http://tc.eserver.org/publisher/Management_Communication_Quarterly A listing of works published by Management Communication Quarterly 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/Management_Communication_Quarterly http://tc.eserver.org/34845.html http://tc.eserver.org/34845.html Recent scholarship has argued that the concept of profession is undertheorized and accepted uncritically. The authors address this issue by summarizing the characteristics of professions and articulating professions as institutionalized occupations. Their study of a veterinary call center suggests that profession influences the workplace through (a) knowledge providing, seeking, and sharing; (b) self-management of behavior, emotions, and productivity; (c) internal sources of motivation; (d) a service orientation; (e) the invocation of field standards; and (f) participation in a knowledge community beyond the workplace. Although these features may be distinguishable analytically, they are unified in the experience of work. Moreover, the close match in this case between the service orientations of the profession and of the organization strengthened the workers' commitment and thus the legitimacy of the organization. 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/34847.html http://tc.eserver.org/34847.html Work—life research tends to privilege the organization—employee relationship, with the family's role largely relegated to providing emotional and material support to the employee and adapting to organizational requirements. Systems oriented research, however, points toward a larger role for the family, including mediating the employee's relationship with the organization as well as direct organizational interactions. This study uses Weick's model of organizational sensemaking to examine, through the analysis of employee and family interview accounts, how a global high-tech organization and its employees' families enact one another as environments. Three dynamics of mutual enactments— two cooperative and one competitive—were identified, along with implications for work—life integration research and practice, for more traditionally programmatic work—life accommodations, and for families' management of their relationships to employing organizations. http://tc.eserver.org/34848.html http://tc.eserver.org/34848.html Despite its acknowledged importance, performance appraisal (PA) continues to be one of the most persistent problems in organizations, especially the appraisal interview (AI) component of PA, for which many techniques have been attempted with only mixed success. The authors conceptualize the AI as a “conversation about performance” and draw on an extensive review of the communication literature to identify the discursive resources available to the organization, the appraiser, and the appraisee for improving the preparation for and conduct of a conversation about performance. The authors' conceptualization extends research on PAs by identifying methodologies and conceptual underpinnings with connections to interpersonal, organizational, and mass communication scholarship. http://tc.eserver.org/34849.html http://tc.eserver.org/34849.html This study explores how employees express dissent to management about the same issue on multiple occasions across time (i.e., how they practice repetition). Employees completed a survey instrument reporting how often they used varying upward dissent tactics, how often and for how long they raised the same issue, and how they perceived their supervisors responded to their concerns. Results indicate that employees relied predominantly on competent upward dissent tactics but that they adopted less competent and more face-threatening tactics as repetition progressed. In addition, employees' perceptions of their supervisors' responses to repetition related to the overall duration of repetition but not to the frequency with which employees raised issues or the amount of time that elapsed between dissent episodes. 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/34851.html http://tc.eserver.org/34851.html Since the 1960s, Brazil has developed very close ties between academia and professionals in the marketplace. The efforts of scholars and the enthusiastic support of professionals have contributed to this development and advanced both practice and the scholarly agenda of the field. This essay examines this partnership as it formed through the growth of undergraduate education, the development of graduate programs, the establishment of the bridge between academia and the business world, and the integration of the academy and the market. 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/34853.html http://tc.eserver.org/34853.html The author explores how a tobacco firm in crisis engaged in crisis communication and image repair work in a highly polarized ideological milieu. Through an analysis of the tobacco firm's public statements produced in the aftermath of a 1997 lawsuit, the author demonstrates how the firm dealt with its milieu by exploiting and embracing both of the ambient ideological poles. By embracing these poles, the firm turned critique and opposition into discursive resources for its crisis communication. The author argues that political-ideological framing of organizational communication and discursive appropriation of critique and opposition serve as critical foci for organizational communication scholarship. http://tc.eserver.org/34854.html http://tc.eserver.org/34854.html During my 30 years in the academy, I have seen universities subject to increased demands for accountability. These demands from both internal and external publics translate into added attention to quality assessment. To evaluate teaching, universities measure student learning outcomes and rely on standardized scores as indicators of teaching effectiveness. To assess research productivity, departments document publications that appear in top-ranked journals and presses and track dollar amounts raised through external funding. This focus on evaluation, in turn, lends new credence to independent ranking systems that provide unbiased indices of quality. An unintended consequence of these academic norms, however, is the pattern of treating standards as objective indices rather than practical guidelines. http://tc.eserver.org/34855.html http://tc.eserver.org/34855.html In contemporary organizations, competitive advantage can come from ideas employees communicate to supervisors for improving processes, products, and services. One approach to studying employee communications with supervisors is voice behavior. In this research, the authors consider leader— member exchange (LMX) and the individual cultural value orientation of power distance (PD) as predictors of voice. Two studies, conducted in different countries, demonstrate the unique and combined effects of these predictors. In Study 1, conducted in the United States, LMX was positively related to voice, PD was negatively related to voice, and PD made more of a difference in voice when LMX was high. In Study 2, conducted in Colombia, LMX and PD were both related to voice but did not interact. The authors discuss the implications for theory and practice. 