Preface to Analysis of "Strategic Organizational Communication"

Introduction

I am done with my analysis of Business Communication Today. It was starting to bore the shit out of me, and as a writer, that is a bad sign. So after I skimmed through the rest of the book just to make sure I was not missing anything blogworthy, I decided to conclude this analysis. I think I gleaned the most important and useful stuff from the book. So I hope you, the reader enjoyed or found the content useful in some way or another.

So now that I am done analyzing Business Communication Today, I am going to begin an analysis of another of my favorite college textbooks. The name of the book is Strategic Organizational Communication in a Global Economy - 6th ed. It was written by Charles Conrad and Marshall Scott Poole.

Preface

The goal of this upcoming series of articles, and of this book I will be analyzing, is to provide a unified description of the incredibly diverse array of ideas that make up this rapidly expanding field. This book places organizations and organizational communication within a broader social, economic and cultural context. It has a relaxed and engaging writing style. Strategic Organizational Communication in a Global Economy focuses on the two-level concept of strategic choice making. This book contends that people make choices about the overall strategies that they will use to operate the societies and organizations that they will live within. Ironically, people tend to normalize and naturalize these choices transforming them from a conscious selection among a number of available options into assumptions, taken-for-granted facts of life. 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. The result s a complicated cycle of acting, creating situations and adapting to them.

Understanding this action-situation-adaption 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. For example, U.S. society is defined in part by a tension between community and individuality. This tension arises from many of the challenges faced by contemporary U.S. organizations - challenges as diverse as the attitudes of generations X and Y, the blending of traditional and cultural strategies of motivation and control, the implementation of feminist and other so-called alternative forms of organizing, and the need to understand non-Western forms of leadership.
• 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. However, each strategy of organizing is a choice. 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.

*SOURCE: STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION 6TH ED. BY CHARLES CONRAD AND MARSHALL SCOTT POOLE*

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