CMM - Nino Soria de Veyra

Talking our world into realities that shape us, part 2

You might want to visit this site by Richard W. Dillman, called the Happy Fun Communication Land. It presents a very interesting explanation of W. Barnett Pearce and Vernon Cronen's Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM).

CMM whole model

Pearce and Cronen argue that “persons-in-conversation co-construct their own social realities and are simultaneously shaped by the worlds they create” (Griffin 69). They look at individuals as social constructionists creating their narratives, their realities, “strange loops,” and dialogic communication.

Pearce and Cronen present the following theoretical tenets undergirding CMM (Griffin 70-71):

“The experience of persons-in-conversation is the primary social process of human life”
“The way people communicate is often more important than the content of what they say” (logic of meaning and action)
“The actions of persons-in-conversation are reflexively reproduced as the interaction continues”
“As social constructionists, CMM researchers see themselves as curious participants in a pluralistic world”

CMM theorists differentiates between (Griffin 72-73):

“Stories lived” – co-constructed actions performed with others
“Stories told” – individual stories open to interpretation, with stories embedded in multiple contexts or frames (episode, relationship, identity, culture)

These frames are defined as (Griffin 74-75):

"An episode is a communication routine that has boundaries and rules -- a recurrent language game."
"[T]he relationship between persons-in-conversation suggests how a speech act might be interpreted."
Speech acts between persons-in-conversation are always interpreted by the other in terms of each person's identity or self-concept.
"[T]he term culture describes webs of shared meanings and values, [and so] people who come from different cultures won't interpret messages exactly the same way."

For CMM theorists, “coordination” is the fitting of stories lived with other’s stories lived, and the “management of meaning” as the adjusting of stories told with stories lived, and vice versa.

CMM is usually critiqued for the following characteristics:

Wide scope
Imprecise and confusing definitions of concepts
Jargon (left out here, but a sample of which includes: constitutive rules, regulative rules, reconstructed context, gamemastery, grammars, the daisy model, the LUUUTT model, etc.)

Topics

Orientation
Theory in Communication

Interpersonal Communication Theories

Group and Public Communication Theories

Functional Perspective on Group Decision Making
Adaptive Structuration Theory
Rhetoric
Dramatism
Narrative Paradigm
Speech Codes Theory

Organizational Communication Theories

Bormann’s Symbolic Convergence Theory
Information Systems Approach to Organizations
Cultural Approach to Organizations
Critical Theory of Communication Approach to Organizations
Anxiety/Uncertainty Management Theory
Face-Negotiation Theory

Media Theories

Semiotics
Media Ecology
Cultural Studies
Cultivation Theory
Agenda-Setting Theory
Spiral of Silence

Integration

Coordinated Management of Meaning by Nino Soria de Veyra is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.