http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Organizational-Communication A listing of the most recently indexed works about Organizational Communication in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Organizational-Communication http://tc.eserver.org/35813.html http://tc.eserver.org/35813.html After new product releases or service updates, a torrent of disparate corporate information follows based on the perceived requirements for each team to show their worth. Sales collateral, Marketing webcasts, Support knowledgebase articles, Engineering release notes, and internal reference guides from formal Documentation teams stagger out like drunken sailors looking for their ship after a Cinderella liberty. Add to this meandering information all of the informal input from bloggers, social sites, forums, and independent Web sites, and you have a fog of information to stumble through to find real knowledge and employ best practices for purchased products and services. http://tc.eserver.org/35820.html http://tc.eserver.org/35820.html The intranet is often a depressingly static place even today in many organizations. But those applying Enterprise 2.0 (social, emergent, freeform approaches to business activities) can soon find that the opposite is often the case. The information captured and the knowledge shared in a social business environment is usually globally visible and lasts long after the collaboration ends. http://tc.eserver.org/35695.html http://tc.eserver.org/35695.html As companies have their offices spread across more and more geographic locations and a large scale of employees working in different countries, it becomes even harder to represent a single organization as one unique entity. The key lies in raising awareness for the company’s vision and mission as well as equipping staff in all locations with the latest technologies. Advancements in communication technology have led to a deeper focus on knowledge management activities – benefiting both the organization and the individual. http://tc.eserver.org/35650.html http://tc.eserver.org/35650.html The key to intranet success is to provide value to employees and give them a reason to visit the site repeatedly. One of the primary ways to achieve this is to connect employees with the people and groups with whom they need to collaborate. Workgroups, or communities of practice, provide the basis for a living, growing, vibrant space in which people can access the information they need, share best practices, and contribute to a shared knowledge base. This article discusses the role of communities of practice within organizations and provides a framework for planning research and design activities to maximize their effectiveness. http://tc.eserver.org/35659.html http://tc.eserver.org/35659.html An enormous amount of knowledge resides within international organizations. But how can the knowledge management (KM) team unlock this information and make it available to a large number of employees around the globe? How much knowledge should actually be shared and what kind of experience should not be passed on because it might hinder innovation and creative thinking? In an interview with tcworld KM expert Patrick Lambe answered these and many other questions. http://tc.eserver.org/35661.html http://tc.eserver.org/35661.html More and more organizations are establishing cross-border teams to take advantage of global talent and global markets. Location and time are no longer impediments to building the 'dream team' but in our rush to take advantage of these new media of e-mail, video conferences and the like we may not realize that there is also some learning for us to do on the cultural front. http://tc.eserver.org/35401.html http://tc.eserver.org/35401.html As a policies and procedures (P&P) practitioner, do you delve into P&P content development projects without a clear understanding of the organizational context? Astute P&P practitioners add more than documentation skills to assignments--they apply an understanding of the organizational context from three perspectives. http://tc.eserver.org/35402.html http://tc.eserver.org/35402.html Have you struggled with job position names and titles in your policies and procedures (P&P) content? Here are several style rules to follow. http://tc.eserver.org/35244.html http://tc.eserver.org/35244.html Change management is the subject of many books but what is it like to have to lead staff who are finding it difficult? Gina Lane has extensive experience of change in local government, and Non Departmental Public Body and a charity, and in this article provides insight and practical tips for how to support and lead your team as the organization undergoes change. http://tc.eserver.org/35128.html http://tc.eserver.org/35128.html Although previous researchers have proposed organizational demography as an important determinant of communication, no one has tested this relationship directly. http://tc.eserver.org/34821.html http://tc.eserver.org/34821.html This article aims to report initial findings about networking in organizational settings in Australia through the use of enterprise social software. http://tc.eserver.org/34846.html http://tc.eserver.org/34846.html Today's organizations are challenged with attracting, developing, and retaining high-quality employees; thus, many firms seek to improve their recruitment and selection processes. One approach involves using realistic job previews (RJPs) to communicate