Marshall’s Center for Management Communications hosts speakers series

Marshall’s Center for Management Communication continued its Speaker Series on Thursday afternoon.The presentation titled, “The Power of Discourse: How Communication Creates, Defines, and Directs Organizations,” is the second part within the Speaker Series, which commemorates the Center’s 35th anniversary. The event featured a speech given by Professor François Cooren, Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Montreal.

Sky Marsen, one of the associate professors at the Center, stated that Cooren’s unique perspective is what made the Center want to ask him to speak.

“Well [Francois Cooren] is representative of what is known as the Montreal School of Communication,” Marsen said. “It’s a special kind of approach. So he will be presenting the principles and the methods of this approach and giving examples from his own research on how this approach works. So it will give students ideas about what method to use if they wanted to use this method. How to research topics, and problems and issues in communication using this method.”

Cooren similarly spoke highly of the Center for Management Communication, stating that it was their prestige as well as the chance for him to communicate what he has learned through his research to students that made their offer for him to present stand out.

“It’s a very prestigious institution so for me it was an honor to be invited,” he said. “I’ve been working on organizational communication for the past twenty five years, so for me it’s a topic that I hope to communicate to the audience. It’s not typical business communication what I’m doing. I’m trying to defend what I call a constitutive view of communication, which is that communication kind of makes organizations what they are. So instead of thinking about communication as being ‘okay we need to communicate that’, I like to think about communication as any kind of interaction within the organizational life in general.”

Cooren further expanded on his ideas by highlighting the importance of the subtext that belies speech in an organizational setting.

“One of the points I’m making which might be controversial, is that when people communicate with each other, they tend to make other things speak. It’s kind of a strange idea, this idea that we are not only talking but in many respects expressing values, principles, evoking rules, procedures, and reaffirming mission statements. So oftentimes we are cultivating in our speech what matters to us in organizations.”

Following Cooren’s presentation was a brief panel consisting of panelists Drew Boyles, CEO of Endless Pursuit Corporation, US-West Regional Director of Entrepreneur’s Organization, and Chairman of El Segundo Economic Advisory Council; Janet Fulk, USC Professor of Management and Organization; Peter Monge, USC Professor of Communication; and Patricia Riley, Director of USC’s Global Communication Program. The panel was moderated by CMC professor Sky Marsen.

Marsen noted that she hopes that the presentation as well as the panel informed the students who were in attendance to encourage the Center to continue bringing in influential speakers in the coming semesters.

“We hope to continue [speakers with unique approaches] with other speakers just to show the richness of methods and approaches to business communication. We started in the beginning of February and we’re hoping to do a couple a semester. We started this year but we want to continue, so we hope the ones that we’ve had are popular and useful for people and to encourage us to continue for years to come”.