So what is organizational communication? And what are we doing when we study
organizational communication? I want to try and answer these questions from two different
perspectives. First, we can talk about organizational communication as the communication that
happens within organizations. That is, all the communication activity you’ll see if you go to any
organization today: sending emails, writing memos, talking on the phone, having meetings (and
more meetings!), teleconferencing, video conferencing, speeches, presentations, and so on.
This is a more conventional approach, and I think is what comes to mind when people initially
think of organizational communication.
But I want to go deeper. I want to introduce an alternative, more sophisticated approach of
seeing organizations as communication. This can radically change how we understand human
interaction and organizational life, and it opens up exciting possibilities for research and
practice.