Organizational List Theory

In just the past 2 decades, the homely list has been elevated to the object of communication analysis—indeed, as no less worthy of our attention than are conversations and public speeches. Given our increasingly hurry-up culture, our obsession with tips and proficiency, and our need for easy-to-grasp requirements and procedures, lists are now a familiar kind of communication in our lives. Whether it is the local newspaper informing us about the key steps to take to protect our homes before leaving on vacation, or a self-help book about things to look for in a life partner, or a Web site such as wikiHow that offers over 42,000 how-to articles styled in the form of recipes for performance, we are constantly exposed to lists and are expected to use them. In addition to receiving them, we constantly organize others by generating lists for them to abide by, and we self-organize by the lists we make for ourselves. We also respond to the authority of others by accepting protocols that they have designed for us.

Lists are such a routine part of our day-to-day communication that we often merely accept them as a requirement. Part of their power is their very commonplaceness; they may be tacked on the refrigerator or sent to us in an e-mail, but like other social technologies, they become tacit influences once accepted. Larry Browning and his colleagues' research shows that while we resist lists because no one wants to be a bureaucratic automaton, we still conveniently forget their authoritative origins and incorporate and reframe them as our own autonomous thinking when we find them helpful.

Lists have not until recently enjoyed being the focus of communication research. For example, when this author made a presentation about them to a linguistics department in Scandinavia a few years ago, the faculty unanimously opposed studying lists as a kind of discourse because so many requirements were already being laid on them in list form, and they did not want to further legitimize this form of control. “We don't want to get that started!” they insisted. But lists as a genre of persuasion simply will not go away. It makes sense to view lists as a topic that merits understanding and to explore what we gain or lose from them [Page 719]and how we respond when others make them a requirement for us.

The theory of lists as communication is part of the larger reconceptualization of organizational communication in the last 25 years from merely being the conduit for messages in the organization, to a more potent view that the communication in the organization is the organization, that it makes up the structure itself. This reconceptualization is based largely on the Aristotelian persuasion model, that the purpose of all messages is influence, and any communication in an organization (nonverbal, charismatic, conversational, etc.) has the potential to influence the person—to affect how they see themselves and how they perform their work. The communication-is-the-organization movement was bolstered by the development of Anthony Giddens' structuration theory, which made the claim that organizations are essentially composed of frameworks (lists) and interactions (speeches, discussions, conversations). Browning conceptualizes the list by expanding on Walter Fisher's idea of technical rationality and makes it the opposite of, equal of, and complement to the story. If the story is changeable, interesting, and historical, the list is current, reliable, and defensible.

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