6
Coordinated Management
of Meaning (CMM) of
W. Barnett Pearce & Vernon Cronen
A First Look at
Communication Theory
8th edition
Em Griffin
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 2
Coordinated Management of
Meaning (CMM)
 Stories from the Field as a Practical Theory
 CMM as an Interpretive Theory –
Picturing Persons in Conversation
 CMM as an Interpretive Theory:
Stories Told and Stories Lived
 Cosmopolitan Communication:
Disagree, Yet Coordinate
 Ethical Reflection: Martin Buber’s Dialogic Ethics
 Critique: Three Theories, Three Appraisals
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 3
Coordinated Management of
Meaning (CMM)
Persons-in-conversation coconstruct their own social realities
and are simultaneously shaped
by the worlds they create
Every conversation has an afterlife
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 4
CMM in Action—Stories
from the Field
Pearce and Cronen believe practical
communication theory should offer a
variety of tools to help understand
flawed patterns of interaction
Family Therapy
• Strange loop – description of unwanted
repetitive communication pattern
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 5
CMM in Action—Stories
from the Field
Mediation
Cupertino Community Project
Dialogic communication – conversations
in which people speak in a manner that
makes others want to listen, and listen in a
way that makes others want to speak
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 6
Figure 6-1: A Strange Loop of
Diagnosis and Behavior
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 7
CMM as an Interpretive Theory
– Persons-in-Conversation
 Social constructionists – Persons-inconversation co-construct their own
social realities and are simultaneously
shaped by the worlds they create
1. Experience of persons-in-conversation is
the primary social process of human life
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 8
Persons-in-Conversation:
Creating Bonds of Union
 Social constructionists (continued)
2. The way people communicate is often
more important than what they say
• Logical force – moral pressure or sense of
obligation a person feels to respond in a given
way to what someone else said or did
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 9
Persons-in-Conversation:
Creating Bonds of Union
 Social constructionists (continued)
3. Actions of persons-in-conversation
are reflexively reproduced
as the interaction continues
• Reflexivity – process by which the
effects of our words and actions
on others bounce back and affect us
4. CMM researchers see themselves as
curious participants in a pluralistic world
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 10
Stories Told and
Stories Lived
Stories lived – co-constructed
actions that we perform with others
Stories told – narratives used
to make sense of stories lived
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 11
Stories Told and
Stories Lived
Managing Meaning through Stories Told
Storytelling, central act of communication
• Hierarchy of meaning – rank-order of
relative significance of contexts that
encompass a story as aid to interpretation
• Speech act – any verbal or nonverbal
message as part of an interaction; basic
building block of social universe people create
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 12
Stories Told and
Stories Lived
Managing Meaning (continued)
Episode – “nounable” sequence of
speech acts with a beginning and
end that are held together by a story
Relationship – emerge from
dynamic dance of coordinated
actions and managed meanings
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 13
Stories Told and
Stories Lived
Managing Meaning (continued)
Identity: identities continually crafted
through the process of communication
Self-images become context
for how we manage meaning
Culture: webs of shared
meaning and values
• People who come from different cultures
won’t interpret messages the same way
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 14
Stories Told and
Stories Lived
Coordination—The
Meshing of Stories Lived
Coordination – 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
• Communication can create social universe
of community, tolerance, and generosity
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 15
Figure 6.3: Hierarchical-Serpentine Model
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 16
Cosmopolitan Communication:
Disagree, Yet Coordinate
Cosmopolitan communication –
coordination of meaning with
others who have different
backgrounds, values and beliefs
without trying to change them
Pearce used the dialogue the same
way that Martin Buber does to
describe the optimum form of interaction
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 17
Ethical Reflection: Martin
Buber’s Dialogic Ethics
Buber focuses on relationships
between people rather than
moral codes and conduct
I-It relationships – we treat the
other person as a thing to be used
I-Thou relationships – we regard
our partner as the very one we are
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 18
Ethical Reflection: Martin
Buber’s Dialogic Ethics
Buber (continued)
Dialogue is synonym for ethical
communication; creates the between
Narrow ridge – metaphor of I-Thou
living in the dialogic tension between
ethical relativism and rigid absolutism
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 19
Critique: Three
Theories, Three Appraisals
Interpretive Theory
Pearce and Cronen value curiosity,
participation, and appreciation of diversity
• Lack of clarity limits CMM’s aesthetic appeal
Critical Theory
Most critical scholars do not
consider CMM a critical theory
• Does make clear value judgments
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Slide 20
Critique: Three
Theories, Three Appraisals
Practical Theory
Pearce, Cronen, and their followers
need to show how the experience of
practitioners has informed the theory
Pearce: he can train people to use CMM
concepts but not by asking them to read
© 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.