a balanced view of the organization. The authors explored the effects of organizational culture (hierarchy, market, clan, and adhocracy), recruitment strategy (RJP vs. traditional), and personality (horizontal and vertical individualism—collectivism) on attraction to Web-based organizational profiles using a sample of 234 undergraduate students in a mixed two-factor experimental design. Results indicate that the clan culture is viewed as the most attractive. Traditional versus RJP recruitment produced higher levels of organizational attraction. Finally, predicted relationships between the personality framework of horizontal and vertical individualism—collectivism and organizational attraction were supported. http://tc.eserver.org/34850.html http://tc.eserver.org/34850.html Duality arguments are now a common perspective employed in organizational discourse research to avoid the problematic dualism of necessarily prioritizing structure or agency. Despite this considerable philosophical maturity, not all duality approaches are created equal. In fact, duality theorizing in current organizational discourse research has developed into two perspectives— structured in action or acted in structure. This article outlines the characteristics of each research program and provides an illustration of how similar organizational phenomena may be interpreted differently depending on paradigmatic orientation. Then, methodological recommendations and two emerging theoretical myopias—duality and organizing biases—are described to challenge scholars to employ dialectically these seemingly incommensurate perspectives in their theorizing of 21st-century organizational discourse. http://tc.eserver.org/34852.html http://tc.eserver.org/34852.html As a professional practice and an academic subfield, organizational communication is a relatively recent addition in Brazil, dating primarily from the 1980s. In both arenas, organizational communication developed from the theory and practice of public relations. Much of its design, however, grows out of the particularities and consequences of the Brazilian social, political, and economic context. This article presents a brief profile of the history of public relations and organizational communication in this country. http://tc.eserver.org/34856.html http://tc.eserver.org/34856.html The complex distribution and negotiation of authority in real time is a key issue for today's organizations. The authors investigate how the negotiations that sustain authority at work actually unfold by analyzing the ways of talking and acting through which organizational members establish their authority. They argue that authority is achieved through presentification—that is, by making sources of authority present in interaction. On the basis of an empirical analysis of a naturally occurring interaction between a medical coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières and technicians of a hospital supported by her organization, the authors identify key communicative practices involved in achieving authority and discuss their implications for scholars' understanding of what being in authority at work means. http://tc.eserver.org/34858.html http://tc.eserver.org/34858.html Meetings serve an important function in organizational communication. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have infiltrated meetings and allowed a new range of communicative behaviors to emerge. This cross-organizational study relies on key elements in the social influence model to predict variables that influence engagement in electronic meeting multitasking behaviors. The observation of organizational norms and the perceptions of others' thoughts concerning the use of ICTs for multitasking during a meeting explain a considerable amount of variance in how individuals use ICTs to multitask electronically in meetings. Implications for workplace ICT use in meetings and contributions to the social influence model are also discussed. http://tc.eserver.org/34612.html http://tc.eserver.org/34612.html Even when some recognize the need to scratch that collaborative itch, it can be difficult to resist the urge to impede such efforts, so you need to consciously think about what you are doing to foster trust in your organization’s CoP efforts. http://tc.eserver.org/34396.html http://tc.eserver.org/34396.html One of the main issues crossing the fields of organization theory, communication theory, and information technology is whether email communication does increase participation in decision making. Common sense and some case studies suggest the so-called "democratization argument": since email allows direct (non-filtered) communication between people and identity/status concealment, it enhances more freely and easy participation in decision making. http://tc.eserver.org/34278.html http://tc.eserver.org/34278.html It is the task of the project manager to be aware of the larger environment in which a project is operating. One approach that helps achieve this insight is systems thinking. http://tc.eserver.org/33644.html http://tc.eserver.org/33644.html Learn how to use a wiki as an organizational tool within your company. http://tc.eserver.org/33577.html http://tc.eserver.org/33577.html This work explores prediction of technical communication patterns within product development organizations. Our methodology involves first predicting the patterns of communication and then measuring the actual communications to see if the