasurers, secretaries, machines, corporate seal,texts, and operations, to just name a few, but there is not, on onehand, the organization (at a higher level), and on the other (at alower level), action and interaction (Cooren, in press a; Coorenet al., 2005).

We never leave the terra firma of interaction because it is pre-cisely through these interactions that something such as an organi-zation can come to exist and act. When we scale up, we do not leavethe territory; we just start to see the same phenomenon in a widerpicture. If we want to see how an organization functions, we need toidentify the ways by which things get organized through interac-tions, and this implies, among other things, that we dwell on thedetail of organizational interaction. Even if the organization I stud-ied may be considered to be, in some respects, heedless, the peopleworking for it (in its name, on its behalf) have to make it work, andone of the means they have at their disposal is to meet regularly to

Cooren / Rejoinder to McPhee, Myers, and Trethewey 9

address the problems they can identify and try to solve. As pointedout in my article, one of the things they accomplish, for instance, isto construct, amend, and add a series of textual blocks that ulti-mately represent the intelligence or heedfulness of the group. If, asWeick and Roberts (1993) contend, “[t]o connect is to mind” (p.374) and intelligence has to be found in “patterns of behavior ratherthan in individual knowledge” (p. 360), it should be possible toextend this position to management meetings in which peoplestrive to present solutions and make decisions collectively.

One of the key arguments presented by McPhee, Myers, et al. isthat we find RCS in nonorganizational interaction, which for themmeans that what I allegedly identify as sufficient conditions for col-lective mind prove to be features that we find in any interaction. Asthey say, “If we accept this as organizational mind, Cooren, andHutchins and Weick and Roberts, have sold us a poke with a pig thathas turned out to be rancid.” (PE: PLS INSERT PAGENUMBER). If the pig proves to be rancid, it means that it long agoexpired, although one of the points of my article precisely was tokeep it alive, and thus to speak of collective minding and not simplyof collective mind. That we find RCS in any interaction is actuallyencouraging, because it means that the operationalization I waslooking for proves to be correct: What Hutchins (1995) and Weickand Roberts (1993) identified can indeed be operationalized in themachinery of everyday conversation. Are these sufficient condi-tions? Certainly not, but as I said before, I never claimed they were.What I do, however, contend is that the interaction reveals patternsof behavior that display a form of collective intelligence. By this, Imean that the interaction allows people to build a solution collec-tively through mobilizing situations and events from past experi-ences and connecting them up with what is at stake in the discus-sion. It is this phenomenon that is precisely one of the aspects of thedevelopment of collective minding.

Conclusion

Adopting McPhee, Myers, et al.’s metaphoric style, I think thatwe, as organizational communication scholars, need to “let the cat

10 Management Communication Quarterly

out of the bag” (“ne pas acheter chat en poche,” as we say inFrench). To not end up with a cat in a pocket (or a pig in a poke, ifyou happen to have one at your disposal) means that we need todemonstrate more frequently how organizational interaction func-tions. Whether we use the text-and-conversation model (Cooren,Taylor, & Van Every, in press; Taylor & Van Every, 2000), networktheory (Monge & Contractor, 2003), Centering Resonance Analy-sis (McPhee, Corman, & Iverson, in press); conversation analysis(Tracy, in press; Pomerantz & Denvir, in press), speech act sche-matics (Cooren & Fairhurst, 2004), interaction analysis (Fairhurst,2004; Fairhurst & Chandler, 1989; Fairhurst & Cooren, 2004), con-textual analysis (Stohl, in press), narrative analysis (Robichaud,2001, 2002, 2003; Robichaud, Giroux, & Taylor, 2004; Taylor &Cooren, in press), ethnographic approaches (Murphy, 1998, 2003;Tracy, 2000), or any other form of analytical viewpoint (Deetz,Heath, & MacDonald, in press; Fairhurst & Sarr, 1996; Philipsen &Leighter, in press; Putnam, in press; Sanders, in press), we will stillneed to document our intuitions on how organizing really works.

This does not mean, incidentally, that organization has to bereduced to human interactions and agency. On the contrary, I thinkwe need to open up our analyses to other forms of organizing thatare crucial to our understanding the effects of translocalization sotypical of organizations, especially through their technological andtextual forms (Cooren, in press a; Cooren et al., 2005). The fact thatI was focusing in the article on a management meeting and its dis-cursive effects of translocalization does not mean that I reduceorganizations to this kind of exchange. The management meetingwas only one of the several incarnations of the drug rehabilitationprogram I was studying. And this particular drug rehabilitationprogram is nothing other than all its incarnations and embodiments(again, it is not a higher-level system), which can be identified andstudied by using all the methods I have already mentioned as wellas by many others that still need to be invented.

Cooren / Rejoinder to McPhee, Myers, and Trethewey 11

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François Cooren is an associate professor at the Department of Communi-cation of the Université de Montréal, Quebec, Canada. He is the currentchair of the Language and Social Interaction Division and an active mem-ber of the Organizational Communication Division of the InternationalCommunication Association. His research interests include organizationalcommunication, conversation analysis, and communication theory. Hismost recent articles have been published in Management CommunicationQuarterly and Organization. He is the new editor of Communication The-ory, effective July 1, 2005.

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