COMMUNICATION THEORY Assignment 1

Encyclopedia of Communication Theory

Organizational Communication Theories

Contributors: Author:Eric M. Eisenberg

Edited by: Stephen W. Littlejohn & Karen A. Foss

Book Title: Encyclopedia of Communication Theory

Chapter Title: "Organizational Communication Theories"

Pub. Date: 2009

Access Date: October 28, 2020

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.

City: Thousand Oaks

Print ISBN: 9781412959377

Online ISBN: 9781412959384

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412959384.n266

Print pages: 701-705

© 2009 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online

version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

Organizational communication is the process by which language and social interaction promote coordinated action toward a common goal. Organizational communication theories are explanations developed by researchers to describe and account for how organizational communication occurs in practice. Nascent theories of organizational communication have existed for millennia, but were introduced more formally in the first half of the 20th century following the industrial revolutions in Europe and the United States. Since then, the perceived importance of communication in promoting organizational effectiveness has grown, while conceptions of what it means for an organization to be effective have broadened considerably. Theories of organizational communication have developed from narrow conduit models aimed solely at improving the bottom line of corporations to more diverse formulations that emphasize the importance of participation by multiple stakeholders in the development of public, private, and nonprofit institutions.

Managerialism and the Conduit Model

Western industrialization brought with it a keen interest in the role of communication in promoting organizational effectiveness. Up through the 1960s, organizational communication (and organizational studies, more generally) was an eager accomplice to the seemingly inevitable expansion of bureaucracy and the rationalization of Western society. The foundational research on leadership and organizations in the United States was funded by grants and contracts issued by large corporations and the U.S. military.

With few exceptions, the organizational communication theories that were developed during the first half of the 20th century reflected a conduit model of communication that saw the process solely as the transmission of information (based on an engineering perspective) and sought to identify communication breakdowns that impeded productivity. These theories reflect classical views of organization as a top-down, management- controlled activity for which downward communication was paramount, and effectiveness had mainly to do with understanding and following orders.

Human Resources and Employee Participation

By the 1950s, a number of factors had conspired to disrupt and challenge this wholly transmissional view of organizational communication. World War II and its aftermath caused many to have second thoughts about the moral superiority of expanding bureaucracy and technology, deployed to perfection in the Nazi death camps and on the wrecked cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the same time, labor movements in the United States and in Europe increasingly challenged the unwillingness of so-called captains of industry to afford workers a greater voice in decisions that affected their livelihood. The theories that developed during this time period went beyond downward communication to focus on horizontal communication (among peers, as documented in the Hawthorne Studies) and upward communication (of employee suggestions and opinions). These new theories characterized employees as human resources whose active input and agency were essential to organizational effectiveness.

Viewing employees as active participants in organizational decision making led researchers to focus on the relationship that is most paramount in employees' work lives—that which they have with their supervisors. One of the most researched forms of organizational communication is the superior-subordinate relationship, and this work has been highly theoretical (e.g., leader-member exchange, upward influence). Central to these theories is the notion that this relationship is complex, is subtle, and always involves multiple goals. Superiors must be clear about performance expectations, but tactful to maintain a good working relationship. Subordinates must be forthright about their ideas and suggestions, but not seem insubordinate. What emerged from this work is that the quality of this relationship is a critical factor shaping employee morale, commitment, and productivity.

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Two Master Metaphors: System and Culture

Accompanying this movement toward greater employee participation was a growing recognition in the late 20th century that organizational environments had become exceedingly more turbulent and complex. This complexity was not well managed—or well explained—by transmissional models of hierarchical organization. The received notion of an organization as a pyramid of roles and reporting relationships sustained through orders delivered through an unequivocal chain of command was challenged by different, more holistic models borrowed from biology (systems) and anthropology (culture).

Systems Theories of Organizational Communication

As top-down hierarchical models weakened their grip and new communication technology suggested many new opportunities for connectivity among individuals, what emerged was a new conception of coordination that replaced the idea of a stable organization and focused instead on the process of organizing. Karl Weick, a social psychologist and influential organizational theorist, first introduced these ideas to organizational studies in 1969, and they were immediately picked up in organizational communication. From this point on, theories no longer characterized communication as something that went on inside an organization, but maintained instead that communication was the very process by which organizing happens.

