Origins and Traditions of Organizational Communication

A Comprehensive Introduction to the Field

Anne M. Nicotera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138570306
• eBook ISBN: 9781351336277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Origins and Traditions of Organizational Communication provides a sophisticated overview of the fundamentals of organizational communication as a field of study, examining the field's foundations and providing an assessment of the field to date, explaining and demonstrating a communicational approach to the study of organization.

It provides a set of literature reviews on focused topics written by experts in each area, and links organizational communication theory and research to practice. In reviewing foundational management theory, the book analyzes how early to mid-20th-century management theories shaped contemporary organizations, providing students both with background knowledge of these foundational theories and an understanding of their influence on our thinking and our organizational world.

Written at an accessible level for early graduate students, yet still sophisticated enough for doctoral students, the book is ideal for students and teachers of organizational communication and communication history.

Downloadable ancillary materials include chapter PowerPoints and a set of instructors' materials containing chapter abstracts, glossaries, discussion questions, annotated supplementary readings lists, and practitioners' corners. Please visit www.routledge.com/9781138570313.

Part I

Organizational Communication History

In this section, the origins and history of the field of communication are summarized, providing a comprehensive overview of the field from its inception to the present. Chapter 1 defines the field and its fundamental concepts and explains the emergence of the field in the context of the emergence of communication studies in general. A set of conceptual models (applied throughout the book) are presented that frame an understanding of conceptual approaches to organization and the reciprocally enabling and constraining relationship between organization and communication. Chapters 2 and 3 present the theoretical and conceptual developments in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, respectively. Finally, Chapter 4 explains the metatheoretical paradigms that drive ways of knowing in the field, providing overviews of each and analyses of how they approach organizational communication.

1 Organizing the Study of Organizational Communication

Anne M. Nicotera

Organizing and Communicating

Organizing, as a set of human social processes, is as old as human society. Organizing can be defined most simply as the coordination of individual activities for the purposes of achieving the accomplishment of collective tasks—whether the task at hand is warding off an approaching predator, cultivating crops, building a pyramid, leading an army to battle, managing a corporate budget, implementing grand-scale emergency response to a natural disaster, or planning a family holiday gathering. Organizing is natural to human social collectives and is accomplished through communication. It must be noted, however, that while organizations are social collectives, not all social collectives are organizations. Organizational communication refers to both the nature of the collective and the nature of its activity. An organization emerges from human interaction. Once it exists, the organization provides a context for communication—which it both drives and is driven by. And thus organization and communication are forever intertwined—continually enabling and constraining one another. Our organizing communication creates organizations—entities to whose authority we then surrender.

Organizations permeate all aspects of human life. Society is defined by organizations—from the manufacturers of our clothing and distributors of our food to the contracting companies that build our houses, the banks that hold our mortgages, and the governments that regulate them. The contemporary human being is an organizational being. Organizational communication theory is a body of scholarly work that seeks to untangle these fundamental processes of human social life—how do humans coordinate individual activities in the context of communicatively structured social collectives to get things done, to be who we are, and to create new realities and structured collectives? This book will help you to understand the field of organizational communication and provide a disciplinary base for your study of organizational communication phenomena. First, we need to define both communication and organization.

Defining “Communication”

We start by defining communication because it is more fundamental. Organization, whether as a process or a thing, is created only from communication. So, while communication and organization mutually drive one another, communication is more primary. The discipline of Communication is complex, with a vast literature representing over a century of theory and research from numerous scholarly traditions—all working toward an understanding of human communication processes. At its simplest core, communication can be defined as a symbolic process of creating and sharing meaning. Even after decades of wrestling with definitions, this is the field’s fundamental cornerstone. The simplicity of this definition can be misleading, however, because it underlies a huge, complex, and increasingly specialized array of theories and abstract conceptual constructions. This elegant definition unifies the field. Communication theorists and researchers of all stripes, when they agree on nothing else, can still be recognized as members of the same field by their consensus on this fundamental definition.

Communication as human action. As a set of human phenomena, communication is contextual and transactional, the parties simultaneously and continually influencing one another as their interaction constitutes meaning. The conceptualization of humans as actors is crucial. We are defined by our actions, which are in turn defined by communicatively constructed social, organizational, and institutional structures, which are in turn defined by our actions, which define us—in full reflexivity. Human action is deeply embedded in a complex of social constructions that define our humanity. Following the tradition of communication rules theory (Cushman, Valentinson, & Dietrich, 1982), the human self is threefold: the identity self, the evaluative self, and the behavioral self—the last being the crucial agentic aspect of rules theory. We know who we are (identity) and how good we are (evaluative) only through what we do (behavioral). Cushman and his associates (Cushman & Cahn, 1985; Cushman & Craig, 1976; Cushman & Florence, 1974; Cushman et al., 1982) identify self-concept as a cybernetic control system for human action in coordination situations:

Human actions that take place within a standardized communication situation require common intentions, an established set of rules for the cooperative achievement of those intentions, and a procedure for manifesting the variable practical force the actors feel for participating in the coordination task.

(Cushman et al., 1982, pp. 96–97)

The primary assumption in the rules perspective is the action principle: Social behavior is structured and organized; action within and between human beings is governed by implicit and explicit rules. According to Cushman and Pearce (1977), rules take the form of practical syllogism:

A intends to bring about C;

A considers that to bring about C s/he must do B;

therefore, A sets her/himself to do B.

The possible range of actions (B) is delimited by enduring structures that underlie human interaction. Owing to the fundamental nature of humanity as defined by social action, human action is inherently communicative.

