What makes communication 'organizational'?

How is an organization constituted as an actor? This article explores the property of communication that explains how organization is able to enter the field of discourse, express an intention, and be accorded a voice there. The paper argues that communication becomes explicitly 'organizational' when a collective agency finds expression in an identifiable actor, and the actor is recognized by the community as a legitimate expression of such agency. This is comparable to Searle's 1995 view of the institutional basis for the construction of social reality. The article develops its argument through an analysis of two contrasting theories of action in speech, one bottom-up and linguistic in inspiration, the other rep-down and sociological in spirit. We show that both versions of action-in-speech are to be found in uncomfortable propinquity in John Austin's original presentation of speech act theory (Austin, 1962) and that the continuing debate between the bottom-up and top-down positions, notably enunciated by Each and Harnish (1979, 1991), and Searle (1989, 1995), can be traced to contrasting visions of communication, either person-centered or group-centered. Implications for organizational research are briefly discussed.