The Situated Organization explores recent research in organizational communication, emphasizing the organization as constructed in and emerging out of communication practices. Working from the tradition of the Montreal School in its approach, it focuses not only on how an organization’s members understand the purposes of the organization through communication, but also on how they realize and recognize the organization itself as they work within it. The text breaks through with an alternative viewpoint to the currently popular idea of 'organization-as-network,' viewing organization instead as a configuration of agencies, and their fields of practice. It serves as an original, comprehensive, and well-written text, elaborated by case studies that make the theory come to life. The substantial ideas and insights are presented in a deep and meaningful way while remaining comprehensible for student readers. This text has been developed for students at all levels of study in organizational communication, who need a systematic introduction to conducting empirical field research. It will serve as an invaluable sourcebook in planning and conducting research.

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Product Description: Today's organizations face a wide variety of challenges, including such contradictions as maintaining unity of action while becoming increasingly diverse. Even the definition of organization is changing and evolving. In this monograph, the authors apply their academic and professional experience to address the notion of "organization," setting forth communication as the essential modality for the constitution of organization--explaining how an organization can at the same time be both local and global, and how these properties which give organization continuity over time and across geographically dispersed situations also come to be manifested in the day-to-day of human interpersonal exchange...read more

The first part of this new book concentrates on the office automation phenomenon. Chapter 1 sketches some of its disappointments and sets the stage for the chapters to follow. In Chapter 2, the author argues that images of organization incorporate what has been called a worldview and are thus inevitably relativistic in their orientation. This allows the author to criticize some common assumptions about the nature of organization, but it equally introduces a theme that is central to his theory, and that will be picked up again in a later chapter. Chapter 3 gets to the heart of his criticism of conventional theories of communication process, and in doing so allows the author to demonstrate the feet of clay of one of the sacred cows of our time: the concept of office work as information processing. The second part is concerned with theory and its implications. Chapter 4 describes the event of communication, in microcosm. Chapter 5 is an attempt to give this perception a more systematic presentation. Chapter 6 tries to understand the problem of operationalizing the theory, as a means to understanding, and studying the dynamics of conversation and of communication mediated through texts. Chapter 7 explores one implication of the theory, namely, the maintenance of requisite variety, within a conversational system. Chapter 8 concludes the presentation by a consideration of some of the implications of the theory for the conduct of research.