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Organizational Communication
Theory, Research, and Practice

v2.0 Jason S. Wrench, Narissra Punyanunt-Carter, and Mark Ward Sr.
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1.3 History of Organizational Communication

Learning Objectives

  1. Differentiate among the three ways the term organizational communication can be understood, according to Stanley Deetz.

  2. Define the term organizational communication as it is used within this section.

  3. Identify some of the major historical events in the creation of the field of organizational communication.

Now that we’ve introduced some beginning definitions, let’s switch gears. To help you get an initial grasp of organizational communication, we’ll explore three ways of viewing the term and then offer a brief history of the field.

Viewing Organizational Communication

Stanley Deetz argued that defining what is meant by the term organizational communication is only half the question: “A more interesting question is, ‘What do we see or what are we able to do if we think of organizational communication in one way versus another?’ Unlike a definition, the attempt here is not to get it right but to understand our choices.” Instead, Deetz recommends we grasp three different ways to conceptualize organizational communication: as a discipline, to describe organizations, and as a phenomenon within organizations.

Organizational Communication as Discipline

The first way the term organizational communication is defined is as a specific subfield of the communication field. However, organizational communication is not an academic area of study unique to the field of communication studies. How people within organizations communicate, and how organizations corporately communicate, also interest fields like management science, organizational behavior, and industrial psychology. Organizational communication is a unique , observed Dennis Mumby and Cynthia Stohl, because it attracts a “community of scholars [who] constitute a disciplinary matrix when they share a set of paradigmatic assumptions about the study of a certain phenomenon.” Organizational communication is a discipline because people who study it share certain core ideas about the subject. Mumby and Stohl note, “This does not mean that there is a consensus on every issue, but rather that scholars see objects of study in similar ways, and use the same language game in describing these phenomena.” In fact, you may find your teacher or even yourself disagreeing with our interpretation of certain aspects of organizational communication, which is very much a normal part of any academic discipline.

Organizational Communication as Descriptor

The second way we can view the term organizational communication is as descriptor for what happens within organizations. Deetz explains, “In the same way that psychology, sociology, and economics can be thought of as capable of explaining organizations’ processes, communication might also be thought of as a distinct mode of explanation or way of thinking about organizations.” As you will quickly see in this book, organizational communication is a —people in a variety of different academic areas conduct research on the topic. Scholars in anthropology, business, psychology, sociology, and other academic areas conduct research that is fundamentally about organizational communication. Communication scholars differ in how we approach organizational communication because our training is, first of all, in human communication. So we bring to the study of organizational communication a unique history and set of tools that other scholars do not possess.

Organizational Communication as Phenomenon

The last way one can view the term organizational communication is as a specific phenomenon, or set of phenomena, that occurs within organizations. For example, when two employees get into a conflict at work, they are enacting organizational communication. When the chief financial officer of an organization is delivering a PowerPoint presentation on the latest quarterly earnings to the organization’s board of directors, they are engaging in organizational communication. The latest advertisement campaign an organization has created for the national media is another example of organizational communication.

A History of Organizational Communication

Instead of providing a long, drawn-out history of the field of organizational communication as we know it today, we’ve provided a brief timeline dating back to the 1750s when the Industrial Revolution began in the United Kingdom. The introduction of steam-powered machinery forever changed the way businesses operated and led to the eventual creation of the modern corporation. Table 1.2 summarizes the major events in the history of organizational communication as a field of study. This table is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but only a representative list of key moments in the study of organizational communication.

