The book defines Organizational Communication as "the orchestrating of communicative practices that announce how formal and informal structures of events and persons in a given organization interrelate to accomplish a purpose of purposes"(140). Every one has a different goal in mind of what they think is better through organizational communication. These different approaches to organizational communication change or alter the sense of the good. Different dwelling places have different forms of organizational communication and one can only pick the dwelling place that seems best fit for them.
At my old school I was in a fraternity and we would have weekly meetings to discuss a variety of topics such as events coming up, things needing to be done, and house chores. "Organizational Communication focuses on the form of communication needed to get a particular task done" (139).
We had all of these tasks that needed to get done and this house or fraternity would act as a dwelling place for organizational communication to take place. A variety of views will come into play when attempting to complete these tasks because of the "better" view of the good. We would try tackle these issues as formal as possible but sometimes it would get out of hand and turn into an informal dwelling place of opposing views. The book states that we can go through formal and informal forms of communication but are all competing to accomplish a purpose. Providing clarity of the purpose, mission, and organizational good allowed us guidance for what the organization sought out to protect and promote.
Here your experience of being in a fraternity reminds me the negotiation and change requirement for dwelling place in organizational communication ethics. It is described in the text book that "No dwelling place can please all, and no dwelling place can remain alive and well without change"(P 141) and "If this negotiation does not occur, the dwelling place loses its vitality and declines because of a smugness of mission or utter disrespect for the organization, with both actions taking the future of the place for granted"(P 141).
ReplyDeleteFrom my experience, as I was a leader in student union in China, there were always meetings, even weekly. Sometimes we just talked about routines but there were arguments about some specially issues, like where would an activity take place and who would be invited to be judges. But through those arguments, we tried our best to make things to be perfect, that the power of negotiation and change among an organization.