L. Putnam

• University of California, Santa Barbara

En este trabajo, los autores nos intentan llevar de la mano por las distintas perspectivas que han dado forma, tanto a la historia reciente de la comunicación en las organizaciones, como al estado actual y proyección futura de la misma. Estas temáticas son abordadas desde los trabajos originales de Gerald Goldhaber (un referente de la comunicación...

This symposium will assess whether the popularity of organizational discourse analysis is in decline, what problem this decline might raise, and what can be done to address it. Panelists will offer insights into how discourse analysis can address concerns about parochialism and how it can engage materiality and socio-materiality to address social c...

The present interview initiates a series of dialogues that the Moroccan Journal of Communication Studies intends to publish regularly, in accordance with the themes that the journal sets forth and the debates that our authors and editors generate. This interview aims to promote organisational communication as an academic vocation with specific...

Organizational change and innovation are central and enduring issues in management theory and practice. The need to understand processes of organization change and innovation has never been greater in order to respond to dramatic changes in population demographics, technology, stakeholder needs, competitive survival, and social, economic, environme...

As colleagues and collaborators, we reflect on the work and legacy of Peter Carnevale, currently professor at the University of Southern California, and recipient of the 2002 Jeffrey Z. Rubin Theory‐to‐Practice Award of the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM). We review Carnevale’s main contributions, including his work on time...

The past decade has experienced an increase in the number of studies on organizational space or where work occurs. A number of these studies challenge traditional views of organizational space as a fixed, physical workspace because researchers fail to account for the spatial dynamics that they observe. New technologies, shifting employee-employer r...

This symposium embraced the premise that organizing and spaces are intrinsically interconnected and that to adequately study management and organization phenomena, researchers must take organizational spaces into consideration. Organizational spaces are the various physical and virtual locales that operate as sites for organizational actions and in...

Navigating organizational workspace is often plagued with tensions that emerge from the interplay of intended designs with organizational activities and lived experiences. These tensions are evident in research findings, such as inconsistencies in the ways that employees react to new workplace designs. They call on scholars to rethink organizationa...

In this overview article, we contend that most theorizing and research on paradoxes has occurred at the organizational level. However, individuals and their social interactions often serve as the micro-foundations for higher level organizational paradoxes. Thus, it is becoming increasingly clear that a more complete consideration of paradoxes and t...

Esta es una segunda edición 2018 editada por los autores en favor de la Red Mundial de Comunicación Organizacional (México) y aportada en sus derechos para ser distribuida en su versión digital en forma gratuita.

The study of organizational tensions, contradictions, dialectics, and paradoxes is on the rise in the organizational sciences. This article sets forth an integrative methodology for studying these oppositional phenomena by aligning grounded theory techniques with the little “d” and big “D” orientations of organizational discourse analysis. This int...

This study examined the conflict framing of union leaders as they reacted to changes in the entertainment industry. The analysis revealed how participants named conflict‐based issues and attributed blame for them, cast them as whole stories, or reframed them. Overall, the leaders of two types of unions differed in their naming and blaming of contro...

This work is the result of a contribution that Dr. Linda L. Putnam and Dr. Garrido have donated to the World Network of Organizational Communication in its effort to disseminate those disciplines that benefit the development and projections of people in organizations in the whole world. The authors have donated their rights in these contents for th...

Trabajo libre de derechos y menciones, ha sido posible gracias al aporte de rediseño de Executive Business School Barcelona (2018).

Working within a Bakhtinian perspective of relational dialectical tensions, this study seeks to elaborate on current organizational change theories through a rich set of qualitative data collected on an Internet start-up that revolutionized the music industry. Following the company for 12 years, we focused on the tensions arising during the company...

The study of paradox in strategy and organization studies has grown rapidly over the last 25 years. Paradox, as contradictory yet interrelated opposites that exist simultaneously and persist over time, can be qualified as a successful area of study. Yet success, however sweet, may come at a price, namely, premature convergence on theoretical concep...

Organizational communication as a field of study focuses on the role of messages, media, meaning, and symbolic activity in constituting and shaping organizational processes. Researchers also study communication ties or connections between organizational members and the nature and patterns of information flow. More recently, scholars have centered o...

This paper examines an increasingly popular yet underexplored form of organizational employment: internships. Drawing on interviews with 40 interns, this study explores the communicative tensions they faced and how two different groups of interns, satisfied versus dissatisfied, reported their responses to these tensions. Data revealed three key ten...

