The Emergence of Shared Interpretations in Organizations A Self-organizing Systems Perspective

The past decade has seen the emergence of an enduring interest in the study of organizational communication from an interpretive perspective. In a comprehensive critique, Putnam (1983) notes that past functionalist research treated “social phenomena as concrete, materialistic, entities-types of social facts” (p. 34) and “organizational charts as fixed, concrete structures that determine authority and task relationships” (p. 35). Functionalist research tended to “reify social processes by ignoring the creation of structures, by recasting individual actions into fixed properties as levels, departments, and boundaries, and by treating organizations as containers or entities” (p. 35). It assumed a “unitary view of organizations; that is, organizations [were] treated as cooperative systems in pursuit of common interests and goals” (p. 36). There was also a tendency for functionalist research to pursue “universal law& that is, explanatory theories that apply to a wide range of circum-