The Communication, Performativity and Organization (CPO) standing working group of the European Group for Organizational Studies explores how organizing and organizations are continuously produced and performed through communication and interaction. From this performative perspective, any organization and organizing process is always a matter of the sayings, doings, understandings and interactions performed in everyday life. This stance on organizations can bring novel insights into many central research topics, as evidenced by the growing body of work in organization studies that adopts such a performative perspective on organizations (Bourgoin et al., 2020; Cabantous et al., 2018; Gond et al., 2016) or a communicative constitution of organization (CCO) perspective (Cooren, 2010; Cooren, et al., 2011; Schoeneborn et al., 2019). 

 Building on both the performative and the CCO perspectives, the SWG will invite its participants to pose new questions and develop new insights arising from the assumption that organizational phenomena are never fixed, but are brought into existence by relations of human/non-human actors and their material-discursive practices. In particular, the SWG will be an opportunity to develop knowledge based on a conjoined communicative and performative stance on four important topics for organization scholars, each time approach through the lens of communicative performance.

Our aim is that the SWG nurtures a new, strong cross-disciplinary CPO community, enabling its participants to enhance and synthesize diverse theoretical and analytical approaches. Such a move will advance knowledge of the performative powers of communicative relations and practices, and of the way organizational phenomena are continuously constituted through the sayings and doings of organizational actors. 

 To develop and expand the theoretical, methodological and empirical avenues of CPO, the SWG also welcomes thought-provoking contributions by scholars from within neighboring research traditions, including, amongst others:

As a meeting point between various research traditions (e.g., performativity, CCO, critical studies, process studies), the CPO SWG is of particular interest to a number of participants who attended previous EGOS colloquia, including:

The SWG will also be of relevance to organizational discourse researchers and will attract scholars who do not normally attend EGOS, but whose work resonates with the aim of exploring the constitutive features of communication and performativity in organizations.

The concept of performativity was originally crafted as a means of describing how communication performs reality, for instance in speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) or in the writings of Wittgenstein (Fayard, 2017; Shotter & Tsoukas, 2011). Communication, in this sense, is performative and consequential: it creates and accomplishes organizing. This line of inquiry has been developed, in particular, by scholars working on the elision of communication and organization studies scholarship. This research focuses on how communication constitutes organization (e.g., Boivin et al., 2017; Schoeneborn et al., 2019; Taylor & Van Every, 2000).  

The notion of performativity – broadly defined as the power of discursive and material practices to shape and change the world – has also gained increasing traction in organization studies (Gond et al., 2016) and has resulted in numerous conceptual developments (e.g., Beunza & Ferraro, 2018; Cabantous & Gond, 2011; Cabantous et al., 2016; Garud & Gehman, 2019; Harding et al., 2017; Hultin & Mähring, 2017; Fleming & Banerjee, 2016; Marti & Gond, 2018; Muniesa, 2018; Nyberg & Wright, 2016; Roscoe & Chillas, 2014; Simpson et al., 2017; Vásquez et al., 2018; Wickert & Schaefer, 2015). Drawing on the work of scholars such as Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, Donald MacKenzie, Judith Butler and Karen Barad (Barad, 2003; Butler, 1993, 1997; Callon, 2007, 2010; Latour, 2005; MacKenzie & Millo, 2003; MacKenzie et al., 2007), researchers adopting a performative lens consider that organization exists through the way in which people and things interact and communicate (Cooren, 2018). 

The CPO community shares with both the CCO and performative research traditions a post-humanistic outlook on organization that seeks to de-center analytical attention from human beings and to re-focus it towards inter-relating actions and practices themselves (human and non-human; see Cooren & Seidl, 2019). By connecting both streams of research, the CPO community aims at enhancing and strengthening organization theory based on a relational ontology – to explore the ongoing communicative performativity of organizational phenomena and issues.