Materiality and Discursivity in the Study of Organizations: Agency, Metaphors and Structures

Abstract

In this article I draw upon the distinction between the semiotic and the semantic aspect of language in order to understand the role of material forces and discourse in shaping organizations. This helps finding complementarities between approaches more focused on language and discourse when studying institutions, and approaches centered on social structures as material causes for human agency, such as critical realism. The notion of metaphor, in particular, helps addressing various problems with the critical realist notion of structure. The critical realist notion of structure thus enriched can, in turn, help explaining how social forces shape language. The distinction between the semiotic and the semantic aspect of language also leads to a more general approach towards organizations in terms of which other theories can be interpreted.