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/34857.html http://tc.eserver.org/34857.html Peer evaluation is the hallmark of the academic profession. Hiring, advancement, and reputation in the university setting have traditionally depended on a scholar's work as judged by his or her colleagues. The emerging trend toward journal ranking as an indicator of research accomplishment poses an important challenge to professional academic standards and to higher education generally because ranking schemes diminish the professoriate and degrade knowledge work. We argue that when scholarly journals are ranked in terms of their desirability as publication outlets they take on the characteristics of commodities. 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/34859.html http://tc.eserver.org/34859.html Most previous social network studies have focused on the positive aspects of social relationships. In contrast, this research examined how the negative aspects of social networks in work groups can influence individual performance within the group. Accordingly, two studies were conducted to make this assessment. The first study examined the effect of negative relations and frequency of communication on performance among student groups. The second study investigated how the Five Factor Model of personality and position in adversarial networks interacted to influence individuals' performance. Although results of the first study indicated that frequent communication with others could make a person more likeable, consequently helping him or her perform better, the second study showed that those individuals disliked by others were less likely to achieve a good performance rating, despite their conscientiousness, emotional stability, or openness to experiences. http://tc.eserver.org/33557.html http://tc.eserver.org/33557.html This essay describes the authors' efforts to engage disciplinary calls for greater diversity through the construction of an international online community and conference, COMMUNEcation. They describe the commitments and goals of the community and conference, the construction of the COMMUNEcating space, and their encounters with disciplinary, geographically, and linguistically diverse scholars in their mutual exploration of global and organizing practices in their local contexts. The conference contributions and conversations prompted the authors to ask three salient questions around scholarly understandings of the Other and Othering practices of organizing and communicating across the globe—Where is the Other? Who is the Other? and What is the Other? The second half of the essay discusses these questions in detail and concludes with the authors' reflections on creating "spaces inbetween" through technology and an introduction to the multiauthored collaborative essay and conference product from the Scholars of the COMMUNEcation Network that follows. http://tc.eserver.org/33558.html http://tc.eserver.org/33558.html The present study explored the possibility that McGregor's (1960) Theory X/Y assumptions serve as cognitive determinants of superior communicator style, a multidimensional set of style variables that can have considerable effects on subordinate well-being and organizational viability. A total of 279 superiors completed an online survey that measured Theory X/Y orientation and superior communicator style. Correlational tests revealed that Theory X assumptions were positively related to the Dominant and Impression Leaving styles. In contrast, Theory Y assumptions were negatively related to the Anxious style, and positively related to the Supportive, Impression Leaving, and Nonverbally Expressive styles. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential psychological effects of each style profile as well as the implications of the findings for screening job applicants. http://tc.eserver.org/33559.html http://tc.eserver.org/33559.html Most prior media use research has assumed that people use information and communication technologies (ICTs) independently of other ICTs, that is, as discrete media. This study uses cross-organizational, in-depth interview data to uncover the important role that ICT sequences play in persuasion, information exchange, and documentation. The primary occasions for sequential ICT use were (a) preparing for meetings, (b) performing daily tasks, and (c) following up to persuade. When people need to follow up initial communication episodes, the overall groupings of ICTs represent two underlying attributes: degree of connection with others and extent of synchroneity. These findings support an expanded perspective on media richness theory and information theory by illustrating that ICT sequences can expand cues and channels and provide error-reducing redundancy for equivocal and uncertain tasks. http://tc.eserver.org/33560.html http://tc.eserver.org/33560.html The authors describe the work experiences of in-home day care providers, particularly their relationships with the parents of the children for whom they care throughout the day. The authors identify two unintended consequences of the providers' organizing structures and policies: feelings of stress and underappreciation in potential interactions. Ironically, the providers also instituted these same structures and policies to stay home with their own children and meet their own financial needs. This double bind of agency and constraint produced stress, which in turn compromised their interactions with their family and friends. Findings highlight the difficulties involved in managing work and family from a home-based business and draw particular attention to the relational challenges faced by the providers. http://tc.eserver.org/31979.html http://tc.eserver.org/31979.html Recent management research imports rhetorical scholarship into the study of organizations. Although this cross-disciplinarity is heuristically promising, it presents significant challenges. This article interrogates