anticipated linkages are realized. We applied this methodology to a commercial product development project in the electronics industry. In this case study we found that: 81% of all coordination type communication linkages were predicted in advance; occurrences of frequent communications were more accurately predicted than infrequent communications; and two-way communication exchange was most often observed, even where oneway information transfer was predicted. For the management of product development projects, these results imply that certain aspects of organizational design can be planned by anticipating the technical communication linkages required for project execution. Finally, a critical analysis of our methodology suggests improvements for future work. http://tc.eserver.org/33498.html http://tc.eserver.org/33498.html Middle managers interpret experiences and observations of employees and relate them to organizational contexts, practices, and strategies. By analyzing authentic verbal communication between middle managers and employees, this article will draw five conclusions about how interpretational work support organizational goals and values: 1. Middle managers and employees collaborate in interpreting tasks in relation to organizational context; 2. This interpretative work is based on language acquisition: learning the vocabulary of the organization; 3. The managers articulate the process, explicitly defining reality and influencing language use; 4. Employees show expectation of having their experiences interpreted by managers; 5. Employees may challenge managers with competing interpretations. This article will contribute to the study of leadership communication by combining organization communication theory and conversation analytic methodology. The article shows important ways in which middle managers "do leadership": by contextualizing employee actions and bringing employee perceptions in accordance with executive-level perceptions of organizational practices. http://tc.eserver.org/33502.html http://tc.eserver.org/33502.html Studies of influence in organizational settings have tended to concentrate on defining categories of influence based on self-reports and questionnaires. This has tended to decontextualize and generalize the findings and therefore overlooks the inevitably temporally and locally situated nature of all social activity. Using conversation analysis as a methodology and videotaped data of naturally occurring talk, this article seeks to go beyond such taxonomies of influence. More specifically, this article seeks to provide a fine-grained analysis of how subordinates, as well as superiors, can influence decision-making episodes of talk. It is also argued that the results of such research can be fed back into practice and ultimately can be of help in allowing better decision-making practices. http://tc.eserver.org/33503.html http://tc.eserver.org/33503.html Humor and laughter are emotion-involving activities that can be jointly constructed in interaction. This article analyzes instances of joint laughter in leader-member meetings where laughter may or may not be associated with humor. The method applied is conversation analysis in which the focus lies on laughter's role in the microlevel organization of interaction. The results show that the instances of laughter do not occur in accidental locations but are clearly connected to specific activities. First, humor and laughter can be strategically used by team leaders to create collegiality and a good working atmosphere in their teams. Second, laughing together is connected to closing down a topic or a phase in a meeting in a way that displays mutual understanding. Third, shared laughter initiated by team members appears to be a resource that can be used to reduce tension in challenging situations such as the accomplishment of difficult tasks or the treatment of delicate topics. Finally, laughing together can be used to do remedial work in problematic or conflicting situations. Ultimately, joint laughter appears to be a resource that can be used to improve the task performance and, through this, the achievement of the goals of the organization. http://tc.eserver.org/33491.html http://tc.eserver.org/33491.html A number of smart businesses are realizing that the organizational characteristics that lead to their successes — such as agility, decentralized decision making, and fast growth — have made their Web sites unworkable through poor development processes and inconsistent user experiences. This frustrates any attempt by visitors to find meaningful information. http://tc.eserver.org/32677.html http://tc.eserver.org/32677.html This article examines what works and what does not work well when selling UX within an organization, identifies barriers you might encounter to the adoption of UX methods in your organization, and discusses how to package and present UX to stakeholders. In this article, we’ll try to avoid just being prescriptive. Rather, we’ll pose questions along the way, regarding what has worked well for you. http://tc.eserver.org/32542.html http://tc.eserver.org/32542.html This session is designed to provide you with an overview of Thomas Gilbert's Behavioral Engineering Model (BEM) and alternatives to his model, and a review of Hersey and Chevalier's PROBE Model to assist you to identify elements that support and impact behavior within your organization. http://tc.eserver.org/32322.html http://tc.eserver.org/32322.html