An organization can have a building, a logo, employees, bank accounts, and an organizational chart. But none of those things, by themselves, tell people how to work together.
That lesson became clear to Kwame when his small consulting company began to grow.
For years, the business had operated with twelve people. Everyone knew everyone else. When a client had a problem, someone walked across the room and asked for help. Decisions happened quickly. New employees learned by sitting beside experienced ones.
Then the company won several large contracts.
Within eighteen months, twelve employees became seventy-five. Departments appeared. Managers were hired. Policies were written. Meetings multiplied.
One afternoon, Kwame looked around a leadership meeting and said, “We need to start acting like a real company.”
One of his managers smiled.
“We already are one,” she said. “The question is what kind of company we are creating.”
That distinction sits at the heart of the communicative constitution of organizations, often shortened to CCO. The central idea is that communication does not simply happen inside an organization. Communication helps constitute or create the organization itself. Robert McPhee and Pamela Zaug’s influential framework argues that organizations emerge through multiple communication flows connecting members, structures, coordinated work, and the outside world.
For academically inclined readers, Arizona State University provides an overview of the communicative constitution of organizations.
In plain language, an organization is partly built through what people keep saying, writing, deciding, promising, explaining, and doing together.
The organization chart was not the organization
As the company grew, Kwame hired a consultant to create a new organizational chart.
The chart looked impressive. There were departments, reporting lines, directors, managers, and clear boxes showing who reported to whom.
But almost immediately, reality became more complicated.
A client problem crossed three departments. Nobody knew who owned the final decision. A manager believed she could approve expenses that finance believed required another signature. Two employees with similar titles thought each person was responsible for the same account.
The chart described the formal organization, but conversations still had to make it work.
People needed to ask:
“Who owns this?”
“Who has authority to decide?”
“When should I involve finance?”
“What happens when two departments disagree?”
Those conversations did not merely explain the structure. They helped create the working structure.
This connects directly to structure is built by what people keep doing. Written rules matter, but repeated communication and behavior eventually determine how those rules actually live inside the workplace.
People have to become members
Then came the new employees.
Each person received a laptop, employee handbook, email address, and job description. Technically, they belonged to the company on their first day.
But anyone who has joined a new workplace knows that legal membership and lived membership are not the same thing.
New employees still had to learn what questions were acceptable, how managers preferred updates, whether disagreement was welcomed, and what “urgent” really meant in this particular company.
They were negotiating membership.
McPhee and Zaug’s four-flows approach identifies membership negotiation as one of the communication processes through which organizations are constituted. People have to establish what membership means and how an individual relates to the larger organization.
That is why “I work here” becomes meaningful through trust and lived experience. An employee can complete assignments without feeling connected to the organization. Belonging develops as people learn where they fit, who depends on them, and whether the promises made during hiring survive contact with daily work.
Every organization develops its own language
As the company grew, employees also created phrases that outsiders would not immediately understand.
“Red client” meant a customer relationship requiring executive attention.
“Take it upstairs” meant involve senior leadership.
“Clean handoff” meant responsibility had clearly moved from one department to another.
Nobody planned these expressions. They emerged because people needed shared shorthand.
Every organization develops communication habits like these. Some appear in policy manuals. Others exist only in conversation.
This is why every community has codes for how to speak. Groups create local rules about what words mean, how disagreement works, who may speak, and what counts as respectful communication.
Learning those codes is part of learning the organization itself.
Work has to be coordinated through communication
One morning, a client called with an urgent problem.
Sales knew what the client wanted. Operations knew what could realistically be delivered. Finance knew what the change would cost. Legal knew which part of the contract mattered.
No department had the complete answer.
The company became capable of responding only when those different people coordinated their actions.
This is another part of the CCO perspective: activity coordination. Organizations exist because people communicate in order to make interdependent work fit together.
This sounds obvious until communication fails.
A sales representative makes a promise operations never heard about. Finance changes a procedure nobody explains. Leadership makes a decision that frontline employees interpret differently.
Suddenly, the organization looks less like one organization and more like several groups occupying the same building.
Coordination is what turns separate activity into organized activity.
Stories tell people what kind of organization this is
As the company grew, Kwame noticed something else.
New employees kept hearing the same story.
During the company’s early years, an important client had experienced a serious problem on a Friday evening. Several employees stayed late to solve it, including Kwame. The story became part of how people explained the culture.
“We do not disappear when the customer has a problem.”
Over time, that sentence became more powerful than a paragraph in the values statement.
This is why stories turn individuals into a group. Shared stories teach people who the heroes are, what behavior earns respect, and what “people like us” are expected to do.
The story was communication, but it was also culture-building.
It helped constitute the organization by giving people a shared explanation of who they believed they were.
The outside world helps create the organization too
An organization does not exist only in conversations among employees.
Customers, suppliers, regulators, partners, competitors, banks, and communities also interact with it.
A customer signs a contract with the company, not simply with the employee sitting across the table. A bank decides whether the company is credible. A regulator determines whether it meets required standards. A supplier decides whether it is trustworthy enough to extend favorable terms.
The organization has to communicate its identity outward.
In the four-flows framework, this is often described as institutional positioning—communication that helps establish the organization’s relationship with external institutions and audiences.
A business becomes recognizable partly because people repeatedly communicate who it is, what it does, what it promises, and whether those promises can be trusted.
Identity is being built all the time
One afternoon, Kwame overheard an employee explaining the company to a new hire.
“We are direct here,” she said. “If something is going wrong, you are expected to say it early. Surprises are worse than bad news.”
Kwame smiled because he had never written that sentence anywhere.
Yet it had become part of the company.
Communication was teaching identity.
The same principle appears at the individual level when identity is built in conversation. Repeated labels, roles, expectations, and stories influence how people understand who they are. In organizations, repeated communication also shapes who people understand we are.
That is why leaders should pay attention to ordinary conversations.
Culture is not produced only during annual meetings.
It is produced when a manager explains a decision.
When someone is corrected.
When a new employee asks a question.
When a customer complains.
When credit is given.
When a mistake happens.
The organization is being constituted in all of those moments.
How to use this theory in real life
If you lead an organization, stop treating communication as something that happens after the important work.
Communication is part of the important work.
Look at how people become members. How do newcomers learn what belonging means?
Look at structure. Do people understand roles, authority, and responsibilities?
Look at coordination. How does information move when several people depend on one another?
Look at stories. What repeated narratives tell employees what kind of organization they belong to?
Then look outside. What are customers, partners, and the public being taught about who you are?
Those conversations are not separate from the organization.
They are helping create it.
Watch out for this
The communicative constitution perspective does not mean buildings, money, technology, contracts, and formal authority are imaginary. Organizations clearly have material resources and legal realities.
The theory draws our attention to something easier to overlook: those realities become organized through communication. Roles must be defined. Contracts must be interpreted. Decisions must be communicated. Work must be coordinated. Membership must be negotiated.
Communication does not explain everything about an organization, but it explains much more than a newsletter or a meeting.
One thing to remember
Kwame originally thought his company needed to “start acting like a real company.”
What he eventually understood was that the company was being created every day.
It was created in meetings, policies, customer promises, stories, job descriptions, arguments, decisions, and ordinary conversations.
That is the central insight of the communicative constitution of organizations.
An organization is not merely a place where people communicate.
It is something people continually bring into existence through communication.
Reflection question
If someone studied only the everyday conversations inside your organization, what kind of organization would they conclude you are creating?
