Theoretical Developments in Organizational Communication Research

Theoretical Developments in Organizational Communication Research

Organizational communication began to emerge as an identifiable academic field in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s (Redding, 1985), forming around a set of highly practical questions concerning what makes managerial communication in organizations effective. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the field's boundaries expanded to address the effects of small group networks, superior-subordinate communication, and communication climate on employee satisfaction and performance (Putnam & Cheney, 1985). Since that time, the field's identity has grown to include a concern for nonmanagerial voices, the technical rationality that underlies most organizational decision making, understanding the very nature of “organization,” and the role of organizations in democratic societies (Mumby & Stohl, 1996). The use of multiple theoretical perspectives has vastly expanded the areas of research conducted to better understand organizational communication and its problems.

In the field's early development, scholars tended to view communication as one of many variables operating in patterned and predictable ways in organizations, which themselves were viewed as objects to be described, predicted, and controlled (Deetz, 2001). Working within this [Page 166]tradition, scholars adopted administrative or social scientific theories of organizations and communication and used these to form questions about causal relationships between organizational and communication variables. Over time, scholars began reconceptu-alizing preexisting organizational theories in communication-centered terms, while continuing to search in more methodologically sophisticated ways for regularities and causal relationships among communication processes and various organizational outcomes (K. I. Miller, 2000). Such a postposi-tivist perspective continues to drive many research programs in organizational communication, including those centering on communication during organizational change (e.g., Kramer, Dougherty, & Pierce, 2004; Lewis, 1999), member socialization into workgroups (Myers & McPhee, 2006), and network formation (e.g., Monge & Contractor, 2004).

In the early 1980s, Linda Putnam and her colleagues convincingly argued for a shift toward using an interpretive paradigm in organizational communication research (Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983). Rooted in beliefs that organizations are socially constructed rather than naturally existing objects and pluralistic systems rather than highly unified, cooperative ones, research began focusing on multiple voices in organizational life and meaning-centered understandings of communication to show how particular realities are socially produced and maintained. The developmentof descriptive theories grounded in the experiences of research participants in particular social/ cultural sites or the use of theoretical concepts as general sensitizing devices was pursued, to complement research grounded in formal predictive theories.

The interpretive paradigm laid the groundwork for critical models of organizational communication research as scholars began arguing that complex social processes of organizing and meaning formation as well as knowledge claims about these processes can never be politically neutral (Deetz & Kersten, 1983). Thus, the field's theoretical boundaries further expanded throughout the 1980s and 1990s as critical scholars began examining how various forms of domination and asymmetrical power relations embedded in larger political and economic systems shape the social construction of reality (Mumby, 2000). Guided by social theorists and philosophers, critical researchers challenge what they take to be the narrow technical and economic interests of corporations and place the study of organizations in a wider social context, often calling for changes that would develop the human capacity to participate in less distorted forms of communication and the organizational capacity to contribute more meaningfully to the development of democratic societies (Cheney, 1995; Deetz, 1992).

...