Coordinated Management of Meaning

Coordinated Management of Meaning

Primarily the work of W. Barnett Pearse and Vernon Cronen. Was an attempt to move away from purely empirical communication theories
Drew from philosophy, psychology, education

and other disciplines. By their own admission, early versions of the theory were a mess.

Coordinated Management of Meaning

Communication as Improvised Theater?
A tale told by an idiot? (W. Shakespeare)

What makes for theater (or narrative)?

Closed set of characters (thats all of us). Plots and sub-plots, but a closed system We direct our own dramas We interact with other actors in communication We coordinate our drama with others Some are better at this than others We dont always agree
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CMM At a Glance
In conversation and through the messages we send

and receive, people co-create meaning. As we create our social worlds, we employ various rules to construct and coordinate meaning. That is, rules guide communication between people. CMM focuses on the relationship between an individual and his or her society. Through a hierarchical structure, people come to organize meaning of literally hundreds of messages received throughout the day.

CMM Assumptions
Which is to say
Human beings live in communication. Human beings co-create a social reality. Information transactions depend on personal and

interpersonal meaning.

#1 Living in communication
Communication central to being human
Communication is like a theatrical production

where the actors are also directors Communication is not just an odorless, colorless, tasteless vehicle of thought and expression. This was the moving away from empiricism part.

All interactions are unique

Everyone has undergone a different set of

interactions. Is unique the same as unpredictable?

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#2 Social Constructionism
Social Constructionism is a theory that posits that people in conversations coconstruct their social reality. Reality is constructed via interaction:
Humans create meaning: out of communication a

social reality is built. Actually, many social realities are built. These are the models we internalize; we use them to guide future interactions. Eventually, large numbers of people arrive at a consensus this becomes the social reality.
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#2 Social Construction of Reality

Social Reality
Social reality emerges from past interactions and

is modified by current interactions Strong relationship between CMM and the idea of merging of self and society from Symbolic Interaction Theory. Questions to discuss Are there sensory and physical limits to social construction? What about conformity vs. individualism?

#3 Two types of Meaning in CMM

Personal Meaning
Interpretation of interactions by self Unique and idiosyncratic, but not that much, for

most people.

Interpersonal Meaning
Agreement on meaning by interactants Questions: Do all the people in a relationship really ascribe

the same meaning to things? How predictable are meanings and interactions?

THE HIERARCHY OF ORGANIZED MEANING

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The Hierarchy Of Organized Meaning

CMM posits that humans organize meaning in a hierarchical manner. The Hierarchy has six layers, from bottom to top:
Content Speech acts Episodes Relationships/Contracts Life Scripts Cultural Patterns
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The Hierarchy
Cultural Patterns Life Scripts (autobiographies) Relationships (contracts) Episodes Speech acts Content
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Hierarchy of Meanings - 1
Content
Actual subject of interaction The meaning of the actual words

Speech Act
Compliments, insults, commands, etc. Co-constructed with other via rules and based on past

experience

Episodes
Speech acts take place in different contexts which shape

interaction Events with beginning, middle and end, like scenes in a movie

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Hierarchy of Meanings - 2
Relationships
A relationship about which people agree and which may be

ongoing created and modified by episodes

Life Scripts
Created by clusters of past episodes Central to definition of self, personal meaning

Cultural Patterns
Integration of self into society Central to social construction of meaning Source of intercultural communication difficulties e.g. individualism, collectivism, etc.

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CMM Some discussion points

Are Reality TV Shows Real? What do they say about individual merit? Why do we watch them?

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A RULES-BASED THEORY

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Rules-Based Communication
People communicate on the basis of negotiated rules, not fixed prescriptions.
Rules are malleable, dynamic, created and

changed by interaction participants. Question: what is the rule for creating a rule? Fixed process becomes a law-like proposition Negotiable becomes infinite regress Random hard to imagine interaction with no prediction of others communication behavior Best guess evolutionary?

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CMM Rules
Constitutive rules:
How behavior is interpreted in context In CS terms: functions that process inputs

Regulative rules:
guidelines for action CS terms: functions that generate outputs

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CMM Rules
Consider an RPI course
Who controls who talks? Faculty member is the center of a wheel or on the

rim? Do students push themselves into the center or avoid it? How is that regulated or interpreted by others? How does class conversation relate to grades? E.g. becoming known so that you get a better grade; learning more vs. showing potential misunderstanding

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Influences: Morality and Resources

Morality people bring their moral code(s) to the communication process.
Could be immoralities, as when attempting to

defraud or seduce (inappropriately) Since systems of morality vary across cultures, this can lead to difficulties

Resources the set of schemas (stories, symbols, images) that people use to understand their world.
The senior shop supervisor vs. the new MBA

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Rules and URPs

Rules, in CMM, provide people opportunities to

choose between alternatives. Rules dont strictly spell out what to do they require flexible expanding abilities that cannot be reduced to technique. When two people each apply his/her own rule set in such a way which results in continual conflict, we observe an Unwanted Repetitive Pattern (URP).
Getting out of one requires awareness and willingness to

discover or formulate a new metarule. Can you think of any examples?

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Charmed and Strange Loops

The use of charmed and strange is borrowed from quantum physics. The term strange loop is from chaos theory.
This may be a case serious overreach on the part

of the CMM theorists.

Basic idea: When processing in the Hierarchy proceeds smoothly across levels, we have a Charmed Loop. If there is an inconsistency across levels, we can get a Strange Loop.
Example of the alcoholic.
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Example of the Alcoholic

Life Script A
I cannot control my drinking

Life Script B
I can control my drinking

Episode A
Drinking is declined

Episode B
Drinking is allowed

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Categories of Critique
Scope
Very broad, maybe too broad Rather abstract, with some ambiguous terms Early versions were poorly constructed, mixing

language from different research traditions.

Logical Consistency
Reasonably consistent

Parsimony
Its breadth seems to make it non-parsimonious Parsimony not the be-all and end-all here.
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Categories of Critique
Utility
Very useful for explaining actual observed

communications. Its a practical theory

Testability
Difficult to falsify, although experiments

addressing a part of the theory could be.

Heurism
Very heuristic, with research in many areas.

Test of Time
Still too new to say.
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Some Observations
Coordinated Management of Meaning is essentially an explication of Symbolic Interaction Theory. Although often presented as nonempirical, CMM is consistent with empirical approaches like Co-orientation. A good candidate for model-building as a critical technical practice. (Agee).

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