management's use of rhetoric, contrasting it with communication studies. Five themes from management research identify how rhetoric is used as an organizational hermeneutic: The article demonstrates that management research conceptualizes rhetoric as a theory and as an action; as the substance that maintains and/or challenges organizational order; as being constitutive of individual and organizational identity; as a managerial strategy for persuading followers; and as a framework for narrative and rational organizational discourses. The authors argue that organizational researchers who study rhetoric characterize persuasive strategies as managers' most important actions. http://tc.eserver.org/31978.html http://tc.eserver.org/31978.html Rhetorical analysis provides a means through which a political perspective on technological change can be developed at a micro-discursive level. Through the analysis of managers' arguments and counterarguments, this article identifies three rhetorical strategies that negotiate the relationship between the technical and the social: attributing the effects of technology; claiming convergent and divergent interests; and constructing identities for self, groups, and the technology. It argues that a rhetorical approach maintains space for agency on the behalf of employees (through the witcraft of argument) and analytical skepticism concerning the reality of technology properties and effects (through counterargument). In addition, it proposes the concept of the argumentative context as a means of bridging the gap between individual and organizational rhetoric. 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/31691.html http://tc.eserver.org/31691.html There are many terrific leaders at large. But society and business have suffered from poor leadership, bad leadership, narcissistic leadership, and above all, too-powerful leadership. Viewing followers as recalcitrant infants in need of tough parental attention really will not do. Too much leadership discourse has evaded this kind of problem: Fairhurst (2007) offers a challenging alternative to a route that frequently leads to a dead end. The myths of powerful, transformational, and charismatic leadership offer short-term comfort. It would be consoling to believe that Superman has stepped from the cinema screen and into the boardrooms of our organizations, whatever his attire. But such comfort exacts too high a price. http://tc.eserver.org/31686.html http://tc.eserver.org/31686.html The author reconnects resistance in production to its radical roots. Current literature suggests that resistance in the liberal workplaces of late capitalism has gone underground, becoming mostly evident in unofficial, offstage practices such as cynicism, parody, and humor. The author argues this resistance is too often a decaf resistance. This is a resistance without the cost of radically changing the economy of enjoyment, which ties us to our master. The author argues that resistance, as a real act, which suspends and changes the constellation of power relations, has a cost that cannot be accounted for in advance. To understand this cost, we need an ethics, which the author calls, following Lacan, the Ethics of the Real. http://tc.eserver.org/31692.html http://tc.eserver.org/31692.html Without question, the study of leadership has a long and rich history within the organizational sciences despite varying attitudes toward the topic. For example, leadership psychologists portray leadership as an inner motor of leader and increasingly follower traits, states, emotions, and cognitive processing styles that as independent variables cause messages and behavior to be produced. http://tc.eserver.org/31695.html http://tc.eserver.org/31695.html This article draws on channel expansion theory to explore the selection and use of communication media by organizational members. Channel expansion theory scholars posit that media richness perceptions are dependent on experiences with communication partners, the message topic, and the communication media utilized. This study tests channel expansion theory in the context of new and traditional communication media. Respondents (N = 269) completed questionnaires regarding their use and perceptions of face-to-face, telephone, e-mail, or instant-messaging interactions. Results indicate that experience with channel, topic, partner, and social influence are all significant predictors of richness perceptions, when controlling for age and media characteristics. Findings also suggest that the richness of a medium is not fixed and may be shaped by interpersonal factors, including one's relevant experiences. http://tc.eserver.org/31693.html http://tc.eserver.org/31693.html Gail Fairhurst's book (2007) on discursive leadership is a highly welcome Gcontribution to the endeavor of establishing discourse analysis as a substantial approach to management communication. It presents a range of theories and methodologies for doing research on the central topics of leadership and on the crucial activities in management, such as instruction, mentoring, and performance appraisals. As a linguist doing research on management meetings, I would like to comment on the contribution that the book may make to theory and training in the fields of communication and management, and I wish to make some suggestions about the way forward for empirical research on discourse in management settings. http://tc.eserver.org/31688.html http://tc.eserver.org/31688.html The author argues that an ironic approach to collusion can help shift the focus of resistance away from the relatively rare events surrounding implacable opposition or total unanimity to the quotidian aspects of workplace politics. Collusion is characterized as an outcome of organizational politics conducted between the traditionally opposed parties of radical industrial sociology (i.e., managers and workers) under the guidance of an ironic mode of cognition. Irony is depicted as a foxlike way of gaining 'a perspective on perspectives,' which provides a means of understanding stalemate, accommodation, and collusion by showing how opposing ideological positions are indebted. It also illuminates the moments when collusion breaks down and resisting parties become implacably opposed hedgehogs (one position prevails over the other), leading to overt conflict and resistance. http://tc.eserver.org/31684.html http://tc.eserver.org/31684.html By using the term 'mentoring at work,' the editors, Belle Rose Ragins and Kathy Kram, suggest that they are putting scholars in conversation with each other in their attempts to figure out what mentoring work is and how mentoring actually works. 