Organizational Communication

The term organizational communication denotes both a field of study and a set of empirical phenomena. The former is a largely US-based subdiscipline of the field of communication studies (though programs are being established in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Europe, and China); the latter refers broadly to the various and complex communication practices of humans engaged in collective, coordinated, and goal oriented behavior. In simple terms, organizational communication scholars study the dynamic relationships between communication processes and human organizing. Communication is conceived as foundational to, and constitutive of, organizations, while organizations are viewed as relatively enduring structures that are both medium and outcome of communication processes. While research has focused tradition ally on corporate organizational forms, recently the field has broadened its scope to study nonprofit and alternative organizations.

As a field of study, organizational communication differs in its intellectual origins and current disciplinary matrix from cognate fields such as management, organization studies, and organizational/industrial psychology, though it shares a number of research agendas with these fields. Based in the discipline of communication studies, organizational communication scholars draw on both social scientific and humanistic intellectual traditions, and share academic departments with rhetoricians, media scholars, social psychologists, and discourse analysts, to name a few.

Historical Overview

The historical emergence of organizational communication reflects its dual allegiance to both the social sciences and humanities, though it did not emerge as an identifiable field of study until the 1950s. Indeed, the term organizational communication did not become the accepted descriptor of the field until the late 1960s. In his history of the early decades of the field, Redding (1985) identifies its multiple and eclectic precursors, including classical rhetoric (particularly the Aristotelian tradition), business speech instruction, Dale Carnegie courses, early industrial psychology, and traditional management theory. However, Redding suggests that it was the ”triple alliance” of the military, industry, and academia during and immediately after World War II that laid the foundation for the development of a coherent and programmatic research agenda. This alliance emerged out of a need for wartime college courses in ”basic communication skills” for both military personnel and industrial workers. The task of teaching these courses fell mostly to English and speech (the latter the forerunner of communication programs) instructors, hence generating a network of scholars interested in communication in military and industrial settings. The establishment of a ”Training within Industry” program by the Manpower War Commission, part of which focused on training supervisors in human relations skills, further solidified the recognition that ”communication in industrial settings” was a legitimate focus of research.

Interestingly, Redding (1985) indicates that, for the most part, communication remained a rather peripheral organizational phenomenon for the already established social science disciplines such as industrial psychology, management, economics, sociology, and industrial relations. As such, they ceded the study of ”industrial communication” to nascent programs affiliated with speech (later, communication) departments. Hence, Redding identifies the 1950s as ”the decade of crystallization” during which a number of such dedicated programs were established; the ”founding” departments included those at Purdue University, Michigan State University, Ohio State University, Northwestern University, and the University of Southern California. Most of these programs adopted the moniker ”business and industrial communication” to describe their domain of study, reflecting both a focus on corporate settings and a strong managerial orientation toward research problems (an orientation also inherent in other organization related fields, of course). Thus, research agendas typically focused on demonstrating causality between communication processes and corporate efficiency and productivity, and covered topic areas such as diffusion of information, upward and down ward communication, communication networks, techniques for improving communication skills, and ”human relations” issues.

This research agenda remained fairly stable for more than two decades. Indeed, Goldhaber et al.’s (1978) ”state of the art” review of the field – called, simply, ”Organizational Communication: 1978” – identifies two broad areas of research: ”information flow” and ”perceptual/ attitudinal factors.” The former includes the study of communication networks, communication roles within those networks (liaisons, isolates, bridges, etc.), and channel and message features; the latter examines member perceptions of, for example, organizational climate, information adequacy, and job satisfaction. The review reflects the then dominance in the field of the ”systems” model, with its efforts to understand organizations as systems of interdependent practices engaged in information processing. Such research continued to have a distinctly managerial/corporate orientation, with focus on issues such as efficiency, productivity, employee retention, and human relations.

Goldhaber et al.’s review is an interesting historical document insofar as it presents a snapshot of a field that, just a few short years later, would look very different. In the early 1980s the rather circumscribed research agenda that Goldhaber et al. describe gave way to a more ecumenical approach to organizational communication. This broader agenda is rather neatly summarized by Pacanowsky and O’Donnell Trujillo’s (1982: 116) claim that ”more things are going on in organizations than getting the job done … People in organizations also gossip, joke, knife one another, initiate romantic involvements … talk sports, arrange picnics.” Variously identified as the cultural, interpretive, or meaning centered approach, this research took seriously the idea that everyday ”informal” communication practices are the very stuff of organizing. While earlier research rather assumed ”organization” as a given and thus studied communication as a variable that occurred in organizations, the interpretive perspective removed the ”variable” tag, privileging communication as constitutive of organizing.

