Greimas’ Semiotics and the Analysis of Organisational Action

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, an increasing number of organisational theorists interested in understanding the constitution of organisation have shifted their attention from the study of organisational structures to the analysis of the interaction processes through which organisations are constituted and maintained over time (Weick, 1979, 1995). This change was not a mere change of conceptual strategy, but a change in the definition of the problem itself. Rather than being taken for granted, the organisation and its structural dimensions became the very phenomenon to be explained (see Weick, 1979, 1995; Putnam and Pacanowski, 1983; Poole and McPhee, 1983; Taylor, 1993; Taylor and Van Every 1999). In that vein, a wide variety of perspectives were put forward to describe the organising processes by which organisations emerge out of interaction and are reproduced in the course of daily routines. These included systemic, interpretive or phenomenological (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Putnam and Pacanowski 1983) and structurational perspectives (Ranson et al., 1980; Giddens, 1984). Among the metaphors used to describe organising, that of a grammar suggested by Weick has been particularly influential (Weick, 1979, 1995; Bantz, 1989; Taylor and Van Every, 1999). Such a metaphor drove researchers’ attention from the content of organisational activities to the implicit rules and schemas involved in organising.