A pragmatist view of the reader-author relation in organizational settings

Pragmatist thinking is highly present in the textual semiotics approach of Umberto Eco (Eco, 1985a), who is deeply inspired by Charles S. Peirce's works. In this paper we attempt to pull together the field of literary semiotics – in which Eco operates – and the field of organizations as text producers. We elaborate upon the idea that the author of a text does not fully control its meaning and that the readers are legitimate participants in this process of meaning-making. Observations of everyday life inside organizations show that this situation often generates unexpected phenomena, the authors being often reluctant to accept the readers' interpretations when they are too distant of "what should be understood". We argue that, in a pragmatist view, the process of meaning-making concerning a text should imply author, text and reader in a repeated loop. Such a cycling process is necessary to reveal discrepancies in the interpretation of the text and to raise questions which may be taken as the startpoint of an inquiry. As an empirical case we present a research operation led in 1980-1981 (Dégot et al, 1982), which made use of utopian scenarios to stir a reflexion inside a large organization about the consequences of introducing new information technologies. Divergent interpretations of those texts have led to a theory about ambiguity and creativeness, which we will reconsider in light of textual semiotics.