Probably the most significant impetus behind this ”interpretive shift” was a series of conferences in Alta, Utah, beginning in 1981 and devoted to this nascent research agenda. A number of important publications emerged from the first such conference, including (perhaps most significantly) Putnam and Pacanowsky’s edited volume, Communication and Organizations: An Interpretive Approach (1983), and a special (1982) issue of the Western Journal of Speech Communication devoted to interpretive organizational communication research. While by no means unified in their characterizations of this approach, all of the essays in these two publications took seriously the idea that communication created organizations, conceived as complex systems of meaning.

Examined more closely, this turn toward meaning centered scholarship reveals the emergence of three distinct yet related approaches to the relationship between communication and organizing. First, interpretive studies drew on both the ”linguistic turn” in continental philosophy, including hermeneutics and phenomenology, with its ”anti representational” view of language as the medium of experience rather than expression, and Geertz’s development in his classic Interpretation of Cultures of an interpretive anthropology that situates meaning as a public, semiotic, communicative – rather than cognitive or structural – phenomenon. In Geertz’s view, the study of culture involves the creation of ”thick descriptions” that unpack the relationship between everyday communication practices and collective sense making and meaning construction. Second, critical studies articulated together three research traditions-hermeneutics and phenomenology, Marxism and critical theory, and Freudian theory – to examine the relationships among communication, power, and organization. This scholarship argued that while interpretive research appropriately focused on how organization members collectively constructed systems of meaning, it overlooked the extent to which such meanings were the product of largely hidden, ”deep structure” power relations that systematically distorted meaning construction processes to favor dominant power interests. Third, rhetorical studies brought together developments in continental philosophy with classical rhetoric in the Aristotelian tradition to explore processes of persuasion in organizational settings. Here, the focus was on examination of how organizational rhetoric can produce worker identification with organization values, inculcate decision premises in members through enthymematic corporate discourse, and function as a form of unobtrusive control.

Of course, this ”interpretive turn” by no means signaled a complete, overnight paradigm revolution in theory development and research in organizational communication. Indeed, Putnam and Cheney’s (1985) overview of the field identifies the four principal ”research traditions” in the field as the study of communication channels, communication climate, organizational networks, and superior-subordinate communication. At the same time, they designate information processing, rhetorical studies, culture studies, and power and politics (i.e., critical studies) as ”new directions.” In this sense, the 1980s and 1990s represented a period of ferment when the newly emergent approaches competed with the long established research traditions over what counted as legitimate ways of conceptualizing and studying organizational communication. At the center of these debates were questions not only about appropriate methods, theory development, and so forth, but also about the ontological status of organizations as communication phenomena; that is, do they have real, material features independent of human sense making and communicative practice, or are organizations reducible to systems of socially constructed meanings?

In the last few years this ferment has given way somewhat to a recognition that the study of organizational communication benefits from an exploration of both the connections and tensions between and among theoretical perspectives. As such, organizational communication as a field of study has developed an interdisciplinary identity that is home to diverse theoretical perspectives and epistemological assumptions, including (post)positivism, realism, interpretivism, rhetoric, critical theory, postmodernism and post structuralism, feminism, and postcolonialism. In this sense, organizational communication at the beginning of the twenty first century can be characterized as a multi perspective field that is ecumenical in its approach to methods, theories, research domains, and philosophical assumptions. The rather fractured, polarized debates of the 1980s and 1990s about ”paradigm incommensurability” have developed into, if not paradigm consensus (a condition that no one really considers desirable), a recognition that different epistemologies represent different resources upon which scholars can draw to address the relationship between communication and organization (Corman & Poole 2000).

