A Communicative Theory of the Firm: Developing an Alternative Perspective on Intra-organizational Power and Stakeholder Relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Existing theories of the firm exhibit significant shortcomings when questions turn to intra-organizational power and extra-organizational relationships — two issues central to understanding firm operations. Here I advance an alternative view, founded on the Montreal School of organizational communication's conception of conversation—text relations, yet extending it in several ways. In developing a communicative theory of the firm, I highlight the functions of, and relations between, `concrete' and `figurative' texts, paying particular attention to their participation in the construction of an authoritative (yet never monolithic) system for cooriented and distributed action. Using examples drawn from struggles over power, strategy, and organizational form at GM, I show that seeing the firm in textual terms presents a very different view of its operations. Doing so, portrays individuals and collectives as engaging in sophisticated games where firms marshal consent and attract capital through textually mediated practice. Moreover, through game playing, the firm's trajectory is authored. Building on these arguments, I present two novel and testable propositions about the nature of organizational change in interfirm and stakeholder relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".