François Cooren is a French and Canadian communication scholar and was, from 2005 to 2008, the editor of ''
Communication Theory
Communication theory is a proposed description of communication phenomena, the relationships among them, a storyline describing these relationships, and an argument for these three elements. Communication theory provides a way of talking about a ...
''. He completed his Ph.D. at the Department of communication of the
Université de Montréal
The Université de Montréal (; UdeM; ) is a French-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university's main campus is located in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce on M ...
in 1996, under the supervision of
James R. Taylor. He was chairman of that same department from 2006 to 2015, where he is full professor. Cooren also completed a postdoc at the Université de Louvain-la-Neuve, in Belgium.
Cooren is former President of the
International Communication Association (2010–2011), an ICA fellow since 2013 and an NCA distinguished scholar since 2017.
Cooren's research mainly focuses on organisational communication in mundane and emergency situations. He is part of what has come to be known in the field as the
Montreal School of Organizational Communication, which proposes communication as the "site and surface" of organizations, meaning that the latter emerge from and are maintained by communication processes. This parts from what could be called conventional organizational communication, which views communication as a phenomenon taking place in pre-existing organizations. That particular point of view, inspired by the works of
Taylor and Van Every,
[Taylor, James R. and Elizabth Van Every (2000). ''The Emergent Organization: Communication as its Site and Surface.'' Mahwah, NJ:Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates.] Weick and others, leads Cooren to use interaction analysis and conversation analysis as his main source of data, although, whereas other interaction or conversation analysts do not seek to explain anything beyond the observed interaction, Cooren, following the works of
Harold Garfinkel or even
Gabriel Tarde, uses the micro - the interactions - to find an explanation to what takes place at the macro - organizational - level.
Selected bibliography
* Cooren, F. (2010). Action and agency in dialogue: Passion, incarnation and ventriloquism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
* Cooren, F. (Ed.) (2006). ''Interacting and Organizing: Analyses of a Board Meeting.'' Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
* Cooren, F., J. R. Taylor, & E. J. Van Every (Eds.) (2006). ''Communication as organizing: Empirical and Theoretical Explorations In the dynamic of text and conversation.'' Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
* Cooren, F. (2000). ''The Organizing Property of Communication.'' Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
External links
François Cooren's official page on his department's websiteThe Language, organization and governance research group, of which François Cooren is a member
Notes
Université de Montréal alumni
Communication theorists
Living people
French sociologists
French expatriates in Canada
Year of birth missing (living people)
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