STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

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3 STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

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5 SEVENTH EDITION STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY CHARLES CONRAD AND MARSHALL SCOTT POOLE A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

6 This seventh edition first published Charles Conrad and Marshall Scott Poole Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February Blackwell s publishing program has been merged with Wiley s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Edition History: Wadsworth (6e, 2005) Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA , USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at The right of Charles Conrad and Marshall Scott Poole to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conrad, Charles R. Strategic organizational communication : in a global economy / Charles R. Conrad and Marshall Scott Poole. 7th ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (pbk.) 1. Communication in organizations. 2. Communication in management. 3. Communication Social aspects. I. Poole, Marshall Scott, II. Title. HD30.3.C dc A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 10/12 pt Minion by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

7 To: Helen and Cecil, who gave me a love of knowledge, BJ, who has given me knowledge of love, and Travis and Hannah, our gifts of love. To: Ed, Helen, and Kim, who are the foundation, Lisa, who built the home, and Sam, who keeps it warm with all my love.

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9 CONTENTS PREFACE xi UNIT I UNDERLYING CONCEPTS 1 CHAPTER 1 STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION 3 Organizational Communication as Strategic Discourse 5 Case Study 1.1. How to Handle the Scarlet 7 The Fundamental Paradox 10 Thinking Strategically About Organizing and Communicating 12 Case Study 1.2. Can You Trust Anyone Under Thirty? 14 Creating Socio-Economic Spaces 18 Making Organizations Look Alike 20 Strategies of Organizing 23 Strategic Communication for Individual Members of Organizations 24 Summary: The Complexities of Organizational Communication 26 CHAPTER 2 KEYS TO STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION 30 Seeing Connections: The Importance of Systems Thinking 32 Case Study 2.1. There Go the Lights, Here Come the Babies? 40 Uncovering Assumptions: The Importance of Critical Thinking 43 Valuing Differences: The Advantages of Diversity 47 Thinking Globally: The Challenges of Globalization 49 Understanding Technology: A Radical Force for Change 52 Case Study 2.2. Working in the Virtual Future: An Optimistic View (Looking Back) 58 Summary 66

10 viii CONTENTS UNIT II STRATEGIES OF ORGANIZING 71 CHAPTER 3 TRADITIONAL STRATEGIES OF ORGANIZING 73 Traditional Strategies of Organizational Design 75 Case Study 3.1. Feel Safer Now? 83 Traditional Strategies of Motivation, Control, and Surveillance 89 Case Study 3.2. The Power of Rewards at Industry International 92 Traditional Strategies of Leadership 98 Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Traditional Strategies of Organizing 99 Case Study 3.3. Scenes From the Electronic Sweatshop 104 Conclusion: Communication and Traditional Strategies of Organizing 107 CHAPTER 4 RELATIONAL STRATEGIES OF ORGANIZING 113 Relational Strategies of Organizational Design 114 Case Study 4.1. Going South? 118 Relational Strategies of Motivation, Control, and Surveillance 127 Case Study 4.2. Empowerment or Iron Cage? 133 Relational Strategies of Leadership 136 Information and Communication Technology and the Relational Strategy 139 Assessing Relational Strategies 142 Thinking Critically About Relational Strategies 146 CHAPTER 5 CULTURAL STRATEGIES OF ORGANIZING 155 Defining Key Terms: Cultures and Organizational Cultures 157 Cultural Strategies of Organizational Design 159 Cultural Strategies of Motivation, Control, and Surveillance 161 Organizational Symbolism and Cultural Strategies of Motivation and Control 166 Case Study 5.1. It s My Party and I ll Do What I Want To 171 Case Study 5.2. Resistance and Control in Three Service Organizations 175 Cultural Strategies of Leadership 178 Technology and Cultural Strategies of Organizing 181 Thinking Critically About Cultural Strategies 183 CHAPTER 6 NETWORK STRATEGIES OF ORGANIZING 191 Network Strategies of Organizational Design 193 Box 6.1. Choosing Communication Media 202 Box 6.2. What Might Have Been 208 Case Study 6.1. al-qaeda: A Network Organization? 209 Case Study 6.2. Evolving Into a Network Organization 213 Network Strategies of Motivation, Control, and Surveillance 215 Challenges for Control Systems in Network Organizations 218 Leadership in Network Organizations 219 Challenges and Problems for Network Organizations 221 Beyond Networks: Alternative Strategies of Organizing 222 Box 6.3. Postmodern Organizations? 225 Conclusion 227

