Communication Constitutes Projects: The Communication Perspective of Project Management

 

Around the early 1980s, communication theory transitioned from the “information transmission” paradigm to the “linguistic turn.” In organizational communication, the “communicative constitution of organization” (CCO) perspective arose to explain how organizations continually reinvent themselves through communication. CCO scholars argue that organizations are created as members use language and texts to co-create the organization’s social reality.

Using the CCO perspective, scholars and practitioners can understand how organizations are formed, why organizations behave in certain ways, and how the organization will evolve. CCO is a relatively new field and still has many questions such as exactly how communication constitutes organization and the mechanisms that members use to create the shared organizational reality.

While researching CCO, I realized that the same concepts that helped communication to create organizations could also help create projects. Organizational theory and project management share much in common. Both organizations and projects deal with aligning people, processes, and tasks around a common vision to achieve goals. Organizations and projects primarily use communication to coordinate activities and members.

A major difference between projects and organizations is that projects have a defined end while organizations can theoretically last indefinitely. According to the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), people use communication to create a shared reality. CMM and CCO share much in common, especially how organizational reality is created by the organizational members’ interactions. The same tools in CMM can be used to understand how people in projects create a shared reality despite the limited lifespan of projects. In fact, the project realities could be subcomponents of the organization’s overall communication reality.

In future postings, I will examine how communication constitutes projects (CCP) in light of CCO and CMM. CCO and CMM have much to offer the field of project management including better ways to manage project management communication.