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CHAPTER 3 Structuration Theory Robert D. McPhee, Marshall Scott Poole, and Joel Iverson T he theory of structuration, rooted espe- cially in the work of Giddens (1976, 1979, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1991), was first applied to organizational communication in the 1980s, a period of theoretical and methodolo...

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Structuration Theory Joel Iverson, Robert McPhee

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CHAPTER 3

Structuration Theory Robert D. McPhee, Marshall Scott Poole, and Joel Iverson

T

he theory of structuration, rooted especially in the work of Giddens (1976, 1979, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1991), was first applied to organizational communication in the 1980s, a period of theoretical and methodological ferment. Structuration theory (ST) in general, and in communication and organization studies in particular, has evolved since that time (Ahrens & Chapman, 2007; Englund, Gerdin, & Burns, 2011; Haslett, 2012; Poole & McPhee, 2005; Seibold & Myers, 2005; Whittington, 2011) and has influenced parallel schools of self-organizing systems theory (see Poole, Chapter 2), actornetwork theory, and critical realism. In this chapter, we add flesh to two undeniably true skeletal tenets: First, ST addresses, cogently and enlighteningly, the major theoretical issues still roiling organizational communication studies (the relationship of agency and structure, the articulation of organizations and society, the place of material factors in explaining organizational interaction, and the communicative constitution of organizations [CCO]). Second, ST has demonstrated broad applicability and important insights regarding organizational identity and identification, organizational culture/climate, formal and genre-clad discourse, group decision making, information technology

use in organizations, and institutional impacts on organizations. We focus on structuration-based studies in communication but also include relevant work in allied disciplines. We examine work that represents hybrids of ST with the theoretical traditions mentioned above. Our first section reviews the basic concepts of ST. Second, we review STinspired organizational communication research, using the Four Flows Model of organizational structuration. The third section discusses critiques, debates, and future directions.

Foundations of Structuration Theory Although the basic principles of ST were formulated by Giddens (1979, 1984), their application in organizational communication has often generated debate.

System/Practice/Structure ST hinges on the distinction between system and structure. A system is an observable pattern of relationships among actors. Systems are layered 75

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and include micro-level interaction; meso-level units such as groups, larger organizations, and networks; and macro-level units such as economic sectors, intersocietal systems, and religions. ST focuses especially on systems of human practices or meaningful patterns of activity that range from narrow micro-level activities, such as problem solving or assimilating a new member, to broader arrays of processes, such as project management or medicine. Structures are the rules and resources that actors depend on in their practices. Structures underlie the patterns that constitute systems. A rule is any principle or routine that can guide activity. In micro-level assimilation, learning the ropes means learning technical rules as well as principles of exchange and reciprocity. A resource is anything else that facilitates activities, namely, material (budget, tools) or nonmaterial (knowledge, traditions) items. For instance, the structure implicated in money as a resource is not the coins per se but the action potentials that money affords. Structures are not directly observable, and in fact, the term structure is only a useful reification. In the duality of structuration, structures are both the medium of interaction and its outcome. As actors draw on rules and resources to participate in a system, they enact and sustain these structures as part of the ongoing organization of the system, thereby reproducing these structures. Structuration—the production and reproduction of a social system in interaction—is the process through which structures are constituted. Production means that agents draw on rules/resources to act meaningfully; reproduction implies that the acts maintain or transform those rules/resources. From its beginning (McPhee & Poole, 1980), ST scholarship reframed organizational interaction as production (i.e., appropriating but transforming rules/resources available in the larger social/ organizational context). But perhaps the more important reframing occurs through the concept of reproduction. In effect, members keep the larger organization going as an organization; that is, they reproduce its broad structural properties, but they potentially transform them during

productive interaction. The process of structuration is the nexus of several pairs of concepts often counterposed in social analysis, including action and structure, stability and change, and institution and interaction. ST argues that both poles of these pairs are implicated in a continuous structuring process; consequently, good explanations must emphasize both of them. Two major research approaches focus on the duality of structure. Giddens (1979) argues that institutional reproduction and action are always implicated in a parallel manner during structuration; that is, they are inseparable except analytically, and much scholarship incorporates this Heraclitean, purist assumption (e.g., Corman & Scott, 1994; Orlikowski, 2000; Poole, Seibold, & McPhee, 1985). Another school sees structuration occurring in a cycle between distinct phases dominated by change/action and structure/ stability, respectively (Barley, 1986; Jarzabkowski, 2008; Leonardi, 2007; Yates & Orlikowski, 1992; cf. Archer, 1982; Sawyer, 2005). This school avowedly treats action/structure as dualism, not duality, and purists see it as sacrificing the key insight of ST, the idea that relates structure to action. Advocates of the second approach claim that empirical observations show fairly stable social structures with clear change phases. They recognize the existence of a continuous interplay between action and structure, but they argue that the ratio of action to structure varies over time. Purists, in turn, would prefer to explain the cycle rather than assume it.