This paper challenges the popular notions of tacit and explicit organizational knowledge and argues that its philosophical underpinnings derived from Gilbert Ryle are problematic due to their logical behaviourist perspective. The paper articulates the philosophical problem as the neglect of any role for the mind in organizational activity and the representation of mental activity as purely a set of behaviours. An alternative realist philosophy is advanced taking into account the potential of adopting a number of competing philosophical perspectives. The paper forwards a realist theory of organizational knowledge that moves beyond the surface behaviours of tacit and explicit knowledge and argues that collective consciousness and organizational memory play primary and deeper roles as knowledge processes and structures. Consciousness is not a Hegelian world spirit but rather a real process embedded in people's brains and mental activity. Further, the paper argues that organizational routines provide the contingent condition or `spark' to activate organizational knowledge processes. The implications of this model are explored in relation to the measurement of intellectual capital. The theory developed in this paper represents the first attempt to provide a coherent philosophically grounded framework of organizational knowledge that moves organizational theory beyond neat conversion processes of tacit and explicit knowledge. http://tc.eserver.org/32329.html http://tc.eserver.org/32329.html This paper addresses the influence of two competing views of social identity on knowledge integration. One view sees social identity primarily as a coherent characteristic of organizations, which can leverage knowledge integration by unconditional cooperative behaviour, shared values, mindsets, trust, and loyalty. The opposing view considers social identity as multiple and fragmented. This fragmented view emphasizes the problematic nature of social identity for knowledge integration and states that social identity is an additional barrier to knowledge integration in organizations. The aim of this paper is to examine these competing accounts and to develop insight into the underlying mechanisms that lead to the different effects of social identity on knowledge integration. Two polar case studies illustrate the different effects of a coherent versus multiple identity on knowledge integration and the need for a coherent company-wide social identity, instead of a multiple community or group based social identity, to leverage knowledge integration in organizations. http://tc.eserver.org/32345.html http://tc.eserver.org/32345.html This study extends diffusion research to the intra-organizational level and integrates the classic diffusion of innovation theory (DIT) with the relatively new technology acceptance model (TAM) to empirically explore Chinese journalists' adoption of the internet. It makes a theoretical contribution by proposing four adoption categories — voluntary adopters, forced adopters, resistant non-adopters, and dormant non-adopters — according to the voluntariness of organizational members' innovation decision-making. Based on data from a nationwide survey of 813 journalists in China, this study demonstrates that the DIT and TAM are respectively related to voluntary and forced adoption of the internet.Young, male journalists who perceive the internet positively (i.e., relative advantage and ease of use) and think it to be popular in society are most likely to be voluntary adopters. High-ranking journalists who believe the internet can enhance their job performance and who work in large and technologically sophisticated organizations are most likely to be forced adopters. http://tc.eserver.org/32280.html http://tc.eserver.org/32280.html This paper describes the initial results of a qualitative field study of the work required to review and approve the content on government agency web sites. The study analyzes content management work in terms of Strauss’s conceptualization of articulation. The analysis describes examples of high and low level articulation in content review and approval including using paper, personal contact, and surveillance. Study results suggest that the articulation work present in non-software based review and approval processes helps to balance conflicting agency goals of publishing content and achieving absolute oversight over published content. It also suggests that software based content management systems may prove helpful for the management of some types of content in some situations, but it hypothesizes that actors will choose paper and face to face communication mechanisms to review and approve large amounts of new content and sensitive content. http://tc.eserver.org/32205.html http://tc.eserver.org/32205.html Who is writing all the documents that organizations produce? The typical answer: Anyone who has a keyboard. But not everyone with a keyboard has the skills required to create the quality documents that ultimately fall into the hands of customers and regulators. Nor does everyone who is asked to write these important documents have the desire—or time—to perform such tasks. http://tc.eserver.org/31977.html http://tc.eserver.org/31977.html What is the role of contradiction in organizational rhetoric? This article argues that existing research tends to focus on contradiction at an institutional level and then develop a distinct but complementary perspective that views