Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 100
Change the practices that keep making the old organization
Membership, authority, coordination, and institutional identity are repeatedly produced through communication rather than merely described by it
Premise
Executives often treat the organization as a container for messages. The Communicative Constitution of Organizations perspective reverses that assumption: recruitment, policies, routines, role descriptions, decisions, stakeholder exchanges, and recurring stories help produce membership, authority, connected work, and the collective actor outsiders recognize.
Robert McPhee and Pamela Zaug’s four-flows framework makes this constitutive claim usable. It identifies membership negotiation, self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning as analytically distinct but related processes. The model moves communication upstream: from explaining the organization after decisions are made to examining the practices through which the organization is continually made and remade.
What the model is: Communicative Constitution of Organizations in Knowledge →
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- The essential model
- Why this matters
- Risks and limits
- Executive takeaway
- Key questions
- Selected sources
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryTheories & Explanatory Models
- DomainOrganization & Structure
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Theories & Explanatory Models
Explains how or why a communication process works by relating mechanisms, conditions or variables. Its value is an account that can guide inquiry into what produces an outcome, rather than a name for the outcome alone.