Content area
Full Text
Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT)-an explanation of the process and consequences of human symbolizing-has enjoyed popularity in communication studies but, in organizational communication, its appeal has declined, perhaps because of perceptions of its irrelevance to complex and contemporary concerns. To develop SCT's appeal as well as its possible resurgence, this article rouses and redirects it. In rousing SCT, the article reviews its central statements, remembers its uses, and lays bare some weaknesses (i.e., explaining why humans narrate reality and share dramas, restrictive convergence assumptions, and restrictive assumptions about membership in rhetorical communities). In redirecting SCT, the article relaxes and complements its assumptions with ideas from organizational communication theories (i.e., sensemaking, power and politics, bonafide groups, and multiple identifications) and points a reinvigorated SCT toward exploring coalition action in response to leader behaviors at Harvard Business Review and the University of Colorado.
Keywords: symbolic convergence theory; organizational coalitions; power and politics
In the early 1970s, Ernest Bormann and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota introduced Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT) as a framework for discovering, describing, and explaining the dynamic process by which humans come to share symbolic reality. Since its beginnings, and for the better part of two and a half decades, SCT has had a significant impact on communication scholarship, appealing to those examining communication in areas as diverse as intercultural communication, mass communication, organizational communication, and rhetoric. Its popularity can be explained by the following: (a) its claimed stature as a metatheory that is both idiographic and transhistorical or transcultural (Bormann, 1985a); (b) its central focus on human discourse (i.e., narrativity); and (c) its recognition of communication as creatively constructing, and being constrained by, reality. SCT's popularity is also seen in its appeal to those trained in either rhetorical or social scientific methods (Cragan & Shields, 1981), and its relevance to phenomena at the level of the individual, the collective, and the sociohistorical (see Bormann, 1985b, 1988; Bormann, Knutson, & Musolf, 1997).
Despite some evidence of a SCT resurgence (see dramatistic-based research by Clark & Salaman, 1998; Grint & Case, 1998; Jackson, 1999), SCT's influence in recent organizational communication scholarship has been largely negligible, perhaps because of earlier criticisms (e.g., Mohrmann, 1982) or perceptions of its irrelevance to contemporary and more complex...