Property as interorganizational discourse: Rights in the politics of public spaces

In this article, I extend organization and communication theory to conceptualize property as an interorganizational discourse. As an analytic of discourse's capacity to gain and defend stakeholder rights in the public domain, property discourses provide a rigorous, language-centered approach to organizational conflict over environmental spaces by conceptualizing how material-symbolic tensions play out diachronically. I ground this theoretical terrain through a discourse analysis of a decade-long conflict over public lands in the southern part of the U.S. state of Utah. The case - Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument - constitutes a significant clash of politics between environmental preservation and extraction and especially what political regime ought to control roads accessing this 1.9-million-acre national monument. The analysis and interpretation indicate that property politics involve a complex interplay of symbolic and material forces among stakeholders. Conceptualized in this way property discourses provide considerable insight as many nations and societies face escalating struggles over increasingly scarce resources.