Cynthia Stohl

• University of California, Santa Barbara

Social media have great potential to facilitate corporate social responsibility (CSR) dialogue between companies and their stakeholders, but two fundamental issues remain: how to encourage greater participation/dialogue and how to avoid the development of echo chambers, whereby participants merely reinforce their previously held views, potentially...

Background: The differences between NGO networks for two distinct types of CSR practices are underexplored: convergent CSR, which pertains to the global standards embraced by both the local and global institutions, and divergent CSR, which is framed primarily by local economic, political and social conditions. Purpose: Grounded in institutional and...

Transparency is a complex and multifaceted communication phenomenon. In the current environment, demands for organizational transparency now come from a wide range of entities we term visibility agents, ranging from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and global networks, on one hand, to activist coalitions and automated surveillance agents, on th...

As institutions of higher education aim to support diverse campus communities, a sense of urgency has developed to better understand the predictors of success for faculty and students of color. Amongst the growing body of literature about the needs and challenges of faculty and students of color in higher education, one finding is unequivocal: mess...

Interactivity is an important concept in the study of online social processes. Two experiments tested how interactivity influenced people’s willingness to comment on social media and their perceptions of a company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. Across two operationalizations of interactivity (presence/absence of replies, high/low...

The contemporary communication landscape enables individuals to connect and engage with collective action efforts in multifaceted and ambiguous ways. This complexity makes membership in collective action groups particularly intriguing and important because of its pivotal role as a mechanism that connects individual behavior to group, organizational...

A common observation in the digital age is that new technologies are making people’s behaviors, decisions, and preferences more visible. For scholars who study organizations and their effects upon society, increased information visibility raises the hope that organizations might become more transparent. Typically, we assume that increased informati...

A central proposition of the “business case” for corporate social responsibility (CSR) is that a company's CSR practices are linked to consumer behavior and a firm's financial performance through reputational mechanisms. This study addresses the equivocal support for this proposition through an empirical analysis of the survey items most often used...

This study explores the appropriation of traditional media content in an online protest context and highlights the significance of legacy media to activists’ communication practices online. Appropriation refers to the direct transfer of content originally produced in traditional media into social media posts. Focusing on the massive 2015 South Kore...

The business case for CSR argues that it is most profitable when it distinguishes the company from its competitors. However, empirical evidence of the positive relationship between CSR and consumer behavior is mixed. Taking a longitudinal approach, this study examines the degree to which CSR is associated with the online assessments of products fro...

The practices of strategic communication in organizations are best understood as embedded in a communication environment that has multiple types of relationships and diverse communication links among stakeholders and institutional actors. These connections represent an organizational network that produces a capacity to act for individual and mutual...

Digital ubiquity and penetration across spatio-temporal boundaries have exacerbated the need for a clearer understanding of where the boundaries of personal, professional, and public communication begin and end. Indeed, boundary specifications have become an iconic problematic for organizational control and employee communication in the age of soci...

Three global developments situate the context of this investigation: the increasing use of social media by organizations and their employees, the burgeoning presence of social media policies, and the heightened focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this study the intersection of these trends is examined through a content analysis of 11...

Terrorism is communicatively constituted violence. Multiple types of organizations, state and insurgent, employ terrorism. Terrorism is used as a strategy either to maintain a regime or to create the conditions for a new governing system, but both state and insurgent organizations employ terrorism tactically to advertise the cause, to secure conces...

Clandestine/hidden organizations are composed of groups of people who keep their affiliations secret and conceal internal and external organizational activities. Since the early 2000s, the prominence and notoriety of clandestine organizations have made them the subject of much discussion, debate, and research, although they have existed throughout...

What we see, what we show, and how we look are fundamental organizational concerns made ever more salient by the affordances, dynamics, and discourses of the digital age. Contemporary organizing practices are awash with material, mediated, and managed visibilities: Companies erect glass buildings with open and networked office spaces to efficiently...

Organizational transparency is in vogue. When technologies make it possible for information, decision processes, and behaviors to be visible to others, actors and organizations will presumably be forced to behave more responsibly because they can be held accountable for their actions. In this article, we question the theoretical assumption that hig...

Introduction What we see, what we show and how we look are fundamental organizational concerns made ever more salient by the affordances, dynamics, and discourses of the digital age. Contemporary organizing practices are awash with material, mediated and managed visibilities: companies erect glass buildings with open and networked office spaces to...

Embodying both the promises and perils of our collective past and the dreams and dangers of global connectedness, the study of crowds, clouds, and community includes assumptions about central communication processes: organizing, socializing, and mediatizing. Across International Communication Association Divisions and Interest Groups we have a rich...

The Occupy movement is said to represent a new generation of post-Seattle protests, driven by social networking, and breaking from organizing practices in previous eras. This study analyzes the Occupy Wellington protest to shed light on the role of protests in an era of digital media ubiquity. Based on the participant observation as well as 76 brie...

Responding to rapid economic and technological change, escalating interdependence and the intensified competition associated with globalization, organizations are entering into multiple collaborative relationships across sectors and nations. These collaborations are more complex than typical organizational structures. Incorporating the bona fide gr...