Interpretive approaches encompass social theories and perspectives that embrace a view of reality as socially constructed or made meaningful through actors' understanding of events. In organizational communication, scholars focus on the complexities of meaning as enacted in symbols, language, and social interactions. This entry describes the distin...

Offensive behavior can create problems in the workplace. How victims cope with such behavior creates a range of individual, relational, and organizational consequences. Coping practices such as avoidance and forgiveness are products of individual characteristics and organizational values and norms. The purpose of this study was to explore the assoc...

This article presents a constitutive approach to the study of organizational contradictions, dialectics, paradoxes, and tensions. In particular, it highlights five constitutive dimensions (i.e., discourse, developmental actions, socio-historical conditions, presence in multiples, and praxis) that appear across the literature in five metatheoretical...

Paradox theory stands at an exciting moment in organization and management theory. Scholars increasingly seek out insights about the nature and management of contradictory demands to explain a wide array of organizational phenomena across multiple levels of analysis. Our two reviews in the 2016 Academy of Management Annals attest to this growing br...

This introduction examines the contributions of articles in this special issue to organization theory, especially efforts to rethink or add to Morgan’s metaphors and to generate new organizational images. In general, the articles in this issue offer new metaphors and sub-metaphors and enrich specifications for two of Morgan’s images. Moreover, they...

When negotiators begin their deliberations, they typically have different definitions of the issues or agenda items that they plan to discuss. Issue framing focuses on the shaping and reshaping of issues through examining bargainers’ cognitive schemas and biases, their labeling and classifying of issues, and the sequential development of interactio...

In this article, we express our appreciation for the honor accorded our 2004 Communication Theory article, "Organizations as Discursive Constructions." We do this through situating the 2004 article historically so the reader can appreciate the milieu that surrounded the publication of this piece. We also trace the different ways that scholars have...

This study explores the framing patterns of disputants in four different intractable environmental conflicts. In particular, it examines how disputants form interpretive communities through the ways that they frame these conflicts. The research reveals a complex picture in which interpretive communities form around disputants' conflict roles and ex...

In this overview article, we contend that most theorizing and research on paradoxes has occurred at the organizational level. However, individuals and their social interactions often serve as the micro-foundations for higher level organizational paradoxes. Thus, it is becoming increasingly clear that a more complete consideration of paradoxes and t...

This paper extends the issues raised in this forum by highlighting assumptions and characteristics of the discourse-materiality relationship in five explanatory frameworks, including the Foucauldian approach and the materiality-performativity perspective presented in the previous two essays. It argues for preserving the dialectical relationship bet...

Extant communication research on negotiation typically focuses on the microprocesses of interaction without much attention to the larger context in which these conflicts occur. However, public campaigns related to labor-management conflicts impinge on the way negotiations are enacted. This study focuses on the turning points and conflict framing in...

Workplace flexibility initiatives as a potential remedy for work-life conflicts are the focus of a considerable number of investigations. Despite their contributions, research findings reveal tensions and contradictions in the ways that employees, managers and organizations develop, enact and respond to these flexibility initiatives. This critical...

Flexibility is a key issue in organizational life, especially because organizations rely on work from remote locations and create policies to accommodate work-life balance. Most existing research examines workplace flexibility in primarily the individual or the organizational domain. Views of communication in these domains typically embrace transmi...

We argue that there is utility in studying intractable conflicts using an institutional theory lens. If the frames and behaviors of conflicting groups become both predictable and routinely enacted and legitimated, then a contest of logics among actors and their interactive practices (rather than a single dominant logic and its attendant practices)...

Los seis apartados principales de esta obra sobre la comunicación organizacional son: De la economía de producción a al economía de información; El cambio en las metáforas de la comunicación organizacional; Comunicaicón y empresa: tendiendo un puente práctico; Acción y comunicaicón en la cualtura de servicios; Alineando revusros en la gestión estra...

This article explores the implications of my research on bargaining and conflict management for formal and informal negotiations. In particular, I focus on ways to differentiate conflict issues, prevent premature closure, engage in conflict framing and reframing, and join together through collective sense making. I urge negotiators to change the na...

Discourse analysis focuses on the ways that language and symbols shape interpretations of negotiators' identities, instrumental activity, and relationships. These meanings arise, in part, from language patterns that bargainers employ while they are involved in a negotiation. This article provides a brief overview of research findings on language us...

