Performing Stakeholder Capitalism: A Tale From Exxonmobil

In this article, we argue that a historical-narrative orientation can help to expand on how communication performs organizing. A performative reading of organizing through communication finds important foundations in Austin and Searle (see Taylor & Cooren, 1997).
In their article Taylor and Cooren (1997) state that communication becomes explicitly 'organizational' (in a pragmatic sense of the word) at precisely the moment when a collective agency finds expression in an identifiable actor, and the actor is recognized by his or her community as a legitimate expression of such agency (Taylor and Cooren, 1997, p.435). A constitutive approach to communication recognizes the effects by which people in interaction manage to act and speak for or in the name of specific beings to which they feel (consciously or unconsciously) attached, whether these beings be principles, values, beliefs, attitudes, ideas, ideologies, interests, organizations, etc. (Cooren, 2012 p. 5). A variety of forms of agency are always at play in any interaction, a phenomenon that Cooren calls ventriloquism (Cooren, 2008, 2010; Cooren & Bencherki, 2010). Different figures are mobilized in interaction (where figures is also the word used for dummies) in a two-fold process: we ventriloquize such figures (ideologies, interests, etc) through our conduct or talk but at the same time those same interests, ideologies and feelings constantly invite themselves in our discussions through the way they animate us (in which case they are the ventriloquist and we are the dummies) (Cooren, 2012, p. 10).