Systems theories are themselves a highly diverse group of approaches. Early versions were structural- functional in nature and revisioned organizations as comprised of a series of interlocking inputs and outputs and designed to promote efficiency through self-correction. Later theories broadened this perspective to account for a more turbulent external environment and the potential desirability of disequilibrium in the service of nonlinear, innovative, and discontinuous change (e.g., when an institution embraces a new vision or strategy). Most recently, system theorists in communication have turned their attention to the self-organizing properties of living systems, drawing upon cutting-edge research in complexity science.

A large number of organizational communication theories owe a debt to the systems approach. Theories of group interaction and decision making, of organizational change, and most specifically of organizational communication networks can be traced to this perspective. Moreover, as more advanced methods of network analysis have developed, the practical utility of these theories to both describe and transform patterns of organizing has risen dramatically. Finally, the growing awareness of terrorist organizations has elevated the idea of organizations as semiautonomous, distributed networks to the global Zeitgeist.

Cultural Theories of Organizational Communication

Despite the growing practical utility of the systems perspective, a number of organizational communication scholars remained dissatisfied with what they perceived as its enduring functionalist and managerial bias. These theorists were less enamored with a narrow view of organizational effectiveness or profitability and were more interested in treating organizations as communities with diverse stakeholders and multiple bottom lines. Borrowing from the vocabulary of anthropology, these theorists cast organizations as unique cultures and saw researchers as ethnographers whose aim was to produce thick descriptions of organizational communication.

One societal reason for the sudden rise of the cultural approach was the remarkable success of Japanese manufacturing companies in taking over U.S. markets in the 1970s. In their efforts to explain this phenomenon, many organizational theorists attributed this success to the unique Japanese culture and its emphasis on quality and consensus. In the United States and elsewhere, theorists and practitioners began to scrutinize corporate cultures for potential points of leverage. Organizational culture change was itself a cultural buzzword in the 1980s, with its attendant emphasis on shared values, language, and practices.

Treating organizations as cultures naturally invites questions of membership and identification. One of the more researched areas of organizational communication theory is organizational socialization and

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assimilation, with particular emphasis on how newcomers become (or fail to become) members. Some authors frame this process rhetorically and have explored how individuals come to identify with institutions, investigating the critical moments or turning points in this relationship. Others have approached it as an interpersonal process aimed at reducing individual uncertainty and developed theories of both how organizations seek to socialize individuals and how newcomers seek out information to learn about the organization's culture.

Finally, the organizational culture approach was reflective of a broader movement in social theory, characterized by many as the interpretive turn. Significant dissatisfaction with traditional scientific method (including theory development, hypothesis testing, and data analysis) led a critical mass of scholars across most disciplines to pursue a different approach to inquiry, one that favored immersion over detachment, narrative over formal logic, and qualitative over quantitative methods.

Critical Organizational Communication Theories

Recall that the first formal theories of organizational communication were managerial in tone and aimed at eliminating breakdowns and promoting the successful flow of information in the service of productivity. Since then, these initial theories have received increased criticism, some practical (the world has become too complex for conduit or hierarchical models) and others ideological (conceptions of organizing that exclude employee voice or the impact of organizations on their environments are immoral and unethical).

This latter concern crystallized in the late 20th century in the form of critical theories whose aim was to identify instances of power and domination and to emancipate individuals from such abuses. These theories are different in tone and form from the others discussed in this entry inasmuch as they developed from a very different lineage—that of critical and cultural studies in Europe. Stanley Deetz's landmark book, Democracy and the Corporate Colonization of America, influenced many theorists in the field to conceptualize organizing in terms of the expression of power, domination, and resistance. Others have gone on to apply these ideas across a wide range of categories, including race, gender, class, and their various intersections.

Critical organizational communication theories also claim the interpretive turn as crucial to their history, but feel for the most part that ethnographers do not go far enough with their descriptions and interpretations of organizational life. Critical theorists are more attuned to the political aspects of organizing, and their work urges us to see the hidden forces of domination (e.g., hegemony) that exist in taken for granted forms of organizing and communicating.

One of the more intriguing contributions of critical organizational communication theory and research has to do with conceptions of self-discipline, or how individuals and teams can be encouraged to police themselves through a process of concertive control. From this perspective, overt power is unnecessary as members are encouraged to buy into corporate visions and values, which then work as hegemonic controls on their thoughts and actions. This perspective shows the potential dark side of what is typically seen by members as positive, such as self-managed teams or on-site day care. In many ways, this hidden form of power is the most pernicious in that it is most difficult for employees to identify or to challenge.

