This is a comprehensive summary of the 'Communication and Organizations' course from Mumby (2013) for IBCOM. The chapters that are summarized are: 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.
Organizational Communication - A Critical Approach Summary (Chapters 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 &13)
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Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (EUR)
Communication and Media
Communication and Organizations (CM1014)
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Summary Communication & Organizations
Mumby (2013)
Chapter 1 Introducing Organizational Communication
Communications and organizations: we navigate them without really paying much attention to how
fundamental they are to our daily lives.
Organizational control: the dynamic communication process through which organizational
stakeholders (employees, managers, owners, shareholders, etc.) struggle to maximize their stake in
an organization.
We will examine organizations as communicative structures of control.
Organizations as communicative structures of control
‘The problems advanced by social scientists have been primarily problems of human relations in an
authoritarian setting (Charles Perrow).
One of the defining features of an organization is that it coordinates the behaviour of its members so
they can work collectively difficult to achieve in practice particularly in for-profit organizations (where
most people work):
- Tension between the goals, beliefs, and desires of individual organization members and those
of the larger organization.
- Problem is usually resolved by subordinating the goals and beliefs of individual organization
members to those of the larger organization.
- Issue of control becomes central.
How can we exercise control over employees and get them to function in a coordinated manner?
Organization implies control. A social organization is an ordered arrangement of individual
human interactions. Control processes help circumscribe idiosyncratic behaviours and keep
them conformant to the rational plan of organization. … The co-ordination and order created
out of the diverse interests and potentially diffuse behaviours of members is largely a
function of control. (p. 3)
However, organization members are not passive. There is a history of struggle, as employees have
individually and collectively resisted management efforts to limit their autonomy in the workplace.
We’ll examine control as a dialectical process: control is never a linear, cause-and-effect phenomenon
(like one billiard ball hitting another) but is complex and ambiguous; organizational control
mechanisms often produce creative employee responses that produce unintended outcomes for the
organization.
First, two things:
1. Clear notion of what organizational communication means.
2. Develop an overarching framework that allows us to compare the competing perspectives
that make up the field of organizational communication.
Defining ‘organizational communication’
Two phenomena: organization & communication
Organization: all complex organizations exhibit the following essential features (Charles Redding):
1. Interdependence
2. Differentiation of tasks and functions
3. Goal orientation
4. Control
5. Communication processes (not included by Redding)
,Interdependence
- Organizations exhibit interdependence insofar as no member can function without affecting,
and being affected by, other organization members.
- All complex organizations consist of intricate webs of interconnected communication
activities, the integration of which determines the success or failure of the organization.
- Any change in one aspect of the complex system of interdependence can create changes in
the entire system.
Differentiation of tasks and functions
- Organizations operate according to principle of division of labour: which members specialize
in particular tasks and the organization as a whole is divided into various departments.
Goal orientation
- Organizations are oriented toward particular goals.
- An organization comes into being when (1) there are persons able to communicate with each
other (2) who are willing to contribute to action (3) to accomplish a common purpose
(Barnard). complex because organizations often have multiple and competing goals.
Control mechanisms
- Control is a central, defining feature of complex situations.
- Various forms of control are necessary to achieve coordinated, goal-oriented behaviour
(because of conflicts).
- Five different control mechanisms that function in the contemporary organization:
1. Direct control
- Direct employees in explicit ways and then monitor their behaviour to make sure they are
performing adequately.
- Many organizations function through superior-subordinate relations, where the former has
the authority to coerce the latter into working in specific ways.
- Direct supervisory control of workers is still very much a feature of the modern organization.
- Most coercive.
- Relies on a simple understanding of how communication works.
2. Technological control
- Somewhat less direct form of control through various kinds of organizational technology.
- Controls both the kinds of work people do and the speed at which they work.
- E.g.: fast food industry.
- Technological forms of control often shift work from employees to customers as a way to
increase efficiency and profitability.
- Employees can never be certain when they are being monitored and thus are forced to
behave at all times as if they are under surveillance.
- Panopticism (Michel Foucault) = observing prisoners without being visible himself.
Critical technologies 1.1 Defining Communication Technology
What is communication technology?
- Anything that mediates and alters the user’s relationship to the world.
- It embodies a certain kind of human subjectivity and extend our relationship to the world
through that subjectivity.
- Doesn’t have to be electronic (microscope, glasses).
- A functionalist might focus on ways a particular CT can increase organizational efficiency.
- A critical approach to CT would highlight the ways in which technologies shape
organizational power relations.
- A feminist perspective might examine how a particular CT has a ‘gendered’ effect on
organizational communication processes.
, 3. Bureaucratic control
- Still common in many organizations, despite a shift toward more flexible, less formal
structures.
- Enabling organization members to gain advancement on merit rather than based on one’s
connections.
- Is exists as a system of rules, formal structures, and roles that both enable and constrain the
activities of organization members.