Agency Giddens (1979) refers to humans who draw on structural resources as agents and treats them as central to understanding organizations. Agents must have the power to make a difference (thereby reproducing structural resources) and must have the knowledgeability to use their powers in meaningful, normative ways. There are limits to agency, however, including available structures, other actors, and social-systemic complexity that result

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in actions that do not follow routines or accomplish plans. This process can lead, either immediately or eventually, to unintended consequences. Agents then can draw on or appropriate (Ollman, 1976; Poole & DeSanctis, 1990) structural resources in interacting. Through appropriation, they put a general structural rule/resource into action in a version adapted to their contexts. Local uses reproduce the structure over time and can gradually alter or drastically transform it. Agents reflexively monitor their actions (usually tacitly) to assess their progress along expected trajectories of action. However, ST decenters rational, goal-directed agency in favor of a routine flow of context-responsive activity that is monitored at several levels of consciousness. Discursive consciousness (i.e., formulated in words and accessible to deliberative thought), practical consciousness (i.e., nondiscursive knowledge and especially skills that can be used purposefully), and the unconscious (i.e., barred from any level of awareness but affecting actors’ ontological security and existential anxiety) interdependently enable action. Knowledgeable agents routinely navigate their own local worlds. Knowledgeability operates equally but differently in practical and discursive consciousness, but the latter characterizes organizational information gathering, decision processing, and implementation through communication. Greater knowledgeability both leads to and results from greater efficacy and control (Jessop, 1996); but in all systems, knowledge endures alongside incapacity and dissensus.

Dimensions and Modalities of Structuration ST distinguishes among three dimensions of the duality of structure that appear different at the interaction and institutional levels of analysis. In interaction, the three dimensions are communication, power, and sanction. At the social/ institutional level, the dimensions are signification, domination, and legitimation. The interaction and

institution levels interpenetrate in three modalities of structuration: interpretive schemes, facilities, and norms, respectively (Giddens, 1984, pp. 28–29). Modalities highlight ways in which the duality of structure works out in practice. For instance, institutions of domination mean that power resources are available as facilities to some agents (e.g., managers) and not others. Moreover, the ways that facilities are applied and maintained help reproduce domination in society and organizations. Different dimensions may be highlighted in certain appropriations, but they are separable only analytically. Every action or utterance and every social system involves varying ratios among dimensions, and each of dimension implicates the others; for example, task-oriented interaction also conveys norms for control, concealed by ideology. Researchers who focus on discourse have developed classifications of appropriation and structuring moves, partly based on Giddens’s three dimensions, to analyze the range of communicative agency. Adaptive ST and communication genre theory (discussed in detail later in the chapter) elaborate broad, rich schemas that reflect the effects of communication acts on the adaptation and reproduction of communication resources. Communication researchers have also articulated more specific domains of modalities (for example, Seibold and Meyers’s [2007] work on group argumentation, Corman and Scott’s [1994] research on networks, and Canary’s [2010a, 2010b] activity system elements). An important consequence of agency is the dialectic of control in which dominated agents have room to maneuver because power holders depend on their agentive abilities. Through the dialectic of control, agents participate in the production and reproduction of their own action capacities and their own constraints.

Institutions and Action A central problem in social science is the macro-micro issue. Organizational communication researchers offer conflicting accounts of the

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micro phenomena (i.e., interactions, decisions) versus macro systems such as institutions. ST has increasingly reconceptualized this problem while shunning the terms macro/micro, by framing social structure as (1) an assemblage of rules and resources, including structural principles and far-reaching, stable, and consequential rules and resources, and as (2) an order of spatial, temporal, material, and symbolic resource differences, reproduced in distributed interaction. McPhee (1988) refers to this process as systemsstructuration to emphasize that structures are often unequal. For example, a surgeon, in treating patients, can draw on medical rules and resources (i.e., expertise, credentials, and operating room access) in different, often more empowered ways than the patients can. Institution-level reproduction may simply reiterate this process but may also plant the seeds of institutional change, particularly when a local innovation is reproduced robustly and eventually incorporated into the institution. Specifically, Yates and Orlikowski’s (1992) structuration analysis of a genre, such as memo, is part of an organization’s institutional fabric. As the memo is transformed into e-mail messages, some conventions are maintained, but others are changed due to novel affordances of the new technology (e.g., smileys and other emoticons). If these novelties are repeated sufficiently over time, they revise the institution. Such phenomena and conditions have received much less attention from communication scholars than they warrant.

Giddens (1984) developed an array of distance ideas (reviewed in McPhee & Canary, 2013), including the virtuality of structure as a Derridean presence/absence process (Bertilsson, 1984), tacit powers of bodily posture and participation (cf. Goffman, 1963), and the power to edge off from one encounter into another and disembed along time-space trajectories between locales.

Mediation/Contradiction As the modalities imply, agents draw on multiple structures for any practice, and these structures can either mediate or contradict one another. One structure mediates another when its production and reproduction involve the reproduction of the other. For example, in a group decision made using cost-benefit logic, the model of economic rationality mediates group argumentation and choice practices. Structural contradiction is “an opposition . . . of structural principles . . ., whereby those principles operate in terms of each other, but at the same time contravene one another” (Giddens, 1979, p. 141). Contradiction stems from clashes of structural principles (e.g., norms of decision quality and decision speed) whose production and reproduction are connected. Contradictions may result in conflict, but conflicts and contradictions can occur separately of each other.