contradictory rhetoric at an interactional level and as a practical concern, especially when routine is disrupted and repair tactics are required. Drawing on data from a study of a quality improvement initiative in the United Kingdom, the authors examine the contradictions that were constructed when a 'change champion' attempted to deal with resistance to change. They conclude by depicting how contradiction can emerge when actors reflexively shift their identifications to portray themselves and their actions in a contextually appropriate manner. http://tc.eserver.org/31980.html http://tc.eserver.org/31980.html On the first day of Nikki's undergraduate seminar, Organizing Work, she Oasks students to list the idioms and phrases commonly used to make sense of the 'work' experience. She shares the example of her father repeat- edly using the phrase 'daily grind' when she was growing up (important to note, he was not referring to the ubiquitous Starbucks of today). Slowly but surely, the chalkboard fills with an array of idiomatic expressions: 'on the clock,' 'work like a dog,' 'all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,' 'work your fingers to the bone,' 'all in a day's work,' and a host of others, including the Marxian favorite, 'a fair day's pay for a fair day's work.' Students are asked to reflect on the meanings embedded within the list and how language constitutes cultural meanings and values of work. As such an exercise should make abundantly clear, work and meaning would seem to be central to our study of organizational communication. Our talk about work both embodies and structures individual and social under- standings, attitudes, and actions. Yet, the meanings associated with work and the notion of work as meaningful have not been foci of study within our dis- cipline. Indeed, the term work is not even indexed in the New Handbook of Organizational Communication (Jablin and Putnam, 2001), and a search of the EBSCO database found not a single article with work and either meaning or meaningful in the title in a communication journal. Given contemporary devel- opments that make work more central to people's lives as well as less secure, the question of what work means to people and how such meanings contribute to or detract from a sense of purpose or dignity in people's lives is important to consider. http://tc.eserver.org/31694.html http://tc.eserver.org/31694.html This article proposes a shift in how researchers study knowledge and knowing in organizations. Responding to a pronounced lack of methodological guidance from existing research, this work develops a framework for analyzing situated organizational problem solving. This framework, rooted in social practice theory, focuses on communicative knowledge-accomplishing activities, which frame and respond to various problematic situations. Vignettes drawn from a call center demonstrate the value of the framework, which can advance practice-oriented research on knowledge and knowing by helping it break with dubious assumptions about knowledge homogeneity within groups, examine knowing as instrumental action and involvement in a struggle over meaning, and display how patterns of knowledge-accomplishing activities can generate unintended organizational consequences. http://tc.eserver.org/31682.html http://tc.eserver.org/31682.html In this introduction to the special issue, the editors question the still-prevalent dichotomy of power and resistance when studying organizational politics. They begin by tracing the evolution of power and resistance in critical scholarship. Then, they propose that because of changing workplace dynamics, power and resistance are increasingly intertwined. More nuanced concepts are required to describe this. Finally, they argue that power and resistance should be considered as a singular dynamic called struggle. http://tc.eserver.org/31690.html http://tc.eserver.org/31690.html This article argues for the theoretical and practical incorporation of aesthetic sensibilities into the communicative management of hybrid organizing. Using Dewey's Art as Experience as a conceptual framework, it explores imaginative and aesthetic practices as knowledge-producing resources for organizing and social change. The analysis centers on the complex and contradictory ways that artful capacities and instrumental rationalities interweave to achieve the organizational order of a collaborative art studio. Using discourses from multiple stakeholders, this article examines in detail three themes: art as creation and vocation, art as ephemeral integration, and art as survival and social change. Findings are discussed in the context of other scholarship committed to recovering and fostering alternative logics for organizing. http://tc.eserver.org/31683.html http://tc.eserver.org/31683.html The authors propose an alternative to the postmodern way of viewing metaphor primarily as an instrumental and functional rhetorical tool designed to influence members of an organization through ideological appeals, a view that depicts rhetoric as merely subjective and manipulable. Our alternative draws from the "aesthetic side of organizational life" and argues that communication exceeds the theoretical reach of the postmodern perspective, which requires a new conceptualization of metaphor as epistemic and capable of signaling meaning that is inseparable from its unique and discrete form. http://tc.eserver.org/31689.html http://tc.eserver.org/31689.html