Theories of Organizational Culture and Performance

Early in the adoption of the culture metaphor to organizational studies, Michael Pacanowsky and Nick Trujillo wrote an important essay linking the concepts of culture and performance. This was a key move because borrowers of the culture concept invariably focus on cognitive attributes such as assumptions and beliefs and spend far less time examining behavior—that is, rituals and practices. The performance framework directed attention specifically at communication behavior and inspired many other writers and researchers to explore this frame. Key to this approach has been a focus on organizational story telling as a primary means for defining cultural identity. A related stream of work focuses on the semiotics of organizing—how nonverbal elements such as architecture reflect and affect definitions of culture. Finally, some scholars have looked

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directly at ritual behavior in organizations (e.g., safety briefings on airplanes, orientation sessions for new employees, annual holiday parties) as rich sources of meaning (and also of domination).

This approach to organizational communication as cultural performance bears unique promise for investigating an increasingly global subject matter. Organizational culture scholars see all attempts at organizing as representing a unique cultural nexus that marks the intersection of values and practices drawn from institutions, industries, and national cultures. Seen in this way, a careful mapping of the cultural performances of any particular organization will reveal both global and local influences and will reveal how they interact in a particular practical context.

Finally, the cultural performance approach is important because it eschews a disembodied, overly cognitive view of culture and instead places the human body back at the center of organizing. From this perspective, bodily discipline is at the core of organizing processes, and the ways in which bodily diversity and resistance are handled say a great deal about culture. This work has been a significant inspiration for students of feminism and ethnicity, most of whom see gender and race as cultural performances. As postcolonial theorists argue, hierarchy has a different meaning for people who have experienced its abuses throughout their lives. A strong advocate of the embodied approach was Dwight Conquergood, who championed an embodied ethnography that sought to deemphasize the visual in favor of an immersive approach that activated the rest of the senses (i.e., hearing, feeling, smelling) as a basis for understanding culture.

Two Influential Metatheories: Structuration and Sense-Making

According to most authors, the central problem to be addressed in social theory is the relationship between the individual and society. Historically, theories have tended to overemphasize one and caricature the other; either the individual is all-powerful or society is. This duality is itself a reflection of the classic philosophical tension between free will and determinism. How free to act is the member of any society or organization?

This question is crucial for the field of communication because communication is the means by which institutions are created and sustained and is how individuals can transform them. If one accepts the perspective that organizations are constituted wholly through interaction, then communication becomes the interactive prism through which the individual and the social group are continually constructed. This broad perspective on organizational communication is captured by two popular metatheories that have been adopted by scholars in the field: Anthony Giddens's structuration theory and Karl Weick's theory of sense- making.

Structuration Theory

Structuration theory was developed with the aim of transcending an unproductive debate between social theories that constructed either society or the individual as overly powerful. Central to Giddens' formulation is the idea that social structures are both made by human actions and simultaneously work to constrain action. This is called the duality of structure. The unusual term structuration is meant to soften the perception of social structures as rigid and to instead regard them as perpetually produced, reproduced, and transformed through human action. Structuration theory has proven useful to many communication scholars in their efforts to describe the social construction of organizations and the power dynamics inherent in this process.

One of the areas in which structuration theory has been most useful to organizational communication has been in the conceptualization and study of communication technologies. Technologies are ripe for this approach because their successful implementation depends heavily on the social or cultural context. Seen this way, the adoption of any technology—from hospital CT scanners to a new warehouse inventory system—is an occasion for structuring. What this means is that people bring existing rules and resources to bear on their activities and beliefs during the implementation period, in turn shaping how the technology will be regarded and used. Moreover, the actions taken during the implementation process then become part of the cultural context to be drawn upon by future actors.

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Although structuration theory has had many critics, what it does best is move attention away from purely mentalistic or social views of organizing and focus instead on social interaction as a continuous interplay between reproduction and transformation of culture. In so doing, it moves communication to center stage.

Sense-Making Theory

In his conception of organizing, Weick sought to provide a bridge between the system and culture metaphors and to focus on how collectivities of individuals use language to create meaning over time. Weick describes the process of organizing as the incremental reduction of environmental uncertainty through talk. Seen retrospectively, he argues that we do not fully understand what we have said and made until after the fact. Weick's theory of sense-making has been effectively applied in a wide variety of contexts, including orchestras, nuclear power plants, and firefighting. Similarly to structuration theory, Weick highlights the persistence of particular social constructions and the consequences of failing to consider these guiding assumptions more mindfully. His most recent work on high-reliability organizations underscores the consequentiality of communication for human safety and security.

