Abstract
The practice of theory building lies at the core of any academic discipline. For this reason, it is no surprise that members of a discipline periodically ask the question, “What should be the focus of our theory building?” Over the last half century, prominent members of the subdiscipline of organizational communication have asked this question several times (Deetz & Eger, 2013; Krone, Jablin, & Putnam, 1987; Putnam, Nicotera, & McPhee, 2009; Reardon, 1996; Redding, 1979), and some have been brave enough to provide some suggestions—if not suggestions about what organizational communication scholars should study, suggestions about what they do study (Deetz, 2001; Mumby & Stohl, 1996; Taylor, 1993). Not surprisingly, across these various efforts, the high-level answer is always the same: We should study communication as it relates to organizations and the process of organizing. That makes sense as we are a discipline of communication. But what does it mean to study communication?
During the past three decades, one answer to this question has dominated the subdiscipline of organizational communication: To study communication means to pick an organizational phenomenon and to showcase the role that communication plays in it. That is surely a noble pursuit and one that replaced and expanded a much narrower strategy from decades before: To study only overt communication occurring within organizations (e.g., the way people spoke, the way they wrote, etc.; Axley, 1984; Goldhaber & Krivonos, 1977). But as noble a pursuit as it might be, it limits our ability to build high impact theories because it is a strategy of subordination. By strategy of subordination, I mean that when a scholar argues that he or she is adopting a “communication perspective on . . . (let’s say, leadership, just for the sake of picking something),” the implicit assumption is that leadership is a core organizational phenomenon and communication is somehow subsidiary to it. In other words, “communication” is one part of leadership, and the scholar who takes a “communication perspective” on the phenomenon will showcase that piece of the leadership phenomenon and discuss why it is important. The result is often something like a “communicative theory of leadership” in which the communicative or discursive properties of leadership are brought to the foreground and the argument is made that we can have no leadership without communication.
It is doubtful that anyone would disagree that there can be no leadership without communication. But there can also be no leadership if leaders or followers do not have heartbeats, yet social scientists still find ways to study leadership without studying physiology (although given advances in other areas of the field, that is likely not far off). So making the argument that there could be no leadership without communication does not necessarily place communication in a central role in that phenomenon. Any critic who wished to sidestep the study of communication in a phenomenon like leadership could simply say, “Sure, how leaders communicate is important, but it is no more important than X.” And, if scholars adopt a strategy of subordination when building theory, they will not be able to disagree because taking a “communication perspective” on leadership has compelled them to simply find the communication in the leadership among all of the other important processes that are surely there.
To put a fine point on this argument, a strategy of subordination often leads organizational communication researchers to take phenomena that are “owned” by other scholars and to try to put their distinctive stamp on them. The major problem of such a strategy from a theory building perspective is that it leads to small theoretical advances. It allows scholars who consider themselves students of leadership, but not students of communication, to argue that one feature of leadership is communication and that part is the province of communication. The problem arising from this strategy of subordination is that our theories often do not reach people from other disciplines because they think we are theorizing about a small part of a larger phenomenon. Ironically, our very insistence that we should always ask where the communication is in the phenomena we study may limit us from showing everyone else why communication is indeed so important.
A Guide to Building High Impact Theories of Organizational Phenomenon
How might we overcome this problem and build theories of organizational communication that have high impact not just within our subdiscipline but also across adjacent disciplines? There are surely many ways to move in this direction. I will focus on only one here. I argue that as a field, we would produce not only better theory for ourselves, but more theory that has a higher impact outside of our own field if we owned phenomena outright. The goal would be that someone who studies strategy (for the sake of example) would not think to pick up a communication journal occasionally if she wanted to read something about how communication works in strategy, but that she would pick up communication journals regularly because she understands that strategy is fundamentally communicative. A signal of ownership over a phenomenon is that anytime someone wishes to learn about a particular phenomenon, they turn to your work (Redding, 1985). How do we get there? I suggest that there are two strategies that students of organizational communication can follow to begin to build theory in ways that lead to ownership of organizational phenomenon. The first strategy is discovery and the second strategy is reconceptualization.
Strategy of Discovery
The first strategy for building high impact theories is what I call a strategy of discovery. When adopting a strategy of discovery, a scholar directs his or her attention to a core organizational phenomenon that has been poorly understood or grossly undertheorized and aims to build theory about how it works and what its effects are. For a discovery strategy to facilitate the building of high impact theory, a researcher must follow two steps. First, he or she must demonstrate that the phenomenon is communication. Second, he or she must explain what communication does and why.