Current Theories, Constructs, and Research Agendas

Taylor et al.’s (2001) overview of organizational communication research provides some sense of the major transformations that the field has undergone in the last 25 years or so. Indeed, in juxtaposing Goldhaber et al. and Taylor et al.’s reviews, it is difficult to believe that the respective authors are – at least ostensibly – addressing the same field of study. Of course, in many respects they are not. If Thomas Kuhn is correct in asserting that, post paradigm revolution, scholars are not just looking through a new lens but viewing a transformed world, then the field of organizational communication is the product of its own Copernican revolution. A brief enumeration of the theories and topics addressed in Taylor et al.’s review provides some sense of the scope and diversity of the field’s current research agenda. Their review includes discussion of interpretivism and its various iterations (rhetoric, critical theory, feminism, postmodernism), ethnography, structuration theory, activity theory, artificial intelligence, the symbolic-material dialectic, and diversity in organizations. Emergent topics they identify include expanding our notion of what counts as an organizational form to include global, network, virtual, nonprofits, cooperatives, etc.; relationships among technology, organizations, and society; group based structures (often mediated by communication technology); new forms of leader ship; organizational change; new iterations of network research; the relationship between work and non-work domains; organizational ethics; and the connection between local and global organizational forms.

Of course, there are important continuities between organizational communication circa 1978 and 2006. In general, while it no longer enjoys the hegemony it once did, there is still a healthy and vibrant (post)positivist research tradition in organizational communication that both captures the complex dynamics of communication practices and situates that complexity within a concern for the ongoing stability and reproducibility of organizations as social structures. For example, the concern with organizations as social structures is still evidenced in the systems approach to organizing, with its focus on interdependence and collective, goal oriented behavior; in this regard, network research is still a mainstay of the field. However, the progeny of 1960s and 1970s network research bears only passing resemblance to its forebears, with its current investigation of semantic and relational networks, and employment of chaos theory and principles of self-organizing systems. Furthermore, Monge’s (1982) critique of the disjuncture between the process orientation of systems theory and the rather static, reductive empirical methods used to study organizations has led to efforts to develop analytic techniques, including computational analysis, that better capture the dynamic character of these systems features (Monge & Contractor 2003). In addition, leader ship research still enjoys considerable currency, though again scholarly focus has shifted from efforts to identify leadership as an individual trait, style, etc., toward more discursively oriented models that see leadership as a communicative, interaction based phenomenon that is more widely distributed in organizational life.

One interesting measure of both continuity and discontinuity across decades involves a comparison of the first (1987) and second (2001) editions of The Handbook of Organizational Communication. In both editions, chapters are allocated to leadership; information technology and information processing; organizational culture; communication networks; organizational structure; organizational entry, assimilation and exit; decision making; and power and politics. Chapters new to the 2001 edition are discourse analysis; quantitative methods; qualitative methods; globalization; organizational learning; communication competence; organizational identity; new media; and participation. One might claim, then, that there is every bit as much continuity as change over the last 20 years of theory development and research. It is also true, however, that while research domains evince much continuity, approaches to these domains have shifted a good deal, especially given developments in the various meaning based approaches to organizational communication. Clearly, in a short space it is not possible to provide a complete overview of the current and diverse state of organizational communication research. However, a few key issues, trends, and theoretical developments are worth noting.

First, from a disciplinary perspective, there is a distinct and ongoing effort to constitute the field as simultaneously unique in its approach to organizing and interdisciplinary, with connections to management, organizational sociology, industrial psychology, and so forth. For example, in an effort to develop a distinctly communication based approach to organizing, Deetz (1996) developed a critique of Burrell and Morgan’s classic book Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis (1979) and its widely adopted meta theoretical framework. He argued that while Burrell and Morgan provided a useful way of making sense of the field of organizational sociology, they ultimately led organizational communication scholars down a conceptual cul de sac. Deetz claimed that their characterization of all sociological paradigms as either subjective or objective in their approach to knowledge generation had the dual – and contradictory – effect of (a) providing a space for critical interpretive scholars to argue for the legitimacy of their approach, and (b) preserving the “subjective’ Vobjective” split that ensured the continued hegemony of variable analytic (“objective”) research and the “othering” of critical interpretive (“subjective”) studies. A communication based approach, Deetz suggested, refuses the subject-object dichotomy inherent in Burrell and Morgan’s model, and instead positions communication as the constitutive process through which claims for subjectivity or objectivity even become possible. As such, the study of organizations is less about the relative merits of “subjective” and “objective” epistemologies, methodologies, and so forth, and more about understanding how different perspectives discursively construct the phenomenon being studied. For example, according to Deetz, interpretive studies discursively construct social actors and their own discourse as central to knowledge formation, while normative/social science research views the a priori development and subsequent testing of concepts through study of social actors’ behavior as central to the knowledge construction process.

