User:Hcornwell25/Coordinated management of meaning: Difference between revisions

Coordinated management of meaning (CMM), in the social sciences, provides an understanding of how individuals create, coordinate and manage meanings in their process of communication. According to Introducing Communications Theories, CMM is “how individuals establish rules for creating and interpreting the meaning and how those rules are enmeshed in a conversation where meaning is constantly being coordinated.” Adding to that, other researchers state CMM is where “human communication is viewed as a flexible, open and mutable process evolving in an ongoing joint interaction, which enables movement, shifts and evolving ways with each other”. CMM, from these definitions, is where interpersonal connection and open conversation among individuals or groups can be applicable across multiple academic fields and social scenarios.

In simple terms, CMM is how people manage and process the way they communicate with others.

CMM is complex with a variety of definitions. Some state that CMM is “a multi-level structural theory in which rules describe the movement or linkages among meanings and actions. From the perspective of CMM, it’s two persons conversing compromise on an interpersonal system with two interpersonal component systems”. Pearce and Cronen offer CMM to be “encouraging us to look at the process of communication and the ways meaning is made. We are encouraged to think about the ways that we might act in a critical moment”. Some researchers have said that CMM establishes a communication standpoint that invites others to collaborate in discovering new meanings as they work together to arrive at a shared viewpoint in order to move forward. Essentially, CMM also is a “theory of social construction that posits how we create our relationships and even the world itself through communication. It is complex and includes ideas of coherence and mystery”. The data and information shared between two parties are visually and socially understood through the “hierarchies and coordination of the meanings in our messages”.

People live in a world where there is constant communication. In communicating with others, people assign meanings in their messages based on past conversational experiences from previous social realities. Through communication, an underlying process takes place in which individuals negotiate common or conflicting meanings of the world around them, thereby creating a new social reality. CMM advocates that meanings can be managed in a productive way so as to improve the state of interactions by coordinating and managing the meaning-making process. It is an “interpersonal theory that describes causal forces in a conversation in two forces: logical force and practical force. Assuming that people transform sensory perceptions into implications for meaning and action, and that the process for this transformation may be usefully described in terms of the actors’ rules”.

Our social world can be understood through the practice of CMM through “managing our meanings in our messages based off our values”. It is “our task in interactions to actively manage the meanings that make up our lives and to co-ordinate these with meanings to others, to bring coherence to our social world”. There is high importance also on the “processes between people take the form of rule-governed patterns of interactions and that there is logic to the way the we act in communication”. There are also rules and stigmas that vary in cultures when we disclose information or communicate in the ways we are socially taught when assigning meaning to our messages that CMM designs to take into consideration. This is where messages in communication can have disparities in their meaning due to cross-cultural or contextual disclosure differences in how we communicate. More information is covered in the three elements.

CMM relies on three interdependent elements: coordination, management, and meaning. These elements help to explain how social realities are created through conversation and further applications and models listed below.

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