Philip J. Salem

Out of the Woods Facilitating Pragmatic Inquiry and Dialogue

In “Into the Woods,” Karen Evans describes an increasingly hollow public administration environment that is shaped by a misplaced quest for efficiency. She looks to the pragmatism of John Dewey as a way to remedy the situation. This article extends her analysis by linking pragmatism to reflective thought, inquiry, nonlinear dynamics, and communication theories. Finally, a few suggestions for how to more fully take pragmatism to the PA workplace are discussed.

The seven communication reasons organizations do not change

Purpose – Management attempts to transform organizations seldom succeed. This paper aims to describe seven common communication behaviors accompanying those failures.Design/methodology/approach – This paper integrates material from three recent communication and organizational change studies, recent change theory, and complexity theory to model communication and change processes. All the studies employed traditional ethnographic methods, but one study employed quantitative methods as well as part of a mixed methods design.Findings – Data describe six common communication behaviors during failed organizational change efforts. The combination of these behaviors suggests a seventh pattern. Communication during failed efforts seldom involves enough communication opportunities, lacks any sense of emerging identification, engenders distrust, and lacks productive humor. These problems are compounded by conflict avoidance and a lack of interpersonal communication skills. Members decouple the system, sheltering th...

Technology and the Crisis of Self.

Communication between people occurs in a social context including role relationships eventually negotiated by participants. Developing and maintaining these relationships assists the society, and the entire communicative process is a necessary condition for a persons definition of a self identity. Contemporary technologies potentially limit the development of social relationships and broadening of self‐concepts. Computers cannot fulfill many social functions and could disrupt the social fabric, thereby losing vehicles for defining and constructing self. Planning training to improve communication skills may avoid negative consequences. Finding methods to augment new technologies with opportunities to develop relationship‐building skills must become a high priority.

Uncertainty and satisfaction: The importance of information in hospital communication

While many organizational communication researchers have been interested in message uncertainty, few have: (a) operationalized message uncertainty using task, human, and maintenance sub‐scales, or (b) sought to determine which types of message uncertainty best predict various types of satisfaction. This study provided a theoretical basis for investigating message uncertainty and used demographic variables along with task, human, and maintenance uncertainty to predict satisfaction. Results revealed that human uncertainty and sex were the best predictors of satisfaction with the supervisor while the best predictors of satisfaction with the organization were human uncertainty, age, and sex.

Computer Use and Organizational Effectiveness The Case of Two Intervening Variables

We explored the relationship between computer use and computer literacy, communication competence, and organizational effectiveness. Four different types of effectiveness were considered. Increased computer use generally increases computer literacy, with a corresponding gain in organizational effectiveness. Increased use also leads to a decrease in communication competence and a corresponding loss in effectiveness. The relationship between computer use and effectiveness is curvilinear. Managers are devoting increasing attention to computer technology. They may assume that only benefits will accrue from increased computer use without recognizing the organizational costs. The authors contend that adoption of one or more of the newer technologies should be approached in a systematic fashion.

Emergent Patterns in Organizational Communication

All three conferences were organized using Murray’s framework, so we had a unique opportunity to observe how organizational communication, as a holistic discipline, has evolved over the previous 40 years. Furthermore, we believe that conference participants had the opportunity to identify important trends that create spaces for discussion that extended our approaches to the study of organizational communication. When reflecting back, selected papers from the 1976 and 1996 conferences are available in Salem (1999) and, to look forward, selected papers from the 2016 conference are available in Salem and Timmerman (in press). When we mention specific authors, their papers are part of one of those volumes. The organizational communication domain has moved from constructs describing communication problems to a mix that includes constructs central to theories and paradigms. Put another way, the disciplinary domain appears to be less about understanding communication problems and more about seeing the field as one that can address problems as well as produce innovation that is oriented toward understanding processes, in general. The sharpest contrast is between Goldhaber’s 1999 communication audit summary with Putnam’s 1999 description of 11 research areas organized into three perspectives. In 2016, Kuhn emphasized the process and social nature of communication, and he argued for developing a communicative imagination revealing relevant and important problems. At the forefront of this current consideration