Reworking Resistance

Scholars recognize that both nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and non-Western organizational logics harbor the potential to reconfigure fundamental assumptions of organizational research. Drawing from such work, I argue that we must reconceptualize ‘resistance' in organizational communication scholarship by destabilizing its Western-centric assumptions and logics. I do so by engaging in a postcolonial analysis of scholarship on international NGOs, and drawing out typical assumptions of organizational communication work that do not hold under all cultural conditions, or that are imperialistic in nature. Answering calls to center alternative forms of organizing and to draw deeper relations between critical intercultural and organizational communication research, this study asks scholars to resist typical theorizations of ‘resistance,' and decolonize organizational theory.

Moving From Practical Application to Expert Craft Practice in Organizational Communication

This essay reviews practical application activities performed in the field of organizational communication and poses an alternative approach for creating organizations and employees that flourish and can meet the demands of tomorrow. Much of the discipline's practical application efforts have been focused on analyzing problems and focusing on epistemological and conceptual issues—activities that have been appropriate for creating communication competence, but have fallen short in motivating higher levels of proficiency and expertise. This essay creates a case for how the field might valuably move toward other ways of creating transformed practice not through application of organizational communication knowledge, but via an approach that incorporates practical wisdom, critical self-reflexivity, appreciative inquiry, improvisation, sensemaking/breaking/giving and craft practice.

An Introduction to Computational Social Science for Organizational Communication

The exponential growth of “Big Data” has given rise to a field known as computational social science (CSS). The authors view CSS as the interdisciplinary investigation of society that takes advantage of the massive amount of data generated by individuals in a way that allows for abductive research designs. Moreover, CSS complicates the relationship between data and theory by opening the door for a more data-driven approach to social science. This chapter will demonstrate the utility of a CSS approach using examples from dynamic interaction modeling, machine learning, and network analysis to investigate organizational communication (OC). The chapter concludes by suggesting that lessons learned from OC's history can help deal with addressing several current issues related to CSS, including an audit culture, data collection ethics, transparency, and Big Data hubris.

Expanding Organizational Research Methods

Collecting qualitative data in organizations is a complex and messy process which produces subjective, performed, and partial data. In this chapter, the authors argue that analyzing “ruptures” in organizational interview data—paying attention to absences, exits, unspoken feelings, and temporal shifts--can enrich the researcher's understanding by making visible multiple aspects of the data which might otherwise have been overlooked. Examining ruptures draws attention to jarring disjunctures and previously unseen angles often missed through traditional data analysis. Drawing from interview data with brothel owners and sex workers in Nevada's legal brothels, the authors present two main contributions to qualitative organizational research: (1) the benefits of analyzing ruptures in organizational interview performances and transcripts and (2) a challenge to organizational researchers to take seriously their emotions during the interview performance.

Organizing, Organizations, and the Role of Social Media Conversations

This chapter traces the concept of organizational identity in organization theory and places it in the social media context. It proposes that organizational communication theories intellectually based in the “linguistic turn” (e.g., the Montreal School Approach to how communication constitutes organizations, communicative theory of the firm) are well positioned to illuminate the constitutive capabilities of identity-bound interaction on social media. It suggest that social media is more than another organizational tool for communication with stakeholders in that it affords interactants the opportunity to negotiate foundational organizational practices: organizational identity, boundaries, and membership, in public. In this negotiative process, the organizing role of the stakeholder is emphasized and legitimized by organizational participation and engagement on social media platforms. The Montreal School Approach's conversation–text dialectic and the communicative theory of the firm's conceptualization of organizations as social, are two useful concepts when making sense of organization–stakeholder interaction in the social media context.

Forty Years of Organizational Communication

This essay begins with a description of the emergence of organizational communication as a discipline. The authors explain how Murray's notion of a discipline framed a 1976 organizational communication conference and two consequent conferences held twenty years apart. Because all three conferences featured the same distinctive way to present material, the conferences provided a unique opportunity to track the development of the discipline. This chapter provides a representative review of the organizational communication literature over 40 years as an historical context. This chapter begins by explaining Murray's categories, and the authors describe 40 year trends in the literature within each category. The authors end the chapter by highlighting the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Imagination, Action, and Justice

Social justice connects to trends in organizational communication scholarship. Some organizational communication traditions engage, explicitly and implicitly, social justice concepts, such as fairness, equity, freedom, structure, and poverty. Drawing on these rich traditions, even more opportunities exist for conducting organizational communication scholarship that promotes justice. This essay articulates how the theory–practice conversation can be forwarded to enable social justice-oriented scholarship. Communication scholarship can do more justice if it is understood as contributing to the “communicative imaginary” as opposed to only developing theory. The communicative imaginary is the splendid array of social possibilities that humans use to create and recreate ways of living together and sharing in one another's lives. Heroism, tragedy, comedy, and beauty are four frames within the communicative imaginary that enable the pursuit of justice. The essay concludes with a reflection on how solidarity can configure scholars' lives in meaningful and just ways.

Making the Case for Academic and Social Impact in Organizational Communication Research

Engaged scholarship begins with the premise that academic research cannot only be rigorous, but also have social impact by addressing important organizational and community issues. A tacit assumption in much of the literature on engaged organizational communication scholarship is that we have a clear understanding of what we mean by social impact. This chapter explores how various indicators and metrics constitute the meaning of academic and social impact. I argue that there is relatively little overlap in the indicators that are currently used to assess academic and social impact and that this poses important challenges for organizational communication scholars who wish to do engaged scholarship. Five practices are offered to facilitate organizational communication scholars determine the kind of impact they wish to make and manage the challenges posed by the competing demands of demonstrating academic and social impact: (1) connect with your scholarly passion, (2) practice triple translation, (3) develop emergent design skills, (4) go big, and (5) research on the go.

Doing Applied Organizational Communication Research

Over the past several decades, organizational communication has embraced rich theoretical understandings for organization, communication and the interface between the two. Yet, as our theories have become richer and more complex, they have also become increasingly difficult to “sell” to applied audiences that often assume a “transmission” model of communication. This chapter describes challenges I have faced while applying organizational communication theory to issues related to wildland firefighter safety. I propose that a key challenge of applied organizational communication research is transforming what it means for organizational managers to think communicatively. This requires uncovering the organization's research engagement history and trajectory, encountering and working with organization members' assumptions about organization and communication, and identifying and working with pivot points that can help organization members approach problems using communication lenses.

Adapting and Advancing Organizational Communication Research Methods

Organizational Communication scholars have a rich history of encouraging multiple approaches to data collection and analysis. In this chapter, I provide examples from our recent history that illustrate how we have developed our broad perspective on research methods. I also disclose the struggles I had when trying to decide how to represent the trends in published methods found in Management Communication Quarterly between 2000 and 2015. My analysis revealed that approximately two thirds of the papers published in MCQ used a qualitative approach to data collection. Mixed methods were rare, while using multiple methods was more common and has been stable over time. The chapter ends by highlighting pedagogical issues surrounding our field's acceptance of methodological diversity. I argue that as teachers, we must not lose the value of educating the next generation to be methodologically deep in some research approaches. However, we must also encourage methodological curiosity; a mindset that will allow our students to continue learning methods well beyond their graduate education.