Current conceptions of organizational communication are increasingly focused on discourse—actual interactional processes. That said, discursive theories are diverse in kind and intention. For example, Gail Fairhurst distinguished between a close analysis of patterns of talk (which she calls little d discourse), considerations of whole systems of thought (Big D discourse), and work that seeks to attempt to connect the two. What is most compelling about this approach is its focus on everyday work interactions, revealing how talk reflects, reproduces, and occasionally transforms meanings and courses of action.

James R. Taylor and his students at the University of Montréal have spent decades working with Giddens' and Weick's metatheories in an attempt to reclaim their key ideas for a theory of organizing that is more fully communicative. In their work, they describe communication as both site and surface of organizing and explore the oscillation between text and conversation as constitutive to sense-making and therefore of organizing. For the Montréal school, texts are attempts by human beings to memorialize and fix interpretations in the form of (for example) rules, documents, and charters, while conversations are occasions for open-ended discourse that both makes use of existing texts and develops new ones.

But perhaps the most original aspect of the work of the Montréal school—and of its most recent proponent, Francois Cooren—is its use of Bruno Latour's actor-network theory to challenge an ideology of communication that took hold during the interpretive turn and is perpetuated in the work of Weick and Giddens. Specifically, they argue that narrative is the template for all organizing, not only the kind engaged in by human beings, and that nonhuman objects are inscribed with their own agency reflective of their histories. Swords, guns, speed bumps, desks—indeed all objects—compel action; similarly, language consists of discursive objects that can have a life of their own quite apart from human subjectivity and intention. Theoretical work by both Cooren and Fairhurst reflects a critical realism that calls for a thorough account of preexisting institutional forms and material conditions that shape and constrain discourse.

Future Directions

Organizational communication theories mirror the flow of society. Whereas 20th-century theories sought to support a particular kind of capitalism practiced by a particular form of nation-state, 21st-century theories share only some of these interests. Although the study of communication and productivity can and should continue, business success can only be achieved today in global context. This means that the cultural variations and environmental complexities described above must now be essential parts of any theoretical construction. Moreover, this also means that we must find a way to expand our theories to include non- Western voices and experiences.

At the same time, societal interests have expanded from an isolated view of organizations to a more situated perspective that takes into account the importance of not-for-profit organizing and the quality of life in

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communities. This means that organizational communication theories can and should continue to expand to include all kinds of organizing. Moreover, these efforts reflect a deeply felt commitment on the part of many scholars to conduct more problem-centered research focused on persistent social challenges such as justice, safety, and security.

Finally, it is quite likely that future theories of organizational communication will take a broader view of nonhuman agency. There is an emerging realization that social constructionist theories of sense-making are overly narrow and anthropocentric. What is now being called for is a reconsideration of the nature and role of materiality in organizing—one that situates human agency as important, but not the only kind. Human- machine interactions will be a key focus of organizational communication theory in the 21st century.

• organizational communication theories • organizational communication • organizational theories • communication theory • structuration theory • structuration • sense-making

Eric M. Eisenberg http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412959384.n266 See also

• Actor-Network Theory • Constitutive View of Communication • Critical Organizational Communication • Institutional Theories of Organizational Communication • Interpretive Theory • Leadership Theories • Organizational Control Theory • Organizational Culture • Organizational Identity Theory • Organizational List Theory • Organizational Socialization and Assimilation • Organizing, Process of • Sense-Making • Structuration Theory • System Theory

Further Readings

Cheney, G.(2002).Values at work: Employee participation meets market pressure at Mondragon.New York: Cornell University Press. Cooren, F., Taylor, J., & Van Every, E.(2006).Communication as organizing.Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Deetz, S.(1992).Democracy in an age of corporate colonization.Albany: State University of New York Press. Eisenberg, E.(2006).Strategic ambiguities.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Eisenberg, E., Goodall, H. L., & Tretheway, A.(2007).Organizational communication: Balancing creativity and constraint (5th ed. ). New York: St. Martin's Press. Fairhurst, G.(2007).Discursive leadership: In conversation with leadership psychology.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452231051 Goodall, H. L.(1994).Casing a promised land: The autobiography of an organizational detective as cultural ethnographer.Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Monge, P., & Contractor, N.(2003).Theories of communication networks.Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Putnam, L., & Pacanowsky, M.(1983).Communication and organizations: An interpretive approach.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Taylor, J., & Van Every, E.(1999).The emergent organization: Communication as its site and surface.Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Weick, K.(1979).The social psychology of organizing ( 2nd ed. ). Reading MA: Addison-Wesley.

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