College essay: Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM)


Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM)
Of W. Barnett Pearce and Vernon Cronen

Review

The author starts this chapter by telling us about the pioneers of the CMM theory (Pearce and Cronen) and how they were considering it as a critical theory the in the mid-1990s they emphasized that the CMM is also a practical theory which helps in interpreting and get fully understand the way in which social realities are crafted through communication.




Em elaborated more in this theory throughout its aspects examining how Pearce and Cronen tried hard to elucidate that this theory helps in making the life of the others better, they put it in practice on the example of a child having an Asperser’s Syndrome and how the cultural belief interfere to affect his parents behavior toward their child if he has that Syndrome or just pretending which puts them in a nonstop circle of behaviors which Pearce and Cronen call “the strange loop”. Along with that, in the second story of the first section, which is about the married couple who are stuck in a forever fight which led them to the court, we observe how each one of them was interpreting the actions of the other in his own subsystem. However, the author gives more importance to the Cupertino Community project to clarify how professionals use CMM ideas. In this project Cupertino trained facilitators to manage groups discussion that are consisting from variable ethnicities and races to listen and speak without making the other adopt any offensive idea from the speech he is listening to by using the concept of “dialogic communication” which stands for: a conversation in which people speak in a manner that makes others want to listen and vise versa.




Em jumped to discussing how Pearce and Cronen see this theory as an interpretive one saying that the users of the CMM theory consider themselves as social constructionists, which means that they are capable of interpret and construct the social reality they are living in. this theory stipulates that persons-in-conversation co-construct their social realities and shaped by the world they are creating, this means that only through conversation and communication all people are able to craft their social world. This theory is depending on four main aspects. First, the experience of persons-in-conversation in the primary social process of the human life. Second the way people communicate is often more important than the content of what they say. Third, the actions of persons-in-conversation are reflexively reproduced as interaction continues. The fourth and the last aspect is that social constructionists, CMM researchers see themselves as curious participants in a pluralistic world.
Throughout this chapter, Pearce and Cronen has given us stories of people as an example of how professionals use the idea of CMM, but the difference between the stories we told and the stories we lived and how they affect our co-existing is that through the ones we told we make meaning and the hierarchy of meaning we construct makes a big difference in the interpretation of others to the story. Through the story of the couple (Peter and Anne) Pearce and Cronen tried to illustrate to us the sequence of each one in a different order which is consisting of the following: Act Speech, Episode, Relationship, Identity and Culture.




Moreover, the pioneers of this theory elucidate through the Cupertino Community Project how persons with different backgrounds, beliefs, principles, races and ethnicities can decide to coordinate their behavior without sharing a common interpretation of the event. So CMM suggests that people may synchronize their actions even if they don’t share the other’s motives. More than that, the CMM theory can help in spotting the harmful from the helpful style of communication since it insists on the way not the content providing tools for understanding how people interpret their social realities. In the end of this chapter, the author points out that the CMM theory can be practiced from three major angles. it can be utilize as an interpretive theory, a critical theory and a practical theory.

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