2 results
9 - In The Name of the Law: Ventriloquism and Juridical Matters
-
- By François Cooren, Université de Montréal
- Edited by Kyle McGee
-
- Book:
- Latour and the Passage of Law
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 September 2016
- Print publication:
- 30 October 2015, pp 235-272
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
From John Langshaw Austin (1962) to Jacques Derrida (1992) through Harold Garfinkel (1967), scholars studying language and social interaction have often been intrigued by the judicial scene, a scene where testimonies, exhibits, evidence, texts of law and precedents regularly define the fate of specific cases and individuals (Heritage 1984; Bruner 2003). If Austin insisted on the performative dimension of judicial utterances, Garfinkel analysed the interpretive methods jurors use to justify their decisions for another next first time, while Derrida explored the gap that seems to always separate law from justice.
Beyond their differences, however, all these contributions point to the performative or eventful character of law, i.e. the fact that law should be considered an achievement or accomplishment in its haecceity, as Garfinkel (2002) would say. However, they also point – and this is the paradox – to its iterative, uneventful and institutional character, that is, that this performativity should also be considered the product of a specific context, structure or frame that authorises or legitimises certain moves and dictates or prescribes how imputations should be established. Something called ‘Law’ is thus supposed to iteratively and repeatedly find its passage through these performances, since any judicial decision has to be the application, incarnation or embodiment of specific rules that permit, justify or substantiate it.
In this chapter, I will explore this tension by showing how the judicial scene can be considered a dislocated locus where various entities can be made to speak and present themselves, defining the contours and substance of a given case. According to this approach, we do not need to choose between eventfulness and iteration or even between action and structure/system. What we need to show, however, is how different elements of the so-called ‘context’ of a given scene are, in fact, made to say things in a situation of interlocution, thus becoming active participants in what is happening. Using the metaphor of ventriloquism (Cooren 2010, 2012; Goldblatt 2006), I will show – both theoretically and empirically – how participants in legal processes constantly make facts, principles, precedents and texts of law, i.e. say and do things, which come to define what Bruno Latour (2010) would call the making and passage of law.
21 - The communicative constitution of strategy-making: exploring fleeting moments of strategy
- from Part III - Theoretical Resources: Organization and Management Theories
-
- By François Cooren, Université de Montréal, Nicolas Bencherki, State University of New York, Mathieu Chaput, Université de Montréal, Consuelo Vásquez, Université du Québec à Montréal
- Edited by Damon Golsorkhi, Linda Rouleau, David Seidl, Universität Zürich, Eero Vaara
-
- Book:
- Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 03 September 2015, pp 365-388
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Practice-based approaches in management scholarship and organizational communication studies have in the past mainly evolved along parallel trajectories. Nonetheless, their epistemological and ontological stances – mostly influenced by a pragmatic positioning – and their shared concern for ordinary day-to-day (organizational) practices make them complementary trends of literature that would benefit from a more systematic and engaged dialogue (for similar arguments, see Fenton and Langley 2011; Spee and Jarzabkowski 2011; Vásquez, Sergi and Cordelier 2013). Accordingly, this chapter is a first attempt to put together two bodies of literature, the strategy-as-practice and the communicative constitution of organization approaches – stemming, respectively, from practice-based studies and organizational communication – in order to explore the role of talk and text in strategy-making.
Let us first note that we engage in this dialogue as communication scholars interested in understanding processes of organizing by acknowledging the constitutive force of communication (Putnam and Nicotera 2009). We therefore take a particular point of view for studying organization, more broadly, and here, strategy-making, which is deeply informed by the three following premises: (1) to always start from (rather than arriving at) communication as the motto of every inquiry; (2) to take a broad definition of communication that acknowledges the material and social world in which it takes place; and (3) to account for the many kinds of languages, not only spoken and written, that participate in constituting organization and organizing (Cooren, Taylor and Van Every 2006; see also Cooren et al. 2011).
Applied to the study of strategy and strategy-making, this implies that we should not begin by looking at strategy as originating in the individual and his/her situation and then, subsequently, asking how it gets transmitted in communication. From a communicational approach, we focus on strategy – what it is, what it does – and we question the constitutive role of communication in this being and acting. We also extend this questioning to other forms of communication that do not pertain solely to human activity; texts, objects, architectural elements, as we will argue, also ‘communicate’, and thus take part in the making of strategy. Finally, while accounting for the key role of language as talk and text, we do not exclude other modes of communication, such as paralinguistic or non-human modalities, that can also allow us to fully explore how communication constitutes strategy.