Organizational Communication: Foundations, Challenges, Misunderstandings

Modaff and DeWine's new undergraduate text, Organizational Communication: Foundations, Challenges, and Misunderstandings, offers a unique perspective on the field of internal organizational communication. The authors review the foundational material, but intersperse the discussions with excerpts from interviews conducted with over 60 leaders and workers in a variety of organizations.

A central feature of the text is the concept of misunderstandings, which highlights the idea that organizations are inherently problematic. This focus positions communication at the center of organizational life, and shows the reader how and why communication can serve to create and resolve misunderstandings of all types. The authors advance a model, the Communicative Organization, which allows the reader to see the significance of communication to every aspect of organizational functioning.

Benefits to instructors and students include:

* The use of real-life problems as told by organizational leaders and workers to illustrate the material discussed in every chapter, which provides an easy mechanism for starting class discussions.
* Chapters on realistic recruitment and organizational socialization, which are not typically found in other introductory organizational communication textbooks.
* Integration of the concepts of gender and diversity throughout the text.
* Discussions of current applications of theories and concepts as students have or will experience them.
* A postscript that ties all of the material from the text together.
* A writing style that is student-centered yet sufficiently challenging.
* A dedicated website (created by Derek Lane, University of Kentucky, Lexington) to support the text is available at http://www.uky.edu/~drlane/orgcomm. It includes chapter outlines, supplemental content, and suggested course syllabi. The site greatly facilitates use of the text for students. A PDF of corrected pages of the subject index from the first printing is also available at this site.

Daniel P. Modaff is at Ohio University. Sue DeWine is at Marietta College.