History and Orientation
The theory of CMM was developed in the mid-1970s by W. Barnett Pearce and Vernon E. Cronen. This was a time when the social sciences were engaging in profound reassessmeophical grounding. The cluster of ideas in which CMM emerged has moved from the periphery toward greater acceptance and CMM has continued to evolve along a trajectory from an interpretive social science to one with a critical edge and then to what its founders call a "practical theory".
Aware that the intellectual footing for communication theory had shifted, the first phase of the CMM project involved developing concepts that met the twin criteria of (1) adequately expressing the richness of human communication and (2) guiding empirical investigation. Pearce describes the creation of CMM through the following story:
| ...I think that I am the first person ever to use the awkward phrase "coordinated management of meaning". Of course, tones of voice are often more informative than the verbal content of what is said, and struggle and frustration were expressed in the tones of voice in which "CMM" was first said. For years, I had been trying to bring together what I was learning from social science research, rhetorical studies, philosophy, theology, and, in my father's term, the "School of Hard Knocks". I felt that most of the models of communication that I knew were useful but that all were limited and limiting in some important ways, and that I had to invent something that was better.
Communication is about meaning,... but not just in a passive sense of perceiving messages. Rather, we live in lives filled with meanings and one of our life challenges is to manage those meanings so that we can make our social worlds coherent and live within them with honor and respect. But this process of managing our meanings is never done in isolation. We are always and necessarily coordinating the way we manage our meanings with other people. So, I concluded, communication is about the coordinated management of meaning. |
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— W. Barnett Pearce |
CMM is one of an increasing number of theories that see communication as "performative" (doing things, not just talking "about" them) and "constitutive" (the material substance of the social world, not just a means of transmitting information within it). In CMM-speak, "taking the communication perspective" means looking at communication rather than through it, and seeing communication as the means by which we make the objects and events of our social worlds.
The "communication perspective" entails a shift in focus from theory to praxis. CMM concepts and models are best understood as providing tools for naming aspects of performance. The hierarchy model of actors' meanings, for example, does not purport to describe a fixed number of levels or a necessary relationship among those levels. Rather, it serves to discipline and guide perception of the process of communication by asking: What stories are the communicators using to make sense of their experience and to guide their actions? How have the communicators sorted these stories out in terms of their relative importance in this specific situation? What changes in these stories themselves or in the pattern of context-and-contextualized stories occur during or as a consequence of coordinated actions with others?
To date, CMM has found greater acceptance among practitioners than among scholars. Taking the communication perspective confers something like communication literacy"—the ability to inscribe and read the complex process of communication in real time. Among other things, CMM's concepts and models guide practitioners in helping clients become aware of the patterns of communication which make up aspects of the social world that they want to change and help both clients and practitioners identify openings or "bifurcation points" in which changes in the way we communicate have large effects in the continuing process of making social worlds. Many CMM practitioners have an explicit commitment not only to describe and understand, but to improve the conditions in which they and those around them live. They believe that the best way of making better social worlds is to improve the patterns of communication which generates them. Pearce discusses this emphasis on making better social worlds in a video conversation with Em Griffin: CMM Video
CMM has guided research in an array of context and disciplines. Further discussion of CMM concepts and applications for research can be found at the following location: CMM Research
Read more about this topic: Coordinated Management Of Meaning
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