Deetz’s efforts to develop a communication based framework for making sense of organizational communication studies is one among several efforts to frame organizational communication scholarship from within the field itself, rather than relying on concepts, theories, and perspectives developed in cognate disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and management. While Redding (1985) is certainly correct that other fields largely ceded the study of ”communication in organizations” to researchers in the field of communication, nevertheless organizational communication researchers have had a hard time developing a body of research that is not derivative of perspectives long established in those other fields. However, current research has shifted significantly toward communication analyses of organizational phenomena, rather than, say, psychologically or sociologically based analyses of ”communication in organizations.” A number of those efforts are addressed below.

Second, advances in communication technology (CT) in the last 20 years or so have profoundly influenced how organization members engage in information processing and decision making. Organizational communication scholars have developed a significant body of scholarship that addresses these effects, focusing on how CT has reconfigured the organizing process in important ways. While early research tended to be instrumental in its approach, examining CT as “hardware” that users appropriated as an aid to information processing, more recent scholarship has adopted a more meaning centered approach, examining the social construction of CT by organization members. Thus, rather than asking, ”How is CT used by organization members?” the defining question for organizational communication researchers has been, ”What does CT mean for organization members?” For example, Poole, DeSanctis, and colleagues have developed adaptive structuration theory (drawing on Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory) to study the interaction between group decision making and CT. Their development and study of group decision support systems -the use of CT to improve participation in collective decision making – illustrates how, over time, groups adapt CT to their own particular use, constructing it not as determining group decisions, but rather as medium and outcome of the emergent group decision making dynamic. In this sense, CT is socially constructed as a set of rules and resources that both enables and constrains decision making processes. Communication scholars therefore resist a determinist view of either the features or social uses of technologies. Studies of CT have also spawned a large body of research on new modes of organizing, including the emergence of online communities, and virtual worlds and identities (through online gaming, role playing, blogging, etc.). In related fashion, researchers have also examined how advances in CT have challenged basic ideas of organizations as having distinct ”internal” and ”external” communication processes. For example, research on telecommuting has made problematic traditional conceptions of employee identification with and socialization into organizations. In addition, research on the linkages between ”internal” practices of communication and patterns in advertising, public relations, and marketing has played an important role in moving the field beyond the ”container” metaphor of organization.

Third, the study of organizations as communicative sites of power and politics has become a ubiquitous feature of the field. While early post interpretive turn research drew largely on the tradition of Marxism and Frankfurt School critical theory, the last 15 years has witnessed a broadening of perspectives to include feminist, poststructuralist, and postmodern thought. Research motivated by the critical tradition has focused largely on the connections among communication, ideology, and power, exploring how the process of organizing is inflected with deep structure relations of power that are obscured in the very process of (ideological) meaning construction. In this context, critical organizational communication scholars have explored a variety of discursive phenomena such as stories, metaphors, everyday talk, rituals, and so forth, to examine how particular interests and power relations are ideologically secured, contradictions hidden, and certain social realities reified. A related research agenda takes up philosopher Jurgen Habermas’s critical project, addressing the ways that the privileging of technical forms of organizational rationality produce systematically distorted communication and discursive closure (”corporate colonization”) that limit possibilities for alternative ways of thinking about, experiencing, and valuing the organizing process. Two related outcomes of this work are an ongoing concern with theorizing models of organizational democracy, and a focus on corporate ethics and social responsibility (a focus that has intensified in the wake of publicity surrounding the exposure of corporate malfeasance).

