The Pedagogy of CCO

Scholarship claiming an association with the idea of the Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO) has become a central element of theory and research in organizational communication (Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud, & Taylor, 2014). Scholarship associated with the CCO moniker reframes organizations as ongoing and interconnected communicative processes; in offering this view, CCO not only challenges taken-for-granted assumptions of organization but uses concepts that are “both rather abstract and are presented in a vocabulary unfamiliar to many” (Kuhn, 2008, p. 1232). It therefore remains a challenge to integrate CCO ideas especially in the undergraduate classroom. Hence, one may ask, “How to best teach CCO theorizing and, even more importantly, why try to do so in the first place?” Furthermore, in line with the topic of this forum, how might teaching CCO to undergraduates benefit organizational communication as a field more generally? In the following, our aim is to sketch answers to these questions.