Co-Creation of Meaning Theory

It was Robert L. Heath who adopted a co-creation of meaning theory for public relations in his approach to management of corporate communication. By doing this, he referred to E. M. Eisenberg as the one who stressed the need to focus on the concepts of meaning and interpretation in organizations, expanded this theory into a theory on the relationship between (people in) organizations and the outside world, and adopted a co-orientational view of meaning as opposed to a referential view:

This co-orientational view assumes that through interaction people develop the interpretations and expectations they need to coordinate their activities. A meaning, therefore, is not an attribute of a message or a recipient but of the interaction itself. In managing corporate communication the key issue is to manage the interactions in such a way that “compatible zones of meaning” are created with stakeholders.

The co-creation of meaning theory can also be found in European approaches to public relations. Roland Burkart, for example, sees public relations as the facilitation of dialogic interaction between an organization and its publics. It is also found in organizational theory, where Stanley A. Deetz, Sarah J. Tracy, and Jennifer Lyn Simpson focused on the “enactment of meanings” (2000, p. xiii) by which learning processes are developed. In this organizational theory Deetz et al. discussed the process through which people develop their interpretations of an event. They focused on how language, stories, and ritual frame or reframe people's understanding of an event, whereas conversations are useful in creating alternative futures and opening the business to a wider collective learning process. Ansgar Zerfass calls these dialogues “arguments in which new meanings develop” (1996, pp. 31–32). The 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 as many meanings as possible, which is based more on a “battle” of interests than on harmony of interest. Heath referred to this process also as the rhetorical enactment approach, reasoning “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” (2000, p. 4). In a co-creation of meaning theory of public relations, the aim is at finding 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.

The concept of meaning is a much debated concept in human communication theory. Meaning can be explained as the “whole way in which we understand, explain, feel about, and react towards a given phenomenon” (Rosengren, 2000, p. 59). From this point of view on communication, a crucial question is whose meaning is created by whom, and what does it mean for interpreting the world? Recent approaches to the concept of communication are focused on communication as a fundamental twoway process for creating and exchanging meaning, interactive and participatory at all levels. This can be seen as a paradigmatic change from a sender/receiver orientation to an actor orientation, and the co-creation of meaning theory fits into this paradigmatic change. Regarding the character of meaning, many theorists differentiate between connotative and denotative meaning by stressing that the connotative meaning steers behavior much more than the denotative meaning does. A denotative meaning of a phenomenon is the dictionary meaning. It is the literal or overt meaning that is shared by most people. The connotative meaning refers to subjective associations. In a co-creation of meaning theory, the connotative perspective of meaning is seen as most powerful in steering behavior.

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