In recent years critical organization studies has come under increasing criticism and scrutiny for both its rather gender blind approach to power and politics and for its rather undifferentiated conception of the everyday dynamics of organizational power. Since the early 1990s, then, a number of scholars have actively taken up a variety of feminist perspectives to explore organizational communication as a ”gendered” practice. While it is not possible here to differentiate among these feminisms, many share a concern with viewing gender as a constitutive feature of organizing; examining everyday work place struggles as a gendered process; exploring the mundane production of masculine and feminine workplace identities; examining hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy as endemic features of organizational life; and deconstructing the gendered features of mainstream organizational theory. Postmodern and poststructuralist analytics have provided a similar impetus in providing alternative readings of 3296 organizational communication/organizational power. Motivated in particular by the work of Michel Foucault, communication researchers have examined organizations as sites of disciplinary practice that employ various technologies of power to produce identities, docile bodies, and normalized discourses. The shift is thus away from a view of power as repressive, negative, and inimical to emancipation and social transformation, and toward one in which power and knowledge intersect to create the very possibility of particular identities, modes of truth, ways of speaking, and so forth.

More recently, the intersection of feminist and poststructuralist thought has drawn attention to organizations as gendered sites of both disciplinary practice and everyday struggles of resistance. While early critical research tended toward rather non dialectical accounts of organizational power as monolithic and inescapable, current research has shifted toward exploration of the fissures, gaps, and contradictions of daily organizing that belie the apparent seamlessness of managerial control efforts. Here, discourse and all forms of symbolic action are conceived as latent or actual resources that employees strategically utilize in carving out spaces of resistance, hence limiting the reach of corporate colonization. A key element of this research, then, is the ”return of the subject”; that is, an effort to theorize more adequately the role of agency – both individual and collective – in mediating the effects of corporate control processes. Much of this research has adopted a poststructuralist feminist perspective, examining the dialectical relationship between the discursive production of gendered organizational subjects, or identities, and the ways that subjects subversively appropriate these same discourses in order to construct resistant and alternative organizational realities.

Fourth, and related, organizational communication scholars have begun to treat seriously the issue of organizational diversity, particularly as it relates to matters of ”voice.” For the most part, this effort has moved beyond the question of ”managing diversity” – an approach that some scholars have critiqued as a primarily management defined effort to ”deal” with the ”problem” of diversity in the workplace. In contrast, organizational communication scholars have examined diversity in terms of the ways in which issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality are organized into or out of both organizational theory and research and daily organizing processes. For example, scholars have explored the ways that research on organizational socialization implicitly organizes difference out of the socialization process. Researchers have also begun to examine the body and sexuality as both a target of organizational discipline and a locus for transgression and resistance. Extended further, the issue of voice relates also to what ”counts” as appropriate organizations to study. Increasingly, organizational communication scholars are expanding their domains of study to address organizing in alternative con texts and structures, including nonprofits, collectives, NGOs, and so forth. In this context, researchers are interested in studying communication as both medium and outcome of issues such as alternative forms of decision making, organizational ethics, and systems of empowerment. In general, the focus on issues of voice has enabled organizational communication scholars to move beyond rather narrow, managerialist definitions of organizational life.

Fifth, organizational communication scholars have contributed to the ongoing, interdisciplinary debate over the relationship between discourse and organizations. One of the con sequences of this scholarship has been to challenge the stability of the very idea of ”organization.” While for decades scholars have presumed the existence of ”the organization,” focusing research efforts on communication ”within” this stable structure, one current focus lies in exploring the precarious, contingent features of organizing as a moment to moment process shot through with ambiguity. In particular, the ”Montreal School” of Jim Taylor and his colleagues have articulated together a number of different theoretical perspectives, including ordinary language philosophy (Austin, Searle, Greimas), the actor network theory of Bruno Latour, and complexity theory, as a means of explaining organizing as a dialectic of conversation and text that implicates social actors in a continuous but never resolvable search for closure and stability. Much of this work intersects with efforts in both management and organization studies to grapple with the discourse-material dialectic; that is, what are the implications of characterizing organizations as purely contingent, discursive constructions on the one hand, or as having stable, material, ”extra discursive” features on the other hand? For example, does the ”organization as discourse” perspective underplay the role and impact of economic conditions on organizational life? On the other hand, if we view organizations as ”extra discursive,” do we obscure the ways in which even the most apparently ”material” features of organizing (e.g., economic conditions) are made sense of and constructed as meaningful through discourse?