11 CONTENTS ix POSTSCRIPT TO UNIT II CONTINGENCY PERSPECTIVE ON ORGANIZING STRATEGIES 231 Task 232 Case Study P.1. Steeling Away Into a Different Structure 236 Interrelationships Among the Contingency Variables 237 Conclusion and Transition 238 UNIT III CHALLENGES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 241 CHAPTER 7 COMMUNICATION, POWER, AND POLITICS IN ORGANIZATIONS 243 A Perspective on Organizational Power 245 Case Study 7.1. On Death and Dying 247 Societal Assumptions and the Bases of Organizational Power 251 Case Study 7.2. The Playground Never Ends 263 Organizational Politics:Overt Power in the Communicative Process 266 Box 7.1. An Exploration of Life in Systems of Power 274 Conclusion 278 CHAPTER 8 COMMUNICATION, DECISION MAKING, AND CONFLICT IN ORGANIZATIONS 284 Communication and Organizational Decision Making 286 Box 8.1. Making a Green Decision 291 Case Study 8.1. Managing the Ambiguity 304 Case Study 8.2. Koalas and Roos Flying Through Chaos 313 Communication and the Management of Organizational Conflict 316 Case Study 8.3. The Bargaining Case 327 Conclusion 335 CHAPTER 9 ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE 339 Innovation 343 Box 9.1 Organizing for Creativity 344 Adoption 348 Implementation 355 Case Study 9.1. Implementing a Moving Target: Quality Improvement at TopHill Hospital System 356 Case Study 9.2. Storytelling Journeys into Change 368 Conclusion 376 CHAPTER 10 COMMUNICATION AND DIVERSE WORKPLACES 380 Resisting Others 382 Case Study Sequestering Sexual Harassment 387 Confronting the Dominant Perspective 398 Box Feminist Strategies for Organizing 399 Case Study Trying to Stay Balanced 402 Case Study Is That Term Childless or Childfree? 406 Taking a Holistic Perspective 409 Conclusion 412

12 x CONTENTS CHAPTER 11 COMMUNICATION, ORGANIZATIONS, AND GLOBALIZATION 418 Culture, Difference, and Organizational Communication 421 Increasing Cultural Understanding 426 Case Study Can You Trust Anyone Under Thirty, Part 2? 427 Economics, Globalization, and Organizational Communication 431 Case Study Small Companies, Global Approaches 438 CHAPTER 12 COMMUNICATION, ETHICS, AND ORGANIZATIONAL RHETORIC 447 Ethics, Organizations, and Social Control 450 Societal Assumptions and Organizational Rhetoric 452 Rhetoric and Organizational Crisis and Image Management 455 Case Study Lanxess Cleans Up Its Act 461 Public Policy making and Organizational Rhetoric 463 Case Study Ike the Prophet 467 Systems, Actions, and Ethics 469 Conclusions and Implications for Ethics 480 POSTSCRIPT TO UNIT III EPILOGUE 489 INDEX 491

13 PREFACE From its beginning more than 20 years ago, the goal of Strategic Organizational Communication has been to provide a unified description of the incredibly diverse array of ideas that make up our rapidly expanding field. Responses to the first six editions have been especially gratifying. Readers have been particularly complimentary about the level of sophistication of the book and its ability to integrate research from a number of academic disciplines. Responses to the later editions also have praised our efforts to place organizations and organizational communication within a broader social, economic, and cultural context and have appreciated our relaxed, engaging writing style. Of course, we have retained or expanded each of these characteristics. We also have tried to maintain and strengthen the theoretical framework that has been central to the book since its inception. Each edition has focused on the two-level concept of strategic choice making. We believe that people make choices about the overall strategies that they will use to operate in the societies and organizations they will live within. Ironically, people tend to normalize and naturalize these choices, treating them as inviolable truths that need not be justified rather than as choices that are under their control. Eventually they institutionalize these taken-for-granted assumptions in social systems and organizational structures and practices that make some options seem to be the only rational choice and make others seem to be impossible. These overall choices, in turn, create the specific situations that people encounter every day the challenges they face, the resources they have available to manage those challenges, and the guidelines and constraints that limit the options that are available to them. People adapt strategically to the situations that they create, but in adapting, they tend to reproduce those situations, creating a complicated cycle of acting, creating situations, and adapting. Understanding this action situation adaptation cycle requires people to realize these things: Organizations are embedded in societies and cannot be understood outside of a society s beliefs, values, structures, practices, tensions, and ways of managing those tensions.