Demonstrate that the phenomenon is communication
The first step is to show that the phenomenon is communication. To be clear, the researcher’s goal should not be to find the communication within the phenomenon. Rather, the goal is to show that the phenomenon is, at its core, communication. This would entail showing, for example, that communication is not one aspect of leadership, but demonstrating that leadership is really nothing more than communication. Or, to use another example, a researcher might show that communication is not an important part of strategy, but that strategy is simply communication. In other words, the first step in building a high impact organizational theory that takes communication seriously is to show that researchers cannot study the phenomenon without studying communication.
Explain what communication does and why
The second step is to explain what that communication does and why it does those things. Providing this explanation helps to answer questions about why we should care about communication (and, hence, the phenomenon under study) in the first place. To move past demonstrating that a phenomenon is communication to explaining what communication does requires examining the antecedents and consequences of that communicative activity. Any theory based on a strategy of discovery should be able to convincingly argue that communication matters not by saying it does, but by showing how and why different patterns and practices of communication produce a phenomenon and continually reproduce and change it.
Strategy of Reconceptualization
The second strategy for building high impact theories is what I call a strategy of reconceptualization. This strategy entails taking an important phenomenon that is already the focus of organizational research and reconceptualizing that phenomenon as communication. For a reconceptualization strategy to facilitate the building of high impact theory, a researcher needs to proceed in two steps. In the first step, he or she must demonstrate how conceptualizing the phenomenon as being constituted by something other than communication leads to poor explanation. In the second step, he or she has to demonstrate that conceptualizing the phenomenon as communication leads to more accurate or novel explanations the phenomenon.
Provide evidence of contradictory evidence or poor explanation
The first step is to demonstrate that the phenomenon under study is not adequately explained by its current conceptualization. In this step, the researcher often picks a phenomenon that is widely recognized as important (already discovered) and examines that literature around it to explain how that phenomenon is conceptualized. This step involves a great deal of time and attention paid to prior literature and findings. If the phenomenon is truly communication, but it is not being conceptualized in this way, the research on that phenomenon is likely to produce contradictory findings in the literature or scholars’ predictions about the relationships among the variables they study in relation to the phenomenon will not bear fruit. If either of these two outcomes exist, the phenomenon is likely ripe for reconceptualization as communication because such outcomes suggest that the phenomenon has not been conceptualized correctly.
Show that communication leads to accuracy or novelty
After providing evidence of poor fit between findings and conceptualization, the second step is to show, empirically or argumentatively, that communication leads to better fit between theory and data. A scholar might also show that reconceptualizing the phenomenon as communication leads to findings that we would never have predicted with a different conceptualization. In either case, the goal is to demonstrate that considering the phenomenon to be communication shifts our vantage point and provides a set of explanations about the phenomenon, or relationships between the phenomenon and other phenomena that other scholarly work that did not see it as communication could not uncover. Put another way, reconceptualization should demonstrate that any view of the phenomenon that does not treat it as communication will misrepresent or distort its implications for organizing.
Conclusion
To build high impact theories of organizational communication, scholars must own their phenomena of inquiry outright. To make the point unabashedly, when scholars from across the discipline or from other related disciplines (such as management, organization studies, sociology, psychology, information systems, information science, cognitive science, or political science) wish to explore a phenomenon like decision making or technology adoption, their literature search should not bring them to communication theorists for an interesting look at one part of the phenomenon. Instead, their literature searches should bring them to communication theorists to achieve the most fundamental understanding of what the phenomenon is. That is how we will know that communication scholars own the phenomenon in question.
In this article, I have made a strong and perhaps controversial argument that organizational communication scholars should work to own their phenomenon of interest, as opposed to trying to carve off a piece of the phenomenon by examining the “communication aspect” of it. Owning a phenomenon means that it becomes thoroughly defined as communication. I have offered two strategies by which theorists can make advances toward owning phenomena: discovery and reconceptualization. Through these strategies, they can demonstrate that organizational phenomena are, at their core, communication. The important point here is to do it rather than talk about it. Making an overt claim in a paper, in a conference presentation, or in a respondent role that one is taking a “communication lens” or a “communicative perspective” is nowhere near as powerful as demonstrating that the phenomenon of interest is really nothing short of communication. Once scholars have taken a bite from that apple, there is no recovery.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.