Communication Time and Space ST emphasizes space and time as crucial aspects of social theory. Despite communication’s focus on process, most past organizational communication research is atemporal, spatially abstract, and general. ST emphasizes time-space distanciation, in which agents bind time-space in practical forms of face-to-face (social integration) or through indirect, mediated organizing processes at greater distances (system integration).

Several ST scholars focus on the structurational nature of communication (Bisel, 2010; Heracleous, 2010). Specifically, in Bisel’s (2010) structure in action model, communication is dually action and structural reproduction; it reflects both skilled, purposeful orientation and conventional routine. Paradoxically, Giddens (1976, 1979) accepts the intentional use of signs but denies that purpose or intention exists as a present idea held in mind and expressed in signs. He also states that interpretive schemes

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are “standardized . . . stocks of knowledge” that distinguish communication from other actions (Giddens, 1979, p. 83; cf. 1976, 1984). In effect, he seems caught on both horns of the free action/determinism dilemma. The resolution of this paradox seems to lie in the emphasis Giddens places on the Wittgensteinian sense of meaning as the ability to go on and respond to sense made. But making sense communicatively necessarily involves two features: (1) structurating a flow of intentionality wherein the speaker/writer is normatively as well as semantically accountable for being meaningful, that is, communicating rightly (relative to known semiotic systems) given the context and (2) construing, reflexively, an appropriate communicative intent. Communicators therein reproduce the standardized signification system in context, a true duality rather than a text-conversation dialectic. However, Poole et al. (1985) held (as Giddens seems to) that interpretive mutual knowledge generated in local contexts cannot be regarded as logically separable from semiotic systems available to larger groups in society. This stand makes it easier to explicate the CCO (see also Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud, & Taylor, Chapter 7).

Overview of Structuration Research and the Four Flows Communicative Constitution of Organizations ST has become prominent in organizational communication research because of its analysis of interaction and its potential to link with higher system-level phenomena. Recently, theoretical debates have shifted to the notion of the communicative constitution of organizations (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009; Putnam & Nicotera, 2009). This idea assumes that (1) communication has a constitutive, order-producing force (Smith, 1993; Taylor & Van Every, 2000)

and (2) the constitutive force of some specific communication practices is particularly powerful in generating complex organizations. The idea of the duality of structuration recurs constantly, though often tacitly, in this discussion. Notably, ST accounts for the constitution of organized, coordinated systems of interaction episodes and social practices in at least the following interdependent ways: 1. in equating interaction (i.e., production) with interaction that maintains/transforms the system and its structural resources (i.e., reproduction); 2. in the depth and range of structural resources available to agents. An extreme case of this is globalization or the interweaving of various local practices with global institutions; 3. in the constitutive powers of language (e.g., conlocutions), whereby social subsystems are named, categorized, referentially linked to one another, given legitimacy, and endure despite system changes (Boden, 1994); 4. in the phenomenon of distanciation, where relations in time-space are marked and time-space itself is bound so that interdependence across contexts is contextualized; 5. through the coordination and control powers of language, in which one episode choreographs transactions among other episodes as well as power relations within and between them; and 6. in the concept of discursive/material practice itself as constitutive. The terms material, socio-material, and practice have become foci for theory development across disciplines, including communication (Ashcraft et al., 2009; Kuhn, 2011; Orlikowski, 2007). McPhee and Iverson (2011) array the various ways that materiality is treated in ST.

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These implications of system reproduction are logically interdependent in ST’s terms. Thus we can understand how ST is described as both becoming and grounded in action in Fairhurst and Putnam’s (2004) schema and how it might fit equally well into their object category but also how it transfigures all three categories. Objects, including language, operate in action/appropriation as types of resources and discursive organizing is grounded (i.e., enabled/constrained) in material practice. For instance, Sarason, Dean, and Dillard (2006) note how entrepreneurs, interpretive norms, and economic resources co-evolve in “reflexive, recursive processes of interpretation, action, consequence, and reflection” (p. 295). Looking at all six implications interdependently avoids some of the critiques leveled at ST. Thus Fairhurst and Putnam note how becoming approaches collapse the macro-micro distinction through focusing on organizing. However, if properly developed, the concept of distanciation, as well as the notion that institutions are grounded in broad structural phenomena and discursive powers of meaning-coordination, addresses this issue. These implications also address the criticisms that the becoming views are antirealist, while practice-grounded views can tilt toward social constructionism rather than realism/constraint. The second, fourth, and sixth implications, however, address the critiques of ST by avowed realists. Some constitutive communication models (ST and non-ST) are very broad, for example, the text-conversation model (Taylor & Van Every, 2000), systems models (Schoeneborn, 2011), Barley’s (1986) punctuated model...