14 xii Preface For example, US society is defined in part by a tension between community and individuality. This tension is due to many of the challenges faced by contemporary US organizations challenges as diverse as the attitudes of Generations X and Y (Chapter 1), the blending of traditional (Chapter 3) and cultural (Chapter 5) strategies of motivation and control, the implementation of feminist and other so-called alternative forms of organizing (Chapter 6), and understanding non-western forms of leadership (considered throughout the book). Each overall strategy of organizing includes a characteristic organizational design, a system of motivation and control, a particular form of leadership, and a particular relationship to communication technologies. Each strategy of organizing is a choice, however; for example, bureaucracies are bureaucracies because people in them choose to act like bureaucrats. Each strategy also includes opportunities to resist the organization s strategy of organizing. Members of organizations can manage organizational situations strategically. They can exploit fissures and contradictions in social and organizational power relationships. Even in the turbulent world created by the new, global economy, members of organizations can manage organizational situations in ways that achieve their personal goals and the goals of other members of their organizations. RESPONDING TO READER SUGGESTIONS Readers also have been very open about changes that they would like to see us make. As a result, each new edition really has been a new edition. This one is no exception. The New and Improved The most obvious change involves our efforts to locate organizational communication within the new, global economy. We started to focus on globalization in the fifth edition, and have increased that focus as the world economy has become progressively more interconnected. The same progression has been true of our treatment of communication technologies, and for the same reason their importance continues to grow. Both concepts are woven through this edition because they are woven into the fabric of contemporary organizations. We also have added a chapter on Organizational Change, since change is both the impetus and the outcome of strategic adaptation. We also have expanded the analysis of Ethics and Organizational Rhetoric (Chapter 12) that we introduced in the sixth edition, and have updated it to encompass the collapse of the world financial industry in , as well as subsequent taxpayer bailouts and the continuing Great Recession. We both have long been interested in ethical issues facing contemporary organizations, as evidenced in Charley s The Ethical Nexus (1993) and a special issue of Communication Research on Communication in the Era of the Disposable Worker that we coedited in Other changes are more subtle, and each one reflects recent advances in organizational communication theory and research. Chapter 7 deals with dissent and employee resistance in more detail, and now includes an extended case study on bullying in organizations. Chapter 8 revises and reorganizes the discussion of decision making to reflect important new research related to bounded rationality as the default mode of decision making, and

15 Preface xiii links it to processes of human evolution. Chapter 12 includes new case studies involving organizational ethics, and many of the cases that we have carried over from the sixth edition have been substantially revised. Eleven of the 24 case studies in this edition are new, and six of the ones we retained from the sixth edition have been revised. Copies of the cases we deleted from all previous editions will be available on the book s website ( com/go/conradpoole). Oldies but Goodies There are two aspects of Strategic Organizational Communication that we never want to change. One is the extensive research base for the book. The bibliography for this edition is abbreviated in comparison to earlier editions, but as in earlier editions it identifies readings that are especially appropriate for graduate students. In general, we have focused on works published after 1990, and have cited earlier sources only if they are classics in organizational communication research and theory. As a result, the endnotes for each chapter provide a number of additional readings and web citations on virtually every facet of contemporary organizational communication research and theory. The second aspect that we hope always to retain is the conceptual coherence of the analysis. Two beliefs underlie all that we say in this book. The first is that organizations (and societies) are sites in which various tensions and contradictions are negotiated through communication (this idea is explained at length in Chapter 1). The second belief is that understanding organizations and organizational communication requires an analysis of both symbolic and structural processes. We realize that this both-and perspective is an anomalous position in a discipline that relishes either-or distinctions between functionalism and interpretivism, qualitative and quantitative research methods, and so on. We also realize that advocates of each of these polar terms often will feel that we are too sympathetic with the opposite pole and spend too little space examining their favored position. But we have consistently tried both to balance various perspectives and to indicate how each can be enriched by the key concepts of the others. Life is simply too complex for either-or thinking to capture its nuances; organizations are far too fluid and complicated for bimodal or trimodal paradigms to reveal much of importance. ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK Like the earliest editions, this book is divided into three units. Unit I introduces the theoretical framework that unifies the book, develops the concept of strategies of organizing, and introduces the frame of reference for thinking about and analyzing organizations that will be utilized repeatedly in the remainder of the book. Unit II examines those strategies of organizing in more detail, discusses the communicative strategies that members of organizations might use to strategically manage the situations created by applications of those strategies of organizing, and offers a critical analysis of each. Unit II concludes with a discussion of contingency theories of organizing, and of the process of choosing among available strategies. Unit III examines key issues facing organizations during the early twenty-first century organizational power and politics, organizational decision making