Table 1.2 Major Events in Organizational Communication

c. 1750The Industrial Revolution starts in the United Kingdom and quickly transforms the nature of business.
1908
A. E. Phillips publishes the first public speaking book specifically aimed at business professionals, Effectively Speaking.
Harvard Business School becomes the first academic program to focus on the scholarship of business.
1910The first meeting of the Eastern Public Speaking Conference is held. The association changed itself to the Speech Association of the Eastern States in 1950 and then to the Eastern Communication Association in 1973.
1914The National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking is formed and holds its first convention the following year. This association changes its name four times over the next one hundred years: National Association of Teachers of Speech, 1923; Speech Association of America, 1946; Speech Communication Association, 1970; and National Communication Association, 1997.
1919Edward Bernays and Doris Fleishman open the first public relations firm.
1929William Phillips Sandford and Willard Hayes Yeager are the first speech scholars to publish a public speaking book aimed at business professionals, titled Business and Professional Speaking.
1937W. Charles Redding publishes an article titled “Speech and Human Relations” in the academic journal The Speaker. Redding is widely considered the father of organizational communication.
1938Chester Barnard publishes The Functions of the Executive and argues, “The first function of the executive is to develop and maintain a system of communication.”
1941Paul Lazarsfeld publishes the first review of the discipline of communication based on his and others’ research at the Bureau of Applied Social Research and determines that communication can be broken into four categories: (1) who, (2) said what, (3) to whom, and (4) with what effect.
1942Alexander Heron argues that successful communication with one’s employees is necessary for good business in his book Sharing Information with Employees.
1945University of Denver holds the first graduate-level seminar in industrial communication.
1949Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver publish The Mathematical Theory of Communication, which provides the first major model of human communication (source, message, receiver, noise).
1952The first dissertation specifically in industrial communication is completed by Keith Davis in the Department of Business at Ohio State University. The title of the manuscript is “Channels of Personnel Communication within the Management Setting.”
1953Ohio State University and the University of Nebraska offer the first PhD degrees conferred by speech departments in industrial communication.
1961Lee Thayer, a speech professor with an interest in communication in businesses, publishes Administrative Communication, the first true textbook in organizational communication.
1963The Journal of Business Communication is started by the American Business Communication Association.
1964W. Charles Redding and George Sanborn publish Business and Industrial Communication: A Source Book, which compiles copies of previously published articles on a wide range of organizational communication topics. The publication of this book is generally seen as the true start of the field of organizational communication.
1967 The first “Conference on Organizational Communication” is held at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. At the conference, Philip Tompkins reviews the state of organizational communication and divides the types of research into two categories: (1) informal and formal channels of communication and (2) superior-subordinate relationships. Tompkins’s presentation marks the official acceptance of the term organizational communication.
Henry Voos publishes Organizational Communication: A Bibliography, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.
1968Division IV, organizational communication, becomes an officially recognized group by the National Society for the Study of Communication, which becomes the International Communication Association in 1970.
1972W. Charles Redding publishes his book Communication with the Organization: An Interpretive Review of Theory and Research. In this monograph, he poses ten basic postulates of organizational communication.
1973The Academy of Management authorizes a new division within its association, titled Organizational Communication.
1982The Western Journal of Communication publishes a series of articles based out of a conference held in Alta, Utah, “The Summer Conference on Interpretive Approaches to the Study of Organization Communication.” This series of articles argues for the importance of incorporating interpretive methods in the study of organizational communication.
1983Linda Putnam and Michael Pacanowsky publish Communication and Organizations: An Interpretive Approach. This edited book further solidifies the importance of interpretive research methods in organizational communication.
1987Fredric Jablin, Linda Putnam, Karlene Roberts, and Lyman Porter publish the Handbook of Organizational Communication: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.
1991Stacia Wert-Gray, Candy Center, Dale Brashers, and Rene Meyers publish an article titled “Research Topics and Methodological Orientations in Organizational Communication: A Decade in Review.” The authors find that of the 289 articles published in the 1980s, 57.8% were social scientific, 25.9% were qualitative, 2.1% were critical, and 14.2% were categorized as other.
1993Dennis Mumby articulates an agenda for critical organizational communication research in an article titled “Critical Organizational Communication Studies: The Next 10 Years” in Communication Monographs.
2001Fredric Jablin and Linda Putnam publish The New Handbook of Organizational Communication: Advances in Theory, Research, and Methods.
2004Elizabeth Jones, Bernadette Watson, John Gardner, and Cindy Gallois publish an article titled “Organizational Communication: Challenges for the New Century” in the Journal of Communication. In the article, they identify six challenges organizational communication scholars face in the twenty-first century: (1) innovate in theory and methodology, (2) acknowledge the role of ethics, (3) move from the microlevel to macrolevel issues, (4) examine new organizational structures, (5) understand the communication of organizational change, and (6) examine diversity and intergroup communication.

Key Takeaways

  1. Stanley Deetz articulated three different ways the term organizational communication can be understood: the discipline, ways to describe/explain organizations, and a phenomenon within organizations. His first perspective describes organizational communication as an academic discipline that consists of an intellectual history, textbooks, courses, degrees, and so on. The second way to characterize organizational communication is as a way of describing organizations. Under this perspective, organizational communication is used to describe and/or explain how organizations function. Lastly, organizational communication is a specific set of behaviors exhibited within an organization itself. People interact with one another, which is a form of organizational communication, and through these interactions we actually create the phenomenon that is an organization.

  2. The history of organizational communication is a complicated one. Starting with the Industrial Revolution and the evolution of the modern corporation, the idea of organizational communication ultimately crystallized in the 1950s and 1960s. During the early years, most of the research examining communication within an organization was conducted from a social-scientific perspective, but starting in the 1980s with the work of Linda Putnam, organizational communication research has become more diversified to include both interpretive and critical perspectives.

Exercises

  1. Find two examples of how you could use the term organizational communication for each of Stanley Deetz’s three conceptualizations of the term. Did you find this process easy or difficult? Why?

  2. Since the 1960s, which decade do you think has been the most important in the transformation of the field of organizational communication? Why?