Organisational Communication in an Age of Globalization: Issues, Reflections, Practices

Citation

Tremaine, M. (2003), "Organisational Communication in an Age of Globalization: Issues, Reflections, Practices", Women in Management Review, Vol. 18 No. 8, pp. 425-426. https://doi.org/10.1108/wimr.2003.18.8.425.1

Organisations are a part of everyone's life but relationships between organisations and individuals are complex, mysterious and multi‐faceted. An organisation can support your sense of identity, yet also threaten your sense of identity. An organisation can be enabling in some ways, yet constraining in others. In other words, an organisation is the site of conflict and confusion, as well as order and mediation.

Amazingly enough, all of these complex tensions are expressed within this book, which is not so much a textbook as a catalyst for a thought‐provoking conversation with yourself. To help the thinking process, Cheney et al. make several different perspectives available to you as a reader. They write research findings into the conversation, making the ideas clear and accessible without oversimplifying the underlying concepts. They expand your understanding of the way theory can be applied to organisational situations by giving examples of current research in framed one‐page case studies.

They use their own experiences as illustrations and, whenever relevant, they summarise the ideas of noted theorists in a brief paragraph, or a sentence or two, giving access to the core of what is special about the insights Weber or Foucault can give about organisations without writing a treatise. The authors give their readers access to a huge range of fascinating material, fashioning a patchwork quilt of the relevant ideas about the area of – for example, leadership or globalisation. They synthesise by showing the relationship of different ideas or approaches to one another, but nonetheless highlight the differences rather than homogenising or ignoring any aspect of scholarship or enquiry that could enlarge one's understanding.

They have been very successful in fashioning a unified tone of voice, which they use throughout, even though different chapters have been written by different authors. The tone of voice is friendly, sharing, generous and encouraging, but never patronising. Some books in this area can be very distancing and give a sense of having been written from “on high”, a Mt. Olympus where authors reside and look down on the lesser multitudes who need the enlightenment of their book. These four authors write as if they are having an ideas “party” and instead of food and drink for the body they want to give us food and drink for the mind, so that we can think as broadly as possible about organisations and how they communicate.

Of course, it's not possible to write a review without being a little critical and I have to admit that I do find the American expressions and grammar such as, “meet with” or “contexting”, mildly irritating. There is an American outlook underlying the book's perspective too, so that most of the legal cases cited in the discussion of sexual harassment are American and there are some areas where the preponderance of American examples seems unbalanced. Nevertheless, these are extremely tiny blemishes, probably only noticeable because of the thoroughness of the authors” commitment to including examples from different countries and cultures and exploring the alternative perspectives of feminist researchers and pointing out any ethnocentric bias in research approaches in most sections of the book.

In the book's preface, the authors outline and explain the reasons behind some of their decisions to deviate from the time‐honoured recipe for the typical organisational communication textbook. They decided to depart from the chronological treatment of the history and development of management techniques and deal with big issues such as culture or power in organisations by giving them each a separate chapter and going deeply and comprehensively into the history and theory relevant to each topic. They also tried to bring areas of “difference” such as class and gender into the foreground by discussing them in relation to each topic rather than ghettoising them in their own separate chapters.

Their writing style is intended to stimulate, but also actually demonstrates, critical thinking and draws you in to comparing your own experience and considering, for example, what efficiency really means. In this discussion the authors traverse such varied examples as economic competition among European countries, bombing strategies in the Second World War, restructuring the university, cataract surgery in a hospital, manufacturing cars, selling groceries, holding training seminars and creating computer software. The juxtaposition of different ideas and examples makes reading the book energising. To have the relevance of a particular theorist's ideas explained without interrupting the flow of ideas is a very impressive feat, as in likening efficiency to Kenneth Burke's idea of a “god” term, one which is seldom questioned and seen as a good in itself.

The writing style has pace and excitement and I found it wholly engaging and attractively accessible, while still being intellectually stimulating. As an added bonus, some very appropriate cartoons from the New Yorker are used to illustrate points. Two that I enjoyed were one showing concerned colleagues gathered around a fellow‐worker who is propping himself up against the wall saying “it's quite all right, he was just afflicted by a fleeting sense of purpose and he's sure he'll recover” (p. 300) and another in the chapter on organisational change, with the boss saying to the employee, “So, Jim, where do you see yourself in ten minutes?” (p. 316).

The cartoons resonate with your experience just as the discussions in the book do. Everyone's life involves communicating within a series of organisations. Most of the time, all of the processes and issues involved in organisational communication are taken for granted. This book takes readers on a journey into the theoretical landscape of organisational communication and introduces contemporary researchers and their findings, classical interpretations and understandings as well as exploring conflicting perspectives and exposing unchallenged assumptions. Yet, instead of being overwhelmingly dull and wordy, it's written in a racy, economical style which will put you right into the centre of research dialogues happening at the moment and make links to recent events, which add immediacy and complexity to the debates.

Organisational Communication in an Age of Globalization is a textbook and it will do the work of a textbook very well. But it is so much more than a textbook. I see it as a tool for thinking about organisations, for becoming aware of the processes and issues and tensions that exist in organisations, for revisiting some debates and coming to others for the first time and for seeing the relationships between theories and thinkers. Students have to read books to write assignments and pass exams. But beyond that instrumental function of the textbook, this particular book is so well written and interesting that it's enjoyable reading, even after a hard day, and it is capable of giving new ways of understanding the phenomena that are features of organisational life to those who work in organisations. Even those who are familiar with the areas covered in each chapter will be fascinated by the research case studies and the integration of ideas. To me, this book is like a library within a book and makes you re‐examine every organisation you have been part of, wearing several different sets of theoretical spectacles.

The authors have captured the complexity of the huge area of organisational communication and without closing off the entrance and exit points of the maze of ideas, have given readers a map and an invitation to carry on exploring and mapping the maze. Perhaps a large part of the charm of the book is that the authors assume that you as reader will want to be involved as a fellow researcher. You are invited in to the drama and significance and complexity and excitement of the project. This book shows you where you are starting from by making your invisible assumptions visible to you and gives you a vast range of exploratory paths for you to choose from in taking the next step.