What Do Corporations Want? Corporate Purpose, Branding, and Authority in a Startup Accelerator

Tim Kuhn has worked extensively with the CCO-perspective (Communication and Constitutive of Organization), with the constitution of authority and agency in organizations, and with a new theory of the firm, among other things. 

Abstract

“Purpose” has become a battleground for contemporary corporations. Indeed, a common refrain among scholars and practitioners alike is that the key problem facing the firm is the development and pursuit of a purpose—a singular purpose—compelling to its multiple audiences. Yet the forces of late capitalism push firms toward forms of wanting that oversimplify purpose and interfere with what those firms need to become to meet their multiple aims. I argue that understanding corporations’ pursuit of purpose requires that we see them not as stable entities, but as complex communication practices continually bound up in struggles over meaning and action. Corporations’ wanting is, therefore, an ongoing site of contestation. Drawing on a unique combination of Communicative Constitution of Organization and a Deleuzian version of new materialism, this talk articulates a novel stance on how corporate purposes result from “authoritative texts” that encode the promises of value and claims to property that are central to firms’ existence and operations. Through a case study of a high-tech entrepreneurship accelerator, I show how firms’ efforts to order themselves via a unitary purpose paradoxically disorders both their practices and future possibilities. This disorder is not necessarily dysfunctional, however: it can foster new forms of imagination for both firms and analysts’ engagement with them.