This study explores a corporate campaign to pass a referendum to enable the development of a hydropower plant in a small Swedish community. In the changing institutional context that grounds this case, the organization needed to develop communicative practices that embodied “cultural competence,” a set of processes identified as critical for the le...

Challenging the notion that digital media render traditional, formal organizations irrelevant, this book offers a new theory of collective action and organizing. Based on extensive surveys and interviews with members of three influential and distinctive organizations in the United States - The American Legion, AARP and MoveOn - the authors reconcep...

Memorable message research examines interpersonal messages “ … remembered for extremely long periods of time and which people perceive as a major influence on the course of their lives” (Knapp, Stohl, & Reardon, 198122. Knapp , M. L. , Stohl , C. , & Reardon , K. K. ( 1981 ). “Memorable” messages . Journal of Communication , 31 , 27 – 41 . doi:...

A New Generation of CSRCharacterizing Third-Generation CSR PartnershipsTemporal Dimension of Third-Generation CSRBenefits Associated with Third-Generation CSR PartnershipsRisks Associated with Third-Generation CSRNetwork Implications of Third-Generation CSRConclusions References

This special issue challenges scholars to consider the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of viewing organizations as ‘constituted in and through human communication.’ Interrogating the work of one of the most influential approaches to the study of the constitutive nature of organizing, the oeuvre of James Taylor and his collea...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how paradox emerges during a planned change initiative to improve and dramatically transform inter‐agency information sharing. Based on interviews with key decision makers, the authors interrogate the relationships among institutional contradictions, emergent dualities, the communicative management of...

This manuscript details an investigation of memorable messages that help students navigate college life using a control theory framework. Researchers conducted face-to-face interviews with 61 undergraduate students who recalled a specific memorable message that helped them as they navigated college. Results of this formative study show the majority...

Memorable messages about breast cancer sent by different sources, such as friends and family members, were analyzed for the action tendency emotions that they evoked. Negative emotions of fear, sadness, and anger, and positive emotions of hope and relief were analyzed for their associations with prevention and detection breast cancer behaviors. Mes...

Purpose The paper seeks to explore how globalization processes have shaped the nature, scope, and time frame of considerations of social responsibility and the development of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) regime. The paper identifies three generations of human rights' values embedded within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ai...

Scholarly commentary has underscored the importance of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) in organizing the Global Social Justice Movement (GSJM). This study examines key communicative assumptions regarding technology and activist participation in the GSJM by asking three research questions: (a) what impacts of ICT-enabled broker...

Globalization theories posit organizational convergence, suggesting that Codes of Ethics will become commonplace and include greater consideration of global issues. This study explores the degree to which the Codes of Ethics of 157 corporations on the Global 500 and/or Fortune 500 lists include the “third generation” of corporate social responsibil...

Most generally, globalization is defined as “the widening, deepening, and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life” (Held et al. 1999, 5). Globalization is produced and maintained through communicative action. Political, cultural, social, and economic events are no longer bound by time or space. The fre...

Often, people are able to recall a message on a particular topic for a long period of time. These memorable messages have the ability to influence behavior when they are recalled from memory long after initial exposure. Knowing the topics and sources of the messages that are remembered about breast cancer can improve the efficacy of future breast c...

Background: Memorable messages and their speech acts (purposes of the messages) can promote protection against breast cancer and guide health behaviors. Methods: Participants reported their personal, friends', and relatives' experiences with breast cancer and a memorable message about breast cancer if one came to mind. Those with a memorable mes...

Very little has been written in scholarly or popular venues on the conceptualization and utilization of the term network to describe terrorist organizing. In this paper, we identify critical disjunctures between the assumptions of contemporary communication network theory and the assumptions and appropriation of network concepts by the current U.S....

Should business strive to be socially responsible, and if so, how? The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility updates and broadens the discussion of these questions by bringing together in one volume a variety of practical and theoretical perspectives on corporate social responsibility. It is perhaps the single most comprehensive volume availa...

This study explores cultural variations in managers’interpretations of a key communicative process: worker participation. Semantic patterns derived from structural analyses indicate cultural differences in the meanings that managers attach to the term participation. The interpretive data are consistent with two of Hofstede's dimensions of cultural...

We propose an improved theoretical approach to the rich variety of collective action now present in public life. Toward this end, we advance a conception of collective action as communicative in nature, and offer a two-dimensional model of collective action space, comprising dimensions for (a) the mode of interpersonal interaction and (b) the mode...

IntroductionMessagesCommunication ArtifactsCommunication Characteristics of ParticipantsGroup CommunicationCommunication Networks and CollaborationCommunication Environments and InnovationImplicationsReferences

We propose an improved theoretical approach to the rich variety of collective action now present in public life. Toward this end, we advance a conception of collective action as communicative in nature, and offer a two-dimensional model of collective action space, comprising dimensions for (a) the mode of interpersonal interaction and (b) the mode...

This article adapts Burt's 1992 network theory of structural holes to explore dynamic developments within global organizational networks, questioning the proposition that alternative forms of organizing are replacing the nation state as the central figure on the global stage. Our analysis of structural holes within the emerging global human rights...

