Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Matt Everett: Chapter 2

There are four approaches to organizational communication as discussed in the text. They are communication as information transfer, communication as transactional process, communication as strategic control, and communication as a balance of creativity and constraint.
The information approach views communication as a metaphoric pipeline through which information flows from one person to another. The transactional approach states that communication is not made by senders and receivers and that people play both roles simultaneously. Each person shares in the encoding and decoding process. The strategic control approach sees communication as a tool for controlling the environment. It has multiple goals and communication is socially, politically, and ethically motivated. And lastly the balance of creativity and constraint approach is derived from perspectives of Wentworth and others. Communication is the moment-to-moment working out of the tension between individual creativity and organizational constraint. This phrase refers to the balance of creativity.
These four approaches to organizational communication reveal an increased interest in feed back and two-way interaction as key to organizational sense making. Also when people come together and communicate, we vary on the type of communication that we engage in. Dialogue plays a key role in this. There are three different types of dialogue that the text talks about. The first type is equitable transaction, the second is dialogue as empathetic conversation, and the last type is dialogue as real meeting.

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