Co-Creation of Meaning Theory

Robert L. Heath pioneered the use of co-creation of meaning theory for public relations in his approach to management of corporate communication. He drew on the work of Eric M. Eisenberg who stressed the need to focus on the concepts of meaning and interpretations as a means for understanding organizational communication. Eisenberg (1984) emphasized how relationships between people both in organizations and outside of them depend on shared meanings. Co-creation allows all parties to contribute to the shared view of organizational and social lives needed for coordinated enactment, as we can learn from Eisenberg (1984).

As Heath (1994) emphasized, co-creation differs fundamentally from a referential view of how words come to have meaning:

Thus, for instance, both employer and worker share meaning for the activity “work,” but corporations can apply the meaning “cost” to work, whereas employees see it as their identity. A referential approach assumes that both parties look to the activity or thing to define the word. A constructionist, co-creational view presumes as the basis for shared meaning that meaning cultures, which can differ markedly, depend on meaning that develops through interactions.

Co-orientation assumes that through interaction people develop the interpretations and expectations they need to coordinate their activities. In managing corporate communication, the key issue is to manage the interactions in such a way that compatible zones of meaning are created with and among stakeholders. This presumes dialogue rather than monologue.

In organizational theory, Stanley A. Deetz, Sarah J. Tracy, and Jennifer Lyn Simpson (2000) focused on the “enactment of meanings” (p. xiii) by which learning processes are developed individually and collectively through the use of language. Through interaction, people develop various interpretations of an event. Thus, people's understanding of an event are framed or reframed through language, stories, and rituals; conversations are useful for creating alternative futures and opening the business to a wider collective learning process.

Co-creation of meaning theory is found in European approaches to public relations. For example, Roland Burkart viewed public relations as the facilitation of dialogic interaction between organization and its publics. Ansgar Zerfass (1996) called dialogues “arguments in which new meanings develop” (pp. 31–32). Just as language in use is an ongoing process, so is meaning creation. The intellectual basis of this view of public relations is contemporary rhetorical theory, which explains discourse tactics as what players use to maneuver in communicative interactions. A key aspect of this view is the creation of many meanings based more on a “battle” of interests than on harmony of interest.

Heath's (2000) rhetorical enactment approach reasoned “that all of what an organization does and says is a statement. It is a statement that is interpreted idiosyncratically by each market, audience, and public” (p. 4). In a co-creation of meaning theory of public relations, the aim is to find deliberate and pluralistic solutions for problems. By doing this, an organization produces and reproduces its environment and is, therefore, a key actor itself. The key perspective is that by facilitating interactions, new meanings are continually created. That is why this is an open-ended model, a learning process that never stops.

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