SHIFTING FROM A HETERONOMOUS TO AN AUTONOMOUS WORLDVIEW OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION - COMMUNICATION-THEORY ON THE CUSP

A number of organizational analysts have argued that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift, away from a strictly rational to a more transactional view of organization, but their arguments are not situated in a well-explicated communication theory. This article argues for the existence of two, mutually exclusive worldviews of organization and communication, one heteronomous, the other autonomous. A heteronomous model views organization as responding to an environment, and communication as the exchange of information. An autonomous model assumes organization to be generative of its own structures, through a reflexive process of self-production. The resulting ''cell'' of talk, in the autonomous model, is a conversation. Conversations are reflexive and self-organizing: they are produced by communication but are in turn the frame, or envelope, of the communication that generated them, in the absence of which communication would be impossible. They are the organization in the communication. The article explores, through the mechanism of speech acts, the reflexive properties of human conversation, and its capacities to generate those relational properties that we associate with organization. The phenomenon of coupling and its organizational implications are briefly explored. The article concludes by a brief consideration of how to revise our ideas about the conduct of communication research.