The first communication theories. Early communication theory took the form of models. In a classic communication theory textbook, Mortensen (1972) defined a model as a systematic representation of an object or event in idealized and abstract form. Models are helpful as metaphors that guide our ability to visualize concepts of interest in terms of one another as they help us to clarify complex processes, but they are also oversimplified and mask complex processes that cannot be modeled, often leading to premature conclusions. Models are very limited, and thus are best thought of as only a most rudimentary form of theory. The earliest known models of communication were developed by Aristotle in his theories of rhetoric and proof. Much like early organizational theory, as you shall see, Aristotle’s purpose was prescriptive (in his case to provide instructions for persuasive speech).

Linear models. Early 20th-century views of communication treated communication as a machine-like process wherein information or messages are depicted as traveling through channels. These mechanistic models are also known as linear models because the communication process is depicted as a line. These models (in Figures 1.1 and 1.2) seem very rudimentary and unsophisticated by today’s standards, and do not come close to capturing the complexity and nuanced understanding we have of communication processes today. However, they are an important piece of our theoretic history and continue to implicitly influence our thinking. It is important, therefore, to examine them explicitly. The most influential early linear model is Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical model, developed to help telephone engineers design efficient ways to transmit electrical signals from place to place. The Shannon-Weaver mathematical model was essentially a line from left to right that traveled through boxes, depicting an information source sending a message through a transmitter (encoder), which transforms the message to a signal sending it through a channel that is affected by noise. The signal then passes through a receiver (decoder), which transforms the signal back to a message that finally reaches its destination. The Shannon-Weaver model was not meant to describe face-to-face human communication, but it provided a baseline from which to do so. Numerous linear models of face-to-face human communication were based on the Shannon-Weaver linear model.

By 1960, scholars of human communication had widely adopted a message-centered linear approach to modeling communication. The most basic form of linear communication models is often called a model of communication-as-action, depicting a sender (or a source or a speaker) transmitting a message through some channel to a receiver—still a line drawn from left to right (see Figure 1.1). Berlo (1960) coined the term “SMCR” to describe this type of linear model, denoting the model components Sender (or Speaker or Source), Message, Channel, and Receiver. Models that depicted communication-as-action were dissatisfactory because they were too heavily focused on the sender or source of the originating message.

Figure 1.1 Linear model: Communication as action

Schramm (1954) created one of the first models of face-to-face human communication, which is particularly noteworthy because it focused more on the interaction of a dyad than the action of a sender/source. Rather than a sender and a receiver, Schramm’s model depicted interpreters who were simultaneously encoders and decoders. Although messages were still depicted as traveling along a line, the line was circular, linking one first interpreter as an encoder, traveling to the another interpreter as a decoder, and then returning from the second interpreter as an encoder back to the original interpreter as a decoder. Schramm was thus the first scholar to model communication as an interactive process. This form, the circular model, is also called a model of communication-as-interaction. Schramm’s inclusion of the notion of interpretation is the conceptual basis for the meaning-centered approach we now widely embrace.

Figure 1.2 Circular model: Communication as interaction

Early models of communication (linear/action and circular/interaction) are often referred to as a transmissive view of communication because they depict communication as a process by which something (a message, information, etc.) is transmitted from person to person. But even models of communication-as-interaction quickly became dissatisfactory, as our thinking became more sophisticated and our focus shifted from messages to meaning. Communication scholars began to focus on the communication process not solely as the exchange of messages or transmission of meaning, but as the creation of meaning as well.

Nonlinear models. The third generation of communication models were thus nonlinear models, also called models of communication-as-transaction. Transactional models focus on communication’s functions (both including and moving beyond message-exchange), and represent the origins of the constitutive view of communication upon which a large body of organizational communication scholarship rests. The most famous of these transactional communication models was developed by Barnlund (1970), who used a complex diagram of spirals and curved arrows to represent the continuous, unrepeatable, irreversible nature of communication. Meaning was seen as assigned or attributed rather than received. Along with interactants, decoding, encoding, and messages, Barnlund’s model included a set of valenced cues: public cues (in the environment), private cues (in or on the persons), and deliberate behavioral cues (nonverbal and verbal). All of these components were depicted as interrelated and constantly evolving. Transactional modeling proved to be far too complex to depict satisfactorily in a picture, although many scholars tried (e.g., Barnlund, 1970; Dance, 1967; Ruesch & Bateson, 1951; Westley & MacLean, 1957).

The idea of communication as a transaction through which communicators create meaning had a profound effect on the field. Scholars quickly moved beyond creating additional graphic representations of communication processes in the form of pictorial models. The rudimentary nature of pictorial representation can only roughly approximate the process of meaning-creation. This shift from linear to nonlinear modeling represents a shift in thinking from a transmissive to a constitutive view of communication that typifies the growing sophistication of communication theory in the 1960s. It was during this same time period that the field of organizational communication was being formed. To this day, organizational communication scholars presume that communication is constitutive—it creates things (organizations and their internal parts, documents, policies, procedures, events, relationships, etc.). But that does not mean we have abandoned our interest in individuals as sources and receivers of information, in messages and their channels for dissemination, in meaning-creation, and in human relationships.

Defining “Organizational”

The word organizational in the label organizational communication may refer to one of three basic types of enduring social constructions. First, O₁, organizing (v.), is a process of coordinating/ordering among members of a social collective. In this sense, organizational communication theory and research exami...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: Organizational Communication History
• PART II: Foundational Organizational Theory
• PART III: Topics in Theory and Research
• Author’s Index
• Content Index