This document is a summary of a mixed methods dissertation that examined the communicative construction of safety in wildland firefighting. For the dissertation, I used a twostudy mixed methods approach, examining the communicative accomplishment of safety from two perspectives: high reliability organizing (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 1999), and...

This study treats collective bargaining as a social construction of reality. Adopting the framework of symbolic convergence theory, this investigation examines the rituals and fantasy themes of bargainers and team members collected through observations of teachers’ negotiations and interviews with participants. Fantasy theme analysis reveals that b...

Bargaining is accomplished through arguments and persuasive appeals. This study aims to understand the way argumentation in bargaining shapes outcomes. It examines the types of claims and reasoning processes that characterize bargaining interaction on different subissues of a proposal. It tracks the development of arguments through sequential sessi...

Divergent theoretical approaches to the construct of framing have resulted in conceptual confusion in conflict research.We disentangle these approaches by analyzing their assumptions about 1) the nature of frames ¿ that is, cognitive representations or interactional coconstructions, and 2) what is getting framed ¿ that is, issues, identities and re...

Research on gender and negotiation typically focuses on formal bargaining about salary and compensation. This work needs to be expanded to everyday negotiations in the workplace, especially negotiations on organizational issues deemed germane to women. Drawing from research on work-life issues, this study focuses on how women frame problems about m...

In the 21st-century global information economy, science and engineering professionals exert enormous influence in shaping knowledge, communities, and society. The importance of these careers raises concerns about the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), particularly in Western cultures and certai...

Organizational conflict is a frequent occurrence in most work settings. Whether rooted in interactions with co‐workers, supervisors, or customers, conflict is an inevitable part of task and relational communication. Conflict refers to incompatibilities or perceptions of diametrically opposed goals and values that occur in the process of organizing....

Intractable multiparty conflict is omnipresent in social life, but how do individuals in this type of dispute make sense of their situation and therefore enact it in a particular way? The current study investigated this question by examining how disputants from different stakeholder groups framed conflict situations in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota...

Past approaches to the study of intractable conflict focus on a variety of variables that contribute to and sustain destructive social systems. Although rich in case analyses, the extant literature often treats these variables in situ and typically disassociated from each other. This special issue examines the causes and conditions of intractable c...

Using a discourse approach to framing, we investigate the extent to which stakeholder groups cohere or differ in their framing of three environmental disputes. The results help us to better understand the nature of homogeneous or heterogeneous stakeholder groups and how their sensemaking patterns facilitate effective conflict management. Our approa...

This collection of essays arose from a call for papers issued by Organization Studies in 2004 to celebrate and critically engage the scholarship of Karl Weick; to carry forward his thinking into new contexts and take stock of recent developments in the themes, issues and theories that have preoccupied Weick in his more than 40 years of scholarship....

In this article we examine the relationship between discourse and organization. It is a relationship of growing interest in the communication literature as organizations are increasingly framed as discursive constructions. However, such framing appears subject to at least 3 interpretations. First, an organization may be cast as an already formed ob...

Reviews the current literature on the role of communication in the bargaining process, specifically those studies that employ explicit vs tacit bargaining. During explicit bargaining, participants signal their intentions, respond to each other's codes, and attempt to influence each other's expectations. Findings reported fall within 4 areas: commun...

This article highlights the contributions that discourse analysis can make to the study of organizational resistance. Specifically, it demonstrates how using a discursive lens can provide insights into the targets, practices, and consequences of resistance. First, discourse analytic approaches can reveal how acts of resistance target multiple organ...

This article examines discursive forms of resistance used by a splinter group of a U.S. airline pilots’ union in its campaign against a contract settlement supported by union leaders. Forms of resistance included oppositional tensions, military metaphors, and dualities that surfaced in central themes of the campaign. These discursive strategies rev...

This article focuses on qualitative research methods in negotiations, particular textual and discourse analyses. It defines discourse analysis and reviews the ways that researchers have used conversational, pragmatics, and rhetorical analyses to study negotiations. It discusses types of texts available for discourse analysis and the role of researc...

While researchers have demonstrated that frames have profound effects on conflict and negotiation processes and outcomes, the extant research on framing reflects a wide variety of approaches, resulting in conceptual confusion among researchers and practitioners. In this paper we disentangle these approaches by distinguishing them on two dimensions:...