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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.
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