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/31696.html http://tc.eserver.org/31696.html It is unnecessary and impossible for any one perspective to cover all the ground, although it is necessary that a perspective have a clear and distinct view, be it narrow or broad, of the subject matter, of the domain that it belongs to, and of the level of analysis that it entails. With respect to the study of leadership as a communication phenomenon, holism may just be the response necessary for knowledge advancement and for the field of communication to grow 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/31687.html http://tc.eserver.org/31687.html Management in professionalized workplaces is often characterized as Mtrying to herd cats. Having grown up on a dairy farm, the characterization never made much sense to me. Cows and sheep earn our disparaging remarks because they are easy to push around. Their occasional resistance seems counter to their character. But cats are also easy to herd; just have milk. Cats may walk by themselves, but they quickly all choose to walk in the same direction following the pail. Cats may quickly resist getting pushed in common directions, but they are easily pulled there. Got milk, got cats. Are cats more autonomous than the herds? Has resisting cats led us to overlook how easy they are to herd? Resistance comes to us as a term growing out of workplaces that tried to push and direct. Resistance was at least a pushing back; sometimes it was an organized pushing for another direction. http://tc.eserver.org/31685.html http://tc.eserver.org/31685.html The author explores organizational controls in an era dominated by spectacles, images, and pictures and seeks to identify forms of resistance that subvert and undermine these controls. The author analyzes new forms of resistance, such as whistle-blowing, that are particularly aimed at besmirching an organization's image and reputation and argues that although many employees have lost their collective voice, they occasionally raise their individual voices in opposition, cynical rejection, or questioning of managerial practices and discourses or, more often, resort to exit. The author concludes that many current forms of workplace resistance mirror similar forms of resistance used by individuals as consumers in questioning, disrupting, and, at times, challenging the claims of consumerism. http://tc.eserver.org/30760.html http://tc.eserver.org/30760.html Recent conceptualizations of resistance have tended to privilege intentional and conscious acts of resistance and forms of resistance manifested within relations of power that researchers typically define as asymmetrical, such as the labor-management relation. The author argues that these tendencies lead us to overlook forms of resistance manifest in other relations of power that exist in organizations, as well as set ourselves up as arbitrators of what is to be considered 'effective' resistance. Using Bourdieu's concepts of capital and field, the author examines how we can read resistance both to the idea of sex discrimination and to patriarchal power relations from the accounts of female career police officers and offers a more perspectival, relativistic account of resistance. http://tc.eserver.org/30737.html http://tc.eserver.org/30737.html The need for and benefits of proactive and transparent communication about corporate social responsibility (CSR) are widely acknowledged. This study examines CSR communication undertaken by the top 100 information technology (IT) companies in India on their corporate Web sites, with an analytical focus on the dimensions of prominence of communication, extent of information, and style of presentation. The findings indicate that the number of companies with CSR information on their Web sites is strikingly low and that these leading companies do not leverage the Web sites to their advantage in terms of the quantity and style of CSR communication. Although the findings do not necessarily imply absence of CSR action on the part of IT companies in India, they attest to a general lack of proactive CSR communication. The article concludes with managerial implications for CSR communication on corporate Web sites. 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/30736.html http://tc.eserver.org/30736.html This study uses the institutional theory of organizational communication (ITOC) to explain physicians' reactions to managed care. ITOC posits that enduring beliefs and practices both transcend and shape particular organizations and organizing. The authors find that physicians' institutional beliefs moderated the negative relationship between managed care medical practice and satisfaction. ITOC also posits that the negotiation of institutional, environmental, organizational, and individual factors occurs through communication. Controlling for these factors, communication with managed care representatives remains significantly and positively related to satisfaction. The results provide support for ITOC and macro approaches to organizational communication research and offer insights for the management of professionals in general and physicians in particular. 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/30741.html http://tc.eserver.org/30741.html According to communication privacy management (CPM) theory, people manage the boundaries around information that they seek to keep private. How does this theory apply when employees are monitored electronically? Using data from 154 face-to-face interviews with employees from a range of organizations, the authors identified various ways organizations, employees, and coworkers describe electronic surveillance and the privacy expectations, boundaries, and turbulence that arise. Privacy boundaries are established during new-employee orientation when surveillance is described as coercive control, as benefiting the company, and/or as benefiting employees. Correlations exist between the surveillance-related socialization messages interviewees remember receiving and their attitudes. Although little boundary turbulence appeared, employees articulated boundaries that companies should not cross. The authors conclude that CPM theory suppositions need modification to fit the conditions of electronic surveillance. http://tc.eserver.org/25287.html http://tc.eserver.org/25287.html Management Communication Quarterly is a resource for researchers and scholars, as well as managers, professionals, consultants, and trainers.