Collective action theory, which is widely applied to explain human phenomena in which public goods are at stake, traditionally rests on at least two main tenets: that individuals confront discrete decisions about free riding and that formal organization is central to locating and contacting potential participants in collective action, motivating th...

“A good citizen in every country according to the rules where we work.” —Telecommunications executive, Karlstad, Sweden, July 2002 A lthough most discussions surrounding corporate social responsibility (CSR) focus on universal ethics and the relationships among employers, employees, and the communities in which they are embedded, little attention h...

This article brings together previous research efforts by the authors and reviews a wide range of relevant literatures to explain and analyze paradoxes of employee participation and workplace democracy. Although the authors do not take the position that all or even most of these paradoxes are necessarily harmful, they do maintain that there are a v...

W. Charles Redding's academic legacy, viewed over the course of his life, embodies the ways technical and pragmatic knowledge have developed in organizational, as well as managerial, communication. In this article, we identify four characteristics of the scholarly aspect of The Redding Tradition: belief in human progress through empirical investiga...

Virtually all universities and colleges have policies and procedures for dealing with sexual harassment, but most victims do not report their experiences to officials. At the heart of many victims' reasons for not reporting is concern about their safety. There are also safety concerns for persons receiving complaints. This article documents the eff...

This review essay examines a broad multidisciplinary literature on democracy and work, highlighting issues of theory and practice of special interest to communication scholars. The essay treats relevant and selective research from the following fields (in addition to communication studies): the sociology of organizations, political science and publ...

This article synthesizes past studies of illness, stress, coping, and social support and offers a model of communicative support, based on problematic integration theory, that emphasizes two major dimensions of meaning in the breast cancer experience. The model suggests that supportive messages are designed to help the breast cancer patient manage...

The authors argue that, although ostensibly organizational communication as a field of study appears fragmented, one can make the case for its status as a discipline. This status is rooted in four central problematics that implicitly frame a sense of community and identity among organizational communication scholars. These are: (a) the problematic...

This paper adopts a network approach to the study of worker participation in an attempt to capture the inherent communicative nature of participating within an organization. Although complex, dynamic, interactive processes are the very essence of participation, it has most often been conceptualized as a unidimensional, static variable, typically as...

A primary advantage of employee involvement groups is assumed to be the development of knowledgeable workers who are better performers. Little research, however, has explored the processes by which involvement in participatory groups is related to the acquisition of organizational knowledge. This study, of a manufacturing plant using a sociotechnic...

When you look closer, you see the Common Market is bogged down in innumerable petty, inglorious disputes, some as small as grains of sand, a few more important… But they are in reality mere pretexts. There is something else that stops the integration of Europe, something few people ever mention, that really makes these disputes insurmountable obsta...

This article presents an initial formulation of a dysfunctional group dynamic, the farrago. Farrago, literally meaning mixed fodder for cattle, figuratively is used to describe a medley or a confused group. It was decided to call our focal actor a farrago because (a) interactions with this type of problematic person often result in confusion as to...

This paper argues for a postmodern conception of power in which discourse is conceived as the principal medium through which power relations are maintained and reproduced. Specifically, power is identified as a pervasive characteristic of organizational life which constitutes the identity of organization members. Discourse, as a structured social p...

This study culminates in the identification of what can be called “bona fide groups,” a theoretical category proposed for future small group research. In some respects an answer to the various calls and critiques in the previous papers, the article begins with an examination of differing research approaches to naturalistic groups, including discuss...

This study focuses upon the messages presented in quality circle training manuals. Analyzing 10 of the most popular manuals designed for quality circle members, we explore whether the training goes beyond instruction in problem solving and facilitates changes in the way the workers think about themselves and their relationships with management and...

define what is meant by "message" in the organizational context review and evaluate various ways of categorizing messages that have been used in organizational research provide an integrated analysis of one of the most basic approaches to the study of messages, the "functional" consider three problem areas associated with message exchange: ov...

This study examines the structure, form, and nature of the content and context of memorable messages exchanged within an organization. Based on the work of Knapp, Stohl and Reardon (1981) an analysis of interviews conducted within a small company indicates that all members were able to recall precisely a specific message which had a lasting influen...

Once installed, quality circles produce dramatic results for an organization. They improve morale, increase a sense of loyalty to the organization, and foster a sense of teamwork among employees who participate. They improve overall productivity of the organization, and they improve the quality of the product or service. And they reduce grievances,...

This paper describes an empirical investigation of changes incurred as a result of participation in a semester-long intercultural experience. "The A.M.I.G.O. Project" is conducted in small group communication classes and requires students to meet and interact weekly with foreigners living in their community. The project is designed to allow college...

examines group decision making through a bona fide group lens [a theoretical perspective that treats a group as a social system linked to its context, shaped by fluid boundaries, and altering its environment] / begins by developing this theoretical orientation and by distinguishing it from traditional small group research / reviews studies on group...

consistent with previous studies of groups in context, these cases focus on groups that are "naturally emerging" and exist independent of a researcher's intentions / specifically, these case studies underscore the importance of examining the influence of external, historical, and temporal constraints on [phase development, decision making, norm for...