Encourages critical organization scholars to develop our stake in struggle in at least three ways: (a) by examining how the structure and practice of our own work enacts relations of power and resistance (i.e., reflexive, empirical study of organizational dynamics in higher education), (b) by considering how our experience of knowledge labor implicitly shapes our representations of organization (i.e., reflexive analyses of the relation between the process and products of scholarly production), and (c) by more explicitly accounting for our role as cultural agents in representing organizational life and inducting students into it (i.e., reflexive analyses of the relations among the labors of teaching, researching, and theorizing power and resistance). http://tc.eserver.org/31521.html http://tc.eserver.org/31521.html Organizational communication is centered on inspiring and managing change, so it makes sense that communication professionals are seeing a more critical role for research in understanding and reaching their most important stakeholder relationships (employees, customers, suppliers, dealers, etc.). When a company is undergoing significant changes (i.e., a merger, acquisition, slumping sales, a product launch), research can pinpoint exactly where the issues and communication needs are. Oftentimes, such information is considered and then only used in limited ways. So how does a company proceed in bringing research results to life? It’s important to review how the research and tactical elements of communication vehicles are matched up. http://tc.eserver.org/30738.html http://tc.eserver.org/30738.html Argues that the subdiscipline or community of organizational communication scholars is also imagined, as much organizational communication scholarship conducted within the global context is performed and interpreted from the dominant Euro-American intellectual tradition, privileging those concepts as well as particular voices and traditions and often ignoring inequality and exploitation within the scholarly community. This forgetting and the imagined scholarly community it creates continue to reify and legitimate a particular form of rationality and, in practice, lead to further colonization, subordination, and oppression of native/indigenous/other forms of understanding and organizing within our disciplinary field. http://tc.eserver.org/30739.html http://tc.eserver.org/30739.html If one of the principal goals of critical organization studies writ large is the increased democratization of organizing processes, and if communication is key to that democratization, how does postcolonial theory enable us to rethink the relationship between communication and democracy? http://tc.eserver.org/30740.html http://tc.eserver.org/30740.html Community collaboration has become an influential interorganizational phenomenon that provides innovative solutions for social problems. This critical case study uses dialogic theory to investigate how collaboration stakeholders negotiate creative and democratic outcomes. Findings demonstrate how a dialogic moment, although embedded in a homogenous partnership that facilitated discursive closure, constituted meaningful organizational change. The study empirically extends the theoretical claim that diversity resides in the communication situation and reveals that collaboration practices and stakeholder models are better understood when grounded in dialogic theory. http://tc.eserver.org/19877.html http://tc.eserver.org/19877.html Understanding an organization's corporate culture can help explain how to get things done in an organization: communicate, advanced up the corporate ladder, and get project ideas accepted and completed. We can understand culture by identifying values, norms, and assumptions underlying the corporate 'world..' Cultures can he better understood by looking at such things as how an organization responds to crisis, how the intentions of group leaders come to be shared, and how an organization perceives itself. For example, a study of culture at one organization revealed such differing values between two groups, scientists and engineers, that cross-cultural mediation was necessary. http://tc.eserver.org/19723.html http://tc.eserver.org/19723.html As a technical communicator, you may be asked to create online training for your organization. Your first attempt at online courseware development may seem a bit daunting, but take heart. Here are a few online training DOs and DON'Ts that can help you avoid some common development pitfalls. http://tc.eserver.org/10611.html http://tc.eserver.org/10611.html The software development industry is relatively young, rapidly evolving, and surprisingly little is automated. It is therefore an intensely human and social endeavor, having all the phenomena characteristic of any cultural activity -- communication issues, organizational issues, customs, values, fashions, and myths. It brings out the best and the worst in people. Personalities determine much of what happens. It is more like making movies than engineering cars. Software development would benefit greatly from extensive study by sociologists, anthropologists, and clinical psychologists. As we await such analyses, let's document some beliefs embedded in the culture of software development, specifically about user interface design. This article identifies a series of cultural myths and presents realistic conclusions from my extensive experience in user interface design.