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Summary CO Notes - IBCOM Year 1
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IBCOM Year 1CO Notes
Chapter 1
Human beings are communicating, organizing creatures, and we define ourselves largely through our
various organizational memberships and communicative connections.
Organizational control - The dynamic communication process through which organizational
stakeholders struggle to maximize their stake in an organization.
Tensions between individual and organizational control:
Essential features of complex organizations:
1. Interdependence
2. Differentiating of tasks and functions
3. Goal orientation
Barnard: Organizations are goal oriented
An organization comes into being when…
There are persons able to communicate with each other.
Who are willing to contribute to action
To accomplish a common purpose
4. Control
Forms of control:
o Hierarchy of authority and rules
o Rules, plans and rules
Control mechanisms
o Direct control
o Technological control
Communication technology - Anything that mediates and alters the user's relationship to the world.
o Bureaucratic control
o Ideological control (top-down) - A system of values and beliefs with which
employees identify with strongly.
o Disciplinary control (bottom-up)
Many organizations use multiple forms of control.
,They operate with decreasing levels of direction coercion and increasing levels of participation by
employees in their own control.
5. Communication processes
Communication - Meaning-centered perspective, the ongoing process of creating and negotiating
meanings through interactional symbolic 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.
Living in the age of 'crisis of representation' at two levels:
1. Epistemological - How we come to know of things
Possibility of making knowledge claims that accurately reflect, or represent, an
objectively existing world.
2. 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.
Five perspectives on organizational communication:
Discourses: That present challenges to the crisis of representation.
Each discourse has a particular relationship with modernism
1. Functionalism - A discourse of representation
Progress and emancipation can best be achieved through a process of discovery, in
which the application of scientific principles gradually and progressively illuminates
the world for us.
Focus on process of discovery
Perspective of most management theory
Predict, control, and generalize about human behavior
Communication as information transfer
2. Interpretivism - A discourse of understanding
Sees a direct relationship between communication processes and who we are as
human beings.
Rather than viewing communication simply as a conduit, or vehicle, for expressing
already informed ideas about an objective world, interpretivism sees communication
as actually constituting that world.
Humans create realities collectively as they work together
Communication does not occur in organizations, communication creates organizations
3. Critical theory - A discourse of suspicion
The exercise of power is hidden, power works in subtle ways to shape the world.
Different social groups have different levels of access to symbolic and communication
resources, thus the way reality is constructed reflects the ability of powerful groups to
shape this process.
Focus on power
Organizations as political structures
Critique of how organizations create systems of control
, 4. Postmodernism - A discourse of vulnerability
Our common-sense view of the world is vulnerable to multiple alternative
perspectives.
Rather than communication being the symbolic representation of the real world,
communication is what is real, with the world having a secondary status.
Rejection of universal truth
Demise of rational planning of modernity
Postmodernity - Refers to a specific historical period that comes after modernity.
Postmodernism - Refers to a particular way of thinking about the world.
o Challenges and rejects the modernist belief that rationality and science
inevitably lead to progress and emancipation.
Deconstruction - Interpretive analyses that attempt to illustrate how organizations are
not the stable structures they appear to be but actually relatively precarious systems
of meaning fixed more by the dominance of a particular world view.
5. Feminism - A discourse of empowerment
Address the question of voice
Feminist research focuses on exploring the relationship among gender, power, and
organization in order to develop more equitable organizational practices and
structures.
Addresses traditional exclusion of women's voices from organizations
Chapter 3
The emergence of modern organization:
Modern organization depends for its existence on the willingness of its employees to
appear together at a specific place and time.
In order for organizations to survive they depend on people to come to work and stay
for a set period of time.
Wage slavery - Working for an employer
Shift from a society of workers to a society of employees
Change in the kind of jobs
Change in collective beliefs, values and cultural practices
Change in the forms of discipline and control to which people were willing to consent.
Employee: Subject of definable and measurable entity
Manager: To administer and control this subject
Industrial revolution: From an agricultural, mercantile system to an industrial, capitalist system.
The process of mechanization not only enabled the production of vast quantities of
goods but also altered the economic, political, and cultural landscape.
Shift from worker to employee due to enclosure laws > No longer able to provide for oneself > Sell
your labor to others
Enclosure laws - Common lands no longer being common, but awarded to landowners who made
vast fortunes through rents and sheep farming.
The creation of steam power functioned as the engine of the industrial revolution.
Led to efficient, cheap, mass production of good.
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