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Winner of the National Ccommunication Association's Outstanding Monograph award, Organizational Communication Division, 2025
'Corporate purpose' has become a battleground for stakeholders’ competing desires. Some argue that corporations must simply generate profit; others suggest that we must make them create social change.
Leading organization studies scholar Timothy Kuhn argues that this 'either/or' thinking dramatically oversimplifies matters: today’s corporations must be many things, all at once.
Kuhn offers a bold new Communicative Theory of the Firm to highlight the authority that creates corporations’ identities and activities. The theory provides a roadmap for navigating that battleground of competing desires to produce more responsive corporations.
Drawing on communicative and new materialist theorizing, along with three insightful case studies, this book thoroughly redefines our understandings of what corporations are 'for'.
"Going far beyond the organization as an entity model, Kuhn explores the complicated realities of socially mediated communication as manipulated by corporations to create a radically new understanding of what corporations want. Kuhn's book keeps readers engaged with its examples grounded in specific organizations", CHOICE.
"Kuhn does not merely critique unjustified inequities created by capitalism but gives us intriguing ways to go beyond the status quo to generate productive alternatives", Organization.
"This is a dazzling book! It is a provocation that forces scholars to grapple with the complexity of firms’ existence and of their desires. Essential reading for rethinking the theory of the firm." Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento
It makes valuable contributions to organizational communication by continuing to show why it matters to understand organizations as communicative. Through strong examples that illustrate sometimes abstract concepts, this book is important for demonstrating the ongoing relevance of CCO for understanding the complexity of contemporary organizations.
Communication Theory
Kuhn critically examines the multiplicity of corporate purposes and argues that organizational purpose is not a singular entity but a site of contestation, negotiation and performative enactment…. One of the book’s key upshots is what Kuhn calls a communicative theory of the firm (CTF), a stance positing that firms exist not simply because of economic efficiencies or as nexuses of contracts between persons, but as sites for expressing authority and capitalizing on communicative practices.
Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management
Kuhn’s CTF expands far beyond those narrow benchmarks by cueing up investigations of all the different ways a corporation can want among communicative capitalism. The impact of Kuhn’s work lies in revealing how, in pursuing those wants, communication is the very practice that allows for realizing (or constraining) new possibilities of firm constitution.
Management Communication Quarterly
The book resonates with the growing interest in process-relational thinking within organizational studies, extending beyond CCO scholarship…Rather than simply challenging or subverting established theories, [Kuhn] shows how process-relational research can perform or enact seemingly self-evident corporate phenomena differently, surfacing overlooked dimensions and reconfiguring their significance in innovative and consequential ways.
Management Learning
"The book introduces a novel lens for examining firms as communicative and political entities. Kuhn’s approach departs from dominant economic and strategic management theories of the firm, which often assume coherent firm objectives or focus on structural features such as inputs, contracts, and resources. By foregrounding communication and authority, Kuhn offers a more fluid, dynamic, and sociopolitical account of organizational purpose", Administrative Science Quarterly.
Introduction
1. New Forms of Value Generation under Communicative Capitalism
2. Why an Alternative Theory of the Firm?
3. Assembling an Analytical Apparatus: CCO Encounters Deleuzian New Materialism
4. A Communicative Theory of the Firm
5. Boundarying: Inclusion and Exclusion in Dynamic Capability (Re)Development
6. Branding: Hindering Heterarchy in a Startup Accelerator
7. Binding: Collective Atomization and B Corps
8. A New Future for the Theory of the Firm