A number of organizational communication analysts have argued that the field is in the midst of a paradigm shift, away from a strictly rational to a more transactional view of organization, but their arguments are not situated in a well-explicated communication theory. This paper argues for the existence of two, mutually exclusive worldviews of organization and communication, one heteronomous, the other autonomous. A heteronomous model views organization as responding to an environment and communication as the exchange of information. An autonomous model assumes organization to be generative of its own structures, through a reflexive process of self-production. The resulting "cell" of talk, in the autonomous model, is a conversation. The paper explores, through the mechanism of speech acts, the reflexive properties of human conversation, and its capacities to generate those relational properties that are associated with organization. The phenomenon of coupling and its organizational implications are briefly explored. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of how to revise organizational communication analysts' ideas about the conduct of communication research, calling for the building of a body of research that starts from a discourse-based accumulation in solid empirical studies. Includes 21 notes and 3 figures illustrating various aspects of organizational communication. Contains 84 references. (Author/RS)