W. BARNETT PEARCE
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Communication scholar from the Fielding Institute.
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Founding Member of the Public Dialogue Consortium.
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Co-creator of the theory of Coordinated Management of Meaning.
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Authored seven books and more than 100 articles.
VERNON CRONEN
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Communication scholar from the University of Massachusetts.
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Co-creator of the theory of Coordinated Management of Meaning.
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Visiting professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
AN ABSTRACT OF COORDINATED MANAGEMENT OF MEANING
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Developed in the mid-1970’s.
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Persons-in-conversation co-construct their own social realities and are
simultaneously shaped by the worlds they create.
• Every conversation has an afterlife. How we interact today creates the social
reality of tomorrow.
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Can achieve coherence through common interpretation of their stories told.
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Can achieve coordination by meshing their stories lived.
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Dialogic communication, which is learnable, teachable, and contagious, improves
the quality of life for everyone. (Socio-cultural and phenomenological traditions.)
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Relies on three basic processes in interactions:
 Coherence (How meaning is achieved.)
 Coordination (Each person has their own set of rules that govern their behavior.)
 Mystery (Anything during a communication interaction that is unexplainable.)
TERMS DEFINED
Strange Loop – An unwanted repetitive communication pattern—”Darn, we did it again.”
TERMS DEFINED
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Dialogic Communication – Conversation in which people speak in a manner that
makes others want to listen, and listen in a way that makes other want to speak.
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Logical Force – The moral pressure or sense of obligation a person feels to
respond in a given way to what someone else has just said or done—”I had no
choice.”
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Coordination – The process by which persons collaborate in an attempt to bring
into being their vision of what is necessary, noble, and good and to preclude the
enactment of what they fear, hate, or despise.
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A metaphor of I-Thou living in the dialogic tension between ethical relativism and
rigid absolutism; also standing your own ground while being profoundly open to
the other.
TERMS DEFINED
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Social Constructionists – Language theorists who believe that persons-in-conversation coconstruct their own social realities and are simultaneously shaped by the worlds they
create.
TERMS DEFINED
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Reflexivity – The process by which the effects of our words and actions on others
bounce back and affect us.
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Hierarchy of Meaning – A rank order of the relative significance of contexts—
episode, relationship, identity, and culture—that encompass a given story as an
aid to interpretation.
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Speech act – Any verbal or nonverbal message as part of an interaction; the basic
building block of the social universe people create; threats, promises, insults,
compliments, etc.
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Episode – A “nounable” sequence of speech acts with a beginning and an end
that are held together by story; and argument, interview, wedding, mediation, etc.
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Cosmopolitan Communication – Coordination with others who have different
backgrounds, values, and beliefs without trying to change them.
WHY IS CMM IMPORTANT?
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Develop ethical competence.
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Understand interactional patterns.
• “Strange Loops”
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Public dialogue
• Moral conflicts occur when incommensurate social realities clash. Disputes
about abortion, religion in politics and education, legal rights for homosexuals,
and environmental politics are issues in which well-intentioned parties have
created polarized and divisive patterns of communication… Such conflicts
require us to find forms of communication to go beyond our normal ways of
dealing with disagreement. -- Pearce and Littlejohn , Moral Conflict (1997)
REAL LIFE APPLICATIONS
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People can have different values and still have a successful interaction.
(Cosmopolitan Communication)
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Dating.
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Meeting new people.
CRITIQUE OF CMM
By scientific standards, CMM is hopelessly vague.
 Hard to predict future events. Focuses on the “now”.
 Too many terms.
 Difficult to focus on what is important in the interaction.
 Complex, extremely broad theory.
 Does not have a testable hypothesis.
By humanistic standards, it fares better:
 Fresh perspective.
 Value-based.
 Suggests new forms of communication.
 Good interpretive theory.
CONCLUSION
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CMM is value based (Axiological).
 Value curiosity and practical knowledge.
 Social world is made rather than found. (Afterlife of conversation.)
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CMM is Interpretive. (Not ironclad for everyone.)
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CMM is very confusing but is a useful theory when examining communication
interactions.
WORKS CITED
Pearce, W. Barnett (as cited in Griffin, Emory A. "Chapter 6: Coordinated Management
of Meaning (CMM)." A First Look at Communication Theory. 7th ed. Boston:
McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2009. 71. Print.)
Griffin, Emory A. "Chapter 6: Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM)." A First
Look at Communication Theory. 7th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education,
2009. 69-83. Print.
Escher, M. C. (as cited in Griffin, Emory A. "Chapter 6: Coordinated Management of
Meaning (CMM)." A First Look at Communication Theory. 7th ed. Boston:
McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2009. 73. Print.)
Griffin, Emory A. "A First Look at Communication Theory." A First Look at
Communication Theory. N.p., 2013. Web. 30 Jan. 2013.
Craig, Robert T. "CMM Theory Coordinated Management of Meaning - W. B. Pearce &
V. E. Cronen." CMM Theory Coordinated Management of Meaning. N.p., 7 Oct.
1998. Web. 30 Jan. 2013.
WORKS CITED
"Pearce Associates." Pearce Associates. N.p., 2004. Web. 30 Jan. 2013.
Orr, C. Jack. "W. Barnett Pearce: The Legacy of CMM." Dr. C. Jack Orr's Teaching and
Communication Blog. N.p., 17 Nov. 2011. Web. 30 Jan. 2013.
"Vernon E. Cronen, Ph.D." Vernon E. Cronen, Ph.D. The Taos Institute, n.d. Web. 30
Jan. 2013.
Wheeler, Cadia. "Coordinated Management of Meaning." Coordinated Management of
Meaning. N.p., Fall 1998. Web. 30 Jan. 2013.
<http://www.colorado.edu/communication/metadiscourses/Papers/App_Papers/Wheeler.htm>.
Pearce, W. Barnett., and Stephen W. Littlejohn. Moral Conflict: When Social Worlds
Collide. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997. Print.