Sixth, organizational communication scholars have turned to examinations of the relationship between globalization and organizing. Not only is the very notion of ”organization” being brought under scrutiny, but researchers are also challenging the view of the organization as a fixed, physical site that one ”enters” and ”exits.” This rather parochial conception is giving way to a view of organizing as recursively related to processes of globalization. Thus, issues such as the compression of space and time, the fragmentation of identities, increased levels of worker mobility, shifts toward outsourcing and use of temporary employees, the disintegration of local communities, effects of branding, the homogenization of cultures, and so forth, are being studied increasingly in terms of a dialectic between local, micro level communication processes and global, macro level movements of information, people, money, etc. This research further redirects our attention to organizations as nodal points of shifting, temporarily stable discursive practices that are increasingly susceptible to the forces of globalization and that, in turn, shape the globalization process. As such, organizational communication scholars increasingly are eschewing treating organizations as if they are self-contained, hermetically sealed entities, and instead contextualizing analyses within larger, macro level social, political, and economic processes.

The above discussion necessarily paints a picture of the field of organizational communication with a very broad brush. Theoretical nuances are glossed, lines of inquiry are collapsed together, and some research perspectives are overlooked. These limitations notwithstanding, the primary goal of this overview has been to provide a broad sense of the important questions, assumptions, and perspectives that drive research in the field.

Future Directions

There is a strong sense in which the future of organizational communication research inheres in the present. Given the shift toward epistemological plurality in the last few years, it seems clear that the seeds of future research agendas are already sown and budding. First, while organizational communication studies has always been strongly interdisciplinary, the reciprocal nature of the ties to other fields – sometimes tenuous – appears to be strengthening. In particular, its connections to both management and organization studies have become particularly dynamic. For example, there is a great deal of cross pollination between critical scholars in organizational communication and in critical management studies, particularly between those investigating the relations among power, discourse, and organizing. Furthermore, the organizational communication and information systems division of the Academy of Management brings together both communication and management scholars examining CT, communication networks, virtual organizing, and so forth. Such collaborative efforts can only serve to promote interdisciplinary research and the sharing of perspectives, resources, and ideas.

Second, drawing on insights from feminism and post structuralism, organizational communication researchers will continue to destabilize the notion that organizations are neutral with regard to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Scholars are becoming increasingly sensitized to the idea that organizations are raced, sexed, classed, and gendered institutions that are both medium and outcome of member subjectivities. In this sense, focus will continue on the myriad ways in which difference is organized, normalized, works transgressively, and so forth. From a communication perspective, researchers explore identities as performed and embodied through various symbolic and discursive practices.

Third, research on organizational communication will increasingly turn its efforts to capturing the in situ, moment to moment, everyday communication practices of organization members. For much of its history the field of organizational communication has been content to rely on paper and pencil, self-report instruments that, while producing data susceptible to careful measurement, have largely overlooked the complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities of actual organizational behavior. While qualitative research methods are typically associated with the study of real time human organizing, quantitative researchers are also developing tools that better capture the ongoing, processual features of organizational life.

Fourth, the shift toward viewing organizations as changing, dynamic, permeable sites of discourse will continue apace. This has several implications for future research, in addition to the ones addressed above. For example, it suggests a need to further explore the relationship between work and other domains, such as home and the wider community. As the separation between corporations and these other realms becomes increasingly fragile, it is important to understand the effects of such shifts on individual identities, conceptions of democracy, what counts as private or public, definitions of both work and leisure, and so forth. If organizations are simultaneously both more pervasive in their effects on human community and less easily identifiable as empirical phenomena with clear boundaries, then it is increasingly important that the field of organizational communication develop perspectives and research agendas that can adequately investigate these effects.

Fifth, and related, the study of alternative forms of organizing will continue apace. This will involve not only the study of non-corporate organizations, but also the exploration of organizing processes where there is no identifiable organizational “site.” As mentioned earlier, there is a vibrant and growing body of research that examines virtual organizing; organizational communication scholars are well placed to study how the development of such organizing structures shapes human identity, enables the development of new discursive practices, and influences participation in public discourse and decision making.

In sum, organizational communication is, by most standards, a young field that has only just passed its 50th birthday. While it has sometimes struggled to establish an independent identity, it has developed into a vibrant, dynamic research community that has added much to our understanding of the organizational form -a social structure that has, arguably, been the defining institution of modernity over the last 100 years or so.

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