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While communication is the fundamental activity through which social interaction is accomplished, the practice of communicating as a routine organizing activity has not been the focus of much organizational research. Organizational studies that consider communication have investigated specific aspects of communication such as media and technology (Sproull and Kiesler, 1986; Trevino, Lengel, and Daft, 1987; Fulk and Steinfield, 1990), have focused on relationships between communicative behavior and organization characteristics (Rice et al., 1984; Donnellon, Gray, and Bougon, 1986; Huber, 1990), and have explored the symbolic and political nature of communication in organizational processes (Eisenberg, 1984; Frost, 1987; Putnam and Poole, 1987; Manning, 1989; Fulk, 1993).
Communication, however, may also be viewed as central to the organizing process. As Schall (1983: 560) pointed out, without communication "there would be no organizing or organization." Likewise, Weick (1987: 97-98) noted: "Interpersonal communication is the essence of organization because it creates structures that then affect what else gets said and done and by whom. ... The structures themselves create additional resources for communication such as hierarchical levels, common tasks, exchangeable commodities, and negotiable dependencies." In such a view, communication is conceived as inherently embedded and actively involved in agents' everyday social practices.
We adopt such a view in this paper, seeing communication as an essential element in the ongoing organizing process through which social structures are produced, reproduced, and changed (Giddens, 1984). Such a recursive relationship between action and structure is central to practice theory (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990) and to structuration theory (Giddens, 1979, 1984), both of which are grounded in the ongoing, practical activities of human agents in particular historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. Empirical investigations guided by a practice perspective center on the recursive relationship between routine activities and the social structures that are the medium and outcome of those activities (Barley, 1986; Suchman, 1987; Lave, 1988; Pentland, 1992). Our empirical investigation of communicative practices likewise examines how and with what implications agents' routine communicative actions constitute some of the organizing structures of a community and how and why these ongoing practices may change over time.
We investigate communicative practices through the analytic lens of the "communicative genres" enacted within a community. We have previously defined genres of organizational communication as socially recognized types of communicative actions--such...