- Bureaucracy can be a highly effective means of coordinating and controlling organizational
activity, despite concerns about bureaucratic ‘red tape’.
4. Ideological control
- Refers to the development of a system of values and beliefs with which employees are
expected to identify strongly.
- Beauty of ideological control is that it requires little direct supervision of employees
(management perspective).
- If employees have been appropriately socialized into the organization’s system of beliefs and
values, then they should have internalized a taken-for-granted understanding of what it
means to work in the best interests of the organization.
- Companies often carefully vet potential employees to make sure they ‘fit’ the culture, and
then make explicit and carefully calibrated efforts to indoctrinate new employees through
training programs such as ‘culture boot camp’.
- Can be an effective means of creating an engaged, energized workforce.
- Can also be quite oppressive to many organization members, particularly as it often asks the
employee to invest his or her very identity, or sense of self, in the company.
- Employees who don’t fit in the culture may feel alienated from their work.
- Depends on a view of communication as complex and central to the construction of
employee identities and organizational meaning systems.
5. Disciplinary control
- Has emerged relatively recently as organizations have shifted from hierarchical, bureaucratic
structures to flatter, decentralized systems of decision making.
- Disciplinary control is distinguished as a ‘bottom-up’ form of control that focuses on
employees’ own production of a particular sense of self and work identity.
- Emerged as the relationship between organizations and employees has shifted away from the
post-World War II social contract of stable, lifetime employment and toward ‘free agency’
and a climate of much greater instability in the job market.
- ‘The self’ has become a project each individual must constantly work on.
- Individuals constantly engage in forms of self-discipline in which the creation and continual
improvement of an ‘entrepreneurial self’ is the goal.
- In disciplinary forms of control, the individual is both the subject (autonomously making his
or her own decisions and choice of goals) and object (the target of both self-discipline and
corporate and other institutional efforts to shape identity) of knowledge. control is exercised
through ‘the constitution of the very person who makes decisions’.
- Less coercive.
- Depends on a view of communication as complex and central to the construction of
employee identities and organizational meaning systems.
To understand these five forms of control, keep in mind:
a. Many organizations use multiple forms of control. These forms of control overlap in practice
in the workplace.
b. These forms of control operate with decreasing levels of direct coercion and increasing levels
of participation by employees in their own control.
c. The increasingly sophisticated forms of organizational control require a similarly sophisticated
understanding of the role of communication in these control processes.
, Communication processes
- Communication constitutes organization: communication activities are the basic, defining
‘stuff’ of organizational life.
- Organizations are not simply physical containers within which people communicate; rather,
organizations exist because people communicate, creating the complex systems of meaning
that we call ‘organizations’.
- Structure & agency within organizations.
- ‘meaning-centered’ perspective will be adopted: viewing communication as the basic,
constitutive process through which people come to experience and make sense of the world
in which they live communication creates people’s social reality.
- Communication: the dynamic, ongoing process of creating and negotiating meanings through
interactional symbolic (verbal and nonverbal) practices, including conversation, metaphors,
rituals, stories, dress, and space.
- Organizational communication: the process of creating and negotiating collective,
coordinated systems of meaning through symbolic practices oriented toward the
achievement of organizational goals.
Framing theories of organizational communication
Metatheoretical framework: a theory about theories, that allows us to examine the underlying
assumptions on which different theories are based.
Crisis of representation:
1. The idea of “representation” refers to knowledge claims that researchers in various
disciplines make about the world = epistemological dimension dominant view in the social
sciences the notion of a “crisis” thus reflects the recent emergence of challenges to this
dominant model.
2. The notion of “representation” can be understood to refer to the issue of “voice.” which
groups in our society have the opportunity and resources to speak and to represent their
own interests and the interests of other groups? This issue has become increasingly complex
as society has become more diverse.
Five worldviews (presenting increasingly complex challenges to the representational model of
knowledge). Each represents a progressive deepening of the “crisis of representation” in the social
sciences generally and, in the field of organizational communication. Perspectives will be called
discourses (idea that any worldview is made up of a community of scholars who communicate with
one another about their research and debate the strengths and weaknesses of the theories they
develop) 5 discourses:
1. Functionalism: a discourse of representation
2. Interpretivism: a discourse of understanding
3. Critical theory: a discourse of suspicion
4. Postmodernism: a discourse of vulnerability
5. Feminism: a discourse of empowerment
Each of these discourses takes a particular relationship to what is called the modernist tradition.
Modernism: a historical epoch and a way of thinking in which science, rationality, and progress are
the dominant themes.
- A period in which myth and superstition give way to the idea that each individual, through
rational thought, can come to understand the world.
- Modernist principles are at the root of Western-style democratic principles it altered
humans’ relationship to the world.
o Industrial Revolution
o Emergence of the human sciences (sociology, psychology)
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