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Study Guide For Exam 2 REVISED Fall 2016 Includes Cutlure and Community Policing
Study Guide For Exam 2 REVISED Fall 2016 Includes Cutlure and Community Policing
Note: Other material from the readings may be on the Exam, this should
serve only as a guide for what is most likely to be on the exam
1. Defining Organizational Communication
a. Organizational communication: The interaction required to direct a
group of people toward a shared goal.
b. Organizational communication as dialogue: This definition of
organizational communication focuses on mindful interaction,
equitable transactions, empathetic conversations, and real
meaning.
c. Organizational communication as information transfer: This definition of
organizational communication sees communication as a one-way
pipe line where senders attempt to communicate meaning to
receivers.
i. Metaphor - pipeline
ii. Focuses on exchange of information and the transmission of meaning
iii. Pros: It is a basic foundational approach
iv. Cons: It is incomplete, assumes passive receiver that is not participating in
the message
d. Creativity vs Constraint
i. Communication as balancing creativity and constraint
ii. Communication is a moment to moment working out of the tension
between individual creativity and organizational constraint
1. Constraint: The rules, norms that come with a particular system
that those within the system are expected to abide by
2. Creativity: the design and modification of social systems through
communication
2. Communication and the Changing World of Work
a. Situation: this means that it is situational specific. Effective communication for a
construction company is different than what it would be for a film production
company or a small paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania
b. Perishable: we mean that patterns of interaction that were effective last year may
be outdated today due to changes in customer taste and technology
c. Globalization: the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world
which has been brought about the enormous reduction of costs of transportation
and communication, and the breaking down of artificial barriers to the flows of
goods, services, capital, knowledge, and people across borders
d. Outsourcing: is when companies in the United States choose to hire people in
other countries to do some of their work. Business today search the globe for the
lowest labor costs and move jobs to where they can get the cheapest workers. For
example, Nike has been known for having sweatshops in South Korea and
Apple has had its products made in Foxconn in China
When we interact with people, we view them not just as individuals, but members
of social groups.
Cultural similarity and dissimilarity are both important to consider
Involves understanding intracultural communication
Intercultural communication has been studied in various ways and through
various lenses. E.g.
Cultural studies
Critical intercultural communication
Dialectic approaches
Intergroup approaches
Communication at the social identity level
Judge the behavior of self and others in terms of group membership
Determine ingroups and outgroups
Deindividuate both self and others (Makes collective activity possible
but can lead to intergroup bias and prejudice.)
Merits and Demerits
Makes collective activity possible
Can lead to intergroup bias and prejudice
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
f. Thick description
Show dont tell Dont tell us that a culture is sexist, show us that the organization is sexist. How
could this be done?
Quote directly and accurately from those your interview
Be specific and detail in your observations
Focus on the symbols, stories, langue, and how organizational members communicate
Remember the Waagen, Everything counts
Dig, dig, dig do not rely on superficial and easy answers dig to find what is really going on
For the first time, scholars began to take seriously the notion that organizations are communication
phenomena that only exist because their members engage in complex patterns of communication
behavior.
Put another way, scholars viewed organizations as structures of meaning created through the everyday
symbolic acts of their members (Keyton, 2011; Martin, 1992; Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983)
By studying communication phenomena such as stories, metaphors, and rituals, researchers developed
rich understandings of the ways members both constructed and made sense of their organizational
realities.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE CULTURAL APPROACH
Tradition reviews say organizations working only as large bureaucracies. However, by the 1970s
and 1980s this view was becoming outdated. Large bureaucracies, like Ford and General Motors,
began to fail. Workers in these organizations reported feeling dehumanized.
For example, in the wake of the oil crises, Japanese automobile companies were quick to exploit
U.S. companies failure to produce fuel-efficient cars.
In this sense, intrinsic rewards and meaningful work that produced personal growth (a phrase
that would have been alien to the 1950s white-collar worker) became just as important as
extrinsic rewards.
In particular, some researchers were becoming critical of the dominant paradigm and its focus
only on effectiveness and productivity. Such an approach, it was argued, reflected a managerial
conception of what was important to study in organizations.
The cultural approach explained by Mike Pacanowsky and Nick ODonnell-Trujillo (1982),
The jumping off point for this approach is the mundane observation that more things are going
on in organizations than getting the job done. People in organizations also gossip, joke, knife
one another, initiate romantic involvements, cue new employees to ways of doing the least
amount of work that still avoids hassles from a supervisor, talk sports, arrange picnics. (p. 116).
vi. Rites and Rituals: emerge partly from a need for organization members to
experience order and predictability in their lives. Such rituals can be as
informal as a daily greeting between two colleagues or as formal as the
pomp and circumstance of a graduation ceremony
vii. Stories: Organizational culture researchers thus view storytelling as one of
the most important ways in which humans produce and reproduce social
reality.
Organizational stories is that they have a distinct moral imperative
(Bruner, 1991); that is, through the story structure, they move us toward a
particular moral conclusion about some aspect of organizational reality.
Stories are not just random descriptions of events but, rather, perform a
sense-making function in teaching us what is important to pay attention to.
7. Organizational Culture and Law Enforcement
a. Game theory: the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation
between intelligent rational decision-makers. (Myerson, 1991).
b. What are the rules of the game of law enforcement?
what behaviors they expect of each other, how to score points and what it means to
be considered a good player.
What activities produce desirable results that will earn them notoriety and promotions?
What might be the disincentives for them in cooperating with the police?
Why does tension exist between members of minority communities and police?
Both assume that organizations have rules and norms of behaviors that incentives and deincentivize
certain forms of behavior.
Both believe that for change to be successful it must occur on the cultural, not individual level
d. Community policing
Policing also has rules and logic that makes certain actions the right things to do
and other actions the wrong things.
The current crisis in American policing requires dismantling the old law enforcement
game and starting anew.