TY - JOUR
T1 - Transnational immanence
T2 - The autopoietic co-constitution of a Chinese spiritual organization through mediated communication
AU - Cheong, Pauline
AU - Hwang, Jennie M.
AU - Brummans, Boris H J M
N1 - Funding Information:
Please direct all correspondences to Pauline.cheong@asu.edu. We are grateful for the support provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as the A.T. Steel Faculty grant award, Center for Asian Research, Arizona State University. We would like to acknowledge the kind participation of the research interviewees. In addition, we would like to thank James Taylor and Robert McPhee for helpful comments on an earlier draft which was presented at the 2012 meeting of the National Communication Association in Orlando, FL., as well as the editor and anonymous reviewers for their insightful recommendations on our paper.
Funding Information:
Another example of this autopoietic co-constitution was provided by the director of Tzu Chi’s internet radio department. At the time of our research, the organization was in the midst of organizing the theatrical adaptation of the ‘Water Repentance’ text to show how ‘human beings have created negative karma as a result of their afflictions and inner impurities and urge all to sincerely reflect and repent’ (Tzu Chi Foundation, 2011b, para. 1). Referring to this major event, the director stated:
Funding Information:
The research for this article was part of a four-year, multidisciplinary, naturalistic study (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada and the A. T. Steel faculty grant, Center for Asian Research, Arizona State University. This study investigates Buddhist organizing via multiple methods, including extensive archival and literature research, interviewing, participant and nonparticipant observation, and the systematic analysis of the Tzu Chi website and social media interactions. For this article, we triangulated interview and online data (Markham & Baym, 2009) because it allowed us to develop a rich set of complementary insights into Tzu Chi’s transnational co-constitution.
PY - 2014/1
Y1 - 2014/1
N2 - Information and communication technologies are often cited as one major source, if not the causal vector, for the rising intensity of transnational practices. Yet, extant literature has not examined critically how digital media appropriation affects the constitution of transnational organizations, particularly Chinese spiritual ones. To address the lack of theoretically grounded, empirical research on this question, this study investigates how the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation (Tzu Chi), one of the largest Taiwan-based civil and spiritual nonprofit organizations among the Chinese diaspora, is co-constituted by various social actors as an operationally closed system through their mediated communication. Based on an innovative theoretical framework that combines Maturana and Varela's notion of 'autopoiesis' with Cooren's ideas of 'incarnation' and 'presentification', we provide a rich analysis of Tzu Chi's co-constitution through organizational leaders' appropriation of digital and social media, as well as through mediated interactions between Tzu Chi's internal and external stakeholders. In so doing, our research expands upon the catalogue of common economic and relational behaviors by overseas Chinese, advances our understanding of Chinese spiritual organizing, and reveals the contingent role of digital and social media in engendering transnational spiritual ties to accomplish global humanitarian work.
AB - Information and communication technologies are often cited as one major source, if not the causal vector, for the rising intensity of transnational practices. Yet, extant literature has not examined critically how digital media appropriation affects the constitution of transnational organizations, particularly Chinese spiritual ones. To address the lack of theoretically grounded, empirical research on this question, this study investigates how the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation (Tzu Chi), one of the largest Taiwan-based civil and spiritual nonprofit organizations among the Chinese diaspora, is co-constituted by various social actors as an operationally closed system through their mediated communication. Based on an innovative theoretical framework that combines Maturana and Varela's notion of 'autopoiesis' with Cooren's ideas of 'incarnation' and 'presentification', we provide a rich analysis of Tzu Chi's co-constitution through organizational leaders' appropriation of digital and social media, as well as through mediated interactions between Tzu Chi's internal and external stakeholders. In so doing, our research expands upon the catalogue of common economic and relational behaviors by overseas Chinese, advances our understanding of Chinese spiritual organizing, and reveals the contingent role of digital and social media in engendering transnational spiritual ties to accomplish global humanitarian work.
KW - Asia
KW - Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation
KW - Taiwan
KW - authority
KW - autopoiesis
KW - communicative constitution of organizations
KW - information and communication technologies
KW - nonprofit
KW - social media
KW - transnationalism
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U2 - 10.1080/1369118X.2013.833277
DO - 10.1080/1369118X.2013.833277
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84889573804
SN - 1369-118X
VL - 17
SP - 7
EP - 25
JO - Information Communication and Society
JF - Information Communication and Society
IS - 1
ER -