MediaSpace Wiki

Organizational Spr2006 Sess03

Agenda

• Collect Questions
• Make Group Assignments
• Give First Group Assignment
• Allow groups to do some initial coordination
• Review Ideas from Readings
• Handle Questions
• Index Card Assignment

• Organizations exist so we can accomplish things together that we would have trouble accomplishing alone.

 communication -> relationships -> groups -> organizations -> value

• We join them because of a perceived mutual benefit
  • Consider Maslow's Needs
    • Survival
    • Security
    • Belonging
    • Self-Esteem
    • Self-Actualization
  • The first three require that we work together
  • The fourth is generally accomplished in the context of others views of us (self-esteem is a function of the looking glass)
  • Only self-actualization is dependent only on the individual, and it requires the support of the other levels
  • This dependency of higher needs on satisfying more basic needs is fundamental to the usual depiction of Maslow's hierarchy:

• The key accomplishment of organizations is the creation of value. Value is:
  • a perception
  • a cultural or shared perception
  • a language
  • a medium
  • an invention
  • a goal (a set of goals)
• Organizations create value by using communication to create, maintain, and leverage relationships:

 communication -> relationships -> organizations -> value

• An organizations key relationships are its stakeholders
  • Stockholders
  • Management
  • Customers
  • Employees
  • Employee Representatives
  • Government
  • The Community
  • The Media
• Every organization communicates with each of these stakeholder groups in different ways:
  • different media
  • different genres of message and discourse
    • information transfer
    • relationship building
    • control/constraint
    • innovation/creativity
• So how can we study these things
  • As Information transfer

Bell's Drawing of the Telephone (from the original patent; Foulger, 2004)

1. A speaker who creates the message
2. A channel through which the message travels.
3. A receiver who consumes the message and decides what it means.
4. Interfaces that mediates the speaker, receiver, and channel
5. Noise
• We sometimes call this a linear model:

• And it describes early models of management and leadership
• And it has inherent problems:
  • Spillage
  • Overload
    • Amount
    • Rate
    • Complexity
  • Distortion
  • Ambiguity

• As Transaction

• Feedback
• The Importance of Non-Verbal
• The importance of Listening
• The importance of Relationships and perspectives
• The effects of Language and Medium
• Organization as system

• As Strategic Control
  • The study of power and ideology
  • The importance of the non-rational
  • Conflicts among goals
  • The problems and opportunities in Strategic Ambiguity
• Dialectical Approaches
  • Critical approaches
  • Constructivism
  • Structuration

Approaches to studying organizational communication

• Ethnographic
  • Naturalistic
  • Participant-Observer
  • Critical/historical
  • Narrative
• Interview
• Survey
• Archival data
• Semiotics
• Quasi-experiment
• Experiments, in general, won't play
• All will matter to the information we process as we go through the courrse

Index Card Assignment 2 (due Wednesday)

List three organizations that you belong to and three organizations that you would like to belong to.

Index Card Assignment for Friday

List three organizations you really admire; three organizations you really dislike; three organizations you would like to work for someday.

Group Assignment for Wednesday

For your groups assigned BOINC project: (1) evaluate the instructions for joining a project and make specific recommendations for improvements; (2) put together a proposal for how your group might create value (e.g. publicize and attract contributors to) for your BOINC project. Managers are responsible for providing a progress report on your group's progress.