Boris H. J. M. Brummans (PhD, Texas A&M University, 2004) is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal in Canada. His research interests include agency, mindful organizing, organizational communication, organizational ethnography, process philosophy, and qualitative inquiry. He has contributed chapters to several edited books and his articles appear in peer-reviewed journals such as Academy of Management Review, Communication Monographs, Human Relations, Information, Communication & Society, Management Communication Quarterly, Organization Studies, and Qualitative Inquiry. His edited volume, The Agency of Organizing (Routledge), received the 2018 Outstanding Edited Book Award from the National Communication Association’s Organizational Communication Division, and he co-edited the first Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication, which received the same award in 2024. From 2015 to 2019, he served as an Associate Editor of Management Communication Quarterly. Moreover, he served as Chair of the International Communication Association’s Organizational Communication Division from 2022 to 2024.

My research interests fall into three subfields of communication, i.e.:

• organizational communication,
• analysis of social interactions
• and, more generally, communication theories.

My main interest concerns “organizing” phenomena and organizations’ ways of being and acting. I take a “constitutive” view aimed at showing that it is in and through communication that organization is created, in entrepreneurial, associative or humanitarian contexts. This view leads me to analyze social interactions. I explore, in particular, the way in which values, principles, norms and ideologies are expressed, applied and developed in our texts and conversations. In the end, all these interests lead me to revisit different traditions in communication research and to show how each one contributes, in its way, to developing a truly communication-based view of the world around us.

My research focuses on how communication processes shape and are shaped by collaboration practices across professional boundaries. More specifically, I study the role of communication in interprofessional collaboration in health care, both in primary and hospital care. I am particularly interested in how collaborators define the care situation and how they collectively navigate the multiple definitions that are often simultaneously at play, given differences in professional epistemology, organizational and institutional status, and relationship with patients. I am also interested in the role of the patient or client within the context of collaborative care.  

My research interests revolve around collaboration, in particular the role of technologies that organize and channel it. I explore the transformations brought about by the use of information and communication technologies in groups and organizations. I prefer to work on projects that bring together researchers from several disciplines. For instance, I am currently working with CIRST (Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et les technologies) researchers and with the Faculty of Environmental Design here at the Université de Montréal. I have a special interest in situations involving heterogeneous collaboration, where the participants are encouraged to share different types of expertise and viewpoints. My focus is on socio-technical innovation. At present this consists of a study of relationships and the circulation of knowledge between users and developers of Web 2.0 (participatory Web) technologies.

My research interests focus on deepening our understanding of how organisational members who do not interact regularly construct the meaning of their work, often in different ways. I am particularly interested in the experiences and organisational and occupational identities of persons who occupy hybrid public-private spaces, such as volunteers or workers who are employed and managed by an organisation yet work with aged persons in home-based care environments. I aim to show how the multiple meanings given to work and organisational experiences more generally can be mobilised as a resource for individuals who occupy a peripheral organisational position.

I also investigate how communicative processes, which create particular types of collective behaviour, can facilitate and constrain organisational participation. In particular, my research examines how discourses about professionalism combine with organisational control and coordination mechanisms to structure relationality in particular ways, often with the aim of increasing collaboration, and frequently minimising or suppressing dissent. To do so, I analyse how organisational members construct communities of practice by negotiating what ways of knowing and doing should be used to resolve organisational problems and what constitutes appropriate forms of interaction.

The general theme of my research is organizational communication, considered as an organizer and component of groups. Since this way of looking at communication itself calls for more detailed explanation, a first part of my research is theoretical in nature. I attempt to clarify the premises and concepts essential for an understanding of the constitutive dimensions of communication that in turn can explain the evolving, plural and hybrid realities that increasingly go into shaping contemporary organizations.

To complement this approach, I am also pursuing a program of empirical research that over the years has led me to many organizational and institutional fields. This second aspect of my research is driven by a growing interest in the communication issues and challenges raised by collaboration between various stakeholders, be it in “pluralist” organizations or in groups attempting to formulate or inform public policy. I am especially interested in the strategies by which the players and the groups, as part of such collaboration, describe and integrate their personal experiences and their frequently implicit local logic and knowledge, in their attempts to give a voice and legitimacy to their always specific relations with reality and their environment.