Taylor Receives Fellows Book Award
James R. Taylor & Elizabeth J. Van Every, U of Montreal, received the 2013 Fellows Book Award for their 1999 book The Emergent Organization: Communication as Its Site and Surface.
This book has been highly influential within the field of organizational communication and beyond. The central perspective of the work has become, in the words of one committee member, “one major lens for viewing organizational communication . . . [with] a very strong and loyal following among a significant segment of the field.” One amazing achievement of the book is that the authors turned away from a common approach in organizational communication up until that time, which was to argue for the contributions communication theory could make alongside theories from management or sociology. Instead, through an argument carefully grounded in language and discourse theories, phenomenology, social studies of technology, conversation analysis, and semiotics, they arrived at communication as the logically necessary mechanism for any organizing (whether social or material) to be accomplished. Taylor and Van Every did something that goes beyond the realm of organizational studies: they developed an original thesis that ultimately reconciles the study of conversations and the study of texts.
James Taylor is Emeritus Professor of Communication at the U of Montreal where he was founder of the Department of Communication in the early 1970s. Elizabeth Van Every is a sociologist/historian and has been a coauthor with James on several research projects and books. Since James’s retirement in 1998 he and Elizabeth have visited universities internationally to work alongside other researchers. Today, they continue to write and publish books.