Coordinated Management of Meaning

The coordinated management of meaning (CMM) theory, developed by W. Barnett Pearce, Vernon Cronen, and their colleagues, explains how communicators organize interaction. Since its inception in the 1970s, this theory has been included consistently in the canon of communication theory and applied to a variety of settings. It is a wide-ranging theory that touches many aspects of the field and presents a way of analyzing all kinds of human activity in terms of the communication perspective, or how reality is constructed in social interaction. The major tenets of the theory today can be summarized in the categories of meaning and action, coordination, and story telling.

The theory first appeared in print in the mid-1970s, with its first full-blown explanation following in 1980 in Pearce and Cronen's book Communication, Action, and Meaning: The Creation of Social Realities. Having undergone considerable expansion and refinement over the years, the theory continues to develop and has been influenced by thinking in social constructionism, cybernetics, philosophy of language, logic, rules theory, dialogue theory, action research, and other traditions. It originated as a general descriptive theory of communication but today is most often regarded as a practical theory.